Science Files – March 3, 2026

Introduction & Interpersonal Communication

Dan

All right, welcome back. It’s time for Science Files. The telephone lines are open, folks: 902-405-6000, or 1-877-801-8255. That is the number if you want to access the program and ask Dr. Rob Thacker a science or space question: 902-405-6000, 1-877-801-8255. Welcome back to Science Files. Dr. Rob, I guess I should turn your microphones on. The science of not pushing the buttons.

Rob

I speak loud enough so even if you don’t have the mic on, you can hear me.

Dan

Rob, we were talking, as part of the last hour on the show, about our ability to admit that we’re wrong. No, you haven’t. Please. One of the areas that it kind of went to was younger generations and their reliance on their devices, and the way they communicate has changed. And I relayed a story about calling your younger siblings or your nieces or your nephews on the phone, like actually dialing the numbers and having them answer it, and it creates anxiety because, yeah, the younger generations don’t communicate the same way that we do. I would imagine, in your profession, dealing with young minds that are coming to the university, that you have interactions with students that are very much like that.

Rob

That’s actually a tricky question, because the anxiety about the telephone I have definitely seen. That is clear and obvious. But in terms of interpersonal interaction, we’ve seen a little bit of a growth of this idea that professors are really unapproachable and so on, which, sorry, I mean, I really try to be as approachable as I can be. I’ll talk about the sort of things that I find difficult and so on, which admittedly, in some cases, might be rather high-flown and stuff, but no, I’m always trying to be approachable, because learning is a social thing. I mean, there’s this concept that you can learn on your own now. To a certain extent, you can. I would happily admit to that. In fact, I’ve done that myself extensively. But the best learning happens in a social environment. That’s why science is largely a collaborative effort. This idea of the lone genius, I mean, yeah, sure, there are advances that are like that, but all of that proceeds on the basis of other stuff and talking to other people about it.

Dan

It’s always good to have somebody to bounce an idea off of.

Rob

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I would say that actually, in terms of interpersonal discussions, I still get to talk with a lot of incoming students in a way that I think is really very healthy. The thing that I probably don’t have a good handle on is the ones that I don’t get to talk to, where their headspace is at. So 10, 15 years ago, that might have been like, dude, so uncool. I don’t want to talk to him. Now, that’s definitely true, but there may be other reasons, like they find me intimidating or something like that. So that is a difficult issue to work through in general, and I don’t really have a good idea. What the university has tried to do is to provide more support for students that’s peer level, so students providing homework help and things like that. We have something called the SNAP Centre that does that. That’s great. And don’t get me wrong, I think that’s totally cool, but I would, as the professor in a class, really like the students just to come and talk to me and say, we’re having a problem with this, versus it being handled by a student who, agreed, does give me some feedback, but not always enough to know what’s really going on.

The Scientific Method & Admitting Mistakes

Dan

From a scientist’s perspective, this conversation began with an author who’s written a book about how we’re unable to admit that we’re wrong. When you’re in the research world and are in the sphere of investigating something in science — and I’m not a scientist, I’ll fully admit that — is it difficult if you’re on a project and you’ve been on a project for years and suddenly the experiments or the numbers don’t add up, and you have to admit that maybe you were wrong about something?

Rob

Yeah, so let me sort of pull a layer of the onion off the way science works. It’s rare that you’ll have a situation in which you get basically nothing out of an experiment. You’re always doing multiple things. So what is common, though, is for the key thing that you’re looking for not to work. And so I can give you an example. People know about the Higgs boson and CERN finding it and so on. What they probably don’t know is Fermilab was trying to find it as well with a very limited particle accelerator, and they didn’t find it. So all of that said, even though that was what they were trying to do, they were doing lots of other things at the same time as well with the experimental data and so on. Usually, that’s what happens in science. You try not to be one and done, because that’s high risk. So yes, you will definitely have situations where people come up and say, we were looking for X and we didn’t find it. The best example I can give now is planet 10 searches and things like that, looking for evidence of another big planet out there, and they’ve basically all come up with nothing. So that happens, but when it happens, you are supposed to say, this is what happened. I’m sorry we didn’t get what we were expecting. I’ve actually had this happen very recently with a student’s thesis, where we were hoping to find something on the basis of a scientific theory, and it’s not worked. And so now we’re asking ourselves, why didn’t it work? It’s rare to have a situation where there’s no information coming out of whatever your answer may be, but yes, it does happen sometimes.

Dan

And the two competing or three or four or five competing groups, like you’re talking about CERN, in the scientific community, is it very much like in the sporting community, when somebody gets there first? Is there bragging rights? And is there that kind of thing?

Rob

Yeah. So let me try and separate two things. The scientific method is meant to be objective, and this has been studied and so on, and philosophers will still have some concerns about it, which I understand, but there is this idea that things should be testable and repeatable. Where things get messy and difficult is when you have different research groups trying to address the same question, but with different approaches that ultimately give somewhat different answers. And then it can get really messy, because it’s very difficult to compare, and people will argue for one thing or another, and there’s no common ground in the arguments, and those can become a bit chest-thumping, if I’m honest. There’s also the situation of people who want to be the first into a thing, because that’s staking a claim. And there are actually some people, like the famous UK chemist Harry Kroto, who like to do one thing and then move on to the next thing and move on to the next thing, and so on. They don’t like going down into the details of one particular thing. So there is a well-known habit amongst certain scientists of wanting to be the first person in the field, because if you’re the first person in the field, everyone who comes after you is going to cite your work. Here’s the crazy thing about science: if you wrap up all of the questions and solve them and the field ends, you don’t get cited.

Dan

So you leave the door open.

Rob

So you never want to really solve everything. But the best thing to be is the first person into a field and then ask interesting questions that people go and pursue and try and answer, because then people are saying, oh yeah, they had this idea, and now we’re proving so-and-so. So that’s generally a tactic that some people use. I’m kind of in that camp personally. I like to be the first into a field. I don’t like being in a field when it becomes about whether it’s seven or eight in the last decimal digit. I don’t find that particularly exciting. I like to think about the big-picture questions and so on, but it doesn’t mean that that kind of work isn’t very valuable. National Institute of Standards — that’s what they do all the time. So, yeah.

Hearing Adjustment, Tinnitus & Noise Damage

Dan

Interesting questions. That’s what we do here on the Science Files. 902-405-6000, 1-877-801-8255. We’re back after the break.

Dan

Welcome back. 902-405-6000, 1-877-801-8255. Let’s go to the phone lines, and we’ll say hello to Ron. Ron, how are you?

Ron

I’m good. First time calling in for this show.

Dan

Appreciate that. Yeah, what’s your question, please?

Ron

Well, first of all, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the news feeds, but the premier of BC, Eby, he’s done with the time change. He’s going to stop it. So after this one, that’s it for BC anyway. Hopefully the rest of the country will follow in suit. But the reason I called in was I’ve got a little issue, and you guys cover a lot of topics, so I’m just going to see if Rob can answer this one.

Rob

Sure.

Ron

So I’m watching TV. I watch a lot of late-night shows and stuff like that, and I’ve got my speakers hooked up to my amp, and you know, the TV’s volume is just not enough. So I’m listening to it at night. If I don’t turn down that volume at night when I go to bed, when I get up in the morning and turn it on, the TV seems very loud, like it’s louder than what I set. Jesus, I listened to it that loud last night? So does something happen with my hearing senses or something at night?

Rob

So your hearing will actually adjust to the overall volume levels that you are in. So you’ll go from a situation — if you’re in a loud room, and you probably had this years and years ago or maybe even now — so you go from a loud room into a quiet room, and your ears are ringing. And that is literally your overall level of sensitivity adjusting to the sound that you are in. It’s a little bit like how you can also have smells that you become blind to. Your senses will adjust over time in the same way. Even your eyes will adjust to the level of brightness. You’ll change your pupil size to adjust that way. And with your ears, your brain is literally adjusting. And the other thing to be aware of, of course, is that if people literally have long-term exposure to very loud noises, then you’re just going to damage your hearing, even though you’re used to listening at that level.

Ron

Yeah, I just thought it was odd because, you know, I’m listening to it at night, and it seems fine, but boy, if I don’t turn that volume down at night before I go to bed, I get up in the morning—

Rob

Well, when you’re in bed, you’re in a quiet environment, so you’re adjusting to that quiet environment.

Dan

Thanks, Ron. Turn the TV down. Yeah, really. 902-405-6000, 1-877-801-8255. Tinnitus is a radio person’s disease, isn’t it? I have tinnitus, and that’s because for 30 years I’ve had these things on my ears, and maybe they were too loud, and now I get the tinnitus, the ringing of the ears.

Rob

Yeah, so I mean, tinnitus is one of those things that I don’t think is particularly well understood either. But yes, my wife, who’s deaf, actually suffers from tinnitus a lot. And so, yeah, loud noises literally are bad for you. We’re not designed for loud noises. It’s not something that the human ecosystem produces very often. And so when we live in environments that are loud, then yes, you will do damage to your hearing. I mean, honestly, if you go to a concert, don’t do it too often, because you’ll damage your ears. You’ve got to remember those people up on stage, they’ve got ear protectors now, and all of the sound pressure is facing you, not them.

Dan

Yeah. Well, depends where their stacks are.

Rob

Very true. But yeah, this is a serious issue. If you don’t look after your hearing, you can damage it pretty easily.

Dan

It’s interesting because, and I know this is probably more of a Dr. John question than a Dr. Rob question, but it’s interesting that mine comes and goes. It’ll be not there, it’ll be very light, it’ll be extremely heavy some days. And I think there are a bunch of different environmental factors and tiredness and everything else. It’s to the point that sometimes I have to put earbuds in and put white noise on to be able to shut my brain back to relax.

Rob

Yeah, that’s really tough. And I’m really quite sympathetic, because I know how annoying tinnitus can be. I mean, if it’s really bad for my partner, she’ll go a bit crazy. So yeah, I’m really sympathetic, and I’m happy that you have a way of dealing with it. That’s good, because not everyone does.

Dan

But it’s probably contributing to it too, because you’re using noise to deaden the ringing and the sleeping. That sounds like it’s the psychological factor, it feels like.

Rob

Yeah, and it’s the placebo effect. I think it’s just that, you know, okay, this is the sound of the ocean that’s making me happy now, and it’s not the same as the ringing in my ears because I had my headphones on too loud.

Number Systems: Base-10, Binary, and Base-60

Dan

Hello, David.

David

Hi there. Yeah. Question for the doctor. My question actually is about the base-10 numbering system. You know, there just seems to be something special and elegant when working with it. But is that true, or is it just because we have 10 fingers and 10 toes and it seems to work for us? And the reason I ask is because I’ve sort of used binary, octal, and hexadecimal. You can do everything you can do with a base-10 system, but there just seems to be something sort of special about, you know, each place value being 10. So, you know, you do calculations, there are multiples of 10, there are all kinds of shortcuts and stuff like that. So is it just how our brains work, or is there something about it?

Rob

You got it, David. It’s how our brains work. And so, funnily enough, I actually think if you want to talk about elegance, anything based on a power of two is actually a better number system than base 10 alone. So that would be binary.

David

Then, yeah.

Rob

So binary, if you want to go powers of four, powers of eight — octal as well. So hex is also really easy, and that’s because you can literally take the numbers and divide them into chunks really easily when you do powers of two. Decimal, though, we’ve grown up with it, and so for us, if you grow up with it, you literally feel it’s natural. We have 10 fingers, 10 toes, so that is a natural counting system. But you don’t have to count with 10. If you look at the spaces between your fingers and thumbs, then how many have you got on one hand? You’ve got one, two, three, four, and then one, two, three, four on the other hand. So there are actually some societies that have grown up with octal rather than decimal.

Dan

And is it, Rob — this may sound like an elementary question — but is it because we’ve used it and it’s everywhere, base 10, and we’re able to do that kind of mathematics in our brains? But can you do the same thing with other systems?

Rob

If you had literally been taught to grow up with octal — so zero to seven — then you start with one, zero again. That would be the natural way of counting for you. You would be literally thinking about doing that. You would use the spaces when you learn and so on. So it’s not that decimal is somehow magically better. It’s just the system that we use. And in fact, this always blows people’s minds, but probably the most creative base system ever used by humans is base 60, which goes back to the Babylonians. And the reason for that is, when you have the number 60, think about how many divisors the number 60 has — lots. So if you want to express things as fractions of a whole, base 60 is really great for that, because you can divide it by one, you can divide it by two, you can divide it by three, divide it by five, and so on. So base 60 is actually a really, really good base. But of course, we don’t like base 60 because 60 figures and counting on toes aren’t exactly practical.

Dan

Can you tell somebody’s passionate about mathematics, folks? And how many of you were looking at your hands when you said, if you look between your fingers, you know there are four spaces there? But you’re looking.

Rob

If you’ve got five fingers and thumbs, you’ve got to have four spaces.

Dan

Yeah. Why did — and this might be a broader question — but why has the world accepted base 10? I mean, the currencies all work in it and that kind of thing.

Rob

Yeah, I just think this is a situation where commonality has become the primary driver. Enough societies did eventually evolve toward base 10 that it became familiar. I mean, you can look at the counting systems — the Roman counting system is just horrible.

Dan

It’s tough to believe that they got really used to that.

Rob

But they did. But yeah, it’s become prolific. And I mean, the really incredible thing about it is, it doesn’t work naturally with binary. So when you take a decimal number and you try and represent it with binary, you actually can’t do that perfectly. There are plenty of numbers that you can represent very simply in base 10, but in binary you have to do it with a recurring number. So it’s funny — why am I passionate about this? Because we actually teach this in the computational methods course in grad school for astronomy, so students get to understand this. And so power of 10 does not fit well with a computer at all. We really have to sort of jimmy things around. And in fact, internally, the numbers are stored in a binary form.

(Host/Narrative)

And have forever. And computers have always used binary. But even technically, the number line system is related to binary rather than powers of 10, even though we can express it in powers-of-10 decimal form. Great question.

The Psychology of Math & Algebra Learning

Dan

I appreciate that one, David. There’s two things I’ve seen Dr. Rob get excited about: black holes and numbers.

Rob

Well, it’s funny, because a lot of people, when I teach these lectures, they’re like, what’s the point of this? And when they eventually understand that there are these really fundamental things going on in computers in terms of how we represent numbers, then the light goes off. And this is really relevant, believe it or not, to AI, because now we have AI mathematics that’s done with what we call very, very low-precision math. And I look at that and I say, you’ve got four bits — what are the numbers you can represent with that? And, you know, it’s not very many. And yet we’re using that mathematics in AI models, which is really quite interesting.

Dan

Four bits is 50 cents, isn’t it? We’re back after the break.

Dan

All right, welcome back. Dr. Rob still talking about numbers. It’s one of his passions, being a physicist and — well, he’s just a math guy. See, I wasn’t a math guy. I’ve developed an appreciation for math in later life, if that makes any sense. All the way through my academic career, I was awful at it because they—

Rob

Didn’t like it.

(Rob cont.)

So this is one of the really incredible things about math and people’s viewpoints on math that boggles my mind. Math was invented literally to make things simpler, but most people see that as something that makes their life harder.

Dan

I could never get my head wrapped around it. I just didn’t. I couldn’t. But now — and maybe, you know, some of it was life events and, you know, my joining the military and liking structure and liking everything that, you know, everything in the apartment has to be at right angles, and very rigid rules. And math is very rigid rules, yep. And I sit back and I look at it now, going, well, you know, I really probably should have been more interested in math, because it is like that.

Rob

There are real social factors here that we can actually talk about, because I find this quite incredible: reading to your kid is a thing. It really is a thing that people take seriously, and to a large extent it doesn’t matter who you are or what your educational background is — reading to your kid is a good thing. No one says to their kid in the stroller as you go around the store, let’s count the steps. Let’s count how many green peppers there are here. People don’t do that. So whereas words and communication are considered to be this important thing that we really do invest in making our kids prolific at, with numbers that’s not true. And so because of that, by the time a number of people get to school, math is seen as this geeky thing and not part of your everyday thing.

Dan

Did you, Dr. Rob?

Rob

I didn’t. I honestly didn’t care, because I loved math so much, I literally didn’t care. And so we did a sort of — this is back in the days when they did standardized testing of kids when they were really, really young. And so I obviously tested really well on mathematics, and I just truly loved it. So everything I did, like when I was a kid, I wanted to know what day my birthday was going to be the next year. So I realized, oh, the number of days doesn’t go in perfectly into the number of weeks, and so it’s constantly changing, and things like that, when I was a kid. And I just thought, wow, you can do so much with math. I was just amazed by it. But for most people, because they’ve had a hard time with it, they don’t grow up with an affinity for it, and so they’re not going to be able to pass that on to their kids. And I think that’s a real shame, because it’s an amazing system that helps you do things more easily than not using math in most cases.

Dan

I think it’s also — and to use myself as the example — I’m very much a tactile learner. I need to learn by touching things and figuring it out, and maybe the math concepts, when I was younger, I didn’t understand how I could make that tactile. It was just numbers and division symbols and stuff that really upset me.

Rob

So I think the challenge is, at some point, though, it has to go from your motor memory into your thinking memory. Counting, yes, counting you can do by moving things around, and that’s quite frankly how we teach most kids. And so it’s like literally subtraction is we take these things away, you literally remove them. So that is a motor thing right there, and that makes it accessible. But the hard thing, I think, for a lot of people is algebra, and how we go from having numbers one, two, three, four, five and then having a symbol that represents any number. There are people I’ve seen who literally cannot get their heads around that. And it doesn’t matter how many times you show them, literally, I’m going to turn this number into a letter, and we can put the number back in down here, it all works out. They just don’t get it. And I would love to know more about the psychology of what’s going on there. But you see that, and that stops people from being able to do things that would really help them. I’ve literally had students in what we half-jokingly call astronomy for poets — people with an arts background who want to learn about astronomy. And so I’ve had people in that course say, okay, let’s do the algebra, and they’re like, I can’t do algebra. And I literally have them: let’s go up to the board, let’s try this, let’s try that, and then they say, I literally can’t do it. And I feel like that person has been let down by society somehow, or the system.

(Host/Narrative)

Or the system. Yeah.

Astrology, Astronomy & Solar Activity

Dan

Hello, Brian.

Brian

Good day, guys. Thanks for taking my call. Dr. Rob, my question might seem a little strange, but I watched this astrophysicist on YouTube, Stefan Burns. Seems to be a very intelligent man talking about dark spots on the sun and the effects of the plasma blast on Earth and everything. But every now and again, he includes astrology in there. And I’m not a real believer that a formation of stars in the sky is going to affect anything here. I was wondering what your opinion is on that.

Rob

Yeah. So I’m just going to be upfront with you that I did do a little bit of research on Stefan Burns, and his reputation in the scientific community isn’t what I would call solid. So just be aware, there are people putting out stuff that isn’t always grounded in the most rigorous research. And so the fact that you’re saying he’s pulling in astrology, and whatever you want to do for entertainment, that’s fine, but no, there’s no known methodology that connects things that are literally astronomically far away to our day to day, and that’s just not something that we take seriously in science, to be honest. I mean, 400 or 500 years ago, astronomy and astrology were kind of similar things. Now, they’re very different.

Brian

One question on that: he does a lot of, like, when we have a big solar flare coming toward the Earth, he’ll associate that with, say, Mount Etna erupting at the same time. And then he would say there’s an influence between the two. Do you believe that? And is that something that I can believe in?

Rob

Okay, this is actually quite interesting, Brian. So there aren’t very many theories at all that connect solar storms to geological activity, and the only one that I know of is something that’s come up very recently that, to be frank, is not taken very seriously by geologists. And that would literally require the Earth’s atmosphere and the crust of the Earth to be like a giant battery. And so when you have the solar storm come along, that would require some kind of interaction between the structure in the crust — that’s where you’re literally developing all of this storage of charge — and the atmosphere as well. And so even the people who’ve written this model say that it’s going to be very weak, and the only thing it might do is slightly push a certain plate system over the edge. They don’t think it’s ever going to be able to have enough energy to do a major thing. And I'll be completely frank with you, there are a number of geologists who just think it’s silly and rubbish.

Dan

Appreciate the call, Brian. 902-405-6000, 1-877-801-8255. Astrology and astronomy, they’re spelled similarly, but they’re very different things. I know there are people out there who are firm believers in astrology, and that’s cool, that’s their deal, but it’s not science.

Rob

No, it’s not. I mean, if you’re going to predict that people’s days are going to include certain things, then you need to be specific. And if you look actually at most horoscopes, they’re very general. So over time, horoscopes are progressively more general, so there’s not really much information in them. Now, if you get a kick out of reading what’s going to happen and you’re happy with that—

Dan

I know some people that read them every day, and their day’s not complete unless they read them.

Rob

Yeah, no, I can get that. But if you look at the actual information content, it’s pretty low nowadays, because if you put a lot of information in and say this is going to happen, then it gets easily scientifically testable. And of course, that’s not going to work, because you can’t predict the future.

The Cosmic Web vs. Biological Analogies

Dan

Welcome back. 902-405-6000, 1-877-801-8255. Let’s get back to the phones and say hello to Danny. Danny, how are you?

Danny

Not too bad. How are you fellows going?

Dan

Not too bad. What’s on your mind today, sir?

Danny

Good. I’ve got a question probably going to sound like a real stupid one to you, but—

Dan

Never a stupid question.

Danny

Okay, given the magnitude of our universe and stuff, is there any chance that the planet Earth is simply a cancer cell in somebody’s knee?

Dan

Well, that’s heavy stuff. Okay, okay, so—

Rob

Okay, I get what the overall philosophy here is: things are in things. And so is it possible that, on the very largest scale, we are the equivalent of a cancer cell in someone’s knee? And the long and the short is no. And so why is that? That’s because we actually know the distribution of material in the universe really, really well. And so as you go out bigger and bigger and bigger — and this will make you smile, because I’ve got a fun little connection — the closest analogy I can give you is that clusters of galaxies, so these things with hundreds of billions of stars in them — we’re in a galaxy ourselves — and they tend to cluster together. And if you look at the distribution of these, they come together at what we call the nodes of the cosmic web. And if you look at it, it looks like a giant web of brain neurons, even though it’s not, trust me, not associated with a giant brain. The overall structure is very reminiscent of neuron structures in the brain, which is always very amusing when people see that and they go, it’s the universe-type brain. You’re like, no, but it looks very much like the overall layout of connected neurons. There you go.

Dan

Danny, thanks. All right. Appreciate it. 902-405-6000, 1-877-801-8255. We’re into that abstract theory.

Rob

Yeah, no, it’s actually quite cool. And so the reason why we get that, what we call filamentary structure in the universe, relates literally to a property of gravity. It’s not actually related to biology in any way, shape, or form. But I know that in Star Trek: Discovery, they have this idea of connections that were like the fungal networks in trees through space and so on. And I think they probably may well have seen some overall layouts of the galaxy distribution and said, oh yeah, that looks kind of like neurons. Let’s use another biological analogy.

Dan

So we’re not inside somebody’s brain.

Rob

We are not, alas, no. On truly enormous scales, people say, well, maybe it could be so big we don’t know about it, but the problem with that is it’s just so big that light takes so long to travel that it just doesn’t work.

Solar Energy Technology: Space vs. Earth

Dan

Hello, Brian. Your question for Dr. Rob, please.

Brian

Dr. Rob, it’s a solar power day, and I’ve got a solar question. My panels are four by eight and they’re 550 watts. I’m wondering, the panels up in space for the space station satellites, are they designed differently where they don’t have to deal with the atmosphere and they have radiation and so forth?

Rob

So I know that for the ones they use in space, they use the really high-efficiency, really pure ones. And so there must be some way of cooling those, because they are going to have to get rid of some of the heat energy. That’s right. But I’m not sure off the top of my head precisely how they do that. The thing to remember is, if you have something that’s in the sun’s direct view, it’s going to get very, very hot on the side facing the sun, but the side away from the sun is going to be very, very cold. So it may be they deliberately have a way of just getting that heat energy through to the other side and radiating it off on the other side. That might possibly be how it’s done, but I don’t know off the top of my head.

Brian

Okay, perfect. Thank you.

Dan

Thank you, Brian. 902-405-6000, 1-877-801-8255. Would it be the same composition? You know?

Rob

Yeah, the design would be pretty much the same. So you’re just going to be — because you want the most power you can get out of a given area — always looking at using the very, very best solar cells you can in space. That’s one of the reasons why people look back at the efficiency of solar cells used in space over time, looking back 20 or 30 years ago, and go, oh wow, they were using really, really good solar cells in space. And yes, because they had to. That’s literally where some of the best solar technology goes.

Dan

Are you able to generate more power — and this might be the wrong way to describe this — per square inch of solar panel in space as opposed to on Earth because of things like Brian said, the haze, the atmospheric absorption?

Rob

Yes. But the actual value of what we call the solar constant, the amount of energy you get per square metre at the Earth — I mean, that’s the same up in space as it is down on Earth, modulo atmospheric effects. And so interestingly, at the wavelengths that we typically use for solar, which are visible wavelentgths, the atmosphere doesn’t absorb much of that energy. So you don’t lose too much. If you went to infrared, then there are places where, wow, yeah, it really does absorb. But no, in visible light, it’s not actually getting rid of very much at all. It’s quite a high efficiency.

Science vs. Law: Eyewitness Testimony

Dan

Email question, Dr. Rob, and it’s something that curtails from our conversation last week, if you remember back to the show when we were talking about somebody’s experience with extraterrestrial life, and you were describing sort of how the process is when somebody reports an encounter. And this person writes: last week Dr. Rob said eyewitness is not considered to be scientific evidence. Then why are so many people in prison based on eyewitnesses? If the law accepts eyewitness testimony to put a person in jail, then why doesn’t science accept it? Is science above the law?

Rob

Is science above the law? Science just has different standards, and that’s the way to think about it. It’s not about whether we’re above it or beneath it. It’s just different ways of inquiring about the universe. And the main thing that I would say is different here is reproducibility. Scientific standards have a requirement of reproducibility, and that literally makes one-off experiments really problematic. And law, on the other hand, is dealing with single situations. It can’t avoid it. And so all of that said, you talk to most lawyers and what they actually think about eyewitness evidence, and it’s not that good. They know.

Dan

It’s part of the evidentiary pie.

Rob

Yeah, but even so, it’s known that eyewitness testimony changes with time. That is known, and that’s something that courts have to deal with.

Dan

So your theory of stealing a piece of equipment is the best way to prove it.

Rob

I’m truly waiting for the day someone says I was abducted, and here’s the proof. I’m listening.

Dan

You’ll have a line-up assigned.

Climate Change, Droughts & Hydrology

Dan

One more email question before we say goodbye for the day, and it comes to us from Lee, and it says: when we had the abnormally long dry period last year, where’d all the moisture go? There must have been regions or countries that had more rain than we would usually get, but we didn’t really hear about it. Or am I remembering my grade seven science?

Rob

No, no, no, you’re totally right. When we’re not having rainfall because we have a prolonged situation with either the jet stream keeping things out or something like that, then yes, that moisture is winding up somewhere. But I don’t know off the top of my head where that would be.

Dan

Water’s still evaporating. It has to go somewhere.

Rob

Exactly. So it’s going to be going to another place. This is one of the challenges with climate change. When people start thinking about, well, where can I go? What’s going to be less affected by climate change? And the answer is I think a lot of places are actually at risk now of having longer dry spells and, for that matter, torrential rains, because we’ve seen it here. When we have, literally, manhole covers popping off because the volume of water coming down is so large — I don’t ever remember seeing that as a kid. So yeah, it’s true. If it’s not raining here, that moisture is going somewhere else.

Dan

Moisture content in snow — and this is probably a broad question — but we’ve had a significant amount of snow this year. Do you think that that’s going to be enough to sort of reverse the drought condition, replenish the aquifers?

Rob

So one of the interesting things it may do is it may actually help with the moulds that decompose the leaves. So it may help from the fire-protection side of things. Will it be enough water at the end of the day? You’d have to ask a hydrologist. I don’t know off the top of my head. I would be surprised if that’s true.

Dan

Because, I mean, the amount of water we need—

Rob

The water’s got to get down into the aquifers as well. That’s the key thing. So one of the challenges is, if you have a very, very dry surface, then water can’t penetrate and it just flows off. So that’s one of the things we’re dealing with, and why — I know holidaymakers hate it — drizzle is great for the ecosystem. It really is. It keeps things moist, and it allows water to penetrate the surface as well.

Dan

As always, my pleasure. Dr. Rob, thanks everyone for the great questions, and we’ll see you next week.

Dan (Closing)

That is Dr. Rob Thacker. He’s here every Tuesday from 12 until 1. Thanks to Vanessa VanDennes on the other side of the glass, rock star as always. We have a busy show planned for you tomorrow. Of course, Dr. John will be here to answer your medical-related questions. That’s going to happen at 11 o’clock. Then we’ll shift the open hour to noon. We’ll also keep our eyes glued on downtown Halifax. There’s supposed to be a gathering down there at lunchtime tomorrow to show opposition to the cuts the government made in the budget. We’ll keep you up to speed on that as well. Thank you to all of you who dialed the numbers and joined the conversation. It was great conversation today. See, maybe we haven’t lost the ability to do it. We’re going to do that open hour again tomorrow. Hope that you join the program. Until then, everybody watch out for the snow tomorrow. The parking ban’s on — not my decision, but it is. We’ll see you tomorrow. Be well, and remember: be kind to one another.