New Possible Explanation for the Hubble Tension | S26E148

[00:00:00] This is SpaceTime Series 26 Episode 148 for broadcast on the 11th of December 2023. Coming up on SpaceTime, a possible new explanation for the Hubble Tension, that little moon discovered by the Lucy mission orbiting the asteroid Dinkinesh finally gets a name, and SpaceX's

[00:00:20] Starship second flight explodes in mid-air. All that and more coming up on SpaceTime. Welcome to SpaceTime with Stuart Gary. Ever since the creation of the Big Bang 13.82 billion years ago, the universe has been expanding.

[00:00:54] However, that rate of expansion has been an ongoing area of debate, with different measurement techniques giving contradictory values and different results. By knowing how fast the universe is expanding, scientists not only have a better picture of what the universe

[00:01:09] is doing, but also where it's going and what our ultimate fate will be. At first, the discrepancy in the rate of the cosmic expansion, known as the Hubble-Lemaitre Constant, was put down to simply a lack of accuracy in the actual measurements, and it

[00:01:25] was assumed that as scientists received more and more accurate observational data, the differences would gradually disappear. However, that's not what's happened. Instead, the discrepancy, known as Hubble Tension, has actually gotten bigger. Now a new study reported

[00:01:41] in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society is proposing a new solution to the problem. Using an alternative theory of gravity called MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, cosmologists have found that this discrepancy in the measured values of the Hubble Constant

[00:01:56] can easily be explained, and the Hubble Tension disappears. Okay, so what are we actually dealing with here? Well, the expansion of the universe causes the galaxies to move away from each other, and the speed at which they move is

[00:02:10] proportional to the distance between them. In other words, the further away from us a galaxy seems to be, the faster it's moving. For instance, if one galaxy is twice as far away from the Earth as another galaxy, its distance from us also grows twice as fast.

[00:02:27] It was US astronomer Edwin Hubble who first recognised this connection. In order to calculate just how fast two galaxies are moving away from each other, it's therefore necessary to know how far apart they are. However, to do this you need a constant by which the distance

[00:02:42] can be multiplied. And this is what we call the Hubble-Lemaitre constant, a fundamental parameter of cosmology. Its value can be determined, for example, by looking at the very distant regions of the universe. And this gives us a speed of almost 244,000 km per hour per

[00:02:59] megaparsec, with 1 megaparsec being a little bit more than 3 million light-years. Now one way of measuring cosmic distances involves looking for specific kinds of exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae. These are really great cosmic distance markers because

[00:03:17] when these stars explode they all explode at about the same mass, and consequently they explode with about the same amount of luminosity. And because astronomers know how bright they are, they can determine how far away they are by their apparent brightness using a formula

[00:03:31] called the inverse square law. It's a little bit like looking at a row of identical streetlights along a road. The nearest one will be the brightest, but they'll look progressively fainter the further away they are. In the same way, these Type Ia supernovae act like standard candles,

[00:03:49] providing a sort of cosmic distance ladder. Say you look at a galaxy, and if you're lucky you'll see a Type Ia supernova explode in that galaxy, and then you can work out just how far away it is. Another way of measuring cosmic distances

[00:04:02] across the universe is to look at the cosmic microwave background radiation, the leftover heat from the Big Bang, which provides a snapshot of the early universe just 300,000 years after creation and which is now cooled to just 3 degrees above absolute zero. Here, astronomers

[00:04:19] examine the spectral signatures of different elements observed in the light of the electromagnetic spectrum. See, each element and molecule has its own unique spectral signature, a sort of celestial fingerprint, and laboratory tests here on Earth let scientists know exactly

[00:04:34] where on the spectrum that signature usually sits. However, as celestial bodies move through space, their celestial signatures shift to different positions on the spectrum, depending how fast they're moving and therefore how far away they are.

[00:04:48] This Doppler shift effect is exactly the same as what you get when an ambulance speeds past with its siren on. You'll notice the pitch changes as it comes towards you, passes you, and then moves off into the distance. That happens because the approaching sound waves

[00:05:03] coming towards you are being compressed. That heightens the pitch. We call this blue shifting. And the sound waves you're hearing as the ambulance moves away from you are stretched to a lower pitch, and that's called red shifting. And it's the same thing with spectral readings.

[00:05:19] Astronomers know where the elemental lines for hydrogen are on the spectrum. But if these lines are shifted towards the red or blue, then the object you're seeing from your viewpoint is moving away or towards you. And the faster it moves, the stronger the change, consequently

[00:05:34] the further away the object is. The trouble is, these two methods, one using the cosmic microwave background, the other using Type Ia Supernovae, don't match up. In fact, the value for the Hubble constant is around 10% less for the cosmic microwave background signatures compared to the Type

[00:05:51] Ia Supernovae standard candle. This report from NASA TV. When Hubble was launched, one of its main objectives was to measure the Hubble constant, the expansion rate of the universe. Charlie? Yes, Charlie, stand by for a go for release. A minute late. Okay, Charlie.

[00:06:16] Flight PDRS, go ahead. The telescope's released. Okay, thank you. Beginning in the mid-2000s, around 2005, I started a project to use what are sort of the gold standard tools in astronomy for measuring distances, which is to use pulsating stars

[00:06:37] called Cepheid variables and exploding stars called Type Ia Supernovae, and of course the Hubble Space Telescope itself, and to try to make more precise measurements than had ever been made as a check on the universe.

[00:06:50] New observations from the early history of the universe, what's called the cosmic microwave background, were beginning to make very precise predictions of how fast the universe ought to be expanding today. And so we wanted to follow up on that by making comparably precise measurements.

[00:07:06] So it was the WMAP, Cosmic Microwave Background Satellite, that NASA flew in the early 2000s, and then that gave way to PLONK, the European Space Agency satellite, that's even more precise. So by measuring the cosmic microwave background and then using a model that we call the standard

[00:07:23] model of cosmology to then extrapolate that to the present time, they determined ultimately that the universe ought to be expanding in funny units that we use 67.4 plus or minus 0.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, which roughly means the universe will double in about 10 billion years.

[00:07:46] Using the Hubble Space Telescope and some of these tools, the Cepheid variables and the Type Ia Supernovae, we determined the local expansion rate to be about 73.0 plus or minus 1.0 kilometer per second per megaparsec, which is the most precise local or present measurement of the expansion rate.

[00:08:07] But it differs from the expected value, expected that is by the state of the universe shortly after the Big Bang coupled with our understanding of the universe, this cosmological model. And in fact, those two now sit apart from each other by about five times their mutual

[00:08:23] error bar, which is a phenomenon we call now the Hubble tension. To give you an analogy, it would be like if you had a small child and you measured their height when they were two years old, that would be like the cosmic microwave background measurement.

[00:08:38] And then you used a model of how children grow to predict how tall they ought to end up at adulthood. And that would give you a height and then you would actually measure when they grew up how tall they were.

[00:08:49] And so that's the comparison we're making, the present state of the measurement versus what is a very precise measurement in a younger universe. And then a model like the growth curve of a child to predict how tall they will be.

[00:09:02] Except unlike a child, we've seen many children grow. We have a very good understanding of that growth curve, but we've only ever seen one universe and it's full of stuff whose nature we don't deeply understand.

[00:09:12] And so it's not crazy to think that we might be missing something in that understanding. In order to predict and really extrapolate the state of the universe from the beginning to the present day, we have to understand components of the universe, particularly two

[00:09:30] components whose nature is not well understood, but make up 96% of the universe. And that's dark matter and dark energy. Dark energy makes up about 70% and dark matter probably makes up about 25 to 27%. And we don't really understand at a detailed level what these are exactly.

[00:09:48] We don't understand their microphysics. So in order to make these predictions, we assume that they are their most vanilla or plainest possible forms. We see this tension then and so one possibility, not the only possibility, is that they are

[00:10:03] more complicated, that there's a more complex story or some other aspect even that we've been missing about the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope has more or less been working on measuring the Hubble concept for its entire lifetime, about 30 years.

[00:10:19] So the original goal when it was launched was to measure it to 10% uncertainty and I think that was successfully accomplished in the early 2000s. We're now on sort of what I would say is the second generation of measurements of the Hubble

[00:10:31] concept that are targeting closer to percent level precision. And I think Hubble, especially with its new instruments, has absolutely come through with the capabilities needed. Hubble really has delivered the quality and caliber of data that's necessary to make these measurements.

[00:10:51] And in that report from NASA TV, we heard from Professor Adam Rees, a physics Nobel Laureate with John Hopkins University. Scientists have recently come up with a hypothesis that could explain this tension. See, the large-scale cosmic structure of the universe shows that it's built like a giant

[00:11:09] web with filaments and nodes of galaxies, galaxy clusters and superclusters, and these surround vast empty voids. Over the last few years, there's been some evidence suggesting that the Milky Way galaxy could be near one of these voids.

[00:11:25] One of the study's authors, Pavel Krupa from the University of Bonn, says the new idea is that our galaxy is located in a region of space where there's relatively little matter, comparable to say an air bubble in a cake.

[00:11:37] The density of matter is much higher around the bubble than what it is inside the bubble. Repetitional forces emanate from the surrounding matter, which then pulls any galaxies in the bubble towards the edge of the cavity.

[00:11:50] That's why they're moving away from us faster than would actually be expected. So these deviations could therefore simply be explained by a local underdensity. Another research group recently measured the average speed of a large number of galaxies

[00:12:04] that are some 600 million light-years away from us, and they found that these galaxies are actually moving away from us four times faster than what the Standard Model of Cosmology allows. And that's because the Standard Model doesn't provide for such underdensities or bubbles. They should not actually exist.

[00:12:21] Instead, matter should be evenly distributed through space. And we know from the large-scale structure of the universe that's simply not the case. Our Standard Model of Cosmology, known as Lambda Cold Dark Matter, is based on a theory of the nature of gravity first put forward by Albert Einstein.

[00:12:39] However, Cooper says gravitational forces may be behaving differently on certain scales compared to what Einstein expected. So instead, Cooper and colleagues used a modified theory of gravity in their computer simulations. This modified theory, known as MOND or Modified Newtonian Dynamics, was first proposed four

[00:12:59] decades ago by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgram. MOND was originally proposed to explain anomalies seen in the rotational speeds of galaxies. Those anomalies eventually led to the suggestion of an invisible substance called dark matter. Galaxies were spinning around faster than they should for the amount of matter they contained.

[00:13:20] Something else was holding them together, and that led to the suggestion of some invisible substance called dark matter. MOND instead suggests that the anomalies put down to extra unseen mass or dark matter could just as easily be explained by Newton's law of gravity breaking down when the gravitational

[00:13:38] pull is very weak, as is the case with the outer regions of galaxies. Now don't get me wrong, MOND is still considered an outsider theory today. But Cooper says that in his calculations, MOND does actually predict the existence of such bubbles.

[00:13:54] He says that if one were to assume that gravity actually behaves according to Milgram's assumptions, then the Hubble tension would disappear. There would then actually only be one constant for the expansion of the universe, and the

[00:14:05] observed deviations would simply be due to irregularities in the distribution of matter. It's just the latest pebble in a growing mountain of evidence supporting MOND. I guess only time will tell. This is Space Time.

[00:14:21] Still to come, a little moon discovered by the Lucy mission orbiting the asteroid Dinkinesh has finally got a name, and SpaceX's Starship second flight explodes in mid-air. All that and more still to come on Space Time. The satellite discovered during the first asteroid encounter of NASA's Lucy mission

[00:14:55] has now been given an official name, Selam, which means peace in the Ethiopian language Marik. The tiny moon was discovered orbiting the asteroid Dinkinesh during Lucy's flyby last month. Dinkinesh is the Ethiopian name for the Australopithecus fossil named Lucy, after which the Lucy spacecraft has been named.

[00:15:15] Australopithecus are considered to be an early branch of the hominid family tree, the same tree that Homo sapiens belong to. Mission scientist Raphael Marshall from the Blue Coast Observatory in Nice, who originally identified Dinkinesh as a potential target for the Lucy mission, says it seemed appropriate

[00:15:31] to name the satellite in honour of another fossil that was called Lucy's baby. The fossil Selam was discovered in the year 2000 in Dika, Ethiopia. It belonged to a three-year-old girl of the same Australopithecus species as Lucy, although in actual fact the baby lived some 100,000 years before Lucy.

[00:15:51] As the Lucy spacecraft was flying towards Dinkinesh, observations leading up to the encounter hinted that there was something interesting going on in this system. And as Lucy sped past, mission managers discovered that not only did Dinkinesh have a satellite,

[00:16:06] but that satellite was a contact binary, the first contact binary satellite ever observed. The Dinkinesh encounter was added in January as an in-flight test of the spacecraft's systems and instruments, and all systems performed well.

[00:16:20] The tools and techniques that were refined with the data from the encounter will help mission managers prepare the mission's main targets, the never before explored Jovian Trojan asteroids. In addition to the images taken by Lucy's high-resolution camera and its terminal tracking

[00:16:35] cameras, Lucy's other science instruments also collected data that will help scientists better understand these puzzling asteroids. The spacecraft successfully scanned the two asteroids from a variety of vantage points around closest approach, studying their surface and obtaining detailed spectra.

[00:16:53] Scientists were also able to detect and measure the temperature of the system for about nine minutes as the spacecraft flew by on its closest approach. Phil Christensen from Arizona State says different sized particles such as sand, pebbles and boulders all heat up differently as the asteroid rotates.

[00:17:10] And the temperature measurements will allow scientists to study the size and physical properties of the materials on the asteroid's surface. The data will help scientists better understand the composition of the asteroids, allowing them to compare the makeup of Dinkinesh and Salem, and understand how these two bodies

[00:17:26] may be compositionally linked to other asteroids. Lucy is expected to visit nine more asteroids over the next decade in six separate encounters. After an Earth gravity assist this time next year, the spacecraft will return to the main

[00:17:40] asteroid belt where it will encounter the asteroid Donald Johanson in April 2025. Lucy will pass through the main asteroid belt and reach the mission's primary targets, the Jovian Trojan asteroids, in 2027. This report from NASA TV.

[00:17:56] On November 1st, 2023, NASA's Lucy mission was scheduled to fly by and image its first main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh. However, when the team downloaded the spacecraft imagery, it made an unexpected discovery. Asteroid Dinkinesh has a satellite making it a binary asteroid system.

[00:18:16] In the first image from the Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, the team observed the moonrise of a satellite of its first asteroid, Dinkinesh. This image was taken at 1255 Eastern, within a minute of closest approach, from a range of approximately 270 miles from the asteroid.

[00:18:33] Dinkinesh in the Ethiopian language means, you are marvelous, and the asteroid truly did live up to its name. Lucy observations in the weeks leading up to the encounter suggested that Dinkinesh might hold some surprises.

[00:18:47] Sure enough, imagery from the Terminal Tracking Camera T2 can on the Lucy spacecraft shows Dinkinesh's satellite. As the team downloaded more images that had been taken before and after closest approach, they were in for another surprise. That satellite was actually a contact binary.

[00:19:04] It was two objects stuck together. This small satellite has been named Salam, which means peace. The team will continue to study the data from this first encounter as they prepare for their next rendezvous with the main belt asteroid Donald Johanson in 2025. This is Space Time.

[00:19:25] Still to come, SpaceX's Starship second flight explodes in midair, and later in the Science Report, the World Meteorological Organization confirms that 2023 will be the hottest year since records began. All that and more still to come on Space Time.

[00:19:58] SpaceX are describing the second test flight of its Starship Super Heavy rocket as a success, even though both stages suffered catastrophic failures during the flight. The 121-meter tall vehicle is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, producing some 16.7 million pounds of thrust.

[00:20:17] That's more than double that of the Saturn V Apollo moon rockets. The fully reusable Starship Super Heavy is designed as an interplanetary colonial transport vehicle capable of launching more than 100 tons of cargo and people on deep space missions

[00:20:32] to the Moon, Mars and beyond, and eventually allowing humanity to establish colonies on other worlds. The second test flight was launched from SpaceX's Starbase at Boca Chica on the southern Texas Gulf of Mexico coastline. The euphemistically described rapid, unscheduled disassembly of both the booster and spacecraft

[00:20:52] stages occurred shortly after completing a successful stage separation. SpaceX says lessons will be learned from the flight which will improve the next launch attempt. Starship's first integrated flight test back in April also ended in failure, with the spacecraft disintegrating about four minutes after launch.

[00:21:11] On that occasion, the Super Heavy booster core stage suffered multiple engine failures during the ascent and failed to jettison from the Starship upper stage. It seems massive destruction to the base of the launch pad during liftoff may have flung

[00:21:24] debris onto several of the 33 core stage Raptor engines, damaging them and resulting in their malfunction during flight. This time all 33 booster engines kept firing for the full length of their flight cycle.

[00:22:17] Now the next major event is hot staging. In just over 90 seconds from now, to get ready, the booster will shut down all but three of the Raptor engines. Clamps holding the two stages together will release and the Starship's second stage will ignite its engines.

[00:22:32] Starship will then separate from the Super Heavy booster and head to space. And at the same time, the three engines that are still firing on Super Heavy will flip the booster around, putting the first stage on path for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

[00:22:49] Main engine power continues to look nominal on 33 Raptor engines. We're about to shut down the first stage and perform staging. Main engine cutoff or MECO, upper stage engine ignition, and then hot stage separation all proceeded seamlessly at an altitude of 148 kilometers, approximately two minutes and

[00:23:06] 49 seconds after liftoff, just as designed. And acquisition of Houston signal, Houston and New Orleans. Booster engine cutoff, stage separation. Boosting startup. Sexy, sexy. However, the core stage then suddenly exploded during the flip back maneuver about three minutes and 20 seconds into the flight.

[00:23:31] But by that stage, its primary job was already done. And the Super Heavy booster has just experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly. However, our ship is still underway with all six. And we just heard there, ship avionics power and telemetry nominal. All six engines are lit.

[00:23:49] Now, we did know that the hot staging was going to be incredibly dynamic. We knew that there was a chance that the booster would not survive, but we're going to take that data and figure out how we can make the booster better for the next hot stage.

[00:24:04] Yeah, that hot staging put a lot of load on the top of the booster. And of course it flipped around there. A lot of it is still going strong. And it's doing great right now. The ship, the second stage is on its way.

[00:24:21] The next major milestone for the ship will be the shutdown of those engines or SECO, second engine cutoff, which if you follow our Falcon 9 launches, familiar terminology there. So far today has been incredibly successful, even with the rud of the Super Heavy booster.

[00:24:38] Primary objective of the booster today to get to hot staging, to get ship on its way to orbit. It did that admirably. Yeah, we definitely asked. Oh, sorry, ship trajectory nominal. All right. Great news there. So ship trajectory for ship is nominal.

[00:24:52] Once again, Starship second stage, it's firing those engines. And as you just heard, everything's looking good now for the ship. We wanted it to survive hot staging, which it did. We also want to basically demonstrate that successful startup of that, of those engines

[00:25:08] demonstrating controlled ascent, which is what it's doing right now. And eventually orbital insertion, like all of that sounds great. Primary objectives for ship again, continuing to gather engine data and about its health performance. Meanwhile, Starship six upper stage Raptor engines kept firing as planned, but the flight

[00:25:27] came to an explosive sudden end just as Starship's engines were almost done firing to place the spacecraft into a 240 kilometre high suborbital flight path that would have seen Starship splash down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii 90 minutes later. Great news there.

[00:25:44] So we noticed that the chamber pressures inside of the Starship, basically the propellant pressures in the ship are looking good. So they're at the pressures that we expect to try to get into our target trajectory today. And we're not targeting orbit today. We're targeting almost orbit today.

[00:26:02] That's very intentional as part of the mission design. The goal is to get to a thrust profile similar to what we would need for orbit, but also to get to the energy levels. The Starship program is being closely monitored by NASA, who've contracted a version of Starship

[00:26:19] called the HLS to operate as a reusable lunar lander for its manned Artemis Moon program to return astronauts to the lunar surface in 2025. Crews will travel to lunar orbit aboard the Orion spacecraft, which is launched by NASA's SLS rocket.

[00:26:34] They'll then transfer to the Starship HLS and journey down to the lunar surface and back again. Once the Lunar Gateway Space Station is built towards the end of the decade, it'll be used as a jumping off point for missions to the lunar surface.

[00:26:48] Starship will then shuttle between it and the moon, transporting people and supplies. SpaceX also plans to eventually use Starship to replace the company's existing Dragon spacecraft and its current Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles. Other versions of Starship will operate as satellite delivery systems, orbital refueler

[00:27:08] tankers, cargo transports and to provide point-to-point flights around the Earth, allowing people to reach any destination on the planet in just 90 minutes. Now if they can only keep the thing flying. This is Space Time.

[00:27:38] And time now to take a brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week with the Science Report. Scientists have confirmed that 2023 will be the warmest year since records began. The findings by the World Meteorological Organization's Provisional State of the

[00:27:54] Global Climate Report shows that data up to October indicates 2023 has already been about 1.4 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures so far. The report shows carbon dioxide levels are now 50% higher than at pre-industrial levels. And sea level rise for 2013 to 2022 is more than twice the rate recorded for 1993 to the year 2002.

[00:28:20] Meanwhile the Australasian Fire Authorities Council is warning that most of Queensland, New South Wales and the southern part of the Northern Territory will be at increased risk of fire this summer along with some locations in Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.

[00:28:37] The organisation, which is the National Council for Fire and Emergency Services, says vegetation growth fuelled by La Nina-driven heavy rainfalls in recent years is combining with record-breaking dry conditions and temperatures this spring to create higher fuel loads, even in areas

[00:28:52] that were heavily burnt during the 2019-2020 black summer fire season. A new study has found that organ donations from older people may be accelerating the ageing process in younger recipients. Ageing cells can become senescent, a condition in which they start multiplying and secrete

[00:29:11] chemicals that negatively affect neighbouring cells. Senescent cells accumulate in older donor organs and have the potential to compromise transplant outcomes. Now a report in the American Journal of Transplantation has found that transplanting older organs can trigger senescence in younger recipients.

[00:29:30] Scientists observed that young and middle-aged recipients that received heart transplants from older donors had impaired physical capacity and reduced running times and grip strength. And middle-aged recipients who received older hearts also showed increased anxiety-related behaviour, impaired memory and poorer learning performances.

[00:29:49] The authors found that these accelerated ageing effects in younger recipients were driven by the release of senescence-associated factors in mitochondrial DNA from older transplants. A new study suggests that Australia's magic mushrooms could help breed tomorrow's designer shrooms.

[00:30:08] The findings, reported in the journal Current Biology, claim Australia's magic mushroom population contains greater genetic diversity than the rest of the world's commercially available shrooms. Scientists say this diversity could be harnessed to breed designer mushrooms as a potential mental health treatment.

[00:30:25] Scientists sequenced the genes of 38 types of magic mushrooms from Australia and 86 commercially available types, finding that while the Aussie shrooms were genetically diverse, the commercially available ones were sorely lacking in diversity after decades of selective breeding.

[00:30:41] The researchers say some of the Aussie genetic diversity relates to the genes controlling the production of psilocybin, a psychedelic substance with potential as a mental health treatment. This means they may be able to use the Aussie mushrooms to better understand and control

[00:30:55] psilocybin in newly cultivated types of shrooms. While it seems spiritual pseudoscience is everywhere on the social media these days, with an ever-growing number of faith healers promising all sorts of miraculous cures. And it's not just a case of a fool and his money.

[00:31:12] It may well be costing lives. Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics warns people believing in faith healers and wacky cures are stopping vital cancer treatments in the vain hope of an easy cure.

[00:31:24] Yeah, this is a weird story which I had to read through the entire thing which is so long. It's more anecdotal. You're welcome. Yeah, thanks. Literally ran for page after page after page. I've been a skeptic a number of times actually over the years.

[00:31:36] Obviously, faith healers have been around a long time. People who come to you and say, Zappo put my hand on your head and your illness is gone, whatever. You're also the ones who pull bits of chicken guts out of you, aren't they, allegedly? That's the psychic surgery.

[00:31:47] Oh, right. It's not really faith healing so much. That's psychic surgery. They got a physical thing that they pull out of you but it's not you and it's not a real thing. It's just supposed to give you.

[00:31:57] Then it gets into the faith area because it gives people the idea of being cured, right? The same thing happens with these faith healers who are religious ceremonies, charismatic sort of things where people saying hallelujah or even when they're non-religious. Placebo effect. Well, it's very short-lived placebo effect.

[00:32:12] People often think they're cured and then a few days later, they're not. Now it's one thing to feel good after the initial treatment but then if you're not cured, you're not cured and therefore there might be faith but there's not a lot of healing involved.

[00:32:24] Certainly, there's a particular case, a particular article that I was reading recently about a fellow who's a former chiropractor who allows himself to be called a neuroscientist by many of the alternative medicine platforms that he appears on named Joe Dispenza which is interesting.

[00:32:38] He's dispensing stuff but Joe Dispenza is a chiropractor, former but he regards himself as a scientist and he likes to use all sorts of scientific terms and the sciency sort of words like in one particular thing, he says and this is classic, right? Classic sort of sciency word.

[00:32:53] If you can combine a little quantum physics with a little neuroscience, the neuroendocrinology and psychoneuroimmunology, the mind-body connection, epigenetics, all of those sciences point to the finger at possibility. Well, they don't. They form a lot of sciency words that don't necessarily work together. It's a word salad.

[00:33:10] It is a word salad and it doesn't mean anything but it convinces people that this is not religion, this is science, this is medical science and therefore it must be working but it doesn't.

[00:33:21] What happens is that people believe it, they spend their money on it, they give their faith to it, they stop other medical treatments that they probably need that might be having some beneficial effect and they turn to the faith.

[00:33:31] You will find that most times, the faith does not help them in the long run and you then wonder about the faith healers. Are they pure shunks? A classic case of James Randi, the arch-skeptic who recorded radio transmissions between a

[00:33:45] faith healer and his wife who was at the back of the hall who knew about a number of the people in the audience and told him over the radio, little earpiece, there is so-and-so

[00:33:53] in the hall, he has this particular disease and he lives at so-and-so address and blah, blah, blah. And so the person, the faith healer says I get this message from God or wherever. There is a billboards in the audience, you're suffering from back pain and you live on 33

[00:34:06] Lobelia Avenue whatever. Okay, and the person is stunned, the audience is stunned. How would he know all this and he can cure him? Well he knew it because they were cheating and he didn't cure them and he was found out

[00:34:17] and revealed by Randi and he lost his very lucrative activities but he's back as they always do and convincing people that he can still cure them over again. And it's like these things have an amazing ability to bounce back.

[00:34:29] Well I really think skins, let's face it, you've got to be a con artist. Yeah, they're con artists. So I mean yeah, you don't expect morality and ethics from a con artist. They're con artists. They don't have it to start with.

[00:34:41] So you're not going to suddenly have a road to Damascus conversion by some of them. The trouble is they're ripping people off in various ways, emotionally, financially, health-wise whatever. There is no cure through face healing.

[00:34:50] There's an apparent cure, you might feel good for a while because you're convinced in the excitement of the ceremony but 10 times out of 10, you go back and after a while your illness reappears, not that it ever went away but you are still aware of it and there's

[00:35:03] classic cases, sad cases of people who think they're cured, give up their cancer treatment and die within weeks or months of this supposed face healing. And that's the true evil of the whole thing, isn't it? That is the absolute, this is not a fun little thing, right?

[00:35:16] This is evil. And people taking advantage of people and killing them. This is the serious end of the sceptical scale. That's Tim Mendham from Australian Sceptics. And that's the show for now. Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts iTunes,

[00:35:49] Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Bytes.com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favourite podcast download provider and from spacetimewithstuartgarry.com. Space Time is also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both iHeart Radio and TuneIn Radio.

[00:36:11] And you can help to support our show by visiting the Space Time store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies. Or by becoming a Space Time Patron which gives you access to triple episode commercial-free

[00:36:22] versions of the show, as well as lots of bonus audio content which doesn't go to air, access to our exclusive Facebook group and other rewards. Just go to spacetimewithstuartgarry.com for full details.

[00:36:35] And if you want more Space Time, please check out our blog where you'll find all the stuff we couldn't fit in the show, as well as heaps of images, news stories, loads of videos and things on the web I find interesting or amusing.

[00:36:47] Just go to spacetimewithstuartgarry.tumblr.com. That's all one word and that's Tumblr without the E. You can also follow us through at Stuart Garry on Twitter, at Spacetime with Stuart Garry on Instagram, through our Space Time YouTube channel,

[00:37:02] and on Facebook, just go to facebook.com forward slash spacetimewithstuartgarry. You've been listening to Space Time with Stuart Garry. This has been another quality podcast production from Bytes.com.