Science conspiracy theories (featuring Dr. Phil Plait)

Daniel and Kelly are joined by Phil Plait to explore conspiracy theories about the end of the world, demons at CERN, and the face on Mars. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 2:47Daniel Whiteson?

  We're doing our best to understand the universe, from biology to cosmology, from parasites to pulsars. We're building knowledge steadily about how things work, and we're using science because it's amazing. But sometimes, despite the torrent of information and understanding we're generating, wires get crossed. Strange theories develop and build support across the internet, cherry picking evidence rather than fairly applying the scientific method. These aren't science theories, they're conspiracy theories, and unfortunately, they're everywhere. From YouTube comments to the mouths of influencers, people are talking about the end of the world,

• 3:26Daniel Whiteson?

  or how CERN is sacrificing human children, or the beams are responsible for the Berenstein Bears being the Berenstein Bears. I wish that last one was a joke. So today, we'll dig into some of these conspiracy theories and understand where they came from and why they are nonsense. We're joined by one of our favorite science communicators and friends, Phil Plait, who will tell us also about how he saw Vladimir Lenin in his shower curtain. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe of conspiracies.

• 4:12Speaker 07

  Dr. Phil Plait is an astronomer, author, sci-fi dork, TV documentary talking head, a science enthusiast, a pop sci author, and a former goat owner. He writes the Bad Astronomy newsletter, which you can find on Beehive. How is life without goats, Phil? Are you, how, are you okay?

• 4:31Speaker 07

  It's goatless. It's, it's a Saint Chevre. I don't know. I don't know if that's correct French or not. Maybe Zach can help me with that. No cheese is what I think you just said. Yeah, exactly. It's been a while. We had four adorable mini goats when we lived in Colorado, but when we had to move to Colorado, from Colorado, that is, we had to rehome them, and we actually sent them to a farm upstate, which, you know, generally, when you're talking to a kid, is something of a euphemism, but in this case, it actually is true. We, we found a place.

• 5:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Now they can run and jump all day long?

• 5:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, in fact, we found a place that had a huge area with a bunch of other goats, and they needed a few more, so they, they looked pretty happy when we left. That's good.

• 5:22Daniel Whiteson?

  They needed more goats? They had a goat shortage?

• 5:25Speaker 07

  They had quite a few goats, but they were on multiple acres and, you know, and, Kelly, I've heard you talk about your goats. People have a lot of misconceptions about goats. They will eat until they fall over. That, that part is true, but they're picky. They are. And, you know, I know people who swear, "I saw a goat eat a tin can once." It's like, no, you didn't. You saw it in a cartoon. That's right. Fifty years ago, you're misremembering.

• 5:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, cartoons are not documentaries? They're not totally science-based? What are you talking about?

• 5:58Speaker 07

  The Bugs Bunny ones are, you can consider to be real. Coyote and Road Runner, too, yeah.

• 6:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Totally.

• 6:03Speaker 07

  So, yeah, we used to, I used to cut weeds and grass and all kinds of things, and there was some stuff they just, they just wouldn't eat. Yeah. But they looked pretty happy on the farm, though, so plenty to eat, plenty of friends, and plenty of room to run. I'm glad. I miss them.

• 6:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, thanks for coming on the show and dispelling misunderstandings about science and goats. That's what we're doing today.

• 6:24Speaker 07

  That is, that's my job. I think I have that on my business card, goat debunker.

• 6:31Speaker 07

  Most important job anybody can have, really. I work in that field as well.

• 6:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, the pay is terrible, but the, yeah, but it's a lot of fun. You lose money, I think, actually. Whenever you're doing anything with goats, it's a money pit, but there's out, out.

• 6:45Daniel Whiteson?

  But can we really trace any harm to misunderstanding goats? Like, does it matter if people think goats eat tin cans?

• 6:52Speaker 07

  Probably for the goats that are fed tin cans, yeah. Yeah. You know, I will say, there is one big misunderstanding about goats that I've seen many times, is that people do not understand that these are herd beasts. And I will see people saying, "I'm gonna get a goat." And I think, no, you should get at least two or three. And this is the same thing about donkeys and horses. You can't, you know, having one is actually cruel. Yeah. Imagine being locked up in a room by yourself for, you know, four years. It's, actually, that sounds pretty good.

• 7:27Speaker 07

  So for these herd animals, yeah, you need more than one. So there, there can be some misconceptions that lead to unfortunate goat outcomes.

• 7:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, let's talk about the goatist of all conspiracy theories, the ones about the end of the world. Phil, you want to talk about the Mayans and the sort of popular science concept that the Mayans predicted the end of the world?

• 7:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, the Maya notpocalypse, as I like to call it.

• 7:56Daniel Whiteson?

  What is the claim here? What are they talking about? What do they say was gonna happen? Yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 07

  What's the claim? The claim is that the Maya civilization in Mexico and Central America lasted for thousands of years, and at their height, was quite the accomplished group of people. They had big cities and agriculture and all kinds of stuff. They also had a very sophisticated calendar, and the claim is that their calendar came to an end on December 21st, 2012, the day we all remember the Earth was not destroyed.

• 8:33Speaker 07

  We're all just a simulation now. That's correct, a Maya simulation. Right. Which is funny, because Maya, isn't that video software? Isn't that name of a video software package? So, hey.

• 8:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm, it all connects.

• 8:44Speaker 07

  I'm giving them a little bit more fodder, yeah.

• 8:46Daniel Whiteson?

  They're doing it right out in the open, yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 07

  Coincidence? You'll hear me saying that a lot. Coincidence? Yes, yes, it is. When it comes to doomsday, astronomy plays an outsized role because the entire universe basically is a gigantic threat against our planet. And so there's any number of topics you can pick from to cause the end of the world, which is, you know, true. And a lot of these things can happen, you know, the odds of them happening are one in a gazillion, so that gives us pretty rich fodder. What I find funny is that the Maya have nothing to do with this. This is, this is silly. And real quick, if you want to hear more about various ways spaces try

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Kill us. You should definitely read Phil's book Death From the Skies.

• 9:32Speaker 07

  That is true.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay.

• 9:34Speaker 07

  That's all I have to say. I'm done now. I got the plug in. We're done. See y'all.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Oh, great.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Short episode, but right to the point.

• 9:42Speaker 07

  The end of my calendar.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 9:44Speaker 07

  So the idea came about a few decades ago from various and sundry usual conspiracy theorists. The idea is the Maya had, they actually had a very sophisticated calendar. One of them is called the Long Count Calendar, and it has a series of units in it. And these units are similar to the units we have, day, week, month, year. They had a kin, which is a day. My Maya is unfortunately a little rusty. The only word I know in Maya that I'm pronouncing correctly is stolak, which means lizard. That's something I learned actually at Chichen Itza when I visited.

• 10:27Speaker 07

  And I found that a lot of Maya sounds Vulcan. So if you're a Star Trek fan, you're gonna love this stuff. So there's the kin, which is a day and a winol, which is 20 days. Yeah, short of a month, but call it a month. A tun, which is 260 days. And then a bak tun, and a bak tun is 394 years roughly. It's 144,000 days. Now, these numbers are different than ours because they were fanatics about different bases. We do everything sort of in base 10 or 12. I mean, there's seven days in a week and all that, but typically we try to keep these numbers round. They have things that are divisible by 12 and 18 and 20 and all these different things.

• 11:12Speaker 07

  And all of these different cycles come together. They all, you know, at some point, they all cycle together. They each have a common denominator, a greatest multiplicative factor. You know, it's been like, like 50 years since I took that kind of math and I can't remember what the term is. When you have like five things that all multiply together to get a number.

• 11:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. But why did they choose these cycles? Like in the case of our calendar, some of it makes sense. It's physical, like the length of a day, the length of a month, the length of a year. A week is totally arbitrary, but why do they choose these lengths?

• 11:46Speaker 04

  Thousands of years ago.

• 11:47Speaker 07

  Ah.

• 11:50Speaker 07

  That's part of the conspiracy. Well, that's true. I mean, we are talking about things that happened 1,000 years ago, and I'm not that familiar with the history of the calendar. And to be honest, I'm not even sure why they had two. I think there was this sort of a fiscal governmental calendar and then an everyday calendar, which is kind of neat. We have the sort of the same thing. We have a fiscal year, which starts on October 1st in the United States and runs through September 30th. For, you know, reasons. And they had these two calendars as well. It just so happens that these are the units they picked. They may have had religious overtones or just sacred meanings or something. Or they could have just been nuts about certain numbers like 12 and 18. And that's how this all worked out.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  I was gonna guess they had 12 fingers or something, because I feel like when it comes to counting.

• 12:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Humans we're talking about.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  I know, no, I'm just joking. I feel like when it comes to counting, I want like bases that match the number of like digits on my hands. But anyway, I'm sure, you know, archaeological evidence suggests that was not the case.

• 12:54Speaker 07

  The polydactyl calendar that they used.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right.

• 12:58Speaker 07

  They were big about cutting off heads and stuff, so they may have had, you know, base eight because they cut off people's thumbs. I don't know.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Hard to say.

• 13:05Speaker 07

  They were an interesting civilization. Anyway, and I'm making that up, so. The point here is that their calendars were very similar to ours. You know, you have a month and at the end of the month, you cycle back to day one of the next month. So January 1st through January 31st, the next day becomes February, the next month. But then you go back to day one and you do this over and over again till you get to the end of the year, December 31st. And then you go to January 1st to go all the way back to the beginning of those units. And then the next biggest unit, which is a year, goes up one. So you go from 2026 to 2027, that sort of thing. Their calendar did the same thing. Well, when you look at all these numbers, they considered year zero to be 3114 BCE.

• 13:50Speaker 07

  So roughly 5,000 years ago, as our calendar works now. That was just where they sort of started. That was the creation of the world in their mythology. When you look at this, the 13th bak tun ends on dun dun dun, December 21st, 2012. What does this mean? Well, honestly, what it means is that, you know, they recycle their calendar. All the numbers tick up by, you know, go back to zero and then the next, the next biggest unit goes up by one. But in fact, if you're a conspiracy theory, the term in fact is meaningless and you can make up whatever you want. And so clearly, these guys are saying that the Mayans predicted the end of the world. And that was going to happen on December 21st, 2012, a day where it did not happen.

• 14:35Speaker 07

  And let me say, like most conspiracy theories that are based on science, you know, based is a funny word. Like that are, you know, off into another dimension, you know, starting with some sort of scientific fact. This is ridiculous on its face. For example, when you look at the Maya calendar, they had bigger units than the bak tun. The bak tun ticks over. It's like, oh, we're out of bak tun. What do we do? We go to the piktun, which is, which is like, I think 20 bak tun. They even had the alaw tun. This is, oh, I'm, I'm, any Maya out there, you can correct me on my pronunciation. This is an even bigger unit that is 63 million years. 63. Apparently they knew about the dinosaurs being extinct.

• 15:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So that lines up. That's not a coincidence, I'm sure.

• 15:23Speaker 07

  Except it was 66 million years ago, so. But the point being, you know, why would they have bigger units? If when they ran out of bak tunz, I don't know what the plural of bak tun is. Bak tuni, bak tuna, bak tunum.

• 15:37Speaker 07

  Why, why bak tuna? I like that. It sounds like a brand of fish.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  I'd eat that.

• 15:43Daniel Whiteson?

  It sounds like a sushi roll or something, yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 07

  Right. The next unit would be the sashimi.

• 15:48Daniel Whiteson?

  But there is something cool about numbers turning over. You know, like, I'm sure people went crazy with the year 2000, thinking it was going to be the end of the world. For no other reason than like the numbers are cycling over.

• 16:00Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 16:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Like when I'm driving a car and it hits 100,000 miles, I'm like, ooh, 100,000 miles. I'm like, I don't think it's going to be the end of the world, but there is something kind of, I don't know, not spiritual, not chilling. But something cool about seeing the numbers take over.

• 16:15Speaker 07

  It could be the end of your service warranty. So that could be, that could be an issue. And you know, I agree. We love round numbers. We celebrate anniversaries that are based on fives and 10s. The 25th is a big anniversary, 50, 100. This, you know, I, this year was my 31st anniversary, like getting married. Yes, 31. Why don't I feel that that's as important as 30? Well, 31 is a prime number, so it's hard to get a base of 31 out of anything. But 31 is prime. I think 31 is prime. So it's just a thing. And we do have these sort of atavistic attitudes. These attitudes that come from deep, deep, deep back in our, in our evolutionary history.

• 17:01Speaker 07

  That make us kind of be in awe of things that aren't really, you know, deserving of them necessarily. And so we celebrate these things and hey, you know what? Celebrating the end of the year is fun. It's a, it's a good unit. It's, it covers, you know, a decent segment of a life and a, and four seasons. It makes sense. So when a new year is coming, a time of renewal and refreshing and celebration, I totally get it. And to all of my knowledge, the Maya did this as well. When they came to the end of a big unit, they celebrated. They did not think it was the end of the world.

• 17:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Did they party like it was 1999?

• 17:41Speaker 07

  I think, I don't think they had a Y2K problem in their, their issue.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  But it's a shame they didn't have prints.

• 17:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 17:48Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, so that's the, that's the basis of this conspiracy. And then you say to yourself, well, what can happen? You know, destroying a planet is hard. You know, Earth's been around for four and a half billion years and it's been around. It's not vapor right now. So clearly gigantic solar flares, asteroid impacts, these kind of things. They have a very difficult time wiping out a planet. So the fun part is when you start reading about how they say this is gonna happen. And the, the beauty of this, and this is another part where I have to put my head in my hands and say, what are you, what are you doing? Nobody agrees on this. They, you know, you talk to a different conspiracy theorist, you get a totally different answer.

• 18:33Speaker 07

  All they know is that the world is gonna end. Coordinate. Honestly, and, and some of them, uh, you know, sometimes they do. You, you get little cult-like groups that cluster nucleate around, uh, I, I was gonna say a charismatic figure. Not always charismatic, I'll say that. Sometimes you're like, this person has a cult following? We're just jealous. Where's our cult following? Yeah, I know. I feel like I've been ripped off. Uh, if I'm getting paid by big astronomy and big pharma and big climate, you know, where's, where's my check? Where's my cult? And big goat. Wearing white robes and throwing tiny pickles at me. Tiny pickles. No, no, no real genius fans here? Okay. No. Somebody, somebody in your audience will recognize that quote. Okay. Velcom, a real genius. Anyway. Different theories.

• 19:18Speaker 07

  People have written books and, you know, they always, they always just wind up making a lot of money from this kind of stuff. And I think, what good's your money gonna be on December 22nd, 2012? And it turns out, yeah, actually, pretty valuable, it turns out, because it's still around.

• 19:33Speaker 07

  Bunch of different ideas. So, one of the ones that a lot of people heard of is that there is a, another planet in the solar system, uh, variously called Planet X. Nibiru, or Nibiru, uh, it, different people pronounce it a different way. I tend to pronounce it bull shenanigans.

• 19:55Speaker 07

  So however you want to pronounce it. This is an idea that's been around for a long time. Emmanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-American psychoanalyst, uh, in the 20th century. And he came up with this idea of trying to prove that the Bible was literally true. That everything that happened in the Bible really happened. And he did this by, and, and also, I should say, some ancient culture myths and things like that. So he said, look, uh, with Joshua, the earth stood still for a day, manna fell from heaven, uh, there were the plagues. How do we explain this scientifically? And he said, well, maybe the Greeks were right, and that Venus sprang from the forehead of Zeus, if you remember your Greek mythology. Aphrodite. Uh, in Roman, it was Venus spring, springing from, spranging, spranging from Jupiter's forehead.

• 20:41Speaker 07

  He said, hey, what if that really happened? What if the planet Venus got shot out of Jupiter? And ping pong balled around the solar system, causing all kinds of havoc and mayhem, and then settled into orbit around the sun? And he said, well, this is what caused the earth to stop spinning in the, in the Joshua part of the Bible. That it, it passed by the earth and slowed our rotation, and then somehow miraculously started to back up. Uh, Venus had an atmosphere that's filled with hydrocarbons, and at the time, that's what was thought. And, um, uh, that stuff rained down on earth, and that's what the manna from heaven was. He kinda confused carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. Uh, these are two very different things. I know how much you two love chemistry. Chemistry, the one true science, the best science.

• 21:26Speaker 07

  What?

• 21:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, boy.

• 21:28Speaker 07

  The only science we really need. Whoa, whoa, you didn't get a degree in chemistry? Why are you getting all pro-chemistry? I love chemistry.

• 21:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Big chemistry has paid you, haven't they?

• 21:37Speaker 07

  I've written a poem to chemistry. What? Oh, chemistry, oh, chem. No, no, no.

• 21:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no chemistry.

• 21:48Speaker 07

  No, I do like chemistry, but I, I, it, it plays into, you know, like any science, every science plays into each other. And there's a lot of chemistry in astronomy. Uh, and, and you kinda have to know the difference between hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, unless, of course, you're writing a book full of bull shenanigans and are trying to sell nonsense to people, and then it doesn't matter.

• 22:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe you should write a diet book about how people should eat a low hydrocarbon diet.

• 22:11Speaker 07

  Oh, God, that's a good idea. Are you feeling out of gas?

• 22:20Speaker 07

  So, Velikovsky, I could go for 17 hours about this guy. He was way off. His history was terrible, his astronomy was terrible, but, uh, he kinda became a cult figure because scientists tried to suppress him in the 1950s and 60s. And, uh, they, basically, people were trying to teach his stuff in college, and the science professors came in and were blacklisting his book, and basically, Barbra Streisand affected him into becoming a much more popular person than he was, if you know about the Streisand effect. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's making a lot of noise about something that should have been just nobody talking about. That's it. Yeah. And then it becomes much more popular than it ever would have been if you had just ignored it.

• 23:00Speaker 07

  The same thing with Velikovsky. Another guy, Zachariah Sitchen, came along, an Azerbaijani author. He also was big into Mesopotamian, Mesopotamian misinterpretation. You're gonna have that honking noise because I mispronounced Mesopotamian, right? Matt is pretty consistent. He's, he's pretty good with that button. We mispronounce a lot of things. Yeah, I know. Uh, and I'm not an archaeologist, so, uh, I'm gonna mispronounce a few things. He came out with a series of books saying that the Mesopotamians knew about 12 planets, and that included, uh, the moon and the sun, and this, this mysterious other planet. He included Pluto in this as well. And he basically is misinterpreting, uh, some scrolls that they had, and some, some texts that they had.

• 23:45Speaker 07

  But he was saying there's this 12th planet, which is called, uh, Nibiru, uh, that had these aliens on it called the Anunnaki, which were a part of the Sumerians. They were like gods, kinda. They visited Earth long ago, they created humans genetically, you know, da-da-da-da-da. He wrote seven or eight books about this.

• 24:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 24:04Speaker 07

  Uh, loosely based on Velikovsky. And then finally, Nancy Leader shows up. And this was a woman in the 19, late 1990s and early 2000s, who said that she was, and this is absolutely true, she was being communicated with by Zetans, which I believe was from Zeta Reticuli, which is the Betty and Barney Hill UFO case. Uh, they were abducted, lost time, that kind of what made abductions popular in the 1960s, or 50s and 60s. The Zetans telepathically communicated with Nancy Leader, told her about Nibiru passing Earth on May 27th, 2003.

• 24:40Daniel Whiteson?

  And when you say this is absolutely true, you mean?

• 24:44Speaker 07

  The claims that she was making. This is what she claimed.

• 24:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, it's true that she claimed it. Okay.

• 24:49Speaker 07

  Yeah. She was being telepathically communicated with by the Zetans, who told her about Nibiru. I cannot remember if Nibiru was populated or not. Maybe the Anunnaki were there. Um, she had a lot of stuff that she said. Uh, and that this planet was gonna sweep by Earth and wipe us all out on May 27th, 2003. Again, a day you may remember waking up and brushing your teeth and going about your life and not having the planet destroyed. Or a day you forgot about because nothing happened.

• 25:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, or we're a simulation now. Um, yeah. She also claimed the comet Hale-Bopp wasn't real, which I found very funny personally, because this was literally one of the brightest comets in the 20th century. I saw it from inside my house. It was so bright, I could look out a window and see it in the night sky. Wow. A bunch of amateur astronomers went to her house, her apartment, and tried to get her to come outside, and they could show it to her, and she refused to come out. It was a whole thing. So Nancy notwithstanding, there were a lot of people who believed this stuff at the time. Uh, and it got serious. Nancy claimed, and this is a trigger warning here, if you like pets, she claimed she killed her dog to prevent it from having to suffer through, uh, the devastation that was going to happen in 2003 from this. Oh, my God.

• 26:00Speaker 07

  We do not know if she really did that, don't even know if she had a dog, because she said a lot of weird stuff. And she, I, I think she honestly believed this stuff, but she's wrong. And that, this was one way. So, Nibiru is a giant, gasp, giant planet like, like Jupiter, or maybe a brown dwarf, that was coming in from the outer solar system. It's on a 3,600-year orbit that passes by the sun every 3,600 years, which, you know, explains, again, some biblical disasters. It was coming back in 2003, and was gonna cause floods and tsunamis and earthquakes and cats and dogs living together, all that kind of stuff. Uh, and of course, it didn't happen. And I wrote about this quite a bit. I said, listen,

• 26:41Speaker 07

  you can see Jupiter, even though Jupiter is 600 million kilometers away, something like that. It is one of the brightest objects in the sky. A brown dwarf would be just as bright. A Jupiter-sized planet would be visible to the naked eye from well over a billion kilometers away, and it would take years to get from there to here. So, and, you know, even in the year 2000, it's like, well, where is it? Why can't we see it? Yeah.

• 27:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 07

  Oh, it's cloaked, it's invisible, it's infrared, it's it's, it's it's, it's, right? It's this and that.

• 27:10Daniel Whiteson?

  The lack of evidence is evidence for an even more sophisticated conspiracy.

• 27:16Speaker 07

  Precisely. And Daniel, you said this in the episode about UFOs. And that, when I was driving along in my car, I do listen to this podcast, uh, clearly. Uh, and, um, you said that in the UFO episode, that, that, that plays into it, because if you could see this evidence, it wouldn't be a cover-up. To have a cover-up, there has to be something that is up-covered. Am I getting that grammatically correct?

• 27:42Speaker 07

  And so that's how, that's how good the government is. They're able to cover up

• 27:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 27:46Speaker 07

  A gas giant planet heading toward Earth. Uh, yeah, no. As I like to point out to people, you, you remember the, the Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky conspiracy? And how many people knew about that?

• 27:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 27:58Speaker 07

  Four, if you include Hillary Clinton and Monica's friend who leaked this whole thing. Four people knew about this, and yet it got leaked out. If you're telling me that tens of thousands of astronomers, planet-wide, are not gonna be standing on their roofs screaming about a planet heading toward Earth, you don't know any astronomers, because you cannot shut us up. Clearly, I've been talking for like, like, like three hours here without even taking a breath. So, you know, clearly. So, so that's one. That one, the Planet X thing is something I, I debated and, and wrote about for years, which is why I'm a little passionate about it. I even debated Nancy Leader personally What? on Coast to Coast AM, which is a conspiracy theory

• 28:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 07

  uh, radio show. I don't know if it's still on. It was on for, for years and years with Art Bell.

• 28:43Daniel Whiteson?

  I think so.

• 28:44Speaker 07

  Uh, and then George Noory, and I, I was a, a guest. I was on quite a few times, talking about real science. They asked me to debate Nancy Leader, and, and contrary to every instinct I had, I said yes. Uh, and she, I mean, it was very clear that this person's grip on reality was tenuous. And it became, uh, a very difficult situation for me, because it is easy to have fun with grifters, to make fun of them, Yeah. to, to mock them and all that kind of stuff. But when somebody is clearly, uh, having issues that way, it's, it's a much more delicate situation. I did not enjoy that at all, and that was one of the last times I ever did something like that.

• 29:25Speaker 07

  Health issue. Yes, very much. And I'm not a psychologist. I cannot diagnose her. I'm saying that's what it sounded like to me. I have I have run into any number of con artists with the the face on Mars we're going to talk about and with people who said the moon landings were faked, horoscopes, anti-vaxers, any sort of anti-science conspiracy, you will find people who are making tons of money on it. Sometimes they become head of health and human services on this country. It's weird that way.

• 29:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Speaking generically, yes.

• 30:00Speaker 07

  But other times, these are folks who who are having mental issues and it's it's sad, it's awful. And there's not much you can do about that. Well, that was one thing. That was one cadre, one cohort of conspiracy people saying it. Another one was that a solar flare was going to wipe out all life on Earth. Now, the sun has a magnetic field, and the magnetic field gets stronger and weaker over time over this 11-year solar cycle. When it peaks, when it's very strong, you get a lot of sunspots and a lot of solar storm activities, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, these are immense explosions on the sun. Solar flares are very

• 30:42Speaker 07

  bright, they blast out gamma rays, high-energy radiation. Coronal mass ejections are more like a release of vast amounts of matter, about a billion tons of hydrogen blown out from the sun, sometimes at extremely high speed. These can interact with Earth's magnetic field and create all kinds of problems, blackouts, they can destroy satellites. We've had issues like that in the past. And as it happens, 2012 was kind of looking like around the time the sun was going to have a maximum of activity. But then, five and a half years earlier, when it was at solar minimum, that kind of dragged on for longer than people expected. And so the solar peak didn't actually happen until 2014.

• 31:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Because the sun is kind of mysterious and hard to describe and not fully understood, right?

• 31:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, the the magnetic field is driven by processes inside the sun, movement of mass, parcels of hot hydrogen. This stuff is incredibly difficult to work with, because you know, it's hot and under pressure, we can't really work with it. But I mean, work with it theoretically. The the equations that define how fluids flow, very complicated. You throw in magnetism, which is a nightmare, and you've got some of the most complex physics you can do. And so it's very, very difficult to predict what's going to happen. So the sun's cycle was delayed by a year or two. And we just didn't see that kind of activity. It can cause a lot of grief.

• 32:09Speaker 07

  The 1859 eruption that actually is when we discovered all of this stuff caused widespread problems, even though we didn't have electronics. That's called the Carrington Event. If the Carrington Event were to happen today, yikes, we'd have blackouts, you'd lose computer accessibility, banks would go down, it would be a disaster. Ironically, and I love pointing this out to people, in 2012, there was a gigantic storm that blasted off the sun, but it missed us. By a lot? Yeah, if you think the directions around the sun is like a clock, the Earth was at like at 2 o'clock, and this thing shot off at 12 o'clock. So it missed us by, you know, 20, 30

• 32:51Speaker 07

  degrees, something like that. Had it hit us, it would have been devastating. But it missed. So the Maya were wrong again, those boneheads. So that turned out to be a nothing burger. The last one, and this one's kind of my favorite, because it's so silly, there is a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy, called Sagittarius A star, four million times the mass of the sun. It is a beast. As it happens, every big galaxy has one of these, and ours is actually a little underweight. For a galaxy our size, we should have a much bigger black hole. We don't know why. That's a thing. But it still is. It's there, it's big. But it's what we call quiescent. Sometimes these things are actively feeding,

• 33:35Speaker 07

  material falls in, gets very hot, blasts out X-rays and gamma rays. And these can be so bright that just this phenomenon can outshine all the other stars in that galaxy, and we can detect them from billions of light years away. They're they're powerhouses. Our galaxy is not one of them. However, the Earth orbits the sun. And so as we sit here on the Earth, and we look up at the sun, and we compare it to the background stars, it appears to move through the sky relative to these background stars. There are a dozen or so constellations it moves through, and you've heard of them, Leo, Aries, Pisces, Gemini. One of them is Sagittarius, the archer. Sagittarius,

• 34:18Speaker 07

  that is the direction in the sky towards our black hole. That's why it's called Sagittarius A star. When the sun passes by that black hole, according to the conspiracy theorists, their gravity is going to align, and then something terrible is going to happen. The Earth is going to be destroyed, floods, tsunamis, the moon's going to fall into us, something horrible is going to happen. And in 2012, that was supposed to happen. Same thing with this black hole. The sun aligns with this black hole on December 21, 2012, according to these people. And this is going to cause all of these kind of problems. And it turns out, no. A, this happens

• 35:00Speaker 07

  every year, right? The Earth orbits the sun every year. So the sun passes through Sagittarius every year, and it passes by this black hole every year. Nothing happened. Two, it doesn't get that close. It actually gets about five degrees from the black hole. So that's not that close together. That's about half the size of your fist, held at arm's length in the sky. So that's that's pretty far in astronomical terms. So that's that's another problem. Another one is that even though, yes, this thing has four million times the mass of the sun, it's like a billion times farther away, like literally a billion times. Gravity drops with the square of distance. A billion squared is 10 to the 18th. What is that, a quintillion? It's a lot.

• 35:43Speaker 07

  So this black hole has about a quintillionth of the gravitational effect on Earth that the sun does. So literally, or a trillionth, I think, I did the math, I think it's a trillionth, when you do all the math together. So literally, Mercury, the planet Mercury, has a far stronger gravitational effect on Earth than this black hole does. And it aligns with the sun every four months. And so every four months, you are not experiencing tsunamis and floods and cats and dogs living together. So clearly, this is all nonsense. And I could go on and on and on. There are, those are sort of the big claims, they get smaller and smaller and more and more

• 36:21Speaker 07

  ridiculous. But in the end, the Maya were not magic. They were not in touch with some spiritual realm that could predict the end of the world. It was just simply the odometer on their calendar ticking over, and time to buy a new warranty on their calendar.

• 36:41Speaker 07

  Amazing. All right, let's take a break. And when we come back, we're going to move from the Mayans up to the modern era and talk about how CERN is going to end the world.

• 36:53Speaker 07

  A matter of concern.

• 36:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Nice.

• 36:58Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 37:08Speaker 05

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• 39:02Speaker 04

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• 39:07Speaker 05

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• 39:37Speaker 05

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• 40:21Speaker 05

  And I'm here with Timmy Tillman, LAFC star, grew up in the academies of Germany, and now under the bright lights of Major League Soccer.

• 40:28Daniel Whiteson?

  So we know a little something about kicking balls. Maybe you're new to the game, or you're ready to take your passion to the next level.

• 40:34Speaker 05

  Each week, we'll tackle things like, who's winning the Premier League this year?

• 40:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Playing like a number 10. Do you know what that means?

• 40:41Speaker 05

  Then we go over to France.

• 40:43Daniel Whiteson?

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• 40:46Speaker 05

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• 40:48Daniel Whiteson?

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• 40:51Speaker 05

  He's in the NFL, and I'm like, just a big fact, I do enough.

• 40:54Daniel Whiteson?

  That's crazy. Join us each week for a quick chat with your soccer-loving bros about the best sport in the world.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  Soccer. Just don't tell my coaches I said that. Listen to Big Kick Energy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  All right, Daniel, we're passing it off to you. You are leading the next conspiracy theory.

• 41:24Speaker 07

  And try to be quick, will you? My God, that first guess, holy crap.

• 41:30Daniel Whiteson?

  I thought the millennium was going to take over before he was going to finish.

• 41:33Speaker 07

  That was just because we were whizzing around at almost the speed of light. It just made it seem a lot longer.

• 41:39Daniel Whiteson?

  One of the most pervasive and frustrating and amazing conspiracy theories I hear a lot is that CERN is opening portals to other dimensions, summoning demons.

• 41:50Speaker 07

  This one's true. I'm pretty sure.

• 41:54Speaker 07

  I heard it on the internet.

• 41:55Daniel Whiteson?

  It's amazing. I've appeared on other podcasts with a broader audience, and whenever I check the YouTube comments, they're always like, this guy's from CERN, why didn't you ask him about the demons? Or like, we should shut CERN down until they stop opening portals. And it's like, people actually believe this stuff. It's what a lot of people think about CERN.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  What does it even mean? I don't think I understand.

• 42:17Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you open a rift in spacetime, you land in demons, and then they come and ravage Earth's children. I mean, what's complicated about that, Kelly?

• 42:26Speaker 07

  I hadn't heard demons. I heard black holes and other things like that, and time ships.

• 42:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 42:30Speaker 07

  But demons, that's awesome.

• 42:31Daniel Whiteson?

  So there's demons, there's black holes also. Then there's the people who look at the CERN logo, which has a bunch of loops that represent the colliders, and they see 666 hidden in the logo. And they're like, see, that confirms it.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  What?

• 42:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yeah. Check out the CERN logo. And also, there are folks that think that turning on CERN shifted the timeline and put us in an alternate universe where, like, the Bernstein Bears are now the Berenstein Bears, and Through the Loom now doesn't have a cornucopia on it, and Mandela died in prison or something. You know, these Mandela effects, where people feel like things are different from what they remember as a child, and they're roughly connected to something that happened in the 2000s, and CERN turned on in the 2000s, and so therefore, it must be Daniel did this to you.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  And is there any, like, particular? I'm still trying to understand. So is the idea that, like, if you're shooting particles really fast, that's what opens the rift in the time continuum? Or like, is there any?

• 43:34Daniel Whiteson?

  You are already thinking about this in more detail than anybody who's made these claims, Kelly.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  Okay, but so Phil had, like, I mean, those were pretty detailed conspiracy theories. Like, the science was wrong, but they had thought about it pretty hard to try to make the pieces fit together. There's nothing like that happening here. It's just like, physicists are evil, demons.

• 43:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Demons. And there's another connection with demons, which is people think that CERN is actually, like, performing occult rituals, and that we're, like, sacrificing children and all sorts of crazy stuff. It's amazing what people out there think. Now, like many conspiracy theories, there are some nuggets of information out there that have been misinterpreted that are the source of these things. So you can understand this better, maybe, when I tell you, like, where this all comes from. And some of it is popular science's fault, some of it is scientists' fault, right? We're going to put blame everywhere it belongs. So number one is Dan Brown, right? His book, Angels and Demons, shows the control room at CERN, and it's all amazing and fancy

• 44:34Daniel Whiteson?

  and, you know, incredible technology, and it sort of puts CERN into popular culture. And it's there because they're creating antimatter, which they're going to take to Rome and, you know, set up a whole plot there. But that sort of, like, makes CERN more publicly aware than it had been before. And then in 2004, CERN gets a gift from India, and it's a statue of the god Shiva, which is the god of destruction and creation. And it's a very appropriate statue, because, like, at CERN, what do we do? We smash protons together, destroying them, and we create new kinds of stuff. And so, like, hey, kind of cool artistic sculpture. But if you don't know anything about Hinduism, it just looks a little bit, you know, mystical and occult, I suppose.

• 45:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And then in 2009, a guy who actually works for CERN, the research director, was trying to make a comment about how we can explore new things and discover new stuff, and he used a metaphor. He said that we are going to open a door to extra dimensions. And, you know, at CERN, we can explore whether space has additional dimensions, but this term dimension, to a lot of people, doesn't mean, like, a new direction of travel, another coordinate in your system. It means, like, you know, a place you go where there are demons.

• 45:55Speaker 04

  Or the metaverse.

• 45:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, the metaverse. And so this was covered breathlessly in a newspaper. You know, here's the quote, "Top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider says the Titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena or unknown unknowns, for example, an extra dimension. Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said Sergio Bertolucci, director for research and scientific computing at CERN. So the guy actually did say that to a bunch of reporters, and that is the origin of the, like, we're opening a door to demons story.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Wait, he said something about sending stuff through the door or something coming through the door? He, like, went?

• 46:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  I mean, that sounded like, yeah.

• 46:39Daniel Whiteson?

  He was speaking metaphorically. He's trying to talk about, like, the kinds of things we can discover, you know, conceptual doors, not like we're literally opening a door and, like, walking through it and bringing in demons or sending human children or something like that.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  This is why scientists need PR training.

• 46:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  A lot of us just don't know what we're doing.

• 46:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 46:56Speaker 07

  That would help, but, you know, even so, there are just metaphors and analogies that you kind of have to use to say stuff to the press. And no matter what you say, something's going to get misinterpreted. And so at some level, you know, you got to be careful and don't say, well, yeah, sure, this could cause the flaming death of every human being on the planet. Maybe not. But saying something like this, you know, we say in astronomy, we're going to open a new window on the universe when we launch a new telescope.

• 47:29Daniel Whiteson?

  What's coming through that window, Phil?

• 47:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. And to be honest, there's also the thing about the Large Hadron Collider causing a black hole. And that was also caused because of an actual paper, right?

• 47:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, absolutely. And that's an interesting science question. And, you know, you can't control what scientists are going to say, and you also can't control what students do, which caused more problems. In 2016, a bunch of students at CERN, and you have to understand, CERN is a research lab, which means there's scientists from all over the world, thousands and thousands, and they bring their students. So there's, like, young people there, and, you know, they go off and do what young people do. They get drunk, they have fun, they have parties, they dress up in costume. Some kids in 2016 thought it would be hilarious to dress up in costume and do a mock human sacrifice in front of the Shiva statue and take a video of it and put it on the internet.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  Why?

• 48:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And this video is out there.

• 48:25Speaker 07

  Did they dress as Maya? Because that would be, oh, man.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  That would be too much.

• 48:31Daniel Whiteson?

  It's, you know, it's ridiculous. And this video is what people cite. I engage in the comments on YouTube. People are like, well, we all know you're sacrificing children. I'm like, that's not happening. They're like, I've seen the video, man. And, you know, what do you say to that? Like, yeah, I've also seen videos of Halloween parties, right? Those are not proof of sacrifice. Like, everybody's wearing a costume. Like, it's not real, but, you know, it's out there and it's confusing to people. And, you know, this is what students do. And I secondhand even know who these people are. And they're just a bunch of people, you know, thinking this would be fun.

• 49:06Speaker 07

  A lot of conspiracy theories have coincidences. When you have something that is so big and involves so many people, and I mean the conspiracy theory idea, it's like all of NASA is involved in this.

• 49:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 49:17Speaker 07

  And then this happened with the moon hoax, people who think the Apollo moon launch were faked. And then an official died, you know, one of the NASA head guys wound up dying. And that is a conspiracy theorist Christmas.

• 49:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 49:32Speaker 07

  If somebody involved in that organization dies, then it's like, oh, they were silenced. And, you know, why, why at that time? And then they, they have this, this sort of an event that they can, they can swirl around and, and try to put more pieces in, find more anomalies that they can wedge into there and make it all seem real. And, and so, yeah, a video like that is inevitable. Not necessarily a video of human sacrifice at the Large Hadron Collider, but something in that, in that vein, just whatever it might be, you know, you blew a magnet or there was a fireball over the LHC when something happened. It's just coincidence. And if you have something big enough, a coincidence is inevitable and that feeds into the idea.

• 50:17Daniel Whiteson?

  And it doesn't even have to be like, obviously connected to CERN. There was also a video of a tunnel opening ceremony in Switzerland. So Switzerland is very good at building tunnels because they're surrounded by mountains. And they dug this incredible 57 kilometer tunnel through the mountains, which speeds up the trip from Zurich to Milan by an hour. Amazing technological engineering achievement. It goes under like three kilometers of rock. Wow. And they had a tunnel opening ceremony and they hired artists to do like a dance performance. And it's kind of weird. And, you know, I don't know, it looks a little weird, but people think that that's like an occult ceremony at CERN. And they often cite it as evidence that like, you know, why would CERN have like angels

• 51:00Daniel Whiteson?

  and demons in their dance performance to, you know, as an official thing at CERN? But it didn't happen. It's nothing to do with CERN, except that it's also a tunnel and it's in Switzerland. And, but that's enough, right? That's like, well, obviously there's like a Swiss demon tunnel cabal going on here.

• 51:19Speaker 07

  So other than it obviously being like bad PR for the like general public to think there's occult stuff happening at CERN, has there been any like implications in terms of impacts on funding or anybody like getting violent, trying to get into CERN to get video to prove that there's demons there? Like, how far has this gone?

• 51:37Daniel Whiteson?

  To save the children?

• 51:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's right.

• 51:39Daniel Whiteson?

  I think the major impact is people's support for CERN. You know, the public's support for big projects. People think that scientists are wasting our time or they're doing evil stuff. You know, they don't understand it. They don't trust it. They see things that don't make sense and don't sit right with them. And it just feeds this general like anti expertise, anti-science, you know, like, let's just shut it down because I don't get it. What are they doing anyway? And, you know, beyond this like ridiculous demon stuff and the tunnel ceremony, there is the actual legitimate question of will you destroy the earth when you do these collisions?

• 52:20Daniel Whiteson?

  And that's a fair question because there are theories that suggest that when you collide particles at high enough energy, that you'll reach some sort of like quantum gravity regime where black holes can be created. And like, while that would be fascinating from the point of view of like, let's understand the universe, you can ask like, do we want to be making black holes? And this is something with a scientific answer. Like CERN took that very seriously and did a bunch of research into the question of like, could we create black holes that are dangerous to the earth? And the answer is a resounding no, because we're already doing collisions in the atmosphere naturally at much higher energies than anything we can achieve at CERN. And so if those collisions could create black holes, they would have already done so. We wouldn't be here.

• 53:04Daniel Whiteson?

  So the fact that cosmic rays have not obliterated the earth with black holes is very strong evidence that we're not going to produce earth obliterating black holes at CERN.

• 53:13Speaker 07

  This is perfect because this is debunking 101. If you want to know how to counter a conspiracy theory argument.

• 53:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 07

  And people always say, you're just a debunker. And it's like, do you understand what a debunker does? They, they, they correct bunk. You're, you're basically admitting that what you're saying is bunk when you, when you do this. But this is a trick that you can, you can pull out a ton of facts and numbers and physics and whatever to disprove what they're saying. That's a mistake for two reasons. One is that you're accepting their framing. You're, you're saying, okay, you're making this claim. Let's show why the science disproves that in detail. You're kind of accepting that their claim is sort of based in science when it's not.

• 53:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Speaker 07

  And the other mistake is their eyes are going to glaze over. They don't want to hear all the math and physics and everything.

• 53:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 53:58Speaker 07

  However, if you can just turn it a little bit and say, you know, if that were true, the earth would be destroyed a trillion times a day because there are subatomic particles from space hitting our atmosphere at far higher energies than the LHC could ever produce. So clearly this is not happening. It's just boom, you're done.

• 54:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 54:16Speaker 07

  And that's, that's a much more effective way to debunk stuff. And does that work? Like in your experience, have you had conversations? No.

• 54:24Speaker 07

  You do not need to finish that sentence. Okay.

• 54:27Speaker 07

  Sorry to interrupt. No, that's fine. I'm being flippant and I interrupted you because it was funny. Yeah. When you have a dyed in the wool conspiracy theorist, they are typically impenetrable to facts. You can think of them as, as, as being an occult and there's just nothing you can say. And as Daniel pointed out, anything that doesn't fit, fits. You know, because if there's silence on this, then it's because it's being covered up. If there's something that is clearly counteracting what they're saying, that's, that's a false flag operation. That's something they put out there on purpose to make us look bad.

• 55:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 55:02Speaker 07

  Uh, and so it's very, very difficult. What you can do is talk about this stuff and hope that there are people who maybe have heard this and they haven't heard the really stuff about it. And they go, you know, if they heard demons, they'd be like, well, clearly that's wrong. But a black hole, I know those are real. Yeah. You can hope that you can show them that this stuff is nonsense.

• 55:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 55:25Speaker 07

  And so it's kind of those fence sitters I'm typically aiming for, because I know that the, the cult itself is very small, although they're very loud, but they're, they're typically not going to be convinced unless they predict a date. And that's, that's actually what happened with, like I said, with Nancy Leader. She was kind of a cult leader. She predicted a date and I said that when that date comes and goes, there's going to be a coup. She's going to be sort of, a lot of her people are going to leave, but then her inner court is going to surround her even more tightly. It's exactly what happened. And people thought I was amazing that I predicted that. And it's like, no, I read history. We've seen this happen over and over and over again. So, yeah, this is a very, very tricky thing to debunk stuff like this.

• 56:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I have engaged with folks about this, you know, in the YouTube comments or whatever. And either they just think that I'm lying, right? You're a plant from CERN out here to confuse us. Or if they're not willing to go that far, they're like, you know, well, then you just don't know about it. You haven't seen everything that's happening at CERN. You know, have you been everywhere? Have you seen everything? You know, I think they're trying to be kind. They're like, well, Daniel's just clueless, you know? Maybe he thinks he's telling the truth, but he's not aware. And like, how could they keep this kind of stuff secret? Like the implausibility of thousands of scientists from hundreds of countries, you know, at a place where they're like open tours, people can go and visit CERN that were like somehow doing human sacrifices or opening portals to hell or whatever.

• 56:55Daniel Whiteson?

  It just makes absolutely no sense. But you're right, it doesn't have to. And, you know, and anything that happens, they can just fold that into the conspiracy theory. And I think that people have a motivation to believe that. It, it works well in people's brains when their brain is primed for that because they already have some anti-science resentment or, you know, nerds were mean to them or something that they want to believe this. And I think we're seeing that more broadly in politics, that people are accepting obvious nonsense because it sits well with them, because they are primed for that, you know? And I think that's, uh, there's a lot of political talent in identifying and exploiting that, unfortunately.

• 57:34Speaker 07

  Sometimes people just want there to be more magic in the world. Yeah. And science in their mind, and the way they've been taught and the way they see it on TV and everything, the scientists just boil away all the magic to leave fact. And that is, yeah, and Daniel's laughing because that is absolutely not how science works. And I tell people all the time, for example, you know, when I see a rainbow, I appreciate it because it's beautiful and it's lovely and it's, it's, it's so, just so amazing to see it. I also understand the physics and that makes it even cooler. You know, it's like, oh, you have to stand this way and the drops have to be this big and all this kinds of stuff. And it's like, when you know that, it, it makes it more magical to, to steal the, the,

• 58:17Speaker 07

  the fantasy aspect of that word away from it and, and make it more like emotion and wonder and awe. The more you know about something, the more amazing it becomes.

• 58:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, totally agree.

• 58:29Speaker 07

  Agreed. So if y'all are listening and wondering why it's just Daniel and me talking about physics and astronomy and stuff like that, that's because there are no conspiracies about biology, right? We'll get to the vaccine conspiracy some other day, but I'm not prepared today. Or, or, you know, some, some other longstanding conspiracy about some basic aspect of biology that threatens education. I don't think there's anything like that. Evolution? Yeah. No, no. Biology is conspiracy free. Thankfully, everybody just accepts that we are correct, whereas y'all are suspicious as heck. So we've got to question everything. That's true. All right, let's take a break and when we get back, we're going to Mars.

• 59:20Speaker 01

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• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  All right, we are back. And our third conspiracy theory for the day is bringing us to Mars. Phil, take it away.

• 1:03:37Speaker 07

  You know, this one is another one of my favorites. I don't know if y'all remember the face on Mars. This was a photograph that was taken in 1976 by the Viking I orbiter. And this is one of the first spacecraft, not the first, but one of the first that NASA sent to Mars. There was a lander that landed on the surface, and there was an orbiter as well that took pictures from space. And it took this one picture of the Sidonia region of Mars, just this named region, of a rock that was about 2 kilometers, about a mile long. And it looked like a face. It looks like a helmeted statue, like from Babylon or something like that. You can clearly see an eye and a nose and a mouth. Half of the face is in shadow, like it's being lit from the side, because it was.

• 1:04:21Speaker 07

  The sun was kind of low, and so half of this rock is in shadow. But the illuminated half, look, looks like a face. In fact, when they made printouts, this is, you know, in the 1970s, they would print out these photos. Somebody wrote "face" with an exclamation point because it looks like a face. Wow. So, you know, you expect them to do that. Now, of course, come along the conspiracy theorists, which say, it looks like a face, because it is a face. Now, why it looks like a face, we don't know. Did aliens carve it? Did alien gods who genetically engineered humans 5,000 years ago force them to carve it? It could be either of these two things. Or, or it could be a rock that looks like a face.

• 1:05:04Speaker 07

  Now, jumping to the, to the end here is that we astronomers knew that this was nothing. And in fact, there is a psychological effect called pareidolia. And I think you guys have talked about this on the podcast before. This is the tendency to see familiar objects in patterns that are not necessarily random, but don't show what you think they're showing. It's like, this is precisely seeing faces in clouds. I have seen, in clouds, I've seen Yoda. I've seen dragons. I've seen birds, all kinds of things. It's in faces, of course. And there's the famous Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:05:42Speaker 07

  The Virgin Mary in an underpass in Chicago, which was an oil stain. There are a lot of these things.

• 1:05:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Every year in New Mexico, somebody finds a tortilla with the face of Jesus on it.

• 1:05:53Speaker 07

  Yes, precisely. I myself saw Vladimir Lenin in my shower curtain one time.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  That's disconcerting.

• 1:06:01Speaker 07

  This is true. This is true. It was a water stain as I brushed my arm against the fabric of the shower curtain. It wound up looking like Lenin. I have a picture of it. You can look this up. Look up Phil Plait Lenin. You'll find the picture. It's Lenin. And so we, we just tend to see this kind of stuff. And we knew that when we sent more and better orbiters to Mars, they would take a picture of this and they would show it's just a rock. And guess what? That's exactly what happened. A later orbiter took a higher resolution picture, and it doesn't look anything like a face. And this is important because I would tell people, listen, if we had the higher resolution picture first, you would never have thought it looks like a face. And then if you had seen the lower resolution picture,

• 1:06:47Speaker 07

  you'd say, oh, look, that, isn't that funny? When you, when you fuzz out the picture, it looks like a face. But there never would have been a conspiracy. So clearly, if you have a low resolution image and you're basing a conspiracy on that, you gotta be careful because you know that higher-res stuff's going to come in, and it's not going to be a big deal.

• 1:07:02Daniel Whiteson?

  But Phil, I'm looking at a high-res image of your shower curtain, and it really looks like Lenin. Oh, my gosh.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Does it? I gotta say.

• 1:07:09Speaker 07

  It still looks like Lenin, doesn't it? I post a, a picture of Lenin next to the photo. And it's, it's just, it's actually, it's kind of remarkable. It's one of the best. It's one of the best examples of pareidolia I've ever seen. And it's funny that it happened to me, somebody who already knew about pareidolia and wrote about it. In fact, if you look up angry slippers, angry slippers was a popular meme for a while. I took that picture. It was a pair of slippers, pink slippers, that my mother-in-law gave to my daughter. And they look angry. It's very funny. And they, they became a meme for a while. So there you go. So this face on Mars was championed by a guy named Richard Hoagland, who makes a lot of claims.

• 1:07:54Speaker 07

  He was an author, or he's still alive. He's an author. He was a news science advisor for CBS News for a while. But he had no advanced training in science. He has no, no classic science training or anything like that, which is fine. You don't have to have all of this classic science training to, to have a solid view of the universe. But he was the one, he wrote a book called The Monuments of Mars, based on this thing being a face. And what he said was that, you know, even if this thing turns out not to look like a face later, you know, hedging his bet, it's sitting right next to something that looks like a city on Mars.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:08:29Speaker 07

  And he shows pictures of all of these rocks and hills. And these are all large-scale objects. These are hundreds of meters across or kilometers across, big. One of them looks like a pyramid. One of them looks like a five-sided pyramid. And it turns out that's because there's erosion on Mars. There is wind on Mars. There is sand on Mars. It erodes the rocks, and you typically get shapes that are simple geometric shapes, like a pyramid. You can get that. They're not great. They don't look like, you know, the pyramids in Cairo, but they are relatively pyramid-shaped. And you can get simple geometric solids, like a five-shaped, sort of pentagonal pyramid. But he says this is clearly a city. And what he did was he took a picture, and then he drew lines connecting all of these things together,

• 1:09:14Speaker 07

  and then started playing with the math. And he's like, well, here's the angle between the face and this five-sided pyramid and this hill over here. And that angle is, you know, when you take the sine of that angle and divide it by the square root of 2, you wind up getting pi. And if you take the angle over here, or the length between this one, the face and this rock, and this rock and this other rock, and you divide these two lengths, you get the square root of 5 over e, or something like that. I'm making these numbers up.

• 1:09:41Daniel Whiteson?

  The numerology.

• 1:09:42Speaker 07

  But these are his claims, right? Now, he's measuring this off a photograph, so his angles are off. They cannot possibly be perfect. He quotes way too many decimal places a lot of the times, and then very few other times. He picks a hill that becomes some sort of important hill, but not the hill right next to it, which is the same size and looks just the same. But you know, you know why? It's because that one doesn't give you your magic numbers when you do the math to it.

• 1:10:08Daniel Whiteson?

  He's P-hacking.

• 1:10:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. He picked 17 objects to draw all these lines with. And it turns out, if you think about it, there are three points on a piece of paper, you can connect them with three lines and that's it. If you have four points, you can connect them with four lines, the outer perimeter, and then cross two in the middle, the two diagonals, the two opposites can be connected to give you six lines. If you do this with more and more points, the number of lines you can use to connect them goes up very, very rapidly. And there are zillions and zillions of angles to choose from, literally millions. When it comes to 17 objects, there are, I don't even know, hundreds of thousands, millions of different lines and angles that you can start playing with, especially when you start dividing and multiplying these

• 1:10:50Speaker 07

  numbers. There is no number you cannot find a reasonably close facsimile of when you're doing this kind of math. So no matter what, he's going to find magic numbers. And it's funny to me that he didn't pick more obvious hills to do this, because then he could say, "Look, this hill's bigger. I'm going to pick that one. There's our number."

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  But also, has any city ever been built with like, "Well, we can't put the Parthenon there because the angle isn't pi to the statue." And like, is this, is this how cities are built?

• 1:11:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's feng shui.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, okay.

• 1:11:21Speaker 07

  And ley lines. Oh, there's, there's, oh, you need to read more of the internet, Kelly.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  No, I think I, I think I read the right amount of the internet if I don't know.

• 1:11:29Speaker 07

  Okay. Yeah, there's tons of stuff like this out there. Imagine these magic angles and numbers and everything like that. It's all nonsense. None of it makes any sense. And the fact of the matter is, you can do this. I actually have done this. I used to give talks on this. I would draw random dots on a piece of paper, connect them, measure the angles, and then show people, "Look, here, this is an angle divided by another angle, and you wind up getting this magic number." It's very easy to do. But Hoagland went, you know, he, he went on TV talking about this. He wrote books talking about this, talking about these cities. And he, he never, you know, necessarily came right out and said it was aliens carving these, but clearly he was saying these were artificial cities.

• 1:12:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Speaker 07

  And it went on and on and on. And it was, you probably never heard of this. And why am I dredging up this thing? Well, because the face on Mars was a big deal at the time. In fact, they made a movie, Mission to Mars, based on the face on Mars. And in fact, the My Apocalypse also had a movie, 2012. So here we have two conspiracy theories with terrible movies made based on them. 2012 is a whole other topic. We can talk about some other time with the mutating neutrinos and, oh, my God.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  That line also got me. But, but I had somebody at one of my talks the other day asked me what I think about the face on Mars. And, and so I think it's still in people's minds today.

• 1:12:52Speaker 07

  That's interesting. That makes me happy and sad. Sad for obvious reasons, but happy that they're sort of aware that there are these cool things on Mars. And in fact, you can look at pictures of Mars and see smiley faces. There's a Mickey Mouse on Mars. It's very, I've written, I don't even know how many articles about different things. You can look up, there's a, there's a, there's a nebula in Carina that looks like it's flipping the finger at us.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Oh, excellent.

• 1:13:19Speaker 07

  This is a real thing.

• 1:13:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you could just lie in the grass and look at the clouds and see anything you want all day long, right?

• 1:13:25Speaker 07

  Yeah. And so this, this is, the reason I bring it up is because there are an infinite number of these conspiracy theories. They, they go on and on from, you know, the, the World Trade Center coming down to 2012, to, to anti-evolution, to CERN, to everything you can think of. They all rely on the same sort of basic stuff. A basic misunderstanding of science, sometimes a willful ignorance of science, manipulation of numbers, coincidence, they don't want you to know these things, and all of this stuff. And if you-

• 1:13:59Daniel Whiteson?

  You're in the special club that is hearing the truth.

• 1:14:02Speaker 07

  That's right. You, you are intelligent enough to see through this stuff. You're special. And so you get these, these very common methodologies. And if you understand them, you start to see this stuff immediately when somebody presents you with, you know, politicians do this all the time. I'm not going to get all partisan on you, don't worry. But a lot of politicians say a lot of stuff which is clearly wrong and involves a lot of conspiracies. And when you, when you ask them for evidence, they can't come up with it. Or they just show you manipulated pictures, or just a real picture, but it's misinterpreted. And this happens all the time. And if you get your, your debunking kit, your skeptical

• 1:14:45Speaker 07

  kit ready, if you always had that at the fore in your brain, you can see through this stuff and your life is going to be a lot better off for it.

• 1:14:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  All right. On that inspirational note, we're going to call it a day. Phil, thank you so much for being on the show. This was a ton of fun.

• 1:14:59Speaker 07

  Oh, thanks for letting me blather on about this stuff. I have more. We can go on. Part two, three, 10, part pi, any magical number you want.

• 1:15:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 1:15:26Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 1:15:42Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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• 1:17:31Daniel Whiteson?

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