Blueshift - June 2013

"Go outside and look up!", Part 3 of our interview with Dr. Phil Plait.

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Maggie Masetti: Welcome to Blueshift, brought to you from NASA's Goddard 
Space Flight Center. I'm Maggie Masetti.

In Part 2 of our interview with the "Bad Astronomer," Phil Plait, he 
talked to us about the "profound and supreme joy" he got from showing 
people how science, and the universe, works. In this podcast episode, 
we have Part 3 of our interview, wherein we chat with Phil about 
misconceptions and how to combat them. Spoiler: one thing you can do is 
just go outside and look up at the sky!

Sara: Specifically what are some of the space related misconceptions 
that you've covered?

Phil: What haven't I covered? This is like, "okay, fire hose time!" and 
try to pull a particular drop out of this. Asteroids are a big topic 
right now. We're looking at asteroids in the news all the time because 
people are scared about asteroid impacts, of course, and movies have 
really played that up. So every time an asteroid comes by the Earth 
they're in the news and there are so many misconceptions about asteroids 
mostly springing from the fact that human beings have a miserable sense 
of scale. And we look around and see this gigantic planet and we look up 
at the sky and think, "we must be a huge target!" and it turns out we're 
really not. We are a target but it's not like these things are dinosaur 
killers raining down from the sky every 5 years. So I try to explain 
that the asteroid belt in The Empire Strikes Back is not realistically 
depicted. You don't have to duck your head every time you fly through 
one and, in fact, it's very sparsely populated with rocks. And if we do 
see one coming our way it's not all that easy to just lob a nuke at it 
or Bruce Willis and blow it up. Things like that. And even saying we 
don't know a whole lot about asteroids. We've only visited a handful of 
them. We certainly know a huge amount more than we did even twenty years 
ago but there's still a lot to learn and we've only got a few close up 
pictures and here's how we think they formed and they're very similar to 
comets. And again even by the way I'm describing it you can see how you 
start with the misconceptions and sort of very slowly and subtly - and 
sometimes not so subtly - morph it into a discussion of the real science 
of this thing and I love that. I love being able to get people hooked on 
that.

Sara: Well and with the way people learn it's less effective to just 
say, "you're wrong" than it is to show them what's right and to take 
them through the real "how things work."

Phil: Right. And maddeningly research has shown that if you debunk a 
misconception you typically wind up reinforcing it. You know, a year 
later people don't remember that you debunked it, they just remember 
that you talked about it and since they already have it in their head it 
kind of reinforces it. It really it sort of head-desk-banging-ly 
irritating but if you don't do it at all then there's no hope at all. So 
I'm still trying to work a way around that but I feel that even just 
getting it out there is helping a little bit because not everybody gets 
it reinforced. Some people figure it out. And again, you know what, if 
you're encouraging people to think about it that's not necessarily a bad 
thing.

Sara: I think that's certainly how we feel about it and when we hear 
that educational research we think, "well, we'll take this under 
advisement but we can't stop talking about it in case people still get 
it wrong."

Phil: Yeah, what do you do? I don't want to do something that I know is 
wrong and continue to do it but on the other hand I know if I stop I'm 
not helping at all.

Sara: Do you ever hear some of the things that people believe and just 
think, "wooow..."?

Phil: Oh absolutely! I get stuff sent to me all the time and some of it 
is just wrong, some of it is sort of crack-pottery, and some of it is 
illucid. There's this guy who's making videos saying planets and stars 
are alive and I'm not really sure exactly what he's trying to say. But I 
think he's tying it into the Mayan philosophy and the "apocalypse" in 
December which is nonsense. But stuff like that you just kind of look at 
and go, "yeah I'm not going to touch that." That's clearly a waste of my 
time to go in there and try to figure that out. But there's 
crack-pottery too, the kind of stuff where... The stuff that makes me 
crazy is the stuff that's doomsday material. An asteroid... last year? 
YU55 and TU54 [TU24 actual] I think, I may be getting the numbers wrong, 
but every now and again it's easy to find these things on youtube if you 
look for asteroid impact or asteroid whatever. And there were these 
people who were saying these asteroids are going to hit the Earth and 
then I come out with a blog post saying, "no, they're not going to get 
within 3 lunar distances from the Earth." And then they start talking 
about, "well these things are going to connect with us magnetically or 
electromagnetically and cause earthquakes and dadadadada... And the 
thing is, of course, that's utter bologna. Whether these guys think 
they're telling the truth or not, whether they honestly believe that or 
not it's still wrong. And they're scaring people. So I'll go out and I 
made a long video talking about why one of these asteroids is not going 
to do this and the problem with that is you debunk it and you get people 
thanking you or saying you're part of the system and they're paying you 
to lie or blah blah blah. And then three months later the next asteroid 
comes back and it all starts again. There's no memory. And it's amazing 
to me that with this almost unerasable footprint of the internet where 
everything you say now is basically recorded. And you make a video that 
says the Earth is going to be destroyed by an asteroid and then you're 
wrong and you do that three more times and the fifth time you do it 
people will still listen. They don't just go back and look this stuff up 
and go, "huh, this guy's been wrong a lot, maybe he's full of it." And 
that's just another thing that you just have to say, "well, I'm gonna 
keep fighting, I'm gonna keep doing it."

Sara: There are also the things that you can kind of see how people 
believe them. One of the ones I've been sort of mystified by because it 
seems really obvious is that people think the moon is only up at night.

Phil: Sure.

Sara: And when you hear things like that you think, "well these are 
genuine" This is logic or pseudo-logic that they're trying to employ 
based on their own observations and what they think they remember from 
school. What about those? What do you do sometimes with ones they almost 
seem too little worry about but they might be pretty pervasive?

Phil: I get asked a lot, "what are the two things you wish you could 
change in the public's mind about science or astronomy or anything like 
that?" I say I wish, like I said before, that we had a better sense of 
scale. That people understood how big space is and how far away things 
are. And I also wish that I could just get everybody to go outside and 
look up. The second one is so simple. If you can see, just go outside 
and look up, and people don't do that and we hear all the time about 
people who reported Venus as a UFO. I've heard of the moon being 
reported as a UFO! Usually alcohol is involved. People who don't think 
you can see man-made satellites, they just don't know. And the other 
thing that kills me is every time somebody sees a halo around the Sun 
with "sun dogs" which are those beautiful tear drop shaped flares of 
light on either side of Sun. You get those a lot in winter. It's caused 
by ice crystals refracting, acting like a prism, spreading out the 
colors of the sunlight. Every year there's a report of that and the 
reporters are all breathless, "this is a very rare phenomenon." Really? 
I see it a hundred times every winter. All you have to do is go outside 
and look up. And people just don't do that. And the good news is you can 
get people to do that! I write about this all the time. I'll talk about 
the space station passing overhead or as we're recording this there's 
the Moon and Venus and Jupiter have been passing each other and there's 
going to be a gorgeous conjunction Venus and Jupiter in a little while 
where they're going to be very close in the sky. And I expect to see 
lots of reports of people flipping out because of this. And it's amazing 
because Venus is really bright and if you go out after sunset you can't 
miss it and yet, you know, I say that and, of course, you can miss it 
because people do. If people just went out and looked at the stars more, 
looked at the sky more, I think a lot of these misconceptions would go 
away. That's one benefit and the other benefit is that they would see 
just how amazing and beautiful this stuff is. It's shocking of you go 
out to a dark site and see Orion in the dark sky for the first time, 
it's gorgeous. And it would help people appreciate the world around them 
and see the beauty that's in it and that's the best thing I can hope 
for.

Maggie: Stay tuned for the fourth and final part of our interview with 
Phil, where we talk about how being wrong isn't always a bad thing. 

You can find our blog at universe.nasa.gov/blueshift where we'll have 
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I'm Maggie Masetti, bringing the Universe closer to you with Blueshift.

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