Month: July 2025

What’s the biggest thing you can’t see that is still closest to you?

            We can’t be the first ones to notice this. You’ll need patience with the following, as it really constitutes a short course in galactic black hole physics. It’s not hard to understand – just long. From The Pearl of Great Price, Abraham, Chapter 3:

1 And I, Abraham, had the Urim and Thummim, which the Lord my God had given unto me, in Ur of the Chaldees;
 2 And I saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near unto it;
 3 And the Lord said unto me: These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest.

            For decades, astrophysicists have believed that most if not all galaxies must have black holes at their centers. There is just too much “stuff” floating around, moving way to fast, way too close to other “stuff” for it not to all merge due to gravity and orbit-decay. They already knew about white dwarfs and neutron stars – that bigger and bigger original stars give way to more and more dense “final states.” You can actually “see” one neutron star by its rapidly oscillating magnetic field. It’s like a radar beam sweeping over you as the neutron star spins ~1000 times a second. The signal is coherent, which means that the neutron star must be smaller than the distance light can cross in that amount of time – less than 10 kilometers. Calculations show that a teaspoon of neutron star “stuff” would weight tons on Earth – that is, if you could transport and then somehow weigh it.
            Hmmm. What happens if you throw in a lot more “stuff” into the mix – what would you get? Must be something denser (see the Newton paragraph below) – and it will be a real glutton for all the smaller stars and gas and dust whizzing around it. Because of tidal and magnetic drag on the highly conductive material, the individual orbits will decay. Matter will spiral inwards. Annnnnd… I…. Gotcha!

            With each cumulative new addition, the neutron star becomes larger and denser, until finally it has curved space so strongly that light can no longer escape it. By definition, it’s now a black hole. Matter spiraling into it is trapped.
            For almost as much time as they’ve known about the idea, astronomers have diligently sought proof of a black hole at the center of OUR galaxy. They chose it because it’s closer than other galaxies, so it should be easier to image. However, on the face of it this would seem to be a daunting task, as a black hole, by definition, radiates nothing – no mass, no light, no signal can escape its event horizon. Remember from a previous chapter that black holes are really dark gray and fuzzy (but not cuddly). However, there ARE some indirect ways that we might see one. As in almost all of science, we figure things like this out only by indirect means (Eisenhauer, et al, 2003) – just as we figure out gospel truths by indirect means.
            One way to “see” a black hole indirectly is to map stars close to the galactic core. “Our” black hole actually has a name these days: Sagittarius A*, pronounced “Sagittarius A-Star” or just abbreviated Sgr A*. It lies in a corner of a bright region in the center of the Sagittarius Constellation, in the center of our Milky Way. This bright spot was designated “Sagittarius A” by astronomers as the first bright apparent star classified in that constellation centuries ago when they first looked at it. To them, Sagittarius A looked like any other star, but they were using cruder telescopes than the ones you give your kids these days for Christmas. (That nearly worthless toy-store ‘scope? Galileo would have drooled over it.) As bigger and better telescopes became available, it turned out Sagittarius A was a whole lot more than a single star.

A very short course in basic orbital physics:

            Thanks to Newton, we know that the gravitational force between two masses is equal to a constant (the “G” mentioned in the chapter on the Anthropic Principle) times one mass, times the other mass, all divided by the square of the distance between the geometric centers of the two masses. Whew, that’s a mouthful. Perhaps you can understand why physicists really prefer to say things in “equation” instead of in English. A quick translation (I didn’t use translate.google.com to do this) gives: F₁₂ = G * M₁ * M₂/r * r. In shorthand this can be concentrated further to F=GMm/r². This is important, because a star named “S2” close to the center of Sagittarius A has been tracked since 1992 as it moves in a fast, very tight orbit in the center of our galaxy. (http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/s2.htm). In the vernacular, that sucker is really rippin’: it orbits in an ellipse about 5 by 10 light-days across in about 15 years. Days and years here make it seem trivial until you remember the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers (~186,000 miles) per second. This star is moving so fast that it makes the huge nearby stars look like icebergs with a dolphin zipping around nearby – if a dolphin could move at the speed of sound. S2 orbits around something that can’t be directly seen – but because of that equation above, the unseen mass of “our” Black Hole can be measured, and it’s huge: about four million Suns’ worth of “stuff.”

A very short course in basic electromagnetic physics:

If matter is being drawn down into the monster, it will be accelerating because of that 1/r-squared part of the equation: the shorter the distance, the stronger the pull on it, and the faster it goes. In fact, it becomes seething plasma as it falls in, because the calculated forces are truly humongous (try dividing anything by a distance squared that approaches zero – it’s like magma expanding and accelerating up a volcano’s throat to a spectacular explosion, with ash distributed eight states away, like Mount St Helens in 1980). Such a seething cauldron of accelerating matter will radiate: electrons accelerating in a magnetic field give off electromagnetic energy at wavelengths proportional to the radius of curvature of their ever-tightening spiral motion inward. That’s a complicated set of words but think instead of a tether ball spiraling into the pole – a good place not to leave your head. The event horizon of a black hole in a busy galactic center, in fact, should be shrieking at all wavelengths. The closer to the event horizon, the stronger the pull and the higher the energy – and the higher the frequencies, all the way up into hard gamma radiation. You need a number followed by lots of zeros to describe the energies involved. It’s hard to see the screaming-edge source because of all the stars, gas, dust, and junk in between Sgr-A* and Earth – and it’s also a long way away to “look” (about 26,000 light years away) to see anything.

Back to the matter at hand:      

            Astronomers are a persistent lot, and eventually they figured out that certain longer wavelengths can get past all that dust and junk and be picked up by Earth-based radio-telescopes. (They settled on a rather atypical radio wavelength of 1.3 millimeters – not that far from what your cell-phone uses. They chose this wavelength for several reasons, including because it’s not a cell-phone-band frequency.) If you can get a rich enough billionaire to pay for it, you can get a big enough array of radio-telescope dishes, spaced far enough apart on the Earth, to get a pretty darn good radial resolution. Think: seeing the shape of a coin located a football stadium distance away. The shrieking edges of Sgr A* can more or less be made out this way. Its diameter is no greater than 44 million kilometers – probably a lot less. This is about one-half the size of Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. Now, fit four million Suns into that volume – and then step back, or scream as you are gobbled up.
            In 2004, astronomers were astounded to find evidence of a much smaller (1,300 Solar masses) invisible object orbiting the 4-million-Solar-mass Sgr-A* black hole – a sort of mini-black hole orbiting the BIG black hole (Ghez, et al, 2005). This object resides in the center of a cluster of seven massive stars, which orbit it. Astronomers have also identified a number of additional giant stars that circle around in the near vicinity of Sgr-A* (the “lumbering icebergs”).

            Now read verses 2 and 3 of the third chapter of Abraham again. Does this ring a bell? Note that this is not saying that God resides in, or near, a black hole. However, you would have to agree that there are a number of remarkable coincidences here. There are also some amazing physical processes taking place in the core of our galaxy. Abraham hints rather broadly at a vastly greater understanding than I think most people recognize, and certainly more than a humble shepherd could possibly have known on his own.

A decimal point, followed by 44 zeros, followed by 67

            One of the (rather many) unsolved problems of physics is that there are certain constants that cannot be derived from something else; they can only be measured. They just ARE (Barrow and Tipler, 1988). One of these is the fine structure constant, the coupling constant for the electromagnetic interaction between a photon and an electron. Other constants include the speed of light c, vacuum permittivity ɛ, Planck’s constant h, and the gravitational constant G. Depending on who you listen to, there are up to 26 known fundamental (many of them dimensionless) physical constants. Many of these are critical to the current approximation of a Theory of Everything (“ToE”), called the standard model of particle physics.

            It’s not a real TOE, of course, because for nearly a century no one has been able to figure out how to meld gravity with quantum mechanics. The theory du jour (for the past nearly 40 years) for this is actually a mélange called string theory, which requires us to believe that there are 10 (or in some flavors 11) dimensions in our universe, six or seven of them invisible and not measurable. The main problem with this is not the multiple dimensions (which can’t be tested or sensed), but the fact that string theory has over 10 to the 500^th power possible solutions. In other words, you can use it to predict anything you want. On several levels it is thus fundamentally untestable, so by definition is not even science.

            One must exercise a lot of faith to be a theoretical physicist these days.

            Here’s the interesting thing about these otherwise unexplainable constants: if any one of them were just slightly different, no life as we know it could exist in the universe. If you threw a coin and it came up heads 26 times in a row, that would be unusual, right? In fact, the likelihood that all these constants line up perfectly is quite a bit less than 1/2^26.           

            I.e., a decimal point, followed by 44 zeros, followed by 67. THAT unlikely. 

            The only secular explanation for this is the so-called multiverse; we will say more about this later.

            One example may be helpful here: the fine-structure constant, which measures the strength of the electromagnetic force that in turn controls how charged elementary particles (such as electrons and photons) interact. This (dimensionless) constant is nearly equal to 1/137. There are several ways to obtain it, but a simple one is this: The constant is equal to the ratio of the velocity of the electron in the hydrogen atom divided by the speed of light. Its value is precisely tuned to allow the formation of commonly observable (baryonic) matter, and thus the emergence of life. Another precisely-tuned number is the strong nuclear force coupling constant. Its value is about 1. A fraction of a percent increase in this value and the strong nuclear force would bind the dineutron and the diproton, and nuclear fusion would have long ago converted all hydrogen in the early universe to helium. Water, organic compounds, and stars, essential for the emergence of life, would never exist. No stars → no supernova → no heavy elements like oxygen, carbon, silica, and iron… → no life.

            The amazing, beyond incredible multiple coincidences of precise tuning with all these variables is called the Anthropic Principle. Another way to say this: these finely-tuned physical parameters are a necessity, because living observers wouldn’t be able to exist and thus observe the Universe, if these constants were not just precisely what they are.

            Physicists have no idea why this is the case. It just is. 

            Even the current age of the universe is critical: if it were a fraction of the current age, there would not have been sufficient time to build the heavier elements (especially carbon, silica, iron, and oxygen) from earlier stellar deaths – novas and supernovas. There would be no rocky worlds with salty seas to harbor life.      

            Attempts to explain the Anthropic Principle – this precise tuning that permits life to exist – invoke either of two ideas: the existence of multiple universes (the “multiverse”), or an intelligent creator or designer.  “Intelligent design” or “ID” is treated with scorn by most scientists because it is un-testable and un-provable, and repeatedly invokes against-physical-laws action by a Designer God, and therefore is even not remotely scientific. In our view, it is also placing very narrow human perceptions and limits on Who and What God is.

            But what about the idea of a multiverse? The idea here is that there are an infinite number of universes with different physical parameters – including the ONE that harbors life as we know it – so we exist by a sort of cosmic natural selection.

            There is also the very non-trivial problem of where all the energy/mass for all these multiple universes would come from in the first place. The devil is in the details, as they say.

            But the multiverse, like intelligent design, is completely untestable. Some critics conclude that the Anthropic Principle is more of a philosophical concept, or basic assumption like physical laws, since it thus cannot be a scientific principle. One way some scientists have tried to bypass the controversy is to emphasize the so-called Weak Anthropic Principle, i.e., the conditions that we observe in the universe must permit the observer to exist. In mathematics as well as philosophy, the weak form of an argument is one which is easier to support because it makes fewer claims. 

            It certainly is weak. In fact, if you find all of these arguments either non-explanations or circular reasoning, then put a gold star on your forehead. We personally find it amazing that some scientists are so desperate to avoid acknowledging the existence of a Creator presiding over this universe that they will flail around trying to promote something as non-scientific, as untestable (Karl Popper used the word “unfalsifiable”) as string theory, or a multiverse.

            So, who is the believer in something they can’t see here?

            We agree that there’s a lot that science can tell us – we are, after all, both professional scientists. However, we don’t think science knows everything by a very long shot. The evolving history of science alone makes this abundantly clear. And that’s good, because one of the pleasures of doing science is solving problems and looking forward to new answers. As we show here and elsewhere in this book, there are a lot of ways that scientists must operate on faith, including accepting a lot of untestable  assumptions. 

            Just like believers.

            So, the moral of the story here is you can believe in science and religion at the same time – as long as you don’t assume that either of them can currently tell us everything about the universe.

THINK before you make that bet.

            Well, *I* believe in SCIENCE!

            Heard that before? It’s certainly nothing new – it goes back at least to Voltaire.

           Scientism is an expression in use for most of the 20th Century and is often used to refer to science applied in excess – or applied unreasonably. The term scientism can generally apply in either of three ways:

1. To indicate the improper usage of science or of scientific claims,  
2. To refer to a belief that methods of natural science form the only proper elements in any inquiry.
3. To make science into one’s religion.

            In this third and broader sense, scientism is used to describe the invocation of science as a focus of worship, generally by people who would prefer to describe themselves as atheists. It’s sort of like Methodism, or Daoism, or… you can fill in the blanks here.

            Two recent articles, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science” (Freedman, 2010) and “Trouble at the Lab,” (Anonymous, 2013) draw some obvious and frightening conclusions about this approach or life view.

            They both reference two extraordinary papers published by John Ioannidis, a physician and mathematician, in 2005 (Ioannidis, 2005a, 2005b). These are among the most-cited papers in all of modern science – and they are incredibly embarrassing to scientists. In the first paper, Ioannidis convincingly showed why 80 percent of non-randomized scientific studies turn out to be wrong. Fully 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard (and thus far more expensive) clinical trials give incorrect results. It is from studies like this that the medical doctors that you and I seek help from base their diagnoses and treatment protocols. 

            Our lives depend on these studies being correct. Incorrect results include:

• recommendations to use hormone-replacement therapy in post-menopausal women,
• that mammograms and PSA tests are critical for extending lives,
• that anti-depressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil can stop depression,
• that doing puzzles will ward off Alzheimer’s disease, and
• that drinking lots of water during intense exercise is helpful.

            Not one of these turns out to be true. THOUSANDS of stories in magazine articles have been written based on these published studies. Just the propagation of the hoary old “8 glasses of water a day” is astounding. The number of studies that contradict other studies of the same thing are so high that The Week magazine actually has a section called “Health Scare of the Week.”

            Many physicians on their own (including one of our sons), have discovered that just taking a patient off of every drug they are currently taking can improve their health immediately.

            The truly glaring problem is that the large majority of these drug-efficacy studies cannot be replicated. This means that other groups cannot repeat the same experiments and get the same results. Amgen, an American drug company, tried to replicate 53 landmark studies in basic research on cancer. They were able to reproduce the results of just 11 percent of these studies (Begley and Mills, 2012). In a separate study done by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company, only 25% of published results could be reproduced. These analyses aren’t being published by disgruntled scientists, but by editors in the premier of all science journals: Nature. Dr. Ioannidis warns that between one third and one half of medical research results have been shown to be untrustworthy. He suggests that physicians, when faced with all this potentially lethal error and confusion… simply ignore them all!

            Ioannidis’ second paper explains why these flawed studies happen and get published in peer-reviewed journals. Without belaboring the details (you can read them yourself if you want to), it comes down to many things – but many things that compound themselves:

• The “publish or perish” ethos for young scientists to get tenure or grants,
• Ignorance of what constitutes statistical significance among most scientists,
• Ego,
• Fear of reprisals by peers or superiors,
• The tendency of scientific journals to publish almost exclusively just the “new” and “exciting” discoveries,
• Bias in research study design, bias in analysis, self-serving interpretation, and
• Fraud.

            This last issue is interesting, and when identified firmly (often a difficult and expensive thing to do), it is supposed to lead to retractions of published articles. For example, The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal based in the UK, retracted an article by (no longer Doctor; his medical license has been revoked) mister Andrew Wakefield that used a mere 12 case studies, performed unscientifically, to “prove” that the MMR vaccine causes autism (Eggertson, 2010). Multiple attempts to replicate this explosive claim all failed, and further follow-up showed that the data had been “doctored” (pun intended), and basic ethical practices were ignored.

            A University of Edinburgh study of 21 confidential surveys of scientists worldwide (Fanelli, 2009) found that only 2 percent of them admitted to falsifying or fabricating data – but 28 percent said they knew of colleagues who engaged in these practices! If that difference hints to you at a broader problem, then give yourself three stars.

            The problem with Scientism is that it falls for the oldest mistake in the Book: it worships at the feet of the Golden Calf; one of several modern versions of the Golden Calf is Science. But like all man-made things, science is not something to be worshiped. It is a faith that is based on something that is fatally flawed, because science is very, very human.

            Are we advocating that people not trust science? Absolutely not – just don’t bet your life on it, and certainly don’t pour your faith and belief into it! Science is still far better and more honest than the talking heads and corporate-paid pundits on talk radio or some cable news channels. However, as currently practiced in the majority of cases, science is not Truth, and it is not The Answer we are all looking for.

Well, then, can you scientists predict anything?

An old joke goes like this: “What do tornadoes and divorce have in common?”
            Answer: “Somebody’s gonna lose a trailer.”

            Harold Camping made millions preaching that The Rapture would begin on May 21, 2011… and the world would then end October 21, 2011 (Goffard, 2011). In his words, “May 21st was one of the worst days of my life.”

           We don’t feel sorry for him: Would it have been a better day for him if everyone had died? Camping claimed to preach from the Bible, but apparently somehow overlooked Matthew 24:36 ”But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”

            Here are some disasters can you can definitely predict:
            – a volcanic eruption,
            – a traffic accident in your lifetime, and 

            – your inevitable death (though not everyone considers this a disaster).

            Here are some disasters that you cannot predict:
            – mega-earthquakes, and
            – when the world will end.
            In between these extremes there are some that you can “sort of” predict with varying future time-frames:
            – a tornado – by a few minutes to an hour,
            – the price of oil – up to weeks ahead, and
            – if you faithfully and regularly buy Lotto tickets… you will have one less car during your lifetime.

            Conservative estimates of money spent world-wide to study earthquakes range up to $50 billion – but with no success for all that expenditure. The top earthquake scientists we have talked with tell us that science can’t actually predict earthquakes (see previous chapter). We can forecast the statistical likelihood of one, but we cannot predict one. However, statistical likelihood makes the assumption that the earthquake-generation process is similar to and somehow linked to past events, which is a pretty shaky proposition (pardon the pun) – because then we should be able to predict them in the first place.

            Some things are truly random – or at least we cannot find a discernible pattern to them. Roulette comes to mind. However, your ultimate success at roulette is not random:

            You. Will. Lose.  This is because the numbers and payout are rigged against the player.

          However, some apparently random events may simply have causal factors still unrecognized or not understood by science. This hope has driven some brilliant people I know to gamble their entire professional science careers on earthquake research, and they have all seen little for it. So far, anyway.

          Human beings always look for patterns in everything – it’s built into us. If we can see a pattern in something (like earthquake precursors, or bubonic plague and rats), we hope we can predict something (like the next earthquake, or how to NOT get the plague) that might extend our lives. But a number of things we see over our lifetimes just don’t make sense, and there is an instinct in us to try to come up with SOMETHING to explain them. Science merely tries to put some rigor into that process: can you replicate it? Can you verify it somehow? Is it random?

          When something doesn’t make sense, we can either invoke magic, or conclude that we are missing information. There is at least one reason, one causative variable or set of variables, for everything that happens, unless we scientists have seriously misunderstood time; the linearity of time is another one of those faith-based assumptions of science, though there is some argument about it stemming from general relativity. One aspect of this causation issue revolves around the concept of random. The reliability and safety of your online credit-card purchases depends on being able to generate a random number. Really: it has to be something that someone else cannot factor, break down, and otherwise use massive computing to derive the encryption key.

            But here’s the fun part: generating a truly random number is impossible.

            Mathematicians and computer scientists have spent decades trying to do this – but hardware that can generate a number by a certain process can be duplicated. Mathematicians have gotten really, really good at generating pseudo-random numbers – numbers that sure seem to be random. Yet the fact is that the National Security Agency was able to eavesdrop on conversations in Islamabad, supposedly encrypted, on and after May 1, 2011. The NSA knew exactly what Pakistani authorities were saying to each other after Osama bin Laden had been tracked down and killed in their own back yard. That means the encryption keys being used were NOT random. Massive computing power in Fort Meade, Maryland (and a ginormous and not-so-secret server farm in the Utah desert), win again (Wikipedia, 2016, Utah data center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center )

            However, there are no random events. Nothing “just happens.” The Big Bang didn’t just happen. Something causes everything, and if we don’t understand something, it just means we don’t understand the principles underlying it – and it’s a fool’s errand to then just deny that something doesn’t exist just because we don’t understand it.

            But Someone knows all the principles and rules governing this universe.

            Wouldn’t that Someone be nice to have for a friend?

We want PROPHETS. And Seers. And Revelators.

            On April 6, 2009, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake devastated the small town of L’Aquila in central Italy. It was caused by movement on a northwest-southeast fault in a region long known for tectonic activity and volcanism (there is a reason for Vesuvius and all those Alps). Over 300 people died.

            There were a number of fore-shocks, something not unusual for an earthquake-prone region, called fore-shocks only because a big shock followed. These were sufficiently strong that local officials asked for advice from six seismologists and a government official. A week before the main event, these individuals gathered as a panel to review the data, and afterwards at a press conference assured the public that they were in no danger. Their reasoning: that any potential accumulated fault energy was already being dissipated by these small shocks. But then the monster quake hit a week later.

            In May 2011, an Italian judge gave the go-ahead for a trial for these individuals. The charge: manslaughter. In 2012 they were all found guilty – and jailed.

            What’s happening here? Seven individuals were charged in court for failing to predict correctly the devastation that was about to happen. They could spend up to 12 years in jail.

            Is this right? Can you throw people in jail for failure to prophesy correctly? Italian jurisprudence certainly seemed to think so. At last check, the original draconian sentence was thrown out, then reinstated, and then thrown out again by higher courts. Stay tuned.

            The consequences of this trial are being felt far and wide in the scientific community. There have been impassioned letters sent to the Italian judge by European scientific societies, and many other science entities including the American Geophysical Union. 

            The US Geological Survey felt sufficiently moved by this decision to host a two-hour-long, web-based briefing for USGS scientists about legal liability for doing their science under United States law. 

            The bottom line for USGS scientists: if you do your job in good faith, you are not culpable because of several protective federal laws, and you are untouchable by any state or municipal government because of the Supremacy Clause in the US Constitution. That translates to relief for American seismologists – sort of.

            A volcanic eruption can be fairly well forecast: the timing approximately, but the extent of damage and duration less so. Some eruptions can be predicted five months out; for others there may be as little as 15 minutes warning from the onset of the first unusual rock-breaking seismicity to an explosive eruption. The short warning usually correlates with the fact that the particular volcano was poorly instrumented, if at all. The geophysicists couldn’t see any evidence that anything was happening until an eruption was just coming to life, because they didn’t have data from close-in instruments.

            A hurricane can be forecast in a narrower window of time, but again, the extent of damage can only be estimated ahead of time very imprecisely.

            Earthquakes cannot be predicted (Hough, 2009), though they can be roughly forecast. The Dow Jones Industrial average cannot be predicted, though amoral people are constantly trying to game the system to gain an unfair information advantage.

            In these two cases – earthquakes and the Dow Jones – you can make some statistical forecasts based on past history, but they assume history will be repeated. Most people would consider a statement like “There is a 31 percent chance that the Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area will rupture in the next 50 years”... to be close to useless for them personally. “So, what am I supposed to do about it?” But this information is not totally useless: you can use this number to appeal for more funds to retrofit buildings and strengthen building codes. Or you could also move to the Mid-West and have a go at tornado-dodging.

            The FACT of your death can be predicted, in the sense that it will happen. Forecasting the TIMING of your death is less predictable: your lifestyle and parents’ longevity weakly correlate with how long you can expect to live, but that’s about all that science can say. Statistically, Mormons live longer and also live healthier lives, but an LDS Church friend, a chef, died several years ago of lung cancer from who-knows-what fumes in his restaurant grill.

            Scientists are not prophets, nor seers, nor revelators… though these roles are something that we as a society implicitly demand of politicians and leaders. Some of our readers will be surprised to hear that there actually are “prophets, seers, and revelators” around these days. We had these in ancient times, and we have had them again now for nearly two centuries. We personally know people “saved” by having a food storage system in place in obedience to the recommendations of a modern prophet. One of us has lived longer than his maternal grandmother did, in large part because of a set of prophetic instructions he has followed, called the Word of Wisdom, given in 1835.

            We all make bargains, in terms of what we will accept as risk in our chosen professions.  Field ecology and research geophysics are moderately dangerous fields as a career choice. One of us has nearly been killed by Shigella in the Venezuelan jungle, by a sand cobra in Mauritania, by a hunter taking a “sound shot” at him in the Sierra Nevadas of California, by an incompetent helicopter pilot in Venezuela, and even by the frigid sea in Alaska. As professions, ecology and geophysics are both less dangerous than being a fireman or police officer. One of us once worked as a wildland firefighter during three summers while in college, when large-scale forest fires in southern California nearly caught him twice in fast-moving fire-storms. This job is still far less dangerous than working as a Barents Sea crab fisherman, who statistically die in Alaska at truly startling rates.  And we wouldn’t give up our research jobs easily because they are just so darn much fun. 

This is the bargain many people have struck with their life: we choose research and learning, but they’re balanced with the excitement (and danger) that goes along with them (see our Faust chapter).

            As a friend once put it, we make our bed where we choose – but then we must sleep in it, too.

They’re the same, right? Actually, no.

            Are You Superstitious? Relax, It’s Okay!

            Here’s something funny, in an article called “The Science of Superstition,” in the Feb. 16, 2015, issue of The Atlantic magazine: A visitor (thought to be Carl Alfred Meier) once asked the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr whether he really believed that the horseshoe he’d hung at his country home was lucky. “Of course not,” Bohr said. “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.” Also find this quote in:

Droke, Maxwell, 1956, The Speaker’s Handbook of Humor, Anecdote Number 1172, Title: Not Superstitious, Quote Page 373, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York.  Also:

A Journal of Shipbuilding, Marine Engineering, Dock, Harbours & Shipping, Vol 87, 1956, p. 422

            If Bohr couldn’t resist magical thinking, can anyone? We’re all, always, looking for explanations of things we can’t explain. And if the symbolism of the object we’re superstitious about fits what we want to believe, like the horseshoe does – a big basket-shaped item that seems able to catch all the good luck in the world, or at least in that room – great symbolism, isn’t it! – then it must be lucky.

            Because here’s the thing: All humans are always looking for meaning, for explanations, for ways to understand and control the world around us. (In this, we’re not so different from chickens!)

            As Pres. Harold B. Lee said, quoting another religious leader, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, about the purpose of religion: “Man seeks something to end his state of confusion and emptiness…” [“The Iron Rod,” 04 April 1971 address in general conference: https://www.lds.org/ensign/1971/06/the-iron-rod?lang=eng ]

            Does religion do this? It does. It answers questions that science doesn’t even ask, moral questions, where we came from, why we exist, and what we may do to end our confusion and fill our emptiness.

            Here’s a quote from another religious leader, Shoghi Effendi of the Baha’i faith, about the purpose of religion, from the “Sic et Non” blog maintained by Dr. Daniel Peterson: (Peterson, 2018):

            The independent search after truth, unfettered by superstition or tradition; the oneness of the entire human race, the pivotal principle and fundamental doctrine of the Faith; the basic unity of all religions; the condemnation of all forms of prejudice, whether religious, racial, class or national; the harmony which must exist between religion and science; the equality of men and women, the two wings on which the bird of human kind is able to soar; the introduction of compulsory education; the adoption of a universal auxiliary language; the abolition of the extremes of wealth and poverty; the institution of a world tribunal for the adjudication of disputes between nations; the exaltation of work, performed in the spirit of service, to the rank of worship; the glorification of justice as the ruling principle in human society, and of religion as a bulwark for the protection of all peoples and nations; and the establishment of a permanent and universal peace as the supreme goal of all mankind—these stand out as the essential elements.

            We’re trying to think of which of these purposes, or goals, or functions, of religion can be accomplished by science. Hmmm… actually, none of them.

            We’re also trying to think of which of these purposes, goals, or functions, of religion can be accomplished by superstitious beliefs. Hmmm… again, none of them.

            What does superstition do, then? It provides some temporary relief from the fear of the unknown, a temporary illusion of being in control of our lives. It does not provide any of those admirable principles listed by the Baha’i leader, such as abolishing “the extremes of wealth and poverty,” or “the exaltation of work, performed in the spirit of service,” or “the glorification of justice as the ruling principle in human society.” Or anything useful or uplifting for humanity.

            In contrast, here’s some of what religion, and faith, can do for us, as expressed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prophet Gordon B. Hinckley, in an address given in Oct. 1981(https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1981/10/faith-the-essence-of-true-religion?lang=eng). Speaking of his experiences as an apostle, he said:

            “…these have been challenging years, filled with worrisome responsibility and satisfying experience. Mine has been the opportunity to meet with the Saints over the world. I have been in your homes in many parts of the earth, and I wish to thank you for your kindness and hospitality. I have been in your meetings and listened to your declarations of faith and your expressions of testimony. I have wept with some in your sorrow and rejoiced with many in your accomplishments. My faith has grown, my knowledge has broadened, my love for our Father’s children has strengthened wherever I have gone.”

            In what way is this at all like superstition? In no way at all. True religion, then, as opposed to superstition, is uplifting and inspiring, and leads humans to treat each other better, to increase in love and understanding of each other, and to grow in faith.

            In religious documents such as the Old and New Testaments, a sharp line is drawn between superstition and true religion.

            There are, from the Old Testament, the stories of Moses confounding the Pharaoh’s sorcerers. Remember when Moses threw his staff on the ground, and it turned into a serpent (Exodus 7:10)? Remember how then the sorcerers threw their staffs on the ground, and they also became serpents? And then Moses’s serpent ate all of theirs (Exodus 7:12)? Remember how much that impressed the Pharaoh and his sorcerers? (Not at all: See Exodus 7:13.) And so on.

            For instance, here’s a modern retelling of the story of the Prophet Elijah confounding the priests of Baal from the Chabad.org website: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3942331/jewish/The-Story-of-Elijah-and-the-Prophets-of-Baal-on-Mount-Carmel.htm.  You can re-read the story for yourself in 1 Kings 18:20-30. The conclusion is great: “How long are you going to waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him! But if Baal is God, then follow him!” (1 Kings 18:21).

            Whichever version of these stories you read, you come to the same conclusion: The true God of this Earth and all creation as we understand it, and more, appears to demand our worship. Why? Because he needs our love and respect? Not even remotely. Because WE need HIS love and help.

            In the New Testament, we read about Simon Magus, who was so impressed with the gospel of Jesus Christ as preached by Philip that he was baptized. However, he obviously misunderstood how the gospel and the priesthood are organized and practiced: He offered Peter and the other Apostles money for the power he observed in them to heal and give the gift of the Holy Ghost. Peter’s response says it all:

            “But Peter said unto him, ‘Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee. For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity’” (Acts 8:20-23).

            Here’s another point about true religion, a point made by Pres. Harold B. Lee in the same speech cited earlier (https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1981/10/faith-the-essence-of-true-religion?lang=eng):

            “Now, if I may be guided by the Spirit, I should like to talk about another matter. There recently spoke in this city a prominent journalist from the East. I did not hear him, but I read the newspaper reports of his remarks. He is quoted as having said, ‘Certitude is the enemy of religion.’ The words attributed to him have stirred within me much reflection. Certitude, which I define as complete and total assurance, is not the enemy of religion. It is of its very essence.

            Certitude is certainty. It is conviction. It is the power of faith that approaches knowledge—yes, that even becomes knowledge. It evokes enthusiasm, and there is no asset comparable to enthusiasm in overcoming opposition, prejudice, and indifference.”

            On the other hand, we believe that “certitude” is actually the worst enemy of science. If you are certain, then you don’t need to carry out the research – because you already know. It is also one of the reasons for the recurring arrogance of some scientists who seem to believe that there is a contest between science and religion, and persistently ignoring the history of the awkward continuing evolution of science itself. See our following chapter on the massive intellectual fail of “scientism,” or worship of science as a kind of religion.

            We see this “certitude” displayed in the writings of many anti-theist scientists who seem to have taken upon themselves the task of “proving” that any and all religious beliefs are false, frequently stooping to ad hominem attacks when reason fails them.

            There IS this kind of certitude: superstition is NOT religion. Superstition provides a temporary, narrow answer to uncertainty. Religion – true religion – is “…uplifting and inspiring, and leads humans to treat each other better, to increase in love and understanding of each other, and to grow in faith” that there is a larger purpose for humanity. For our existence and beyond.

            Finally, by way of summary:

1. Observation is a key. If something makes little sense, you can invoke magic – or the fact that you lack information. There was poor observation. There were bad statistics in a science paper.
2. Keeping a record is a key. We must not be easily misled by a single or limited number of events recorded second or third hand. Oh Remember, remember…
3. Testing is a key. Can your religion survive testing? Can your scientific theory survive testing?
4. Carefully vetting previous research – and vetting the opinions of parents and friends – is a key. How did they arrive at their conclusion? We don’t have time to always re-invent the wheel, we need to base judgments and research on something reliable – so where do we draw the line at re-evaluating everything?

            Ultimately, is it uplifting? Does it lead you forward to be a better person? If you want to know if it is superstition or religion, you can go back two millennia to this: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:20)

How much does science really know, anyway?

            An older issue of EOS, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union, has a very compact but informative figure in it that is very relevant today:

This shows the relation between fault surface that tears and moment magnitude of the ensuing earthquake (from Stein & Okal, 2011, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2011EO270005). It helps the average science-interested individual figure out how the size of a fault-plane can tell you how big an earthquake COULD be. Really? Other elements of the figure also warn us of potentially how large a tsunami run-up (the wall of water you will meet at the coast shortly afterwards) might* follow one of these monsters. The follow-on tsunami is what killed most of the ~16,000 people who died in northeast Japan in March 2011. (Elliott, 2014). The tsunami, not the magnitude ~8+ Aceh earthquake, is also what killed about 250,000 people around the borders of the Indian Ocean in December 2004. (Satake and Atwater, 2007).

            It’s been known for a long time that the size of an earthquake correlates fairly well with how much surface area is torn in the formerly “stuck” rocks on a fault surface.

Some quick brittle-rock-vs-plastic-rock basics:

            If you have a vertically-oriented fault like the San Andreas, the vertical dimension for the fault “tear” can be only about 10 kilometers – below that depth the rock is so hot and pressurized that it turns plastic and doesn’t “break.” A magnitude 7.8 event is about as big as it can get for the San Andreas Fault. Even if it rips horizontally for 200 kilometers, it can’t get enough surface area torn to have a magnitude bigger than that.

            An ocean-floor subduction fault, however, is a different kind of cat. These faults dip shallowly, almost flat in some places. You can therefore get a lot more “down-dip” rock breakage or “tear” in that direction with this kind of fault before the down-going slab of oceanic crust gets down to the “plastic” zone.

            The Tohoku earthquake off northeast Japan in March 2011 was calculated to have been in the magnitude 9+ range. That’s 10 times more energy released than a magnitude 8 event, and close to 25 times more energy than a “piddly” San Andreas 7.8 event (the earthquake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906).

            The EOS diagram above lays out this surface-slip calculation pair:

            A 60 km by 120 km tear, with 5 meters slip along the fault-face, will give you a magnitude 8 event – and a 10-meter tsunami run-up. That’s a wave – a wall of water – nearly 35 feet high.

            A 200 km by 500 km rip, with 10 meters slip (the Tohoku earthquake), will give you a magnitude 9 event – and a tsunami run-up of up to 20 meters (a 65-foot wave).

            This latter explains the monster 15-meter (50-foot) wall of water that hit and destroyed the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, and over-ran and destroyed villages many kilometers inland. This Fukushima nuclear plant debacle now looks more and more like the Chernobyl disaster that depopulated much of the Ukraine in 1986 (where about 135,000 people were permanently evacuated from their homes in a little over a day).

            It’s been known for a long time that the rate of subduction – how fast a continent is over-riding an oceanic floor – seems to correlate with the frequency of volcanic eruptions inside the continent’s edge. Mount St Helens has erupted twice since 1980 (but no other eruptions have occurred elsewhere in the Cascade Range since 1917’s Lassen Peak event in northern California). The Juan de Fuca plate “only” moves about 2.5 cm (1 inch) per year towards North America, slow compared to 8 cm per year, the rate at which the Kamchatka Peninsula is moving eastward over the Pacific plate.

            More oceanic floor plate thus gets subducted down to the mantle, faster, and this means more partial melting takes place, faster. Think of a lava-lamp with three times the heating coils all turned on at once.

            What are subduction-related volcanoes, anyway? Examples are Mount Rainier on Seattle’s skyline, Mount St Helens and Mount Hood near Portland, and Mount Shasta in Northern California: in fact, the whole Cascades range qualifies. Their equivalents elsewhere: Bezymiani, Sheveluch, Alaid and a boatload of other dangerous volcanoes in Russia’s far east Kamchatka Peninsula; Mt. Fuji and Mt. Unzen in Japan; Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines; and Krakatau (“east of Java”) and Merapi in Indonesia. There’s a reason why the Pacific Rim is called the “Ring of Fire.” More pointedly, all the volcanoes in Central and South America are subduction-related volcanoes (see the previous chapter, “Volcanoes and Nephi’s Smoking Gun”).

            Does this subduction rate thing also hold for the frequency of occurrence for large earthquakes?

            The same diagram in the article suggests that subduction earthquake frequency and size don’t seem to correlate with how fast the plates are moving. This is probably because of complex fault geometries, and how often so-called “silent” or “slow” earthquakes take place (some tend to quietly redistribute accumulating fault strain… and apparently occur frequently beneath the Pacific Cascades).

            The bottom line here: the last huge subduction earthquake on the Pacific Northwest coast happened in January 1700 AD (Atwater 2005; 2015). According to seafloor drill cores, at least 7 of these magnitude 8+ events have occurred in the last 3,500 years, but that means nothing in terms of predicting the next monster. There is no regularity to these things. They don’t “tick” like a clock. The Next Big One could occur tomorrow or 400 years from now.

            What can you do about this? If you live in Kansas, you need not worry. Well, maybe you still do – because of tornadoes.

            If you live in Portland or Seattle (or Tennessee, Arkansas, South Carolina, or Missouri where there have been large earthquakes in the past), however, it would be a good idea to earthquake-reinforce your house – and buy earthquake insurance. The problem is that if a Cascadia earthquake hits in the Pacific Northwest, the damage could be so massive and so far-reaching that it could wipe out many North American insurance companies. Hurricane Andrew (which slammed into south Florida in 1986, the same year as Chernobyl blew up in the Ukraine) caused about $24 billion in damage, and even with the modern practice of spreading risk by underwriting, it stretched some insurance company reserves to their limits.

            You CAN, however, steadily build up toward a year’s supply of food, and develop some sort of water storage system. Again, this is as much for your neighbors as for yourself. You are your brother’s keeper. You could restate it this way: Who would Jesus expect you to save? This is yet another way that science can inform our future. If we study, and are thoughtful and Christ-like, we really need not fear that future.

* Depending on fault geometry, there could also possibly be only a small tsunami – for instance a left-lateral or right-lateral fault movement would not raise or lower the seabed significantly, so it would not create a tsunami. Knowing the fault geometry ahead of time thus makes a big difference in predicting the size of a possible tsunami, when the first seismic waves at a seafloor earthquake sensor reports back to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawai’i and the hypocenter is located.