Advance notice

Today's science news involves something called the Chandrasekhar Limit.

Stars live for most of their lives in an equilibrium between two forces; the inward pull of their own gravity, and the outward pressure from the heat generated by fusion in their cores.  As long as there is plenty of hydrogen left to power fusion, those forces are equal and opposing, and the star is stable.

When the hydrogen is depleted, though, the balance shifts.  The core cools, and the gravitational collapse resumes.  This, however, heats things up -- recall the "ideal gas law" from high school chemistry, and that temperature and pressure are inversely proportional -- and the star begins to fuse the helium "ash" left over from hydrogen burning into carbon.  Eventually that runs out, too, and the process repeats -- carbon to oxygen and silicon, and on up the scale until finally it gets to iron.  At that point, there's nowhere to go; after iron, fusion begins to be an endothermic (energy-requiring) reaction, and the star is pretty much out of gas.

What happens at this point depends on one thing: the star's initial mass.  For a star the size of the Sun, the later stages liberate enough energy to balloon the outer atmosphere into a red giant, and when the final collapse happens, it blows off that atmosphere into a wispy bubble called a planetary nebula.  

The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

What's left at the center is the exposed core of the star -- a white dwarf, still glowing from its residual heat.  It doesn't collapse further because its mass is held up by electron degeneracy pressure -- the resistance of electrons to occupying the same quantum state, something known as the Pauli Exclusion Principle.  But it's no longer capable of fusion, so it will simply cool and darken over the next few billion years.

For heavier stars -- between two and ten times the mass of the Sun -- electron degeneracy is not sufficient to halt the collapse.  The electrons are forced into the nuclei of the atoms, and what's left is a densely-packed glob of neutrons called, appropriately enough, a neutron star.  So much energy is liberated by this process that the result is a supernova; the atmosphere is blown away completely, and the collapsed core, which is made of matter dense enough that a teaspoonful would weigh as much as Mount Everest, spins faster and faster because of the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum, in some cases reaching speeds of thirty rotations per second.  This whirling stellar core is called a pulsar.

For stars even larger than that, though, the pressure of neutron star matter isn't enough to stop the gravitational collapse.  In fact, nothing is.  The supernova and subsequent collapse lead to the formation of a singularity -- a black hole.

So that's the general scheme of things, but keep in mind that this is the simplest case.  Like just about everything in science, reality is more complex.

Suppose you had an ordinary star like the Sun, but it was in a binary system.  The Sun-like star reaches the end of its life as a white dwarf, as per the above description.  Its partner, though, is still in stable middle age.  If it's close enough, the dense, compact white dwarf will begin to funnel material away from its partner, siphoning off the outer atmosphere, and -- this is the significant part -- gaining mass in the process.

Artist's conception of the white dwarf/main sequence binary AE Aquarii [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

The brilliant Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar figured out that this process can only go on so long -- eventually the white dwarf gains enough mass that its gravity exceeds the outward pressure from electron degeneracy.  At a mass of 1.4 times that of the Sun -- the Chandrasekhar Limit -- the threshold is reached, and the result is a sudden and extremely violent collapse and explosion called a type 1a supernova.  This is one of the most energetic events known -- in a few seconds, it liberates 10^44 Joules of energy (that's 1, followed by 44 zeroes).

So this is why I got kind of excited when I read a paper in Nature Astronomy about a binary star system only 150 light years away made of two white dwarf stars, which are spiraling inward and will eventually collide.

Because that would be the type 1a supernova to end all type 1a supernovas, wouldn't it?  No gradual addition of little bits of mass at a time until you pass the Chandrasekhar Limit; just a horrific, violent collision.  And 150 light years is close enough that it will be a hell of a fireworks show.  Estimates are that it will be ten times brighter than the full Moon.  But at that distance, it won't endanger life on Earth, so it'll be the ideal situation -- a safe, but spectacular, event.

The two stars are currently orbiting their common center of mass at a distance of about one-sixtieth of that between the Earth and the Sun, completing an orbit every fourteen hours.  Immediately before collision, that orbital period will have dropped to the frantic pace of one revolution every thirty seconds.  After that...

... BOOM.

But this was the point where I started thinking, "Hang on a moment."  Conservation of energy laws suggest that to go from a fourteen-hour orbit with a radius of around 2.5 million kilometers, to a thirty-second orbit with a radius of close to zero, would require an enormous loss of energy from the system.  That kind of energy loss doesn't happen quickly.  So how long will this process take?

And there, in the paper, I found it.

This spectacular supernova isn't going to happen for another 23 billion years.

This was my expression upon reading this:

I don't know about you, but even in my most optimistic moments I don't think I'm going to live for another 23 billion years.  So this whole thing gives new meaning to the phrase "advance notice."

You know, I really think y'all astrophysicists need to step up your game, here.  You get our hopes up, and then say, "Well, of course, you know, astronomical time scales..."  Hell, I've been waiting for Betelgeuse to blow up since I was like fifteen years old.  Isn't fifty years astronomical enough for you?

And now, I find out that this amazing new discovery of two madly-whirling white dwarf stars on an unavoidable collision course is going to take even longer.  To which I say: phooey.

I know your priority isn't to entertain laypeople, but c'mon, have a heart.  Down here all we have to keep our attention is the ongoing fall of civilization, and that only gets you so far.  Back in the day, stuff like comets and supernovas and whatnot were considered signs and portents, and were a wonderful diversion from our ancestors' other occupations, such as starving, dying of the plague, and being tortured to death by the Inquisition.  Don't you think we deserve a reason to look up, too?  In every sense of the phrase?

So let's get a move on, astrophysicists.  Find us some imminent stellar hijinks to watch.  I'll allow for some time in the next few months.  A year at most.  I think that's quite generous, really.

And if you come up with something good, I might even forgive you for getting my hopes up about something amazing that won't happen for another 23 billion years.

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Rough neighborhood

Most likely all of you know about Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

It's hard to talk about it without lapsing into superlatives.  It has a mass about 4.3 million times that of the Sun.  It's event horizon -- the "point of no return," the closest you can get to a black hole without being trapped by its gravitational pull -- has a radius of 11.3 million kilometers.  It sits at the center of a fifteen-light-year-wide whirlpool of gas and dust called the accretion disk, which we know about because the material in it is moving so fast it has heated up to as high as ten million degrees Celsius, resulting in a steady emission of high-frequency x-rays.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons EHT Collaboration, EHT Sagittarius A black hole, CC BY 4.0]

It's curious that something this luminous wasn't immediately obvious to astronomers.  First, it doesn't emit a lot of visible light; we didn't have telescopes capable of detecting the x-rays that are its fingerprint until 1933.  By the 1970s, more precise observations showed that whatever the x-ray source was, it was extremely compact.  It wasn't until 1994 that Charles H. Townes and Reinhard Genzel showed that its mass and diameter were consistent with its being a black hole.  Another reason it took that long is that between us and the center of the galaxy there are massive dust clouds, so any visible light it does emit (or which is emitted by the dense clouds of glowing gas near it) mostly gets blocked.  (Even so, looking toward the center of the Milky Way in the constellation Sagittarius, visible where I am in late summer, is pretty damn spectacular.)

The third reason that we don't get the full luminosity of whatever electromagnetic radiation is emitted from Sagittarius A* is a fortunate one for us; because of the black hole's immense magnetic field, any bursts of light tend to get funneled away along the axis of its spin, creating jets moving perpendicularly to the galactic plane.  We, luckily, are comfortably out in the stellar suburbs, in one of the Milky Way's spiral arms.  Our central black hole is fairly quiet, for the most part, but even so, looking down the gun barrel of its magnetic field axis would not be a comfortable position to reside.

The reason this comes up is some new research out of the University of Colorado - Boulder, which used data from the James Webb Space Telescope to solve a long-standing question about why, given the high density of hydrogen and helium gas near the galactic center, the rate of star formation there is anomalously low.  This region, called Sagittarius C, extends about two hundred light years from the central black hole (by comparison, the Solar System is twenty-six thousand light years away).  And what the team of researchers found is that threading the entire region are filaments of hot, bright plasma, some of them up to several light years in length.

The reason for both the filaments and the low star formation rate is almost certainly the black hole's magnetic field, which acts to compress any gas that's present along the field lines, heating it up dramatically.  This, in turn, creates an outward pressure that makes the gas resist collapsing and forming stars.

"It's in a part of the galaxy with the highest density of stars and massive, dense clouds of hydrogen, helium and organic molecules," said Samuel Crowe, who co-authored the paper, which appeared this week in The Astrophysical Journal.  "It's one of the closest regions we know of that has extreme conditions similar to those in the young universe...  Because of these magnetic fields, Sagittarius C has a fundamentally different shape, a different look than any other star forming region in the galaxy away from the galactic center."

It is, to put it mildly, a rough neighborhood.

It's staggering how far we've come in our understanding of what our ancestors called the "fixed stars" -- far from being eternal and unchanging, the night sky is a dynamic and ever-evolving place, and with new tools like the JWST we're finding out how much more we still have to learn.  Something to think about the next time you look up on a clear, starry night.  The peaceful, silent flickering, set against the velvet black background, is an illusion; the reality is far wilder -- and far more interesting.

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Ruling over ashes

"Donald Trump is a stupid man's idea of a smart man, a poor man's idea of a rich man, and a weak man's idea of a strong man."

This quote -- often credited to Fran Leibowitz, although I can't find certain attribution -- is spot-on.  He flaunts his wealth in a way that ought to be embarrassing, engages in flexes that crumble whenever someone stands up to him (witness his ongoing war of words with the leaders of Canada), and trots out just enough fancy-sounding verbiage to give the impression, at least if you don't dig very deep, that he knows what he's talking about.  But even a half-assed effort at a close look, and the whole house of cards collapses.  To give just one of countless examples, two days ago he announced a long litany of tariffs that are supposed to somehow fix the American economy despite just about every economist in the country saying, "No no no please merciful heavens no please don't do this it's a terrible idea," and lo and behold, the stock market had its worst day since 2020 (when, not coincidentally, he was also president).  At least there was a grimly humorous note, because on the list was a ten percent tariff on imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands.

If you can't think of any American imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands, there's a good reason for that.  There aren't any.  

The Heard and McDonald Islands are uninhabited.

Well, they're inhabited by elephant seals and penguins.  But lemme tell you, if the seals and penguins start exporting goods, the Stable Genius here in the United States is ready for 'em.

So what's happening is that people who (1) are dramatically uninformed and fact-resistant, and (2) get all their information from Fox News and OANN, are all in on policies that have most of the rest of us repeating "What the fuck?" over and over.  Consider, for example, the effect that "DOGE" has had on scientific research, only two months into the second Trump presidency.

Elon Musk's clearcut-the-government approach -- I was going to call it a strategy, but it's closer to arson -- has already gutted science across the board.  Some examples:

• Officials at the National Institute of Health have been told to scrub all mention of mRNA from grants, presumably because the COVID-19 vaccine, long a bête noire of the right, is mRNA-based.  This comes at the same time as an announcement that an mRNA-based vaccine was shown to have the potential to cure pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest and hardest-to-treat types of cancer known.  Not halt its progress; cure it.  But no, can't have that, not with RFK Jr., Mr. Treat-Measles-With-Cod-Liver-Oil, running health policy.
• Speaking of RFK, he just announced that he's laying off the entire staff of the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy.  All of them.
• Because one loony alt-med type running stuff evidently isn't enough, Dr. Mehmet Oz was just confirmed as the director for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid.
• Work at many medical research institutions has ground to a halt, because seemingly random cuts, firings, and layoffs have taken out not only the researchers themselves, but critical support staff, supplies, and equipment.  "Warehouse staff are also gone, and incoming shipments of reagents and biological samples are now being turned away," said one staff member, who only spoke on condition of anonymity.  "We have orders in mid-process with no idea how to move forward."  This, apparently, constitutes "governmental efficiency."
• The journal Nature conducted a poll of over 1,600 scientists working in the United States, and found that three-quarters of them are now actively looking for jobs elsewhere, particularly in Europe or Canada.  One, who works in agricultural genomics, said, "This is my home -- I really love my country.  But a lot of my mentors have been telling me to get out, right now."
• Responding to firings at NASA and NOAA, and bogus and partisan "investigations" of colleges and research institutions, 1,900 scientists signed a letter warning the American public of the damage Trump and his cronies are causing to our standing as a leader in scientific research.  "We see real danger in this moment," the letter says, in part.  "We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry.  We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated."

The problem is -- to be completely frank -- Trump doesn't give a flying rat's ass about any of this, because he lacks even the smallest shred of empathy, and also because he's too catastrophically stupid to understand science.  Recall that he's the guy who wanted to nuke a hurricane, and when that got nixed, thought he could change its path by drawing on a map with a sharpie.  

Apparently, "Making America Great Again" somehow involves tanking the stock market, killing vital medical research, slicing other scientific programs to the bone, wiping out weather forecasting and climate modeling agencies just as we're heading into tornado and hurricane season, intimidating and censoring researchers, and forcing a mass exodus of the smartest people we've got to other countries where they'll actually have a chance at a stable career.

It'd be different if Trump and his cadre had an actual plan, but at this point I honestly don't believe they do -- beyond (1) stay in power and (2) get as rich as possible.  The rest is just window-dressing, and any damage they do along the way falls into the "Oh, Well!" Department.

Even if a miracle happens and the Republicans grow a spine and start standing up to him and saying "Enough," there's already been so much vandalism done to our reputation worldwide that it's hard to see how it'll be reversible, at least in the short-term.  If I were an investor in another country, no way in hell would I risk aligning myself with the United States right now, not with a capricious, thin-skinned, low-IQ egomaniac running the place.

What I'd be doing is trying to lure qualified Americans to relocate elsewhere.

The whole thing reminds me of another quote.  Like the one I started with, it's of uncertain provenance, and has been misattributed to Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War.  Wherever it originated, it's still apt here. 

"An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground, as long as he is allowed to rule over the ashes."

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Woof

I was discussing the alleged phenomenon of hauntings with a friend of mine, and he said, "There's one thing I've always wondered.  Some people believe that the souls of humans can survive after death, and become ghosts.  If humans can become ghosts, why can't other animals?"

Well, after pointing out the obvious problem that I'm not really the right person to state with authority what a soul, human or otherwise, could or could not do, I mentioned that there are many cases of supposed hauntings by animals.  The most famous of these is the haunting of Ballechin House in Scotland.

Ballechin House shortly before its demolition [Image is in the Public Domain]

Ballechin House was a beautiful manor house, built in 1806 near Grandtully, Perthshire, Scotland, on a site that had been owned by the Stuart (or Stewart or Steuart or Steward, they seemed to have spelled it a new way every time the mood took them) family since the fifteenth century.  The story goes that a scion of this family (sources point to his being the son of the man who had the house built), one Major Robert Steuart, was a bit of a wacko who had more affection for his dogs than he did for his family.  That said, he provided quarters for his sister Isabella, who was a nun -- I'm not sure why she wasn't living with her fellow sisters in a convent, but some claim that it was because she'd had an illegitimate child and gotten herself, um... de-habited?  Anyhow, she lived with them for a time, finally dying and being buried on the property.  As for Major Steuart, he apparently took enough time away from his dogs to marry and have at least one child, John.

As the Major got older, he got more and more peculiar, and finally started claiming that after he died he was going to be reincarnated as a dog.  One runs into these ideas pretty frequently today, but back then, it must have been a sore shock to his nearest and dearest.  So this partly explains why when the Major did go to that Big Kennel In The Sky, his son John rounded up all of the Major's dogs and shot them.

I say "partly" because I fail to understand how, even if you believed that the Major was going to be reincarnated as a dog, killing dogs that were currently alive and therefore presumably none of whom were actually the Major, would help.  But that's what he did.

And boy was he sorry.

Almost immediately thereafter, John Steuart and his family and servants began to experience spooky stuff.  They heard doggy noises -- panting, wagging of tails, sniffing, and the really nasty slurping sounds dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene.  (Okay, I'm assuming that they heard that last sound.  I certainly hear it enough from my own dogs.)  Steuart's wife several times felt herself being pushed by a wet canine nose, and reported being in a room and suddenly being overpowered by a strong doggy smell.

Other apparitions began -- the sighting of a ghostly nun, all dressed in gray, in the garden; doors that would open and close by themselves; and the sound of limping footsteps (the Major apparently walked with a limp).  Steuart himself was not long to worry about them, because he was killed in an accident, supposedly the day after hearing a knocking sound on the wall.  (Maybe it was a coded message from the Major that meant, "The dogs and I can't wait to see you!")

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the creator Spettro84, Ghost-BlackDog]

In the 1890s the hauntings were investigated on the urging of a certain Lord Bute -- I can't figure out whether by that time Bute was the owner of the property, or just a busybody.  Thirty-five psychics descended upon the house, which created such a cosmic convergence of woo-wooness that you just knew something was gonna happen.  And it did.  A Ouija board spelled out "Ishbel" (recall that Major Steuart's sister who was a sister was named Isabella, and recall also that this entire family seemed to have difficulty with spelling their own names).  The psychics experienced various doggy phenomena; one of the psychics, who had brought her own dog along, reported that one evening her dog began to whimper, and she looked over, and there were two disembodied dog paws resting on the bedside table.

I'd whimper, too.

In the interest of honesty, it must be recorded that the house was let several times during this period, once to a Colonel Taylor who belonged to the Society for Psychical Research, which is known for its skeptical and scientific approach toward claims of the paranormal.  And Taylor's diary, sorry to say, records that he slept in the Major's bedroom on more than one occasion and experienced nothing out of the ordinary.

Be that as it may, Ballechin House acquired the reputation of being "the most haunted house in Scotland," and by the 1920s became impossible to rent.  It fell into increasing disrepair, and finally was torn down in 1963.  I think this is a little sad -- I'd have loved to visit it.  I might even have brought my dogs. My puppy Jethro is highly alert, even if he has the IQ of a loaf of bread, and would certainly let us know if there were any other dogs present.  I see no reason why it would matter that the canine residents of the house were a bunch of dogs who, technically, were dead.  The "doggy smell" would be adequate motivation for him to bark his fool head off, as would the whole leaving-your-front-paws-on-the-nightstand thing.

So, the believers in Survival seem to, for the most part, believe that dogs have an eternal soul.  However, this opens up a troubling question.  Why stop there?  If dogs have an eternal soul, do cats?  (Several of the cats I've owned seemed to be more of cases of demonic possession, frankly.)  How about bunnies?  Or weasels?  Or worms?  Or Japanese beetles?  (I'd be willing to believe that if there are gardens in hell, there'll be Japanese beetles there to eat the roses.)  I find this a worrisome slippery slope.  It may be a cheering thought that something of Woofy's nature will survive his demise, even if he terrorizes the guests with sticking his spectral wet nose into said guests' private regions, but I'm not sure I want to be stung by ghostly yellowjackets, or have to spray my plants for ghostly aphids.  The real kind are enough of a problem.

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The shadow of misrule

One of the most interesting figures from English history is King Henry II, who ruled from 1154 until his death in 1189.

Henry was the first of the Plantagenet dynasty, which was to last another three hundred years.  The Plantagenets are said to have gotten their name because Henry's father, Geoffrey of Anjou, was fond of the brilliant gold flowers of the broom plant (in medieval French, plante genesta).  His claim to the English throne came through Geoffrey's wife (and Henry II's mother) Matilda, who was the granddaughter of William the Conqueror, and who had come damn close to ruling England in her own right during the First English Civil War.

Henry was a larger-than-life figure who spent most of his reign trying unsuccessfully to keep peace in his wide landholdings (he ruled not only England, but Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and Aquitaine), reining in his redoubtable wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, and later, dealing with repeated rebellions from his three eldest sons Henry and Geoffrey (both of whom predeceased their father) and Richard, who eventually succeeded to the throne as Richard I "the Lionhearted."

The single incident most often remembered about Henry's reign, though, was his clash with the indomitable Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.  (His picking up of an extra syllable -- "Thomas à Becket" -- is a sixteenth-century invention.)  Becket was initially a close friend and confidante of Henry's, and Henry had been instrumental in his succeeding to the Archbishopric in the first place; but once there, Thomas proved to be stubborn and unyielding, and engaged in what amounted to an eight-year-long pissing match with the king regarding the secular authority's jurisdiction over the Church.  Henry, whose temper tantrums were legendary, ranted at a meeting of his counselors in 1170, "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!"  (The better-known line, "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" is not attested by contemporary historians, although it's certainly a pithy and memorable turn of phrase.)

Either way, four of Henry's knights decided that this was tantamount to a direct order.  Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy and Richard le Breton quietly left the king's presence, and on December 29, 1170 made their way to Canterbury.  At first, it seemed as if they intended to bring Becket back to apologize to the king; eyewitnesses say they left their weapons outside before they went into the cathedral to confront the archbishop.  But Becket, of course, categorically refused, saying to the assassins, "I am ready to die for my Lord, that in my blood the Church may find liberty and peace."  The four knights rushed back out, grabbed their swords, and cut Becket down on the steps leading up into the choir.

The murder of Thomas Becket (ca. 1200) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What happened afterward is why this story comes up in Skeptophilia.  The four knights, understandably horrified at the repercussions of what they'd just done, took off in different directions, as fast as their horses could gallop.  They reconvened in de Morville's home in Knaresborough, Yorkshire, but the following year all four were excommunicated by Pope Alexander III.  Back then excommunication was a huge deal; it meant you couldn't receive the sacraments of the church, including absolution for sins, so it was considered a sure road to spending eternity in hell.  The four tried to make up for it by going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land -- it's thought that none of them returned, and according to one legend they came to bad ends in short order and were buried outside the walls of Jerusalem with the epitaph, "Here lie those wretches who martyred the Blessed St. Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury."

Thomas was canonized in 1173, and his death turned into a good example of "Be careful what you wish for."  In life, he'd antagonized a lot of people with his inflexibility and sharp temper; after he was murdered, all his failings were quickly forgotten and he became a holy martyr.  (In fact, so many miracles were attributed to him that 350 years later the staunchly anti-Catholic King Henry VIII had Becket's bones unearthed, burned, and scattered to the winds so they could no longer be venerated as holy relics.)  As for King Henry II, he never really recovered from his guilt, both in his own eyes and that of his people.  He undertook a remarkable penance -- he knelt at the site where Becket had died, stripped to the waist, and was flogged by the monks of Canterbury -- but it was the beginning of the end of his reign.  His wife Eleanor left him, his two oldest sons, Henry and Geoffrey, died in 1183 and 1186, and he developed health issues (probably stomach cancer) that ended his life at the young age of 56.

Becket's death made such an impression on the English people that it has given rise to a number of ghostly tales.  First, that on the evening of December 29, on the main roads out of Canterbury, you'll hear the onrushing clatter of a horse's hooves, followed by a swirl of icy wind -- the spectral presence of one of the four assassins, fleeing for their lives after murdering the archbishop.  As for Becket himself, he sometimes appears to visitors as an apparition called "Becket's Shadow" -- a vague dark figure with a "pearlescent sheen" and glowing eyes, seen near the pillar where Becket knelt while FitzUrse and the others hacked him to pieces.

It hardly bears mention that I don't give much credence to the ghost stories associated with Henry and Becket, but it does give an extra little frisson to a tale that's really rather sad.  By most estimations, Henry II wasn't a bad king; certainly there were way worse (including his indolent and cruel son King John, who succeeded to the throne after Richard the Lionhearted's early death in 1199 at the age of 41, from sepsis after a wound from a crossbow bolt).  But Becket wasn't an evil man, either.  Hard-headed and self-righteous, sure.  But the collision course the two men ended up on, and the tragedy that eventually unfolded, was as much due to circumstance as intent.  Even the rebellion of Henry's sons (with the connivance of Henry's wife Eleanor of Aquitaine) was a situation where it's hard to pin blame -- it was more what happens when you get a bunch of stubborn and strong-willed people together all of whom think they know the best way to do things.

But even unintentional misrule can cast a long shadow.  Richard I was a blustering bully who had no real interest in governance, and spent a huge chunk of his ten-year reign away on Crusade; John, his younger brother, was roundly hated for his ugly spitefulness, and no one mourned much when he died of dysentery in 1216 at the age of 49.  John's son, Henry III, had one of the longest reigns of any English monarch -- 56 years -- but he was a pious, easily swayed, and not very intelligent man whose obsession with reconquering lost territory in France turned into an utter debacle.  It wasn't until Henry III's capable son, Edward I, was crowned in 1272 -- almost exactly a hundred years after Becket's murder -- that things really began to settle.

It's worth keeping in mind -- especially considering what's happening right now in the United States -- how easy it is to tear things down, and how hard it is (and how long it can take) to rebuild a functioning government.  Any arrogant, entitled prick can run around with a chainsaw; it takes little effort and no brains whatsoever.  Crafting something that actually helps the citizens of the country live better lives requires skill and intelligence and hard work.  Look at what happened in England at the end of the twelfth century, where all it took were hard-headed ideologues refusing to give an inch to precipitate a century's worth of chaos.

How much worse could it be when the ones engineering the destruction are doing it with intent -- vicious and amoral sociopaths who are single-mindedly focused on amassing wealth and power?

Today's elected leaders, though -- and the powerful men who are moving them around like chess pieces, confident that they will never face any consequences -- might want to keep in mind the sobering epitaph carved into King Henry II's tomb at Fontevraud Abbey:

I am Henry the King. To me
Diverse realms were subject.
I was duke and count of many provinces.
Eight feet of ground is now enough for me,
Whom many kingdoms failed to satisfy.
Who reads these lines, let him reflect
Upon the narrowness of death,
And in my case behold
The image of our mortal lot.
This scanty tomb doth now suffice
For whom the whole Earth was not enough.

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Celestial revelations

Once or twice a week I volunteer to sort book donations for our local Friends of the Library biannual book sale.  This particular event, held in May and October and sponsored by the Tompkins County Friends of the Library, is one of the biggest used book sales in the United States -- we process a half a million books a year.  It's an amazing event, raises much-needed money for our library system, and is a must-attend for any bibliophiles.

It hardly needs saying that the sale is one of the high points of the year for me.  I always come back with a huge box of books, because I clearly don't have enough books already.  As the volunteers' presale is on April 27, I've already been snooping around up and down the aisles in the warehouse, scouting out what books I want to pounce on before anyone else has an opportunity to get their grubby mitts on 'em.

Sorting incoming books is a lot of fun, not only because the people I work with are lovely, but because it's highly entertaining to see what people choose to donate.  I've noticed that there seem to be themes -- one day we'll be inundated with books on anthropology, the next gardening, the one after that murder mysteries or religion or science fiction.  There's nothing odd about this, when you stop to think about it.  We all have our obsessions, reading-material-wise, so when people clear out their shelves it's understandable that we'd end up with piles of donations from the same genres.

When I was there last Wednesday, the Theme of the Day was the occult.  We had psychic stuff and reincarnation and crystals and astrology and Tarot card interpretation, as well as about twenty books by the famously loony Graham Hancock.  None of this was all that remarkable.  But then I ran into three copies of a book I kinda-sorta remembered hearing about -- The Urantia Book -- and by the third time, I asked one of the other sorters if she knew what it was.

She didn't.  She, like myself, had heard the name, knew it was connected with the occult somehow, but that was about it.

So when I got home, I looked it up, and it's quite a story.

Cover of the first edition (1955) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The whole thing seems to have been the brainchild of one William S. Sadler, although Sadler said he acted only as a channel and that the pages of the original manuscript "materialized" between 1924 and 1935.  Sadler is a curious figure; he was a doctor and an early "health food" promoter, whose wife Lena (Kellogg) Sadler was the niece of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes.  Sadler started out being a debunker of psychic claims, and in fact wrote a book called The Mind at Mischief in which he exposed fraudulent mediums and their methods of hoodwinking the gullible.

But then... something happened.  It's unclear if Sadler had a change of heart, or if (like the cynical, bored book publishers who decided to out-conspiracy the conspiracy theorists in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) he figured he could come up with his own loony idea that would fool people way better than the two-bit mediums he'd debunked.  Whichever it was, in 1924 he launched into a claim that he had become the focus of a "strange communication from a group called the Celestials." 

So he and some friends got together to write it all down.

These writings, which run to two thousand pages, are what were eventually compiled into The Urantia Book.  It wasn't published until 1955 -- because, Sadler said, there'd been questions he and his team had that needed to be "clarified by the Celestials."

But when it finally did hit the presses... wow.

The "Urantia Foundation" -- formed to coordinate printing and sales of the book -- reports that it's still a hot seller.  Between 1990 and 2000, annual sales went up by over a factor of five (from 7,000 to 38,000).  It became downloadable in 2010, and since then averages around 60,000 downloads a year.  Brad Gooch, in his book Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, says that the number of Urantia study groups and online discussion groups has been going up steadily in the last ten years and is showing no sign of leveling off.

I'll be honest; I haven't read the book itself and have no real intention to, but the excerpts I've found online strike me as fairly innocuous.  There's a lot of talk about all of us having the "Divine Spark" or an "Indwelling Presence" that guides us toward good behavior, and a "Thought Adjuster" that steers us away from sinfulness.  It seems to have no particular quarrel with other religions and philosophies; the attitude is that they all got some things right and some things wrong, so y'know, we're all on this journey together, live and let live, I'm okay you're okay everyone's okay.  And aliens, but they're okay, too.

Honestly, it's all pretty tolerant and friendly-sounding.  Me, I'd take this over evangelical Christianity in a heartbeat, even if Sadler did make the whole thing up.

What's curious about the people who believe this really is a more-or-less divine revelation from all-knowing Celestial Beings, though, is when it gets to the parts about science -- because in a lot of places, it got the science wrong.  And the really interesting part is that the things they got wrong were, oddly enough, wrong in exactly the way that you'd expect from an entirely non-Celestial human who was writing in the 1920s.  It describes the formation of the Solar System via something that sounds an awful lot like the 1905 Chamberlin-Moulton Planetesimal Hypothesis, which was widely accepted in the 1920s but ruled out on the basis of inconsistencies with known physical principles by Lyman Spitzer and Henry Norris Russell in 1940.  It states that the Andromeda Galaxy is "almost one million light years away" -- once again, the accepted value in the 1920s, before better measurements showed that it's well over double that distance.  Back then, too, the whole "fundamental particle" thing was really taking off, and there was no certainty of how deep the well went -- whether particles would prove to be divisible into ever tinier and tinier pieces with no end, or if there really were fundamental, indivisible particles.  Well, Urantia says that all the known particles are composed of a fundamental smaller piece called an "ultimaton;" electrons, for example, are made of a hundred of them.

Unfortunately for Urantia and the Celestials, however, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, one of the most extensively-tested models in all of science, finds no evidence of "ultimatons," and electrons really do appear to be fundamental and indivisible.

So my problem is that if you're expecting me to accept that this really is some kind of revealed truth -- either from a deity, or at the very least, from some super-smart aliens -- then why'd they get the science demonstrably wrong?  And if they got the facts wrong, on what basis should I believe anything else they say?

As generally "nice" as their philosophy seems to be, I have my doubts.

Anyhow, now I know way more about The Urantia Book than I did.  If you're intrigued, and going to be in Ithaca during the first week of May, you can pick up a copy or three at the book sale.  Today I'll be heading down in an hour or so to do my shift sorting more books.  I wonder what the Theme of the Day will be?  Sports?  True Crime?  Graphic Novels?  Self-Help?

Amish Romances?  I kid you not, there's a whole shelf full of Amish Romances.

When you deal with a half a million books a year, there's bound to be something for everyone.

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Taking the plunge

When I was in my twenties, I lived near Seattle, Washington.  It's a lovely part of the country -- absolutely a gardener's paradise, and I was only a few hours' drive from both the ocean and the mountains.  I spent huge chunks of my summers back-country camping in the Cascades, Olympics, and along the Pacific coast, getting as far away from the noise and traffic of the city as I could reasonably manage.

On one particularly memorable trip, I did a solo hike up and over Teanaway Pass in the Cascades, and camped by lovely, crystal-clear Ingalls Lake.  (Fans of my fiction might recognize this as the setting of a very important scene in my novel Kill Switch.)  On the hike in, it'd been one of those unusual blistering hot days the Northwest occasionally gets; not a cloud in the sky, temperatures around 85 F.  By the time I got to the lake and my planned campsite, I was drenched with sweat.  The lake looked really inviting, so I first shucked my backpack, then all of my clothes, and took off at a run for the water.

I was literally mid-swan-dive when I had a sudden, horrified realization.

Ingalls Lake is fed by glacial meltwater.

I must have looked like one of those comical Looney Tunes characters, frantically bicycling my legs in a futile attempt not to plunge into water that was probably around 40 F.  The cold shock was one of the most intensely unpleasant sensations I've ever experienced.  I was out of there, standing naked and shivering on the shore, in five seconds flat.

At least I wasn't hot and sweaty any more.

So I learned a valuable lesson that day: never jump into water before you've tested the temperature.

I have since that time only had one other cold plunge experience, this one knowing ahead of time what I was in for.  It occurred when I was in Iceland in 2022 with a group of nine other guys.  There's a general rule that the overall intelligence of a group of guys is inversely proportional to the number of guys in the group, and this was no exception.  So yeah, we all got naked and jumped into a freezing-cold lake in Iceland.  I don't have any photos of the actual plunge -- which, after all, would be NC-17 rated anyhow -- but this was my reaction afterward, when I'd gotten at least partially dressed:

I think the V-for-Victory stance was more "Yay, I survived" than "Gee, that was fun."  Because the fact remains that I hate being cold.  I have a nice swimmable pond in my back yard, and I take advantage of it when the water is warm enough to suit me, which in the upstate New York climate is the first two weeks of August.  I've got nothing against showing skin -- I'll shuck my shirt without hesitation if it's hot out, and skinnydip if those I'm with have no objection -- but when the weather's cool, I'm in several layers of Smart Wool.

The reason all this comes up is because of a study at the University of Ottawa that was the subject of a paper in the journal Advanced Biology last week that looked at whether the whole trendy Ice Plunge thing actually has any measurable health effects besides making your teeth chatter, and to my surprise, it turns out it does.  They took ten healthy young men, and subjected them to cold water immersion for a grand total of an hour spread over seven days, and then did blood tests to see how their bodies responded on the cellular level.

The results -- after only a week -- were striking.  Cold tolerance increased, which is not all that surprising; but what is more interesting is that autophagic function, which is the body's cellular waste disposal system, improved dramatically.  This process is involved with response to stress, and is critical for repairing damaged or aging tissues.

"We were amazed to see how quickly the body adapted," said study lead author Kelli King.  "Cold exposure might help prevent diseases and potentially even slow down aging at a cellular level.  It's like a tune-up for your body's microscopic machinery...  This enhancement allows cells to better manage stress and could have important implications for health and longevity."

Even so, I don't think I'm going to be joining our local Polar Bear Club any time soon.  The sheer discomfort of being that cold isn't worth any gains I might achieve.  Maybe, like the guys in the University of Ottawa study, I'd acclimate, but I doubt I'll ever get to find out.  I'll stick with relaxing hot showers, and swimming in my pond when the water's nice and warm.

And -- above all -- testing the temperature of lake water before I commit myself to a head-first dive.

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