Date: April 9, 2011
Title: The Lion and The Ghosts
Podcaster: Ben Lillie
Link: http://storycollider.org
Description: A quick tour of some famous theories answers the question: “Do scientists ever believe something they don’t have an explanation for?”
Bio: Ben Lillie is a physicist who left the ivory tower for the wilds of New York’s theater district. How now writes and produces shows about science. He is a Moth StorySLAM winner, and hosts the monthly science storytelling show, The Story Collider, where guest are invited to share true, personal stories of the times in their lives when science has been important, inspiring, or simply absurd. He also writes for TED.com, and likes to say that life is different now, largely because it is.
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Transcript:
Hi, this is Ben Lillie from The Story Collider.
Before, before I get to the astronomy, I need to tell you about the lion. I’ll warn you, it’s going to be a little disturbing.
A few years ago I was in the Field Museum, the natural history museum in Chicago.
My friend had gotten us passes to go in the research areas for a show and tell day for museum members. There was a ton of cool stuff, but the thing that stuck with me was in one room they had a lion. It was dead, it had been at the local zoo, and had died of natural causes. So, in this room, they were doing a demonstration of lion autopsy. And the guy who was doing it was cutting and diving in with his bare hands. And I remember thinking, “is that right? Is that safe? Is that really how it’s done?” And just as I thought that he reached over, with his blood-soaked hands, picked up a soda can and took a big swig of it.
All right, we’ll come back to that.
Around the same time (i.e. when I was living in Chicago) I attended a fun event put together by the Illinois Science Council on the science of the spooky. My friend Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist at Fermilab, was presenting on “The physics of ghosts” (specifically: why they wouldn’t work), and it seemed like there might be some opportunity to
heckle.
Dan’s talk was great, and very tongue-in-cheek, but more interesting was the audience.
I was most interesting in the question session that followed. The question was: is there anything that scientists have evidence for and that they believe in, but to which there is no plausible explanation?
The question was obviously asked in the spirit of: “aren’t scientists so closed-minded that they won’t accept things that are out of the ordinary?” The answer is a resounding “no”, but conditionally.
My dad’s a geologist, so I grew up hearing this story:
In the early 1900s Alfred Wegener proposed
the theory of continental drift. He looked at mountain ranges and different rock strata and concluded this: the continets move around by ploughing through solid rock. That’s a crazy idea. Still a lot of people believed it, the data on mountains
And here’s where it gets interesting. The idea is wrong. The continents don’t move around the earth by ploughing through solid rock. There was, and ism no known mechanism that could drive that motion. The energy needed is just way too high.
But they do move. And there was a reason to think the idea was interesting.
In the 1950s a weath of seismographic data became available, and people realized that the earth isn’t solid rock, there is a semi-liquid layer that the contents can slide on. Suddenly, there was a mechanism for continental drift, called plate tectonics, and the whole idea was accepted.
And that brings us back to my friend Dan, because the reason they asked him to give a tongue-in-cheek talk on the physics of ghosts is that his real research is on Dark Matter, which in many ways is like a ghost;
invisible particles that we know indirectly are almost certainly there, but which we haven’t (yet) directly detected.
The history of Dark matter is a lot like continental drift: First proposed in the 1930’s by a Fritz Zwicky, who looked at the motion of galaxies, saw some things that didn’t make sense with the current model, and inferred that there must be more matter there. And for fourty years that was it. Then in the 70’s Vera Rubin looked at the motion of stars in galaxies and found the same
thing: more matter was needed.
Even today, we don’t have a direct detection. There’s a lot of ideas about what Dark Matter might be, and many indirect lines of evidence that it exists. Enough evidence, that almost everyone believes the dark matter is present.
So, “do scientists believe in anything they don’t have an explaination for?” Yeah, a lot. That’s how almost all the things we have evidence for started; an idea someone believed in. And then they went through the process.
And that brings us back to the lion. He was doing an autopsy to find out
how it had died, and that’s how they’re done. Sometimes it’s messy, and uncomfortable to look at. But seeing the process is as important, more important, than knowing the answer.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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