Seriously? This again?

Over the weekend I started seeing links to articles claiming that NASA has changed the signs of the zodiac. I knew immediately what this was about, even as I was scratching my head about a) how this is news, and b) how short people’s memories are.

I found a few articles about this NASA “news” here and there; that has the headline, “Your Astrological Sign Just Changed, Thanks To NASA”. The first paragraph alone is burdened with quite a few scientific errors:

“We don’t want to be dramatic, but NASA just ruined our lives. For the first time in 3,000 years, they’ve decided to update the astrological signs. This means that the majority of us are about to experience a total identity crisis. Apparently, these changes are due to the fact that the constellations are not in the same position in the sky that they once were, and the star signs are about a month off now, as a result. To further confuse things, there is now a new, 13th sign, called Ophiuchus, which those born between November 29 and December 17 are lucky enough to have to learn to pronounce.”

Cripes. No, no, and no. First off, NASA did not “update the astrological signs”. Second, the constellations haven’t changed. And third, Ophiuchus is an ancient constellation, identified by the Greeks thousands of years ago.

So what’s the deal? Well, before we even get started, keep this in mind: astrology isn’t science; it’s nonsense. It’s been tested 10 ways to Sunday and every time it fails. Even astrologers have come up with tests for it, and it has failed those. Astrology doesn’t work.

Despite that, lots of people believe in it. That’s why I wrote .

Zodiacal confusion

So what’s the deal with this recent silliness? It has to do with the zodiac. As I wrote :

“The planets, including the Earth, orbit the Sun on pretty much the same plane (from the side, the solar system’s planets’ orbits look flat). From the Earth, it looks like the Sun moves around us once per year. The path it takes across the sky is the same year after year, and we call this the ecliptic. The planets all move across the sky in that same path, too.

“So, like clockwork, the Sun passes into the same constellations at a certain time every year. You know the names of these constellations: Sagittarius, Libra, Scorpius, Aries, Gemini
 the constellation of the zodiac, or, if you prefer, the zodiacal constellations.”

These 12 zodiacal constellations have been recognised in one way or another around the world, though most countries (and ) have adopted a modified version of them known to the ancient Babylonians and Greeks.

The thing is, there are more than 12 constellations the sun can pass through. Some are smaller, or have fainter stars, so they get ignored. The biggest is Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer, which is a huge constellation taking up quite a bit of celestial real estate, and in fact the sun spends more time in Ophiuchus than Scorpius. Scorpius has brighter stars and an obvious scorpion-like shape, so it gets better press.

So no, NASA didn’t add in Ophiuchus or change the zodiac or anything like that. Ophiuchus has been around this whole time, but has been ignored by astrologers. They’re the ones who should take the blame for all this, not actual scientists who don’t even think astrology is worth wrapping fish in anyway.

Worse, there aren’t really 13 zodiacal constellations. By some counts, . Not only that, but Earth wobbles like a top, very slowly, and over centuries . If you were born in late March in ancient Greece, you would have been an Aries. Today, you’d be a Pisces.

Given that astrology is based on all this, shouldn’t astrologers at least get their basic facts straight before trying to influence your life?

Not news

Finally, why is this suddenly news? This is the final irony here. This new foofaraw got started, apparently, due to an article on a NASA site for kids called SpacePlace. I like this site a lot and refer quite a few parents and teachers to it. It has simple explanations written at a level for children to understand, and it’s fun and accurate.

The SpacePlace article, , has been around a while but was updated in January 2016, which may have caught some astrology believer’s eye. The article – well worth your time to read – talks about how the zodiac constellations are defined, and how, over time, they’ve changed (as I described above). Apparently, someone didn’t read it very carefully, or didn’t understand it, and wrote that NASA had changed the zodiac. So, yeah. Wow.

But this isn’t even the first time this sort of thing has happened. .

You can’t keep a good piece of pseudoscience down. It’s like a zombie, always rising again.

You know what also rises? The sun. And when it does, it’ll be because Earth is spinning, and orbiting it, and we’ll see the stars and planets and moons doing their thing. And we’ll study them with science and learn their ways, and if people who believe in astrology want to keep looking to the past, well, let ’em. As long as they promise to remember it.

And that reminds me: in one sense, astrology is correct. There is a group of people whose lives are affected by the stars and planets: astronomers. And if I can help spread that particular love, then I’ll be more than happy to.

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Just water vapour

No evidence

Walk away

<sarcasm> Oh good, I get to write yet another article about factually challenged fearmongering nonsense. </sarcasm>

Sigh.

Quite a few people on Twitter and Facebook pointed out this one to me. The guilty party is an article in UK tabloid The Sun. It had this breathless (and grossly ridiculous) headline:

Yeah, not so much. The article itself then goes on to make a series of increasingly shaky and completely wrong claims (what follows are direct quotations from the article):

“Planet Nine – a new planet discovered at the edge of the solar system in January – has triggered comet showers that bomb the Earth’s surface, killing all life, says Daniel Whitmire, of the University of Louisiana.”

“Professor Whitmire claims Planet Nine’s passage through a rock laden area called the Kuiper Belt is responsible for the ‘extinction events’.”

“Now some are convinced there will be a collision or a near miss before the end of April.”

“Nemesis or Nibiru were widely dismissed as crack-pot pseudo-science – until Planet Nine was identified in January by the California Institute of Technology, in the US.”

No new planet

These claims, not to put too fine a point on it, are 100 per cent male bovine excrement.

First, Planet Nine hasn’t been “discovered”. At best, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown found indirect evidence for the existence of a massive planet out past Neptune (as have other astronomers before them). It’s pretty interesting evidence, even compelling, but doesn’t yet add up to a discovery.

Second, Whitmire doesn’t make the claim that the planet (if it exists) causes extinction events. In a recent paper, he does a bit of maths showing that the existence of a planet beyond Neptune is (more on this in a moment), but he doesn’t claim it actually does this. I’m also not sure the planet he hypothesises is consistent with the evidence presented by Batygin and Brown; some of the orbital and planetary characteristics are similar, others aren’t.

Third, he doesn’t say it “killed all life” on Earth, because that would be really, really dumb. Mass extinctions don’t kill all life on Earth, or else we wouldn’t be here. They kill many, even most, species, but not all. I’m not nitpicking; in an article apparently designed to instil fear, phrasing like that is important.

Crackpot planet

Fourth, who exactly are these “some” people who claim there will be a collision in April? The article never says. The claim is made and then never followed up. I could just as easily write, “Some say the author of The Sun article ate 300 puppies for breakfast”. As long as I (and one other person) says that phrase out loud the sentence is factually correct, though (presumably) not true.

Fifth, , whether or not Planet Nine exists. That’s because it is sheer crackpottery. The , based on , and . But gee, other than that


Nemesis – the name given to a purported faint and cool companion star to the sun – wasn’t a crackpot idea .

Sixth, again, Planet Nine hasn’t been identified. C’mon.

Seventh, the basis of all this silliness is the idea that mass extinctions are periodic – that is, occur on a fairly regular cycle. But this periodicity may not even exist.

Extinction cycles

Cycles of extinctions have been claimed before, but . The fossil record is spotty, and it’s hard to get absolute dates for them. There have been claims of a ~60 million periodicity too – I wrote about that one in my book . But these claims struggle with small number statistics, .

I’m not saying the periodicity doesn’t exist, just that it isn’t anywhere near confirmed. Although to be fair to the tabloid, in his paper Whitmire does claim these periodicities are firmly shown, something I’m sceptical about. So claims based on this periodicity .

Not to be outdone, though, the New York Post with unreferenced information basically lifted directly from The Sun article, but with bonus goofiness added. Like The Sun article, the video says Planet Nine was discovered in January, which isn’t true. Then it says Planet Nine takes 20,000 years to orbit the sun, but again we don’t know that at all.

But wait! There’s more!

The video continues blithely on, saying: “Some scientists believe this is what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.” Actually, no, that impact was most likely , not part of a periodic shower of comets, and .

Killer comet?

Then the video repeats (again, with no references or basis in reality) that Planet Nine may send killer comets our way this month. Worse, it mangles the previously mangled nonsense from The Sun, saying scientists (not just “some” people) think it may happen again this month.

That’s some .

Bottom line: Planet Nine, as described by astronomers Brown and Batygin, is likely to exist but hasn’t been found yet. It’s unlikely to cause periodic mass extinctions, which haven’t been shown to exist anyway. And it certainly won’t send a barrage of outer solar system ice our way this month.

In other words, don’t believe what you read in tabloids. Or anywhere, actually. Seek out the actual facts.

And I’ll add that this sort of doomsday-tooting fearmongering is disgusting. It’s irresponsible and mean-spirited. It erodes people’s understanding of science and needlessly scares people just so the paper can sell ads.

And the worst part? They’ll just keep on doing it.

This article was first published by Slate

Conspiracy theories

Curious fact

Role model

Damaging behaviour

I have some good news about the War on Science: the recent Canadian election kicked out a regressive government and put one in place that, all signs indicate, is much more welcoming of reality.

The election of progressive Justin Trudeau appears to be a huge win for science. For one, it meant Stephen Harper was out, and his oppressive anti-science tactics along with him. Under his rule , for example.

Worse was the fact that : they weren’t allowed to talk to the press about any research results without governmental say-so.

No, this isn’t a report from the Soviet Union. This was Canada, in the 21st century.

But it was true, emphasis on the word “was”. One of the first acts of the new Trudeau government was . This is an extremely important event. A government that controls what scientists say can also control the science being done, which can have dramatic and profound effects.

For example, imagine if climate scientists in the US were muzzled, only allowing climate change deniers access to the media. This is essentially what the previous Canadian government was doing.

Science minister

But no longer. And it gets better. Trudeau has announced his new cabinet, and as well as it having male-female parity and , it includes .

This is fantastic news. Harper had banished science oversight to a junior minister in the industry department (part of an overarching plot to relegate science to the services of industry, a shameful act – twice in fact, since I got from the Canadian government after my first article about it).

Now science has its own ministry, and the minister is a bona fide scientist. Her name is Kirsty Duncan (pictured), and she is a medical geographer – .

While Duncan will oversee the government’s role in pure science, , Navdeep Bains, who will oversee the coordination of science and industry.

This is a very positive development. Science is a way of finding knowledge that gets ever-closer to truth. It must be, by its very nature, an exploration of the universe unfettered by political ideology or blinders installed by narrow-minded desires. If the research naturally goes that way, that’s fine, but science must inform politics, not vice-versa. Once politics starts interfering with science, well, that way disaster lies.

I’m glad the new Canadian government understands this. .

This article was first published on

Image credit: Chris Wattie/Reuters

Sigh. This again?

I’m seeing some buzz on social media that a planetary alignment on 28 May will cause a huge magnitude 9.8 earthquake in California.

Let me be clear: No, it won’t. It can’t. Worse, there’s not even an alignment on that date, at least not with the Earth. It’s all baloney.

This all stems from a video by someone who I believe is sincere but also profoundly wrong on essentially every level. It’s been picked up by , then spread around by people who haven’t been properly sceptical about it.

While this story hasn’t gone as viral as , it’s popular enough to debunk and hopefully can serve as a template for future such claims of doom and gloom that are actually smoke and mirrors.

First, . It’s from YouTuber Ditrianum Media. There’s a whole lot of nonsense in there that I won’t even bother with, including claims of spirits and (seriously) .

But then the narrator starts talking about alignments. Several things struck me while watching this.

First, there is simply no way an alignment of planets can cause an earthquake on Earth. It’s literally impossible. ; the maximum combined gravity of all the planets under ideal conditions is still far less than the gravitational influence of the moon on the Earth, and the moon at very best .

To put a number on it, because the moon is so close to us its gravitational pull is 50 times stronger than all the planets in the solar system combined. Remember too that the moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse, so it gets closer and farther from us every two weeks. The change in its gravity over that time is still more than all the planets combined, yet we don’t see catastrophic earthquakes twice a month, let alone ones aligning with the moon’s phases or physical location in its orbit.

So right away, we’re done.

I’ll note that in the video the narrator talks about the planets being “energised”, but doesn’t talk about what this truly means
 but it doesn’t matter, because it’s meaningless. It’s the usual sort of New Age word salad when they talk about “energy”; they never define what that means (unlike in science ) so it means everything and nothing.

Also, if you watch the video, like for example at 7:27 and 8:11, these “alignments” don’t even align with the Earth! One is just two planets that appear to line up with the sun when the Earth is far off to the side, and in another they actually form a perpendicular line with the Earth. This is beyond silly; it doesn’t even make any sense.

At 8:40 he shows another “alignment” of two planets in such a way that if you drew a line between those planets it would apparently go between the Earth and moon
 but note that the moon’s distance to Earth isn’t shown to scale! The sizes of the planets and moon aren’t to scale either. Look at the width of the Earth’s orbit in the display; that’s 300 million kilometres in real distance. The moon’s distance from Earth is about 380,000 km, or a bit more than 0.1 per cent of the size of Earth’s orbit.

To scale, the Earth and moon would be less than a pixel apart on his display! Now imagine how small the Earth itself would be on that scale.

That “alignment” doesn’t come anywhere near splitting the two. I’m not sure I’d take doomsday advice from someone who doesn’t seem to understand the software being used to predict it.

Again, I’m sure the narrator is sincere and honestly wants to help people and warn them of an event he thinks may be real. This puts him a comfortable step up over the various and repulsive scam artists you can find all over the web. But it doesn’t make him within a glancing blow of reality. Alignments of the planets have no effect on us at all. They , they don’t cause earthquakes (the doesn’t either), and about .

There is something very human about being scared of the unknown, and when we don’t understand something, it’s all too easy to supply any number of threatening bogeymen to stand in the nebulous shadows.

Understanding reality makes a lot of those bogeymen evaporate. This is absolutely one of those times.

And yes, understanding reality also introduces us to real things that are scary. But there’s the beauty of science: We can separate the real things that scare us from the things that shouldn’t. If something isn’t real, you don’t have to worry about it. You can focus instead on the circumstances you can affect.

I think that many people who turn to pseudo (and outright anti-) science may do so because they feel that things are out of their control. That’s too bad, because – even though it may not seem like it at first – when you begin down the path of studying science, of becoming a critical thinker, these tools actually help you to be more in control of your life, not less.

Take control. Think critically. And that goes doubly so when you’re reading stuff on social media.

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Right now, and sadly not for the first time in recent years, the US is looking at an outbreak of a dangerous yet nearly entirely preventable disease.

We’ve had pockets of measles outbreaks here and there in the past few years – , just a few weeks ago – but this new one is gaining a lot of attention, no doubt because ground zero was traced back to Disneyland in California.

It is particularly worrisome because of the location: A tourist attraction draws visitors from all over the world, from places where measles may not yet be eradicated, and once infected, people scatter and spread it around even more. , 1000 people are under observation in Arizona, including nearly 200 children, because the measles was brought to a Phoenix medical centre from someone infected at Disneyland. Other .

Social media has exploded with attacks on anti-vaxxers because of this, which doesn’t surprise me at all. But I want everyone to be careful here. This is more subtle and complicated than most people are aware.

Pockets of people

For one thing, as , overall in the US, vaccine rates and acceptance of vaccines have not declined in recent years. So it’s not just that people are listening to the anti-vax movement and rates are dropping.

It’s more about pockets of unvaccinated people, communities at risk because herd immunity has been lowered locally. California has many of these regions. But to add another layer on to this, it’s not just left-leaning upper-class hippies behind this. . So we have to be careful not to throw blame at someone just because of their political ideology.

In fact, several Republican politicians have stepped in it in just the past few days, including and , both of whom made incredibly foolish and grossly inaccurate claims about vaccines. Shame on them.

There are many reasons for locally low vaccination rates. Yes, anti-vaxxers are clearly one reason. But as social scientist Julie Leask says in Kloor’s article, there are other reasons, too:

“It’s not just the haves, but the have-nots who don’t fully vaccinate
 There will be children whose parents refused vaccination; children whose parents were unwittingly not up to date for lack of access; affordability or awareness; adults and travellers who didn’t get a needed booster; and babies who are too young to be vaccinated.”

Not dumb

But what about anti-vaxxers? I for one try not to castigate parents for this. What people forget is that , and they don’t think they’re being selfish. They simply love their children, and don’t want them to be hurt. This belief is quite mistaken, of course, but it doesn’t change the fact that they believe it.

And yes, there is , but I don’t think he’s representative; he’s just someone the media like to go to because of his man-bites-dog beliefs.

Exposing people who vocally make false claims about vaccines is another matter. , and others like them deserve to be taken down when they say outrageous things we know are completely false.

And am I angry at parents who don’t vaccinate their kids? For me it’s more of an intense frustration than anger. . I’m not sure calmly explaining things will either, but it’s a damn sight better than mocking them. That only makes them dig in, and then .

Evidence-based approach

Throwing a huge blanket over everyone who doesn’t vaccinate isn’t likely to suddenly make them decide you’re right. Remember, the evidence is overwhelming that vaccines are extremely low risk and extremely high benefit, yet people still aren’t vaccinating. Clearly there are other factors going on here than rational evidence-based behaviour.

Those of us who are pro-vaccination claim to be evidence-based. Well, then look at the evidence and base your actions on it.

So what can be done? That too is complicated. Certainly we need the government to take this matter up. Given what Paul and Christie said, and who have made profoundly ignorant claims, we should have a care. .

On a personal level, getting the facts out there may not be all we need, but we do need it. So I will continue to write about this and make sure the evidence is available for people to see. And I will direct queries I get to and to .

The deaths of others

In fact, . You’ll find a lot of my own work there.

I will continue to call out anti-vaxxers, but I will also tread carefully when doing so. I always point out that I too am a parent, and . I love my family too, and that’s one reason why I vaccinate. The other is that I know what these diseases can do to the elderly, to babies too young to be vaccinated, and to people who are immunocompromised (on chemotherapy, for example, or with autoimmune disorders and taking immunosuppressants).

Measles is one of the most infectious diseases known, and if the number of infected rises, we will start seeing disastrous effects from it. We eradicated measles in the US years ago; there are no native reservoirs in this country. Outbreaks occur when people travel internationally and bring it back.

Our best defence is getting as many people vaccinated as possible. Disneyland isn’t the first, nor will it be the last outbreak. But we can minimise them, and save a lot of lives doing so.

So please, talk to your board-certified doctor, find out what vaccines you need, and if they recommend you get vaccinated, do so.

The internet has been buzzing about published by a team of engineers at NASA claiming that they have built a device that creates thrust without propellant. There have been written about it, it’s spawned a zillion tweets, and I’m getting plenty of emails asking me about it.

Here’s the thing: I’m not convinced. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I am saying it’s very, very likely to be some sort of measurement or experimental error.

I could write a lot about this, but instead I’ll point you to three people who already have written excellent discussions on what’s going on here: John Baez on Google Plus (you should read both and ), my old friend , and my friend . All dissect this report, and align pretty well with what I’m thinking.

The bottom line here is that what the team is proposing violates a very basic law of physics; all the forces inside the device appear to be balanced, yet a thrust is still generated. says that’s not possible. The only other way this device could possibly work is if it’s interacting with “virtual particles”, an interesting idea, but a highly speculative one – and the authors of the paper don’t discuss the physics. It’s important to note that the paper is not an official announcement of verified results; it’s more like a progress report.

I’ll be clear. Of course science has overturned earlier notions of how the universe works. But sometimes, those rules are shown to be true so much and so often that when you come up with an idea that overthrows all of it, you’d better have iron-clad evidence of it.

This device doesn’t have that yet. The effect is incredibly small, and one thing we’ve learned many times in history is that very small effects are usually due to something not being built or measured correctly. Steve rightly points out the faster-than-light neutrinos story, which were not real; the measurements were messed up by a faulty cable. And as Baez points out, this new device in question wasn’t even tested in a vacuum! That’s extremely important; assuming the measurements are real, the thrust seen could be due to air being warmed up and moving around.

I’m reminded very strongly of the Pioneer Anomaly. The twin Pioneer spacecraft were slowing down a teeny, tiny bit faster than expected as they sailed through space. A breathless media talked about a fifth force and other exotic explanations
 but it turned out to be far more prosaic. One part of the spacecraft was warmer than the other parts. It emitted infrared light, which carried away momentum, slowing the Pioneers down. It was hard to measure, and hard to determine, but once it was figured out it was clearly the right answer.

I suspect that’s what’s going on here. It would be fantastic to have a reactionless drive – something that gets its momentum from the virtual particles swimming into and out of existence in the quantum foam (or some other bizarre concept), and needs no propellant to generate thrust. But the more I want something to be true, the higher I set the bar of evidence to make sure I don’t get fooled. And if you want to invent new physics, or overthrow the law of conservation of angular momentum, that bar is very, very high. I don’t think this device has yet cleared it.

This article first appeared in

Phil Plait writes Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog and is an astronomer, public speaker, science evangeliser and author of