3 AUGUST 2006
It will never make it as a live network TV show, but there is such a thing as Saturday Night Science.
It's the science that's not ready for prime time. However much some scientists
don't like it, plenty of science explores bizarre ideas 
pursued
by people unconstrained by the intellectual shackles of conventional wisdom.
Some of this sort of science is serious, sound work that just happens to involve weird things. Some of it is wacky or even totally bogus. (It's not always possible to tell which is which.)
In any event, examples show up all the time, on Web pages or sometimes even in real scientific journals. The topics are so far out, though, that nobody would be daring enough to write about them for the general reader.
Well, almost nobody.
Here's one from Jonas Mureika, a physicist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He examines the proposal, advanced by others, that human consciousness is the result of computational powers rooted in the subatomic weirdness of quantum mechanics. Most neuroscientists (and physicists too, for that matter) think that it's a joke. But Mureika suggests that, for the sake of open-minded inquiry, it's worth exploring that proposal in light of another weird idea -- namely, that space has more than three dimensions.
Actually, many physicists do believe that space possesses unknown dimensions, so far hidden from human powers of detection. If such dimensions exist, Mureika calculates, the quantum consciousness idea goes down the tubes. His paper has been accepted by the International Journal of Theoretical Physics. You can read the prepublication version online.
While
you ponder that one, let's move on to an incisive analysis by Mikhail
Simkin and Vwani
Roychowdhury of the electrical engineering department at UCLA. They
worry that Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron of World War I fighter
pilot fame, gets more credit than he deserves for being such a hot shot.
Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. Photo: Australian War Memorial Museum
Sure, the Red Baron won 80 fights in a row. But there were nearly three thousand German fighter pilots. Analyzing the statistical records of all the WWI dogfights, Simkin and Roychowdhury conclude that there's a 25 percent chance, just by good luck, that one of those pilots would have an 80-victory streak.
"Richthofen most likely had a skill in the top 29 percent of the active WWI German fighter pilots, and was no more special than that," Simkin and Roychowdhury declare in their paper.
To illustrate their reasoning, they tell of a discussion during World War II between a general and the physicist Enrico Fermi. The general said about 3 out of 100 generals attain genius status, which was earned by winning five battles in a row. Of course, Fermi replied, since the chances of winning a battle are 50 percent, and therefore the odds (just by luck) of winning 5 in a row would be 1/32, or about 3 percent -- which explains why 3 percent of generals are considered geniuses.
You head should now be spinning, so let's seek refuge inside a black hole. You can find a big one sitting at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. But wait. Anatoly Svidzinsky of Texas A&M University says you won't find a black hole there, after all. The Milky Way's core contains a huge amount of matter, but not in the form of a supermassive black hole, he says. Rather it's a huge bubble of axions.
Axions themselves are hypothetical particles of vanishing smallness, not yet proven to exist. But if they do, they would possibly be numerous enough to account for most of the matter in the universe. (Astronomers conceded long ago that they don't know what most of the matter in the universe is, and axions are a plausible candidate.)
Still, most astronomers also believe that many galaxies harbor a gigantic
black hole at their center, millions or billions of times the mass of
the sun. The Milky Way's core seems to have one, too, based on the strong
gravity affecting the motion of stars in the vicinity. 
But
the Milky Way's center also exhibits flares of X-rays that fluctuate on
a 20-minute schedule. That's hard to explain with a black hole, says Svidzinsky
in his paper. But
a huge bubble of axions, amounting to 2.6 million times the sun's mass,
would naturally vibrate on the same 20-minute time scale, explaining the
variability in the X-ray flares. Of course, that would mean Einstein was
wrong about gravity in realms where gravity is strong, but that's a small
price to pay for a giant axion bubble.
The point, of course, is not that this idea (or any of the above) will turn out to be right. A lot of interesting science turns out to be wrong. It's the exploration of speculation that makes science exciting, and powerful, for only by exploring realms beyond certain knowledge can you find truly deep and meaningful knew knowledge. It doesn't have to be right to be science, it has to be an honest effort to grapple with the mysteries of matter, energy, life and all the other contents of the universe.
So in a way, it's a shame that most of the really fun science never makes it to prime time media. After all, Weekend Update is always a lot more fun than the nightly TV news.
E-mail: tsiegfried@nasw.org
