‘One of the greatest damn mysteries of physics’: we studied distant suns in the most precise astronomical test of electromagnetism yet

Michael Murphy
The Conversation
November 11, 2022

The Sun (Shutterstock)

There’s an awkward, irksome problem with our understanding of nature’s laws which physicists have been trying to explain for decades. It’s about electromagnetism, the law of how atoms and light interact, which explains everything from why you don’t fall through the floor to why the sky is blue.

Our theory of electromagnetism is arguably the best physical theory humans have ever made – but it has no answer for why electromagnetism is as strong as it is. Only experiments can tell you electromagnetism’s strength, which is measured by a number called α (aka alpha, or the fine-structure constant).

The American physicist Richard Feynman, who helped come up with the theory, called this “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics” and urged physicists to “put this number up on their wall and worry about it”.

In research just published in Science, we decided to test whether α is the same in different places within our galaxy by studying stars that are almost identical twins of our Sun. If α is different in different places, it might help us find the ultimate theory, not just of electromagnetism, but of all nature’s laws together – the “theory of everything”.

We want to break our favorite theory

Physicists really want one thing: a situation where our current understanding of physics breaks down. New physics. A signal that cannot be explained by current theories. A sign-post for the theory of everything.

To find it, they might wait deep underground in a gold mine for particles of dark matter to collide with a special crystal. Or they might carefully tend the world’s best atomic clocks for years to see if they tell slightly different time. Or smash protons together at (nearly) the speed of light in the 27-km ring of the Large Hadron Collider.

The trouble is, it’s hard to know where to look. Our current theories can’t guide us.

Of course, we look in laboratories on Earth, where it’s easiest to search thoroughly and most precisely. But that’s a bit like the drunk only searching for his lost keys under a lamp-post when, actually, he might have lost them on the other side of the road, somewhere in a dark corner.


The Sun’s rainbow: sunlight is here spread into separate rows, each covering just a small range of colors, to reveal the many dark absorption lines from atoms in the Sun’s atmosphere.

N.A. Sharp / KPNO / NOIRLab / NSO / NSF / AURA, CC BY

Stars are terrible, but sometimes terribly similar

We decided to look beyond Earth, beyond our Solar System, to see if stars which are nearly identical twins of our Sun produce the same rainbow of colors. Atoms in the atmospheres of stars absorb some of the light struggling outwards from the nuclear furnaces in their cores.

Only certain colors are absorbed, leaving dark lines in the rainbow. Those absorbed colors are determined by α – so measuring the dark lines very carefully also lets us measure α.

Hotter and cooler gas bubbling through the turbulent atmospheres of stars make it hard to compare absorption lines in stars with those seen in laboratory experiments. 

NSO / AURA / NSF, CC BY

The problem is, the atmospheres of stars are moving – boiling, spinning, looping, burping – and this shifts the lines. The shifts spoil any comparison with the same lines in laboratories on Earth, and hence any chance of measuring α. Stars, it seems, are terrible places to test electromagnetism.

But we wondered: if you find stars that are very similar – twins of each other – maybe their dark, absorbed colors are similar as well. So instead of comparing stars to laboratories on Earth, we compared twins of our Sun to each other.

A new test with solar twins

Our team of student, postdoctoral and senior researchers, at Swinburne University of Technology and the University of New South Wales, measured the spacing between pairs of absorption lines in our Sun and 16 “solar twins” – stars almost indistinguishable from our Sun.

The rainbows from these stars were observed on the 3.6-meter European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescope in Chile. While not the largest telescope in the world, the light it collects is fed into probably the best-controlled, best-understood spectrograph: HARPS. This separates the light into its colors, revealing the detailed pattern of dark lines.

HARPS spends much of its time observing Sun-like stars to search for planets. Handily, this provided a treasure trove of exactly the data we needed.


The ESO 3.6-meter telescope in Chile spends much of its time observing Sun-like stars to search for planets using its extremely precise spectrograph, HARPS.

Iztok Bončina / ESO, CC BY

From these exquisite spectra, we have shown that α was the same in the 17 solar twins to an astonishing precision: just 50 parts per billion. That’s like comparing your height to the circumference of Earth. It’s the most precise astronomical test of α ever performed.

Unfortunately, our new measurements didn’t break our favorite theory. But the stars we’ve studied are all relatively nearby, only up to 160 light years away.

What’s next?

We’ve recently identified new solar twins much further away, about half way to the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.

In this region, there should be a much higher concentration of dark matter – an elusive substance astronomers believe lurks throughout the galaxy and beyond. Like α, we know precious little about dark matter, and some theoretical physicists suggest the inner parts of our galaxy might be just the dark corner we should search for connections between these two “damn mysteries of physics”.

If we can observe these much more distant suns with the largest optical telescopes, maybe we’ll find the keys to the universe.

Michael Murphy, Professor of Astrophysics, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Confidence in science has plummeted. Here’s why we might want to rethink that
2022/11/11

LIFE-SCIENCE-SKEPTICISM-DMT. - Evgeniy Salov/Dreamstime/TNS

At the start of the pandemic, concerned friends and family turned to Jennifer Dixon for all of their COVID-19 questions: Should I wipe down my groceries? Are packages from China dangerous?

But just a few months later, Dixon, an infection prevention specialist of nearly two decades at WakeMed, noticed a shift. Some of the neighbors and friends who texted and called her for advice were suddenly deeply suspicious about her intentions and qualifications.

“Those same people are the ones who now look at me and go, ‘Yeah, I don’t believe you,’” she said.

Acquaintances unfriended her on Facebook when she posted about masks. Neighbors confronted her after seeing her talk about the vaccine on television. Close friends stopped talking to her.

“The naysayers have become stronger naysayers and then people on the fence have fallen off one side or the other,” she said.

The COVID-19 pandemic was both a lesson in how scientific research can be used to save lives and how far public trust in scientific institutions has slipped.

Scientists who had dedicated their lives to researching coronaviruses were suddenly the subject ofharassment and conspiracy theories. Large swaths of the population declined a potentially life-saving vaccine.

Just over the last two years, the share of Americans who have “a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests” is down by 10 percentage points to just 29%,according to a Pew survey.

Dr. Cameron Wolfe, a Duke infectious disease expert, became the subject of particularly vitriolic distrust in the last two years.

He fielded letters with “blunt threats” and nasty comments on social media. Conspiracy theorists claimed online that Wolfe was injecting HIV into the vaccines and that his children died after participating in the vaccine clinical trials.

Wolfe doesn’t have a problem questioning science. He thinks that critiquing methodologies and evaluating data is a key part of the scientific process. But it didn’t seem to Wolfe his critics were pushing for better COVID-19 research — it seemed like they were rejecting the entire scientific process with surprising aggression.

“I hadn’t ever seen it come from an inherently skeptical place, almost like that was the base framework where so many people would sit,” he said.

While the pandemic exacerbated mistrust in scientists, confidence in research has been slowly eroding for decades.

Another poll from Gallup found that confidence in science has declined since the 1970s, particularly among Republicans.

“The crisis of trust in our society didn’t start with COVID-19 and won’t end with COVID-19,” read anarticle from the Association of American Medical Colleges. “The pandemic provided a fertile environment for myriad social and technological forces to breed confusion and distrust.”

Scientists fear rampant disinformation and waning trust in scientific institutions will make it difficult to address some of the most pressing problems facing the world, like climate change, pandemics and social inequality.

© The Charlotte Observer

Democrats Averted Disaster, But the Working Class Did Not

Opinion by Ben Burgis - Thursday- The Daily Beast

The Democrats have averted disaster—for now. They might hold on to the Senate, thanks in large part to the efforts of John Fetterman. And as I write this it’s still just barely possible that they’ll hold onto the House.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

But it’s hard to avoid the feeling that their current strategy is running on fumes. Even as President Joe Biden and his party describe the GOP as “semi-fascist” and never miss an opportunity to remind the nation of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, early polling shows that Republicans have continued to pick up black and Hispanic support.

Slogans like “democracy is on the ballot” play well with managers at non-profits listening to NPR in their cars, but they move the needle a lot less with working-class people who can tell perfectly well that the current version of American democracy isn’t doing much to improve their lives. And, while solid majorities of Americans have basically progressive views on social policy issues, using language so performatively inclusive that it sounds strange and synthetic to anyone who went to a state university—rather than a liberal arts college—is going to do nothing to stop the slow purpling of traditionally Democratic constituencies.

If Democrats want to do more going forward than just limp from barely-averted-disaster to barely-averted-disaster, they need a winning message on the material issues most immediately relevant to the lives of ordinary voters. As one of my all-time least favorite Democrats once put it, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Democracy on the Ballot?

There is a version of “democracy is on the ballot” that might move a broader segment of the electorate. But it would have to be a more grounded one.

Accusations of “fascism” tend to involve a big enough dose of hyperbole to be ultimately unpersuasive, and I’d argue that tenuous analogies to the brownshirts of yore obscure more than they clarify. Could a future presidential election be stolen? Certainly! It’s happened before. But that’s far more likely to happen again the way it happened in the Bush v. Gore election in 2000—by means of guys wearing suits and ties operating within established institutions, not Proud Boys wielding lead pipes somehow overwhelming the Leviathan of the American national security state.

It makes sense to criticize laws passed in Republican-dominated state legislatures that make it more difficult to vote, or to express alarm at the election of Republican secretaries of state who trafficked in conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. But when the “democracy” under threat is an abstraction, and no connection is drawn to kitchen table issues with an immediate impact on voter’s lives, this can ring a little hollow to all but the most dialed-in liberal partisans.

A Sunoco Gas pump reads cash and credit card prices nearing $4 a gallon in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. 

Aimee Dilger/SOPA Images/LightRocket 

After all, it’s not like elections don’t keep happening or Democrats don’t often win. The price of food, gas, and pharmaceuticals are more pressing issues for most people.

As progressive journalist Ryan Grim suggested in a conversation last week with his conservative co-host Emily Jashinsky on their show Counterpoints, a far more effective pitch would be that Republicans want to undermine democracy “so they can fleece you.” And there’s an abundance of evidence that fleecing is what they have in mind.

Kevin McCarthy’s Signed Confession

We have, for example, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” document, in which the man who will become Speaker if Republicans take the House openly announces his intention to “save” Social Security and Medicare by cutting benefits. The “save” part is nonsense on stilts—the plan is to simply steal promised benefits from elderly people who have paid into the system their entire lives and who would deserve a secure and dignified retirement even if they hadn’t.



House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., addresses an Election Night party at The Westin Washington hotel in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, November 8, 2022. Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel also appear. 

We often hear that Social Security is “economically unsustainable” or that it will “become insolvent” and that the proposed cuts will prevent “insolvency”—but that’s just not how the system works.

The program can’t become “insolvent” because the way the law is currently written builds in a solvency requirement. If Social Security taxes don’t generate revenues sufficient to pay out benefits at the originally projected rate, that triggers an automatic benefit cut. But as Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project points out, the law could easily be amended “to state that, whenever revenue falls short of scheduled benefits, the Social Security payroll tax will automatically be increased to make the two sums balance.” You could even restrict the automatic increases to people making over $150,000 a year and still easily solve the problem typically misdescribed as “insolvency.”

Instead, McCarthy wants to prevent “insolvency” (i.e. benefit cuts) through steeper benefit cuts. The reality of the situation is better described by the late George Carlin’s classic warning that the ruling class in this country is a “big club” that most of us aren’t in and “they’re coming for your Social Security.”

This could have been productively combined with the point about the Republicans’ anti-democratic instincts. “They want to make it harder for you to vote,” Biden could have spent the last year telling people, “so you can’t vote them out when they try to steal your Social Security money.”

Better yet, he could have framed the midterms around an aggressive push for the public health care option he promised during the 2020 campaign and then immediately stopped talking about when he took office. Or better still, he could have gone a step beyond that and adopted Bernie Sanders’s call for a system of Medicare for All where the parasitical private insurance companies were taken out of the picture entirely.


Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during a health care rally at the Convention of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee on Sept. 22, 2017 in San Francisco, California.

 Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Opinion polls consistently show that these proposals have widespread public support. Surely the fact that they’re considered to be unacceptably radical in Beltway politics says something about the state of American democracy. Biden could point to all the polls where a solid majority—even among Republicans—support at least a public option. Then the president could ask why, if we live in a democracy, the people’s will isn’t being done?

The reason he and other prominent Democrats haven’t done any such thing is that this isn’t the kind of pro-democracy message they have any interest in promoting. As Thomas Frank argued in his indispensable book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People, the current version of the Democratic Party has been thoroughly shaped by the cultural sensibilities and political worldview of affluent middle-class professionals, who see social justice as a matter of removing any barriers to the best and brightest from each demographic group rising to the top—so they can craft the smartest technocratic solutions to our problems.

They believe in democracy in so far as they believe that Democratic politicians shouldn’t have elections stolen from them. But they don’t really believe in asking a bunch of people who don’t have postgraduate degrees (and probably haven’t even read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility), how they want to solve society’s problems.

Which Way for 2024 Democrats?

Right now, Democrats are doing everything short of spraying each other with bottles of champagne to celebrate the results of an election where they might have held onto control of the Senate by their fingernails—and they might not have even done that. As of the time I’m writing, The New York Times election forecast says that Republicans will “probably” retake the House. The happy surprise is that they weren’t blown out of the water completely by the party that openly wants to slash Medicare and Social Security.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren addresses a rally in support of Social Security and Medicare on Capitol Hill Sept. 18, 2014 in Washington, DC. 

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

If Democrats do manage to hold onto the Senate, a big part of the reason why will be that John Fetterman beat Republican Mehmet Oz for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. This was a remarkable victory—and one that can tell us a lot about what a better approach than the one most Democrats are taking right now might look like.

Fetterman outperformed Biden’s 2020 vote in almost every county in the state, “including in rural areas where Trump racked up votes.” That’s a particularly impressive accomplishment, after he suffered a stroke early in the campaign that left him with auditory processing issues many observers mistook for cognitive impairment.

So why did he win? Elections are never laboratory experiments in which we can test individual factors in isolation from everything else. There are any number of reasons why Fetterman won (and Oz lost) and if you reran the election with one or two other variables changed you might well end up with a different result. But it’s hard to deny that one important reason Fetterman was able to do so well is that he has left-populist instincts that are utterly foreign to the mentality of far too many other Democratic politicians.

He supports equal rights for trans people, for example, but it’s impossible to imagine him using terms like “birthing people.” When he spoke out against a law that would have prevented trans teens from participating in high school sports, Fetterman explained his position the way you might explain your progressive views about something like that to a conservative friend at a bar—saying the law was “cruel” and calling it a distraction from Pennsylvania’s real problems.

And when it comes to those real problems, he’s sometimes shown himself willing to appeal to deep wells of popular anger against the plutocrats in the “big club.” In an op-ed for the Pennsylvania Times Leader, he urged the criminal prosecution of executives at food, pharmaceutical, and oil and gas companies who have been “gouging customers at the pump and at the grocery store” even as they brag to investors in earnings calls that they’ve been raking in record profits.

I’m not suggesting that Fetterman is perfect. (He isn’t.) But his against-the-odds success in a purple state offers a tantalizing glimpse into what might be possible elsewhere if Democrats get sick of narrowly averting disaster and decide, at long last, to try something else.

Hawayo Takata and the Circulatory Development of Reiki in the Twentieth Century North Pacific 

Justin B. Stein 

Doctor of Philosophy 

Department for the Study of Religion

 Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies 

University of Toronto

 2017 

Abstract 

Scholarly literature on religion in contemporary North America and Europe has taken Reiki, a form of spiritual healing, to be indicative of broader trends in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. 

These works generally assume Reiki is either a form of American unorthodox medicine in Oriental trappings or a form of Japanese religious practice that has found a place in Western biomedical settings. 

This dissertation avoids such characterizations by foregrounding transnational exchange instead of national culture. It argues Reiki is best understood as a product of the twentieth century North Pacific (specifically Japan, Hawaii, and North America).

 It proposes an analytical framework of “circulatory development” to understand Reiki’s movement through transnational networks. Circulatory development describes how the movement of practices transforms both the practices (as they are adapted for new audiences) and the people who encounter them (by embedding them in new social and spiritual relationships). 

This dissertation also proposes a category of “spiritual medicine” for practices that transcend the assumed differentiation of religious and medical spheres. iii 

Usui Mikao (1865–1926) fashioned Reiki’s earliest forms from a mix of elements in 1920s Japan, including some with long local histories and some that had been recently imported from North America. Since the mid twentieth century, Reiki’s most prevalent forms have been reconfigurations of Usui’s practice adapted for audiences in Hawaii and North America by a second-generation Japanese American named Hawayo Takata (1900–1980). 

Using archival materials and oral history interviews, this dissertation analyzes how Takata creatively transformed Reiki practice from the 1930s through the 1970s. It focuses on the relation between her gendered racialization as a Japanese American woman, her development of spiritual capital in social networks, and shifts in the meanings assigned to Japanese religion in Territorial Hawaii and mainland North America. 

It concludes that Takata’s innovations to Reiki practice both accommodated and resisted elements of North American cultural hegemony by gradually introducing practices intended to: 

1) professionalize Reiki as a practice of spiritual medicine;

 2) transmit “Japanese” values to her students, and 

3) establish a form of “particular universalism” that valorized Japan while promoting Reiki as a “universal” practice.

 STONE OF POWER: 

DIGHTON ROCK, COLONIZATION, AND THE ERASURE OF AN INDIGENOUS PAST

©DOUGLAS HUNTER, 2015

Abstract

This dissertation examines the historiography of Dighton Rock, one of the most contested artifacts of American antiquity. 

Since first being described in 1680, the forty-ton boulder on the east bank of the Taunton River in Massachusetts has been the subject of endless speculation over who created its markings or “inscription.” 

Interpretations have included Vikings, Phoenicians and visitors from Atlantis. In its latest incarnation the rock is celebrated in a dedicated state park museum as an artifact of a lost Portuguese explorer, Miguel Corte-Real. 

I accept the Indigeneity of its essential markings, which has never been seriously contested, and show how antiquarians and scholars into the twentieth century pursued an eccentric range of Old World attributions.

 I contend that the misattribution of Dighton Rock (and other Indigenous petroglyphs, as well as the so-called Mound Builder materials) has been part of the larger Euro-American/Anglo-American colonization project and its centuries-long conceptualization of Indigenous peoples. As with colonization itself, the rock’s historiography is best understood through the criteria of belonging, possession and dispossession. 

The rock’s historiography not only reflects that colonization project and its shifting priorities over time, but its interpretation has also played a significant role in defining and advancing it. By disenfranchising Indigenous peoples from their own past in the interpretations of Dighton Rock and other seeming archaeological puzzles, colonizers have sought to answer to their own advantage two fundamental questions: to whom does America belong, and who belongs in America?

The study of evolution is fracturing – and that may be a good thing

Erik Svensson
The Conversation
November 10, 2022

Butterfly (Darkdiamond67/Shutterstock)

How will life on Earth and the ecosystems that support it adapt to climate change? Which species will go extinct – or evolve into something new? How will microbes develop further resistance to antibiotics?

These kinds of questions, which are of fundamental importance to our way of life, are all a focus for researchers who study evolution and will prove increasingly important as the planet heats up.

But finding the answers isn’t the only challenge facing evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin’s theories might be over 150 years old but major questions about how evolution works are far from settled.

Evolutionary biology is now undergoing one of the most intense debates it has had for more than a generation. And how this debate plays out could have a significant impact on the future of this scientific field.

Some biologists and philosophers claim that evolutionary biology needs reform, arguing that traditional explanations for how organisms change through time that scientists have assumed since the 1930s are holding back the assimilation of novel findings

Contemporary evolutionary biology, a vocal minority argue, is incomplete. The dominant and traditional view of the field is too preoccupied with how the genes in a population change over time. This neglects, these critics argue, how individual organisms shape their environments and adjust themselves during their lifetimes to survive and reproduce.

Some go so far as to say that evolutionary theory itself is in crisis and must be replaced with something new.

Not all biologists are convinced. Some argue that repeated calls for reform are mistaken and can actually hinder progress.


How microbes develop resistance to antibiotics is evolution in action. MD_style/Shutterstock

Modern evolutionary theory

The version of evolutionary biology that is still largely taught in schools has its origin in the modern synthesis. This fused Gregor Mendel’s theory that organisms inherit discrete particles (what we now call genes) with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin suggested that environmental conditions weed out heritable traits which are unhelpful and promote those which offer organisms an advantage.

The modern synthesis aimed to unify biology, but it was dominated by a few subfields, particularly genetics and paleontology, and focused on how populations change their genetic make-up over time. From this perspective, organisms are objects and the raw material for natural selection.

Notably, the modern synthesis did not incorporate all fields. The study of how embryos develop and how organisms interact with each other and their environment (ecology) were largely left out.

Organisms are not, critics of the modern synthesis argue, passive objects of natural selection. Instead, they say, organisms are agents that change those environments.

A famous example is the beaver, which builds dams to survive and reproduce, changing its surroundings in the process. This tinkering in turn influences natural selection on itself and other species, thereby changing the beaver’s long-term evolution.

Organisms also inherit more than DNA. This challenges the modern synthesis’s assumption that traits an organism acquires during a single lifetime cannot be passed down.

There is cultural transmission: killer whales teach their children and grandchildren hunting skills and food preferences. Songbirds transfer nutrients to new generations in eggs just as humans give their offspring antibodies through breast milk. Some biologists say that these endowments can revitalise the study of evolutionary biology, diverting our attention from strict genetic inheritance.


The transmission of information between generations can influence a species’ evolution. Monika Wieland Shields/Shutterstock

Diversity is a strength

As an evolutionary ecologist with an interest in how organisms adapt to their environments, I am not as worried as some that the current version of evolutionary biology is incomplete. Neither am I particularly concerned about the limitations of population genetics.

Evolution can clearly be described as changing gene frequencies between generations. But this does not mean that population genetics is the only useful way to study evolution.

Biologists might disagree on what constitutes an evolutionary process, with natural selection and random changes in DNA being the two best studied processes. Evolutionary processes are not the only interesting aspect of evolution, though.

Evolutionary outcomes and the products of evolution – organisms and how they develop – also keep biologists busy. We have come to understand more about how genes and environments interact to shape the development of organisms. These insights from evolutionary developmental biology have clearly enriched our field.

That evolutionary biology is increasingly fractured does not worry me either, as long as we recognize that a plurality of approaches is not a weakness, but a strength. If physicists cannot agree upon a grand unified theory of the universe, why should biologists expect to agree on one beyond what we have already achieved? After all, organisms are much more complex than physical particles and processes.

To take another example from physics, light can be viewed either as a particle or a wave. This duality reflects how a single descriptor is not enough to fully describe the complex phenomenon of light.

If this works for physicists, why could evolutionary biologists not also use multiple ways of studying a process as complex as evolution, and things as complex as organisms? Why can we not see organisms as either agents capable of modifying their environments or objects subject to natural selection, depending on the context? These are two valuable and complementary perspectives.


Organisms influence – and are influenced by – natural selection. 

Erik Svensson, Author provided

Evolutionary biology today is a messy patchwork of several loosely connected subfields. This reflects the enormous diversity of phenomena that we study and the many interests of biologists.

We are united in accepting that natural selection on inheritance and random factors have jointly shaped organisms – but not by much more. Maintaining a coherent overview, either the modern synthesis or some extension to it, seems increasingly hopeless.

Giving up the search for a grand unified evolutionary theory will not hurt our field, but rather, liberate us. It will enable biologists to think more freely about the endless forms most beautiful that are constantly evolving and will continue to do so.

Erik Svensson, Professor (Evolutionary Ecology Unit, Department of Biology), Lund University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

CRADLES IN SPACE: THE CHANGELING IN FOLK NARRATIVE AND MODERN SCIENCE FICTION 

by © Adam Lawrence 

A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies

 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 

Department of English Language and Literature, 

School of Graduate Studies,

 Faculty of Arts Memorial University of Newfoundland 

March 2010 

St. John's, Newfoundland 

ABSTRACT

 This dissertation considers how modem science fiction (SF) has continually employed elements of European folk narrative to explore subaltern and subterranean culture meaning, both the politically disenfranchised and biologically deformed figures who threaten to emerge from their underground habitations and infiltrate the most cherished institutions of the upper world. According to legends deriving from England, Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia, it was common practice for the fairies, also called the "Good People" or the "little people," to abduct human children and leave withered and cantankerous fairies, known as "changelings," in their place. 

I argue that the changeling emerges as a "conceptual persona" in the nineteenth century when folklorists and scientists alike began to interpret changeling tales as unsophisticated diagnoses of congenital diseases-before the medical lexicon of "congenital malformation" was even available. 

The changeling provided the absent lexicon, which was specifically adopted by Victorian British society as an explanation of insubordinate behaviour among children, women, the lower classes, and the non-white races. 

My five chapters discuss the figure of the fairy changeling as it appears in British and other European legends and as it is adapted in several SF novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

To begin, I suggest that these European folk legends describe a "fairy economy," in which two species engage in various forms of trade and exchange (Chapter 1). Through detailed readings of such folktales as "The Fairy Wife" and "The Speckled Bull" and such legends as "The Caerlaverock Changeling" and "Johnnie in the Cradle," I argue that the changeling enunciates a particular set of issues that surface in the Victorian period, concerning childcare, reproduction, cross-cultural and cross-species relations, and hybridity, and which are further explored in the realm of modem SF. 

Both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde re-imagine the changeling as a representative of the lower-class mob, the atavistic criminal population, and the Gothic underworld (Chapter 2). Shelley's and Stevenson's monsters are also clearly prototypical SF creations, related as they are to early speculations on the biologically engineered human. In both The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau, H. G. Wells modifies these gothic/scientific fictions and their folkloric antecedents by exploring, on the one hand, the future devolution of the species into a two-nation world consisting of fey-like "little people" and monstrous underlings and, on the other hand, a near future hybridization of the species through the radical vivisection of various animal types (Chapter 3). Wells's two works present vivid attempts to conceptualize a "symbiotic" community, clearly hinted at in the legends involving human-fairy interactions.

 As I argue through these first three chapters, the changeling narrative presents a fictional narrative that explores human origins through the interaction and exchange with a nonhuman species. Viewed through the lens of SF, the changeling legend conceptualizes species evolution and speculates on the utopian possibilities of cross-breeding cultures and species. 

Providing an Eastern European perspective, Karel Capek explores the folkloric-cum-evolutionary notions of hybridity and symbiosis, first, in R. U R., a craftily disguised melodrama about artificially grown workers called "Robots" and, second, in War with the Newts, a satirical scientific parable about salamanders conditioned and bred to function as a labour force (Chapter 4). In both 11 scenarios, the engineered entities possess the "changeling" instinct to infiltrate and undermine human authority but also present the nightmarish results of co-opting monsters for profit and war. 

Olaf Stapledon develops this twentieth-century folkloric-cum evolutionary exploration, first, in two "cosmological" fictions, Last and First Men and Star Maker, which contemplate the future development of the human species and the potential function of symbiotic communities. Adapting these original far-future visions, Odd John and Sirius return us to the quaint environment of folk narrative, conceptualizing new changelings in the form of a mutant superman and a hybrid man-dog. Together, Stapledon' s "composite" fictional world testifies to the resilience of the folkloric tradition and the religious or supernatural fascination with the fearful symmetry of the human organism. Such science-fictional speculations enable us to discover that legends contain within them subversive undercurrents associated with both a rural underclass as well as a "little folk" driven underground by colonization and industrialization. 

From this perspective, there are some fascinating intersections between folklore and SF, including the crossover between the "alien" and the "fairy," the abduction motif itself, and the cultural significance of physical metamorphosis as it is consistently presented in changeling narratives and in "alien encounter" SF.

Pseudoscience and Science Fiction 

Andrew May

 Crewkerne, United Kingdom ISSN 2197-1188 ISSN 2197-1196 (electronic) Science and Fiction ISBN 978-3-319-42604-4 ISBN 978-3-319-42605-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42605-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952248 

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 

Contents 

1 Charles Fort and the Forteans ................................. 1 

2 Anomalous Phenomena ..................................... 21 

3 High-Tech Paranoia ........................................ 41 

4 Flying Saucers ............................................ 61 

5 Mind Power .............................................. 87

 6 Space Drives and Anti-gravity ................................. 111

 7 Technology of the Ancients ................................... 133

 8 Conspiracy Theories ........................................ 155

 Index ....................................................... 179

Introduction 

Any large bookstore today will have a shelf labelled “Science Fiction”. The term hardly needs explaining. It encompasses any work of fiction that stretches the reader’s imagination beyond the current limits of science: extrasensory perception, time-slips, space aliens, faster-than-light travel and other dimensions. Yet elsewhere in the same store, there is likely to be another shelf with a selection of non-fiction books on exactly the same subjects. How this shelf is labelled— “Paranormal” or “Alternative Beliefs” or “Unexplained Phenomena”—will vary from store to store.

 It will rarely be labelled “Pseudoscience” ... but that is exactly what it is. The prefix “pseudo-” comes from a Greek word meaning false. “Science” itself comes from the Latin for knowledge, but the defining feature of modern science is the method by which this knowledge is arrived at. 

Pseudoscience is “false science”, not because its assertions are false (although they often are), but because they are arrived at by a non-scientific method.

Real science can be thought of as a four-step process:

 1. Pose a question 

2. Formulate a hypothesis to answer that question

 3. Analyse the hypothesis to determine its testable consequences

 4. Carry out the tests, and accept/modify/reject the hypothesis accordingly 

Pseudoscience is only really concerned with the first two of these steps. It is all about making hypotheses, not putting them to the test. In fact, pseudoscientific hypotheses are often constructed so as to be untestable—and hence incapable of disproof. 

Science and pseudoscience may address the same questions, but they approach them in completely different ways. For a scientist, the aim is to get as close to the truth as possible—even if that truth is not an appealing or easily understandable one. 

For this reason, science can often come across as overly complex, boring and irrelevant to the non-scientist. Pseudoscience, on the other hand, is largely geared towards telling people what they want to hear. 

 As a specific example, consider the question of life on other planets. Most people would agree this is an exciting question, and there is a branch of science called astrobiology that deals with it. Unfortunately, it is not a question that can be answered by direct observation, even with the most powerful telescopes. 

The best astrobiologists can do is to determine the most extreme conditions under which life (usually in microscopic form) can survive on Earth and then search for similar environments on other planets. This may strike the non-specialist as a disappointingly dull answer to what started out as an exciting question.

 A pseudoscientific approach to the same question might be as follows. Start from the “exciting” premise that extraterrestrials are intelligent humanoids, similar to ourselves but technologically more advanced by several centuries. They visit Earth frequently, but their technology allows them to remain virtually undetectable and to tamper with the perceptions and memories of any inadvertent witnesses. The aliens may even be conspiring with Earth governments to conceal their existence from the public.

Not only is this hypothesis more appealing than anything real science has to offer, but it is literally impossible to disprove.

In terms of audience appeal, pseudoscience beats mainstream science hands down. The term pseudoscience is a pejorative, and many of the people who use it—usually professional scientists—denigrate it as “bad science”. This misses the point that there is no significant overlap between the “consumers” of pseudoscience and those of real science. 

The latter is an essentially practical discipline: its main role is as an enabler of technological advancement. In contrast, pseudoscience is a creative undertaking—effectively a branch of the entertainment industry. Its end users read books ... and for a book to be successful, it needs to say something large swathes of the public want to read. 

Pseudoscience is much better than real science at giving the audience what it wants. People want to believe there is intelligent, anthropomorphic life elsewhere in the universe. They want to believe in strange powers and mysterious events. They want to believe there is a meaningful pattern behind today’s headlines— even if that pattern is a sinister government conspiracy. 

The phrase “I want to believe” was popularized in the 1990s by the TV series The X-Files. While much traditional science fiction is set on other planets, or in the far future, The X-Files was rooted firmly in its own present. Yet it managed to deal with all the major SF tropes—time travel, aliens, ESP and antigravity—and it dealt with them in the here and now. That is essentially what pseudoscience does—except that it is presented as “fact” rather than fiction. 

Besides its overlapping subject matter, pseudoscience resembles science fiction in other ways. Both are products of the imagination, and both are aimed at a broad, general readership. The most obvious difference is one of purpose.

 Most science fiction writers only want to tell a good story, not to make a didactic point. If they do set out to make a point, they are more likely to satirize some aspect of present-day politics than—to give a common example from the world of pseudoscience—highlight a flaw in Einstein’s theory of relativity. Fiction writers may draw on popular pseudoscientific theories to add verisimilitude to their stories. The best-selling novelist Dan Brown is a master of this technique. 

More surprisingly, the process sometimes works the other way around, with pseudoscience taking its cue from science fiction. The symbiotic relationship between ufology and Hollywood is a prime example of this. A number of SF authors also produced non-fiction works about pseudoscience. Some of them, like John Sladek and John Brunner, took a deeply sceptical view, while people like Arthur C. Clarke and Lionel Fanthorpe approached the subject in a more open-minded way. At the other extreme, writers like John W. Campbell and Whitley Strieber, who started their careers in fiction, went on to become outspoken advocates of pseudoscientific topics. 

For the most part, this book takes a non-judgmental attitude to the pseudoscientific topics it deals with. Whether they are right or wrong is irrelevant to the book’s main purpose, which is to highlight some of the more interesting examples of cross-fertilization between pseudoscience and science fiction.

 The first person to make a systematic study of anomalous phenomena was Charles Fort. His writings coincided with the emergence of science fiction as a distinct genre in the 1920s and 30s, and Fort’s influence on early SF writers was huge. 

This is the subject of the first chapter, “Charles Fort and the Forteans”. 

The next chapter, “Anomalous Phenomena”, discusses a number of Fortean phenomena that have crossed the boundaries between fact and fiction, including the Philadelphia Experiment and the Bermuda Triangle. 

The “High-Tech Paranoia” chapter examines the blurring of fact and fiction in the bizarrely paranoid worlds of writers like Richard Shaver and Philip K. Dick. 

It is followed by a chapter on UFOs—and the intriguing two-way interaction between fact and fiction that has continued from the first “flying saucer” sightings of the 1940s to the present day. 

Between them, the next two chapters span some of the most ubiquitous topics of both pseudoscience and science fiction: ESP and other powers of the mind in “Mind Power”, followed by a range of physics-defying hardware— Introduction ix space drives, antigravity and perpetual motion machines—in “Space Drives and Anti-gravity”. 

A speculative idea that has cropped up time and again over the last hundred years, both in fiction and non-fiction, is that of ancient technology—whether of human or extraterrestrial origin. This is examined in “Technology of the Ancients”. 

To round the book off, the final chapter on “Conspiracy Theories” ventures into the ever-popular realm of conspiracy theories—including the strange notion of “predictive programming”, whereby science fiction itself is used as a medium for the indoctrination of an unsuspecting public

‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ continues the series’ quest to recover and celebrate lost cultures

Julian C. Chambliss,
The Conversation
November 11, 2022


As someone who teaches and writes about Afrofuturism, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” I’m particularly excited about the introduction of Namor and the hidden kingdom of Talokan, which he leads.

The first “Black Panther” film adhered to a longstanding practice in Afrofuturist stories and art by engaging in what I call “acts of recovery” – the process of reviving and celebrating elements of Black culture that were destroyed or suppressed by colonization. This practice is often linked to “Sankofa,” an African word from the Akan tribe in Ghana that roughly translates to “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”

“Wakanda Forever” pulls from the past in the same way, but with a twist: Talokan is inspired not by African cultures, but by Mesoamerica, a vast area that covers most of Central America and part of Mexico.


The trailer for ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.’

A theory of time

The idea that African knowledge and contributions to science and culture have been erased and must be recovered is central to Afrofuturism. The term, which was coined in 1994, describes a cultural movement that pulls from elements of science fiction, magical realism, speculative fiction and African history.

On its home page, the Afrofurist listserv, an email list organized by social scientist Alondra Nelson in 1998, pointed to this process of recovery as a central tenet of the genre:
“Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, cultural producers of the African diaspora composed unique visions on the world at hand and the world to come. This speculation has been called AfroFuturism – cultural production that simultaneously references a past of abduction, displacement and alien-nation; celebrates the unique aesthetic perspectives inspired by these fractured histories; and imagines the possible futures of black life and ever-widening definitions of ‘blackness.’”

This fascination with uncovering the ways in which Black contributions have been erased and suppressed means that Afrofuturist works often mine the past as a first step toward creating visions of the future.

Afrofuturist scholars such as Kinitra Brooks even describe Afrofuturism as a theory of time. For her, the “present, past, and future” exist together, creating the opportunity to push against the systemic devaluation of Black people that occurred during slavery and Jim Crow segregation, and persists in contemporary anti-Black violence.
Looking back to see tomorrow

This recovery can take many forms.

Several Black writers published serialized novels of speculative fiction, such as Martin R. Delany’s “Blake: Or the Huts of America,” a slave revolt story written between 1859 and 1861. Pauline Hopkins’ “Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self,” published in 1903, tells the story of mixed-race Harvard medical students who discover Telassar, a hidden city in Ethiopia, home to an advanced society possessing technology and mystical powers.

Both narratives refuse to depict Black culture as backwards or impotent, and instead celebrate Black empowerment and the rich cultural legacies of Black people.

Curator Ingrid Lafleur has long talked about how Afrofuturist visual aesthetics relies on recovering ancient African cosmology. You can see this practice in the work of musical artists such as Sun Ra, who used Egyptian symbolism throughout his work, and visual artists such as Kevin Sipp, who remixes and reimagines African cultural symbolism to create sculptures and visual work that fuse past styles and symbols with contemporary practices.

Simply put, a reverence for ancestral knowledge and culture is the beating heart of Afrofuturism, and has become an integral part of Afrofuturism’s mission to forge a better future.
Mesoamerica takes center stage

The first “Black Panther” film celebrated an array of African cultures.

Costume designer Ruth Carter deliberately infused elements from across the continent in every scene. For example, the headdress worn by Queen Ramonda, played by Angela Bassett, was inspired by the isicholo, a South African hat traditionally associated with married women. And Lupita Nyong'o’s Nakia wore clothing inspired by the Suri tribe.

And so the film highlighted African cultures not by depicting them as fragile or foundering, but as paragons of artistry and sophistication.

In “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” these themes are explored both in the way the mantle of Black Panther presumably passes to Princess Shuri, and in the depiction of Namor and the kingdom of Talokan.

While Talokan is an underwater society inspired by the myth of Atlantis, Marvel Studios has signaled that the people of Talokan sought refuge underwater in response to colonial invasion.

By invoking the complexities of this history – and seemingly leaning heavily on parallels to Mayan culture – the film celebrates a society that scholarship has long noted for its achievements in architecture, mathematics, astronomy and language.

History books reference these accomplishments. But in popular culture, there’s little attention given to this cultural landscape.

Namor and the kingdom he leads are poised to remind a global audience of the rich world of Mesoamerica that thrived – until European contact beginning in 1502 led to conquest, decline and eradication.

Today, immigration, trade and drug trafficking dominate discussions of Central America and Mexico in the U.S. media. This film, on the other hand, invites the viewer to appreciate the profound cultural legacy of Mexican and Central American civilizations.

Julian C. Chambliss, Professor of English, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Right-wing organization pushing states to shield companies from political boycotts
David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
November 11, 2022

Image (Shutterstock)

For decades ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council quietly drafted right-wing legislation, pushing it to conservative state lawmakers who only had to change a few words here or there and, viola!, become a sponsor of a bill that would further the conservative corporate agenda.

According to a 2012 Bloomberg BusinessWeek investigation (archived), about 200 of ALEC's model bills became law every year.

While most of the bills don't garner public attention, many Americans are familiar with the rash of so-called "Stand Your Ground" laws that effectively allow the use of deadly force in the name of self defense by people who would claim they felt threatened by another person. Trayvon Martin's killer successfully used a "Stand Your Ground" defense to avoid conviction.

ALEC, which is supported by corporations, is now "pushing states to adopt a new law shielding all US businesses from 'political boycotts,'" according to The Guardian, in response to what some are calling “woke capitalism.”

How?

By drafting model legislation that states would pass which would require any government entity to include a clause in all their contracts banning any company they do business with from supporting political or economic boycotts. Those government entities could include a state government or a local police dept., school district, or perhaps a county clerk's office.

"According to the text of the proposed law, which is written by Alec’s lawyers so that all a legislature has to do is fill in the name of its state, it is a response to banks, investment funds and corporations refusing to invest in or do business with industries that damage the environment or are aligned with oppressive laws," The Guardian reports.

One line from the model legislation reads: “The collusion of corporations, and institutions to boycott, divest from, or sanction any industry may violate existing antitrust and fiduciary laws and harms consumers, shareholders, and states.”

The Guardian adds that "Some corporations are increasingly concerned that consumer pressure will cause other companies to boycott them over their funding of rightwing politicians and causes, or social positions."