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God’s Cleanup Crew Is Tougher Than Expected!

NASA satellite photo of oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico roughly 20 days before the Deepwater Horizon well was capped.
On two previous occasions (here and here) I commented on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In both cases, I noted how God’s natural cleanup crew (made up of bacteria) was busy getting rid of the oil that had been so carelessly dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. The speed and efficiency with which the bacteria were getting rid of the pollution have been breathtaking. Indeed, in the second post linked above, I discussed how scientists thought that methane from the disaster would persist for up to a decade in the Gulf, when in fact, it wasn’t even able to stick around for a year!

While these (and many other) studies showed that bacteria were cleaning up the oil better than anyone expected, there was one nagging worry: what about the oil that was floating on the surface of the Gulf? Most of the studies dealing with bacterial decomposition in the Gulf concentrated on the oil that was deep underwater. The surface of the Gulf of Mexico is a much different environment from the deep waters, and it was feared that bacteria would not be as good at decomposing the oil that was floating on the surface.

Indeed, a 1995 study specifically looked at bacterial activity on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico near where the Deepwater Horizon disaster occurred. The researchers noted that the mix of chemicals in that region is not ideal for good bacterial activity. They even did experiments where they added excess glucose to the water and watched how the bacteria responded. While bacteria typically love to eat glucose, the researchers saw very little increase in bacterial activity. This led them to conclude that the surface waters were not very suitable for bacterial-led cleanup.1

The scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are, of course, familiar with the results of this study. So they thought that the oil on the surface of the Gulf would not be cleaned up nearly as quickly as the oil that was deep in the Gulf. Fortunately, they were wrong.

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Science Can’t Prove Anything

Sir Karl Popper's foundational work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, makes it clear that science cannot prove anything (click for credit)
In one of my science textbooks, I make the statement that science cannot prove anything.1 I am always surprised at how controversial such a matter-of-fact statement is to some people. Almost every year, at least one student or parent will contact me simply aghast that I would write something like that in a science textbook. After all, science has proven all sorts of things, hasn’t it?

Of course it hasn’t. In fact, it is impossible for science to prove anything, because science is based on experiments and observations, both of which can be flawed. Often, those flaws don’t become apparent to the scientific community for quite some time. Flawed experiments and observations, of course, lead to flawed conclusions, so even the most secure scientific statements have never been proven. There might be gobs and gobs of evidence for them, but they have not been proven.

Karl Popper probably wrote the most important book related to this concept, which was titled The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Interestingly enough, he originally wrote it in German and then rewrote it in English. As a result, it is one of the few books that is published in two different languages but was never translated. The author wrote both versions. In this book, he argues that science should follow a methodology based on falsification. He shows quite clearly that while science cannot prove anything, it can falsify ideas that are currently thought to be true. He therefore argues that the test of any real scientific theory is whether or not it can be falsified. If not, then it is not truly a scientific theory.

There are a lot of scientists who disagree with Popper that falsification is the key to whether or not a theory is scientific. However, few would argue with his point that science cannot prove anything. Indeed, the journal Science seemed to forget this fact for a moment, but an astute reader chastised the editor, who admitted he was wrong.

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I Was Wrong

Part of being a scientist is following the data no matter where they lead. Sometimes, that ends up requiring you to admit you have been wrong about something. No matter how painful that admission may be, it is a necessary part of being a good scientist. If the data speak, the scientist must listen. I regret to inform my readers that the data have spoken, and something I have believed in for some time has been demonstrated to be quite wrong. While it might be painful for you to read, believe me, it is more painful for me to write:

Cats are not more elegant than dogs, at least not when it comes to the way they drink!

In case you don’t remember the piece I wrote on this, here is what I said:

I have always been a cat lover. It’s not that I don’t like dogs; I do. In fact, I have one friend who says his dog misses me for a while every time I leave his home. Nevertheless, when it comes to what pets I want to have in my home, cats win over dogs every time. I have always found cats more… well… elegant than dogs. Now, a new study confirms this is true, at least when it comes to how they drink.

In the post, I discussed a study that showed the physical mechanism by which cats drink and compared it to the mechanism by which dogs drink. My conclusion was clear: cats are simply more elegant than dogs in many ways, including the way they drink.

Well, it turns out that I was wrong.

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We Have Liftoff!

NASA’s project “Juno” lifted off today at approximately 12:30 PM. It’s destination: the planet Jupiter. I encourage you to watch the two-minute video of the launch below. It still fills me with wonder that we can launch a rocket into space and then plan its flight so it reaches a planet that is hundreds of millions of miles away from earth! This video is especially interesting, because the rocket had a camera facing down, so you not only get to see the surface of the earth as the rocket races away from it, but you also get to see the solid rocket boosters fall off as they run out of fuel.

Even though the rocket launched today, Juno will not reach Jupiter until July of 2016. Why does it take so long to get there? Well, Jupiter can be somewhere between 390,682,810 miles and 576,682,810 miles away from earth, depending on when you check. However, it wouldn’t necessarily take almost five years for the spacecraft to travel that far. It takes that long because Juno will travel a lot farther than that.

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Does This Really Blow a Gaping Hole in Global Warming?

A longtime reader of this blog sent me a blog post from Forbes entitled, “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism.” With such a provocative title, of course, I had to read it.

The blog post makes some amazing claims. It says that the data, published in the Journal Remote Sensing, demonstrate that global climate models do not agree with what happens in the real world when it comes to how much heat the earth is radiating into space. It then says:

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

Now this bothered me a bit, because we’ve known for a while that the global climate models don’t work very well. Back in 2009, for example, Richard Lindzen showed that global climate models don’t conform to the data when it comes to how the earth reacts to rising sea surface temperatures. Why should a paper that reaches essentially the same conclusion suddenly change the global warming debate?

The blog post concludes with this statement:

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a “huge discrepancy” between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.

The way the author of the blog post, James Taylor, wrote about these data made me want to read the scientific paper that contained them. When I read it, however, I found that the “data” were significantly less dramatic than what Mr. Taylor indicates.

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Is Anti-Boring Equal to Exciting? We Might One Day Know!

This public-domain drawing depicts a hydrogen atom (foreground) and an anti-hydrogen atom (background).

Although the term “antimatter” might sound like something from Star Trek, it is actually quite real. When I do nuclear chemistry experiments, for example, one of the ways I calibrate certain detectors is to use a radioactive sodium-22 source. One of the ways this isotope decays is by emitting the antimatter version of the electron (called a positron). That positron rather quickly finds an electron, and they annihilate each other, which results in two high-energy photons where there was once matter and antimatter. The energy of those two photons is well known, so they can be used to calibrate detectors.

Of course, this points to a big problem when it comes to studying antimatter – it doesn’t stick around very long. Since there is all sorts of matter around, any antimatter that gets produced rather quickly finds some matter, and annihilation is usually what results. Nevertheless, some scientists try to do all that they can with antimatter for whatever brief time is available to them.

One of the cool things you can do with antimatter is make anti-atoms. For example, consider boring old hydrogen. It consists of a single proton that is orbited by a single electron. How could you possibly spice that up? What about making anti-hydrogen? Take a positron (remember, that’s the antimatter version of an electron) and force it to orbit the antimatter version of the proton (which is called an antiproton). You now have the antimatter version of a hydrogen atom! Believe it or not, that has actually been done before. In the lab, scientists have made anti-hydrogen atoms. The problem is that none have been able to preserve the anti-hydrogen they have made for more than a fraction of a second.

Now a group of scientists at the European particle physics lab called CERN has managed to make anti-hydrogen and preserve it for the impossibly long time of fifteen minutes!1

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The Earliest Eyes Look Like Modern Ones

A krill, with a magnified view of its eye. (Click for krill picture credit. Eye credit is at commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Krilleyekils.jpg)

A recent article1 in the journal Nature reports on fossil eyes that were discovered in early Cambrian rock. Before I discuss the fossils themselves, I have to make it clear that these eyes are not like the eyes you and I have. You and I have simple eyes. This doesn’t mean they aren’t complex. It just means that each of our eyes has only one lens. In addition to people, many animals have simple eyes.

The fossils discussed in the article were of compound eyes, like the one shown in the picture above. Unlike simple eyes, compound eyes have many, many lenses. Each little “section” you see in the magnified view of the eye is a separate lens. Each lens focuses the light onto its own, separate light-sensitive tissue. For this reason, a compound eye can be thought of as a lot of tiny individual eyes, each of which is called an ommatidium (plural is ommatidia).

Now why would an animal want a compound eye? Well, it allows the animal to have a much wider view. Some insect compounds eyes, for example, allow the insect to see nearly everything around it – not only what is in front of it, but also what is above, below, and behind it.2 In addition, since the visual information is being processed by lots of little units rather than one big unit, a compound eye is much more efficient at developing images, making it sensitive to very fast motion.3 This allows the insect to travel at high speeds without running into things, and it allows the insect to see even the slightest motion from both predators and prey. These advantages do come at a cost, however. The visual acuity and resolution of a compound eye is not as good as that of a simple eye.4

The article reports on seven compound eye fossils that were found in Cambrian rock. According to scientifically-irresponsible dating techniques, these rocks are supposedly 515 million years old. Nevertheless, the fossil eyes are incredibly advanced.

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Strike Another “Vestigial” Organ


(Public Domain Image)

Evolutionists think there is a lot of junk in nature. Of course, that’s what you expect if you think a process that depends on random mutations acted on by natural selection is what produced all the life we see today. If you think that the world and life on it were created by God, however, you wouldn’t expect to see much junk. If you believe in the Christian God, you do expect some junk, because the Bible tells us that creation is in “slavery to corruption” as a result of the Fall of man (Romans 8:21). Thus, there has been some corruption from the supremely-designed state in which nature started. As a result, there should be some junk in nature, just not much.

One specific kind of junk that has been predicted by evolutionists over and over again is vestigial organs. These are organs that supposedly had a function in an evolutionary ancestor but have no important function in a current organism. For example, it was long thought that the primary cilium that appears on nearly every cell in the human body was vestigial. It was supposed to be a remnant of the evolutionary stage when our ancestors were free-swimming, single-celled creatures. Of course, we now know that the primary cilium serves several incredibly important functions.

More famously, it was long taught that the human appendix was vestigial. Supposedly it was a remnant of the evolutionary stage when our ancestors ate a much more vegetarian diet. Of course, we now know that this is false as well. Instead, the appendix has been shown to have an incredibly important function in people. Evolutionist Jerry Coyne made a huge blunder in his book, Why Evolution is True, because he claimed that the fine hair a human fetus grows all over its body (called “lanugo”) is vestigial. However, it has been long known that lanugo serves an incredibly important function.

As you would expect, modern science has just struck down another vestigial organ. This time, it is found in salmon, trout, and many other fishes*.

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The Genesis of Science

During the 2010 Global Atheist Convention, P.Z. Myers (my favorite atheist) said:

Science and religion are incompatible in the same sense that the serious pursuit of knowledge about reality is incompatible with [expletive]…. Religion makes smart people do stupid things, and scientists do not like stupid.

Obviously, Dr. Myers hasn’t studied much of the history of science, since it shows quite the opposite. Indeed, history shows that modern science is a product of Christianity.

Dr. James Hannam recently wrote a book entitled, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, and he makes a very strong case that modern science is specifically a product of medieval Christian thought. As I mentioned in a previous post, Dr. James Hannam is a graduate of both Oxford and Cambridge. He earned his physics degree from Oxford, and then he went to Cambridge to earn a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science. Thus, he is very qualified to write on this subject. He states his thesis in his introduction:

This book will show how much of the science and technology that we now take for granted has medieval origins. (p. xiii)

The book then goes on to give a wealth of evidence to support that thesis.

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A Chemistry Poem by Bailey Gillespie

A student (Bailey Gillespie) sent this to me many years ago, and in a web search, I stumbled across it again today. I thought others might enjoy it as well:

I’m reading a book by Jay Wile
That feels ’bout as thick as a mile
It’s a chemistry course,
And reliable source,
I sure am enjoying his style.

The characteristics we see
Of chemicals in chemistry
Are works of God’s hand,
And part of His plan,
For the earth to function for me.

The way atoms all seem to dance
In molecules inside of plants
Is one of the ways,
God meant to amaze,
That couldn’t have happened by chance.

Experiment with metals like chrome
Experiment with mixtures like foam
Please try to have fun,
Clean up when you’re done,
I hope you don’t blow up your home!