ASM020 Telomeres, Dark Matter, and the Shroud of Turin

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telomeres dark matter and the shroud of turin all that and more on the 20th episode of ask sciencemic

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast now in its 20th week where i answer your questions about science faith and life i do want to let you know that belongs it's coming up in atlanta and i'd love for you to be there we've got a few seats left but not much time left to buy tickets you can go to ask science mike to find out more but for now let's get it started [Music] hi mike my name is renee goodwin and i'm from wilson county kansas and i listen to ass science mike with my step kids nathan who is a freshman at altoona midway high school jocelyn who is a fifth grader and natalie who is a second grader and my question is how can an average person who doesn't have a science degree tell when something is legitimate science or not like when you hear something on the news or see something on the internet how do you know if the science that they're quoting is real science in other words mike why should we listen to the scientific claims that you make on your show as opposed to some of the wackadoodle scientists that are out there spouting nonsense and how do we tell the difference thank you i can't stop laughing so i i record the show i have a notes open that i can read just so i can see your questions and uh haley my wonderful helper goes through and types out a little summary of your recorded questions so i read that to kind of mentally vamp for how to answer the question and on this one she did not include your closing about why should anyone listen to my podcast so i want to start there no one should listen to my podcast i'm not a scientist i just love science um i study it and i i have no idea why anyone listens to this show um it's amazing so i do work really hard at uh making my answers scientifically accurate and i do get really excited when i get mail which i do every week from actual scientists in a particular field i cover who tells me i did a good job explaining what they actually do for a living so i suppose the best way to answer this question would be to kind of share some of my own tips and tricks for discerning what is good science and what is not and let's let's talk about a couple of examples recently in the news fairly recently a few months back maybe a year ago i'm not real good with time but relatively recently this news came out that scientists had discovered slash validated something called gravity waves gravity waves are something that's predicted with a cosmological model called cosmic inflation a way in which the universe came to look as it does now starting with the singularity part of the big bang is is a cosmic inflation and gravity waves are a big deal because they're a signal that goes back further into creation or the universe than electromagnetic radiation basically for the first 380 000 approximately years the universe was opaque to light and so we can't trace an electromagnetic signal all the way back to the very beginning so the farthest back we get is the cosmic background microwave radiation i know a bunch of you are rolling your eyes right now stick with me the cool thing about gravity waves would be they're a signal that would have been able to pass through that that very energetic very hot universe that we could use to make measurements to see how well our models hold up i got really excited about gravity waves and i thought it was most likely that gravity waves were good science it turns out that the research that was published even though prominent astrophysicists and cosmologists were as excited as i was did not pass the proper rigor to kind of leap through peer review and more studies are having to be done i'm still optimistic about gravity waves hold that thought also in science recently science news very very very sensationalistic with something called em drives electromagnetic drives today to make something move in space you have to have some kind of propellant some kind of matter has to be flung out of the spacecraft and that's how we get thrust chemical rockets just energetically the exhaust of the rocket is what creates the thrust well an em drive you're using microwaves is but particularly focused way to create some amount of thrust there was this this news that two different research institutions had tested em drives which theoretically don't work they violate our understanding of physics and found some thrust and i was deeply skeptical and remain so so why do i kind of hold out hope for gravity waves and why am i very skeptical of electromagnetic drives one gravity waves fit within existing models of science well understood science in models that have made other predictions that have been borne out successfully through observation and experiment cosmic inflation the big bang theory have copious scientific evidence to support them every credible scientist in the world in cosmology and astrophysics accepts the big bang theory to to some degree or the other in cosmic inflation as very plausible models for how the universe emerged em drives sound fantastic but there's no good physics to back them up and that means for me to put any confidence in em drives i'm going to have to see a lot of evidence like a working em drive would go a long way uh you know the em drives we've kind of tested now we're done in labs and they're they were in a vacuum chamber but there wasn't a vacuum so we're re-running those tests and we haven't ruled out other potential interference factors the small amounts of thrust found etc etc basically this seems like a lot of sensationalist premature stuff and here's what happens we like the new we like the exciting but science is actually pretty boring the the journey from a hypothesis to a proven idea is slow and the more new and the more interesting idea the more slow the process is in validating it so the first thing with science is never let one headline especially an exciting headline offer proof don't accept that as adequate evidence for an idea look at multiple articles look at some conflicting articles and make sure you evaluate the credibility of sources right there's a lot of junk science sites on the web in general you want to be wary of new ideas in science i know that seems counter to how we sort of view science as a machine of progress but science makes progress by being cautious okay the farther an idea is from established science today the more evidence you need to validate it you want to check for bias in whatever source you're reading from i look at all major news media with a lot of skepticism the big news networks are looking for ratings some of the news networks are looking to satisfy a particular political audience to get ratings that makes them not very interesting as science sources a lot of the science news sites uh are looking for clicks as well they want to sell advertising just as much and they'll sacrifice some academic fidelity to push out results sooner to get more clicks right so in general i kind of i play the waiting game i sit back and i watch and i wait for prominent scientists in the field i'm talking about to weigh in and i look at the consensus of scientists in that field which means i spend more time reading books than websites about science the best thing you can do to be able to filter scientific claims is educate yourself about science by reading books written by respected established scientists and there's nothing wrong with being wrong about science so if some new claim comes out and it turns out that i'm wrong about em drives and they actually do work once i get the proof i'll be just as excited as everybody else part of science is the willingness to admit that you are wrong so those are kind of the approaches i take for evaluating good science and actually as much as i joked in the beginning i do have as a goal for my program to be a reliable source of good trusted scientific information and hopefully over time as you do your research and check my answers as i provide evidence to support my claims you'll you'll all see that i am serious about that and speaking of evidence to support claims on this episode on asknightsmike.com you can click on the show notes and i'll have a link to a scientific american article where a scientist talks about evaluating scientific claims and also a link to a great book called the information diet which not just helps you think about how to evaluate scientific claims but news on the internet in general we are in an age where there's some really low quality information calories out there so i do recommend the information diet to you thanks for the question absolutely a great one [Music] question two this week came in via email and it reads hey science mike so i came across a documentary talking about how they discovered jesus's burial cloth also called the shroud of turin supposedly they say you can see his face imprinted on it and the stains match the areas of his crucifixion my question is this is there any evidence in science to back this up to be true i sort of have a hard time believing this but would love any insight from you thank you for all that you do and i look forward to hearing what you have to say thank you katie well katie i am skeptical about this one as well uh the shroud of turin i don't know a lot of people get really excited about it i really never have in my most bible literate fundamentalist believing day as the shroud of turn was never something that seems significant to me for a number of reasons one and this is really important the shroud of turin shows an image of a man that if it was valid would have been draped over the person uh whose impression it held which is a problem because that's not how they prepared bodies and that's not how they buried bodies uh in first century judaism they wrapped bodies we see that even in the story of lazarus right so you wouldn't expect an image that's just like this this shroud was just laid on top of jesus that was common in the middle ages which interestingly enough in 1988 when they did carbon dating on the shroud of turin it seemed to be from the middle ages which coincidentally is when the shroud of turin was first sort of displayed publicly and discovered so to speak so those things really concern me it's never been conclusively shown to have blood or to not have blood on it as far as i can tell uh there's you talk about uh having to dig through a lot of junk science man there are a lot of sites that are making some wild claims about the shroud of turin but let's suppose for a second it is real blood how would we know that it is actually the blood of jesus i mean if you want to afford something like this you could find real blood even real human blood and you know dress someone up in a crown of thorns and make a fake shroud now one interesting thing is it's got this kind of negative image that you can only see with reverse imagery and i'm told that's difficult to duplicate but i don't think that proves it's the burial cloth of jesus just the more i kind of dig into it just doesn't make sense and let's suppose it was the real burial cloth of jesus it doesn't actually prove he was resurrected so the significance of this artifact it's interesting it appears to be a very intricate innovative medieval art piece slash forgery maybe i don't know if it was intended to be forger if it simply became one regardless i don't see how this proves jesus was real person or jesus was resurrected even if you figure out that it's 2 000 years old and has human blood on it as opposed to you know some kind of pigment or animal blood the catholic church says that they trust scientists to kind of validate it that they don't they don't come they don't speak for or against the shroud of turin they say that it's great if it inspires your faith um but i haven't seen any really great scientific inquiry or access or or i don't know that there's there's kind of a dearth of information for something that has so much popular emphasis so you know in reference to my last question evaluating good scientific claims i don't see enough scientific evidence to validate this artifact scientifically and my default position is skepticism on this one and what we do know the little bit of science we have really kind of places it as a medieval relic and not a first century one so i think your skepticism katie is well placed [Music] question three this week also came from the email inbox it reads science mike my name is aaron funk and i have a phd in chemistry yes they call me dr funk no i'm not a dj i'm 31 and i work as a scientist for a nuclear medicine company in los angeles and i teach chemistry at ucla i go to mosaic and hollywood pastor is aaron mcmanus perhaps you've heard of him mosaic has a very science and faith should have the same intention mindset which i really like first of all thank you tremendously for your podcast i agree with virtually everything you have to say i have been looking for someone like you for a while now i was raised in a completely secular environment and only recently have decided to follow jesus i've wrestled with so many questions many of which you've already addressed and this has been pretty awesome and reassuring it's great to know there's people like us who want to follow jesus and who also accepts science for what it is in terms of a question for you dot dot dot i've read that some researchers think that the first person to live to be 200 is live today and there's a link which you can see at asksciencemike.com i'd like to know what you think about this telomeres telomerases and all that good stuff and for those who take the old testament literally i do not perhaps you can play a game where you come up with a theoretical scenario to scientifically explain how these ages could have been possible perhaps analogous to the physics of superheroes linked to amazon also on ask sciencemike.com anyway i'm positive i'll come up with another question in the future but thought of this one today aaron well aaron it's super intimidating to answer a question by a phd in chemistry who works for a nuclear medicine company and teaches chemistry at ucla because uh frankly my whole job is stealing the work of people like you and telling people about it so we'll see how i do i probably didn't even pronounce telomeres right because everything i know came out of a book right and and i'm a southerner that combination means i do some really wild word pronunciations my friends on twitter have spent a lot of time making fun of how i say eagletarian instead of egalitarian for example but a few thoughts here on the old testament when people were purported to live hundreds of years versus today where we think people might be on the threshold of living hundreds of years first of all humans have an interesting track record at forecasting the future if you look back at say the 1950s and their predictions of the year 2000 they were wildly optimistic just like the 1989 depiction of 2015 was wildly optimistic i'm still looking for that hoverboard and holographic jaws movie by the way on the other hand we can also be incredibly pessimistic when determining the future look at anyone talking about computers when they first hit the scene and what people thought the impact might be no one could have forecast something like the internet in the days of any act now sometimes our predictions are pretty dead on i think of moore's law in the first couple of decades of microcomputers and semiconductors moore's law you know did really well for a long time what i'm saying is some researchers might think we're on the threshold of humans that live a couple hundred of years and we may be but they could also be wildly optimistic or wildly pessimistic in that prediction and i certainly am not qualified enough to with any authority make predictions but i'll share my opinion based on what i've read there's some interesting tests in the labs certainly related to telomeres telomeres are these as you know but my listeners may not are these extra bits of repeating information on the ends of chromosomes every time your chromosomes divide which they have to to function and to reproduce little bits fall off the end and those your telomeres your telomeres are protecting the data integrity of a chromosome by slowly getting shorter okay and there's also um telomerases which can grow telomeres and when we look at the lab there are some interesting results one that if you lengthen telomeres you can basically make immortal cells human cells that are immortal which is good because aging cells make aging people and you know there's been some interesting evidence of significantly reduced aging in mice and lab experiments unfortunately humans are more complicated than mice biochemically and as far as we can tell with human tissues and human beings if we use similar processes to increase our telomeres we basically increase the chances of cancer by orders of magnitude because there's already a word for immortal fast dividing human cells we call them tumors malignant cancerous tumors so that's a problem now our insights into telomeres do tell us a few things i'm going to quote the national institute of health here certain lifestyle factors such as smoking obesity lack of exercise and consumption of an unhealthy diet can increase the pace of telomere shortening leading to illness and or premature death basically the things we know that are unhealthy for your body are also unhealthy for your cells likewise things like physical exercise reduced caloric intake and eating healthier foods can slow telomere shortening and in some cases with physical exercise can even slightly lengthen telomeres without the corresponding increase in cancer risks so we may be on the threshold of major biochemical insight on telomeres that will slow or halt the aging process in humans or we may not be there's really no way to tell other than kind of paying attention to this space if we do crack the code i will not be first in line to get an injection that works on my telomeres i'll want to see some decadal studies and see what it does to cancer rates certainly now if we think about plausible scenarios in the old testament i mean those thought exercises are fun they're not terribly scientific we do know that there are animals on earth that do not age like we do tortoises for example live a very very long time you can imagine perhaps in the past if we had that kind of mindset that some genetic process was more similar to tortoises than it is now but that stuff i i don't you know how many angels fit on the tip end of a pinhead i don't know it's a weird question it doesn't make any sense same way i don't try to defend the plausibility of ages in old testament now you did mention superhero physics and i'm gonna have to read that book i haven't but superhero physics drives me absolutely crazy because every time i watch movies from comic books i roll my eyes because superman swoops in to catch the girl at you know hypersonic speeds and and she's fine because she didn't hit the ground but superman was actually traveling faster than she was toward the ground and so he would have hit her like a very high mass bullet like a missile and turn her into a pink spray or iron man in his amazing invincible unbreakable iron suit uh gets slammed into something going very very fast and he's fine which even if you're in an unbreakable suit the sudden deceleration would crack your bones and liquefy you and mess you up so i'm going to read the superhero physics book because right now super hero physics just drives me insane all the time you know violating thermodynamics where does all this energy come from how does iron man fly where's this where these stores feel things like that drives me crazy so i'm going to check out your link if you'd like to check out the physics of superheroes or this article about the 200 year old people that may already be alive that are children now go ahead and go to ask sciencemike.com we'll have links to that as well as some reading about telomeres for you and uh if you want how to properly pronounce telomere just go to youtube i bet someone can say it better than i can and that's the answer to that question oh man [Music] and our last question this week also comes from the email inbox uh just want to remind you i don't pick the questions for the show my patrons on patreon pick the questions for the show and this week they voted for more written questions if you'd like to influence that process go to asksciencemike.com and click on any link to patreon and and you can learn how you can pick the questions on the show if uh you'd like to hear more recorded questions so here we go question four this week hey mike big fan of the show i have a question about black holes my understanding is that gravity and the mysterious dark matter hold galaxies together but what effect if any does the supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way have on keeping us intact hypothetically speaking if the black hole were to vanish in an instant toss out hawking radiation and insert whatever sci-fi theory you'd like to allow this would there be a noticeable effect on the milky way at large and or in our solar system thanks well there is a supermassive black hole in the middle of the milky way it's like 307 times the mass of our sun which is a lot that's a bit that's a lot of mass it's it's so massive in fact that a star close to it called s2 as it is orbit nears this supermassive black hole to about 124 astronomical units is 124 times the distance from the earth to the sun that it goes to 2 percent light speed which is absolutely phenomenally fast for a star or anything with mass that's fast that's booking it so supermassive black hole does have tremendous effects on these these stars in the center of our galaxy what what effect does that on the larger galaxy well not much even though it's 370 times the mass of our own star here in our solar system its role is subordinate to dark matter dark matter does way more to hold the galaxy together than the black holes within our galaxy which may beg the question what is dark matter and i would like to tell you everything we know about dark matter right now that was it that was everything we know about dark matter which is nothing we don't even know if dark matter is matter at all we assume it is because it has gravity but we don't really know what gravity is either you see there are four forces in physics called the fundamental forces that we understand that underpin reality and science understands three of them quite well all the forces in nature are caused by tiny particles of one type swiping particles of another type so let's talk about the fundamental forces of physics one there's the electromagnetic force which you're really familiar with if you've ever seen light or held a magnet all those are manifestations of that and they use photons as their force carrier electromagnetic force is carried by photons then there's the strong nuclear force it's carried by gluons which are another fundamental particle so protons and neutrons are both made of quarks and the strong force holds them together so it holds the quarks to make the proton and then it also holds the protons together to make a nucleus it's vital with no strong nuclear force there are no atoms there is the weak nuclear force which is carried by both w and z bosons the weak nuclear force creates radioactive decay and nuclear fusion it's super complex and i probably couldn't explain it well in five minutes um if at all finally there's gravity everybody knows gravity you're not flying off the surface of the planet because of it except there's a problem we don't actually know how gravity works we don't know what its force carrier is what particle makes it work and none of our particle accelerators including the large hadron collider have been kind to any theories that tried to describe what gravity may be how gravity might work on a quantum level everything we find in our experiments just makes the standard model of physics stronger and stronger and stronger and the standard model works specifically by pretending there's no such thing as gravity so einstein did like a great job showing us how gravity works at a cosmological scale but we don't have any clue what happens at the particle scale it's a total mystery we know that some particles have mass from the higgs field that's why the higgs boson was a big deal and anything with mass attracts other particles across infinite distances at the speed of light so when we count all the matter in our galaxy all the stars and planets comets and yes supermassive black holes there's just not enough gravity to hold galaxies together the orbits of stars are fast enough that everything should fling apart right but they don't we don't know why and we call that dark matter okay if the black hole at the center of the galaxy disappeared all of the sudden number one gravity propagates at light speed and the milky way is many many many many many many many light years across i want to say it's 100 million if i remember correctly so it would take a long time for the effects of that gravity to propagate out and again it's a minor amount of gravitational attraction compared to dark matter so i could imagine you know i'd need a supercomputer and some astrophysicists to tell you definitively but i would imagine that maybe stars like s2 who were accelerated tremendously by this supermassive black hole if they were in those you know high speed portions of their orbit they may have escape velocity to escape the milky way certainly orbits of stars would change measurably the closer you were to the black hole the more your orbit would be affected but ultimately now the milky way would would keep going just fine we would likely have uh effects in our own solar system that could only be measured with telescopes and math and nothing obvious there wouldn't be any calamity on the surface of the earth or in our solar system at all if the milky way supermassive black hole suddenly disappeared i hope that was an interesting answer i probably had more fun answering that question than almost any i've done on the show i know i know some of you are more listening for the face stuff and others of you more for the science stuff so i hope the faith crowd is kind of able to hang with what would happen if black holes theoretically disappeared and uh and what dark matter is it's really fascinating stuff dark matter and dark energy are basically placeholders in physics for things forces we observe that we don't understand why they're happening fantastic question thanks so much [Music] 20 episodes 21 weeks because i think i missed one week thanks for listening uh you know in 20 weeks we've gained listeners every single show this show has grown every single week it's been out it's unbelievable all you people raiding on itunes you blow me away now people are screenshotting the show in other countries and sending me the ratings from other countries starting with bridges of greg who shares me canada but then i got to see the uk and australia as well that's really really exciting i'm glad you guys like the show i'm glad you're a part of it a couple things coming up one belong this event i'm doing with michael gunger through our thing we do called the liturgists i'd really like to see you there if you're able to be there it's june 15th through 16th in atlanta which means there's very little time left to buy tickets uh there are a few i mean a few tickets left we sold a lot at the very beginning and then you know there's just a handful left people get asking i think some people have told me they wish they could make it you can make it if you catch one of these tickets before the event gets here you can come to belong we'll see it we're gonna have a great time we've got people coming from all over the country the midwest all the way to the west coast washington state and oregon and california and people come from the northeast you know people from canada i can't believe how far people are coming to be a part of this you know hundred person group michael gunger will be there i'll be there pastor betsy uh my pastor you've heard on the literature's podcast we'll be there amina brown will be there uh the absolutely phenomenally talented spoken word poet and speaker and writer uh and also my friend uh lanny donahoe will be there um you may recognize him from orange or catalyst if you're in that world we'd love to see you at belong also the liturgists and i will be at the wild goose festival in july you can learn about all these events at ask asksciencemike.com which is the same place you can submit a question for the show it's what all the cool kids are doing they're using either voice or text questions on ask sciencemike.com and i still get a handful of questions on twitter soundcloud and youtube using the ask sciencemic now the show is listener supported i want to thank everybody who contributes to the show people who contribute to the show financially helping offset the costs and frankly helping me find the time to do it get rewards they get to pick the questions for the show they get early access they can be an executive producer they can guarantee they get a question on the show there's all sorts of benefits available now every dollar helps a lot of people give just a dollar a month i appreciate it other people get five nothing wrong with that if money's tight you can change or cancel a pledge at any time there's absolutely no commitment uh and it just underscores the fact that this is this is not my show it's your show it's our show i answer your questions and you pick them and it's a partnership and i'm thankful for it 20 episodes in amazing our show is produced by greg nordin he does an amazing job our pre-production work is done by hayley hyde and our theme song was written by jeff bodafort if you need original recorded music for a podcast or anything you're doing really an artist composer along with resources for every single question that's been asked in the history of the show don't miss the show notes and guys thanks for listening i'll see you next [Music] week