Blue Collar Scientist

Mark Hempsell, the co-author of the book that posits that a copy of an approximately 5,000 year old Sumerian tablet records an observation of an Aten asteroid, prior to its atmospheric entry, which impacted at Köfels, Austria - this being a story which, in the immortal words of The Greenbelt, we “doubt it very much” - has left two comments on this blog, one of them fairly lengthy and, I thought, requiring some reply.

My original takedown is here, and even though I wrote it before I realized that the Bad Astronomer, StumbleUpon, and other internet opinion-makers would make it the most popular post ever on this blog¹, there’s very little I’d retract. It is still a crappy press release that evidences precious little understanding of impact processes or asteroid orbital dynamics, and it is still a wildly implausible hypothesis that the authors actively resist subjecting to peer review.

The comment of Mark Hempsell’s that I am addressing is here. Starting in the second paragraph, Hempsell exhibits either a puzzling unclarity or a lack of understanding of, or poor research within, the field.

It [the impactor] is definitely neither stony nor iron (what Aten is?)…

Asteroids are classified according to their spectral types, which are determined by their compositions. As I read it, Hempsell is here saying that Aten-class asteroids are not stony or iron-rich. There are relatively few known Aten asteroids - hundreds, not thousands - and few of them have been observed spectrally.

As far as I can tell, all Atens so far observed are either stony, or iron:

• (3554) Amun is an M-type - considered to be of mixed iron/stony composition.
• (33342) 1998 WT₂₄ is E-type - stony or rocky, like an achondrite meteorite, or rather like basalt on Earth.
• (99907) 1989 VA is an S-type - of silicaceous rocky composition.
• 1989 UQ is a C-type, which stands for carbonaceous, and is therefore rocky like a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite. In fact, C-type asteroids are (at least in part) where such meteorites are thought to come from.

Oh, and guess what - this list includes (2062) Aten, the first discovered and hence the “type specimen” for the Aten family of asteroids. It is type S, so again, it is made of silicaceous rocks.

A lot of data on this is available in 2008Icar..194..111P (Photometry of Aten asteroids—More than a handful of binaries)², which lists for a large number of Aten asteroids the B-V and V-R color indexes that are used to constrain asteroidal spectral types. (For my lay readers, B-V and V-R provide the asteroid’s color; it is achieved by measuring the brightness of the asteroid in two defined photometric color bands and then taking the difference - hence the minus sign.)

So to Hempsell’s question, ‘what Aten asteroid is stony or iron,’ the answer is, basically, all of them that we’ve ever checked.

…indeed the impact dynamics…

The impact dynamics? There are no impact dynamics to look at. There’s absolutely no evidence of an impact at Köfels. There is no shocked quartz with PDFs, no impact glass, no crater, no microcraters, no remains of an impactor, no local enhancement of elements and isotopes associated with meteoroids, no ejecta….

I believe the problem here is that Hempsell is looking at Köfels, correctly discerning that the geology suggests there was no impact, and is then making ad hoc adjustments to his hypothesis to compensate. It would be more proper to look at Köfels and acknowledge that no impact occurred there - and then stop. Because one adjustment that needs to be made is extremely implausible:

…suggest a density below 1000 kg/m3.

First, let’s convert to the standard units: 1000 kg/m³ is 1 g/cm³. That happens to be the density of water³. Gasoline (petrol for European readers) has a density of about 0.7 g/cm³. Stuff of this density does not exist in inner solar system small bodies for a very good reason - volatiles that have such low densities evaporate or sublimate, and are lost to the parent body. This is a process we see with comets - sublimation creates the comet’s coma and tail. What you are left with after a few centuries of solar heating and mass loss in the inner solar system are the rocky remains - and it is quite possible that many inner solar system asteroids formed in this way.

The problem here is very serious: Hempsell is hypothesizing that the asteroid was an Aten, which by definition spends all its time in the inner solar system. But it couldn’t have had such a low density if it had spent even a few thousand years in the inner solar system, because the fluffy stuff would have long since been lost. If you run integrations on well-observed Aten asteroids, we find they’ve had more-or-less stable orbits for millions of years. (Sources: see here, and here.)

Hempsell seems to hypothesize an asteroid made of something like gasoline, in terms of density, which can’t exist - or can it? Perhaps the asteroid was a rubble-pile. Maybe rubble-pile asteroids have lower densities than water. Shall we check that out?

It is easy to do. The NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft orbited asteroid (433) Eros, and then landed on it, in 2000-2001. This resulted in very good measurements of its density, which was, indeed far lower than many expected. But the density was still 2.4 g/cm³. If Hempsell is calling for an 0.8 g/cm³ asteroid, this is three times too dense - a massive discrepancy between observation and hypothesis.

The impact effect will be over estimated by Marcus, Melosh, and Collins because of the Alpine terrain.

No, it won’t. Marcus, Melosh, and Collins evaluated different terrain types (PDF). From their abstract:

The program requires six inputs: impactor diameter, impactor density, impact velocity before atmospheric entry, impact angle, the distance from the impact at which the environmental effects are to be calculated, and the target type (sedimentary rock, crystalline rock, or a water layer above rock).

So, unless we believe that Austria is made of feather pillows, it looks like they’ve got the situation covered. In fact, the geology of the area is mixed sedimentary and crystalline rock, and using either target type results in a huge crater, even from an asteroid made the density of gasoline. Go check it out for yourself.

Back to Hempsell:

The way it [ejecta] reaches the south east Mediterranean is the back plume which is deflected by the low pressure region behind the object, an effect well documented during the Shoemaker/Levy 9 impact.

Unfortunately, the SL-9 impact on Jupiter was into a dense gaseous atmosphere with no solid-surface impact, and the dynamics of that impact are thought to be very different from solid-body impacts. Hence, the mechanism that created the Jovian plumes isn’t looked for on Earth. This is for the simple reason that a low-pressure region on Earth cannot achieve as large a pressure difference as on Jupiter⁴. Earth’s atmosphere is significantly less dense to begin with. (Sources: Here, here, here….)

However, suborbital ballistic trajectories of ejecta are expected with large Earth impacts, as happened with the Chicxulub impact (at the K-T boundary - you know, the one that contributed to killing off the dinosaurs). Unfortunately, you don’t get ejecta without a crater. It is the process that forms the crater which causes the ejecta. I’m sure we’ve all noticed that craters are holes in the ground. Ever wonder what happened to all the dirt and rock that used to be where that hole is? Some of it vaporizes, but much of it turns into ejecta.

So, the lack of a Jovian-density atmosphere on Earth means you can’t have SL-9 style plumes, and lack of a crater means you can’t have ejecta. So much for the material supposedly thrown all over Egypt and the Levant, accounting for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra, and all that.

Hempsell then goes on to suggest that we - the multitudes of asteroid experts, anthropologists, textual critics, and so on, who find all this material laughably amateur, and say so in the comments to my original post - are somehow lacking in integrity and qualification because we haven’t read the book.

…if you want to publically slag it [the book? the hypothesis?] off as delusional pseudo-science please do us the courtesy of finding out what we are actually saying first.

The fact of the matter is that a press release was widely circulated by the home institution of one of the book’s co-authors. It is entirely legitimate to be called to account for false and implausible claims made on one’s behalf in a press release that has the imprimatur of the claimant’s academic institution, and I shall not back down.

In response, apparently, to my offer to read the book and post again, Hempsell says:

A final point on free copies; we have sent around 100 copies to journals and researchers in the field, (and in a strange reversal of the current argument several expressed surprise saying they had expected to buy it). I am sorry if you did not end up on that list, but I hope you can see the problem of sending copies to every anonymous web blogger.

I can indeed see the problem of sending the book to every anonymous “web blogger”⁵. However, I’m not one of them: my real name is disclosed on this blog.

Furthermore, my field of research is asteroids. Let’s not push that too far - I’m not as expert as many, many academics working in the field, and I’d not rate my knowledge equivalent to that of a PhD employed full-time in the field. However, I am not in an entirely unrelated discipline such as astronautics engineering; I’m actually employed in a capacity in which I study these bodies in a scientific way, as a part of a team at an astronomical observatory that has, at this point, thousands of peer-reviewed publications on asteroids, some with my name on them⁶.

I’m also, as commentator “Don Amache” points out, pretty well known as a magazine writer and critic, having been employed to review software and books for several years at Sky and Telescope.

And finally, I’ve also managed to give this particular hypothesis a lot of bad publicity. I’m up to about 20,000 hits on the original posting alone, and there’s still a lot of traffic coming in.

One way to respond to bad publicity, if you have the confidence in the hypothesis that Hempsell claims to have, is to send the work over for reading and further review. And it doesn’t have to be a book - I do all of my reading of scientific papers via PDF these days. The cost to e-mail a PDF is insignificant.

Nevertheless, the authors’ claims, as made in the press release, and as made here, on the blog, are in some cases false, and in all other cases wildly implausible. I predict it won’t bear professional scrutiny, or even a semi-professional fact-checking and inspection. I doubt I shall see the book, and I’m not losing sleep over it. We already have enough to know this crazy idea is all wrong.

1. That’s not necessarily hard to do with a young blog, mind. [↩]
2. Sorry - as far as I know, Icarus prohibits its investigators from participating in arXiv or other free-access solutions. [↩]
3. At 4° C. [↩]
4. Think of it this way - the lowest possible pressure on Earth is zero. Sea level pressure is almost 15psi, making the largest delta 15 psi. On Jupiter, pressures are available that are hundreds of times larger, leading to deltas of many hundreds, or thousands, of psi. Apologies for the SI units. [↩]
5. Are there bloggers who are not on the web? [↩]
6. This is absolutely no reason to believe what I say here, by the way. I raise these matters only to show that I do have some qualifications to review such a book. [↩]

The Daily Mail reports on the story of a man who received a heart transplant, and later committed suicide by shooting himself - which happens to be the same way the heart donor died.

Archaeoporn covers the story in fine detail, and I’m not going to rehash their material here. But I did notice in the course of my reading that the density of baloney in this story is very high - maybe even degenerate. Let’s count how many unproven concepts and faulty conclusions exist in this story, shall we? Here’s some material from the Daily Mail story:

For a few brave scientists have started claiming that our memories and characters are encoded not just in our brain, but throughout our entire body.

Consciousness, they claim, is created by every living cell in the body acting in concert.

Already we are stepping out into the great land of mystical nonsense: there is an active debate amongst scientists whether consciousness is an illusion or not. So that’s one.

They argue, in effect, that our hearts, livers and every single organ in the body stores our memories, drives our emotions and imbues us with our own individual characters. Our whole body, they believe, is the seat of the soul; not just the brain.

We know the brain exists, but so far there’s been no evidence of a soul. That’s two.

And if any of these organs should be transplanted into another person, parts of these memories - perhaps even elements of the soul - might also be transferred.

So transplanting a liver can transplant memories. Three.

And doing the same thing can transplant elements of the soul. We’ve already dealt with evidence for the existence of a soul, so we can’t use that again, but look how the writer snuck in a new concept here. The soul is made up of “elements,” which presumably have some characteristics by which they can be defined, and these “elements” can move along with a body part.

Four.

There are now more than 70 documented cases similar to Sonny’s, where transplant patients have taken on some of the personality traits of the organ donors.

Five: Attempts to characterize or measure personality have been fraught with very serious and persistent problems. Until the instruments used to measure personality can be developed to the point where they aren’t baloney, any claim that a personality has changed to more closely conform to another personality needs to be pushed back against with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Professor Gary Schwartz and his co-workers at the University of Arizona have documented numerous seemingly inexplicable experiences similar to Sonny’s. And every single one is a direct challenge to the medical status quo.

And six: Just because someone says it, doesn’t make it true. As we shall see, none of the examples listed in any way challenges the medical “status quo.”

And speaking of which, that would be seven: There is no medical status quo. Medicine is science driven, at least when we quite properly exclude homeopaths, alties, and other frauds; and science constantly refines its understanding of how the universe works.

In one celebrated case uncovered by Professor Schwartz’s team, an 18-year-old boy who wrote poetry, played music and composed songs was killed in a car crash. A year after he died, his parents came across a tape of a song he had written, entitled, Danny, My Heart Is Yours.

In his haunting lyrics, the boy sang about how he felt destined to die and donate his heart. After his death, his heart was transplanted into an 18-year-old girl - named Danielle.

When the boy’s parents met Danielle, they played some of his music and she, despite never having heard the song before, knew the words and was able to complete the lyrics.

Eight: Which is more likely: That the 18-year old boy, who apparently wasn’t widely noted as a good lyricist, wrote a song so derivative of the cultural memes in which he and other 18-year olds are immersed that just such an eighteen year old was able to make a passably accurate guess about where the song was going….

Or, could it be that “elements,” which haven’t been shown to exist, of his “soul,” which hasn’t been shown to exist, were “transplanted,” which hasn’t been shown to be possible, along with the organ, and that this led to supernatural knowledge of the song?

Professor Schwartz also investigated the case of a 29-year-old lesbian fast-food junkie who received the heart of a 19-year-old vegetarian woman described as “man crazy”.

After the transplant, she told her friends that meat now made her sick, and that she no longer found women attractive. If fact, shortly after the transplant she married a man.

Nine: Which is more likely? A woman gets a heart transplant and is put under enormous pressure by her doctors to follow dietary rules prior to the transplant and to continue following them after, so as to maximize cardiac health in an already extremely compromised patient. So she does everything she can to mentally adopt these new rules and follow them. She is praised for doing so. The ultimate result is that she comes to prefer her new, healthier diet and to view her old habits with distaste.

Or, could it be that small bits of the inner fairy transmigrated with the heart during transplant, leading to a new set of dietary and sexual preferences?¹

In one equally inexplicable case, a middle-aged man developed a new-found love for classical music after a heart transplant.

It transpired that the 17-year-old donor had loved classical music and played the violin. He had died in a drive-by shooting, clutching a violin to his chest.

That sounds remarkably similar to my coming to appreciate the music of Jimi Hendrix as an adult, even though I had previously preferred classical music. Just for the record, I’ve had no organ transplants and have never been involved in a drive-by shooting.

The correlation breaks down further when you realize that violins are used to make all kinds of different music. Not only classical, but also rock, fusion, easy listening, Swing, jazz, Dixieland, quadrille, Cajun, contra dance, Táncház, Cape Breton, Métis, Clare, Donegal, Sliahbh Luachra, Sligo, Tierra Calliente, Hardanger, etc, etc, etc. When you have such a long list of music genres to choose from, it just doesn’t look very remarkable when the donor played the instrument, and the recipient came to like one of the many genres of music the instrument plays.

So, that’s ten.

Nor are the effects of organ transplants restricted to hearts. Kidneys also seem to carry some of the characteristics of their original owners.

Take the case of Lynda Gammons from Weston, Lincolnshire, who donated one of her kidneys to her husband Ian.

Since the operation, Ian believes he has taken on aspects of his wife’s personality. He has developed a love of baking, shopping, vacuuming and gardening. Prior to the transplant, he loathed all forms of housework with a vengeance.

Unmentioned in this sexist viewpoint is whether Lynda Gammons actually loves baking, shopping, vacuuming, and gardening, or merely does them because they are things that must be done. Three of the four activities are hobbies enjoyed by many - but I don’t know many people with a love of vacuuming. In any case, we should again ask:

It is more probable that a person who experiences a life-threatening illness and undergoes a risky procedure to survive it might mellow a bit and start to do chores they previously abhorred? Particularly if they are now unable to do some of the tasks they previously undertook for the house, such as building additions or crawling under the car to maintain it?

Or do we need to attribute this to small fragments of surgically removed pixie dust which then took root in a new body and changed everything?

I’m counting this one as eleven. And I’ve not bothered going through the whole story.

It’s easy to dismiss such tales as hokum.

Yes, it certainly is. And that is because such stories really are hookum.

1. I’m not going to bother addressing her sexual preferences - she is at liberty to pursue any sexual preference she pleases, without the need for it to be explained by me as a result of stress, or reflection, or other mental processes; and without need for it to be explained by others as a result of spirits from the woods. [↩]