Yesterday, I went on Facebook. Not an unusual activity for someone my age. Or for someone my parents’ age, which I still haven’t gotten used to. But that’s not the point of this.

Several of my “friends” had statuses mentioning "Ophiuchus", whatever that is. One girl’s panicked reaction to this unpronounceable phenomenon had received enough attention to elicit ten of my peers to "comment" on it.

So, I did what any self-respecting person would do. I decided if nineteen-year-old girls were fascinated by it, it was probably just as important as Justin Beiber and Twilight.

But when I went on Twitter, I found that five of the last seven “tweets” the “tweeters” I follow had “tweeted” were about this “new zodiac sign” (the other two were about boobs and college basketball).

From what I can tell from my “friends” on social networking sites, the public understanding is that there is now a 13th zodiac sign called Ophiuchus in between Scorpio and Sagittarius. Many of my peers were quite upset about the new sign, including one Brooklyn-dwelling associate who was particularly miffed about the consequences for symbolism in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

The most common rationalization of Ophiuchus’ existence was that the “new” zodiac doesn’t apply to people born before 2010 “because this new zodiac sign didnt exist before, since the equinox hadnt changed yet or whatever…” and “i havent noticed any radical planetary shift in my personality, so i refuse to recognize my sign as anything other than what i was born with.” If you can look past the internet teen’s lack of apostrophes or capitalization, you can see a desperate attempt to justify why the night sky isn’t any different than it was a week ago. However, there’s a much simpler answer.

It isn’t any different than it was a week ago.

Before yesterday, I was vaguely aware that the twelve constellations that comprise the zodiac were no longer the most prominent sign in the night sky during the dates they were commonly associated with. For example, I am a Cancer, but if I were to look in the night sky on my birthday, the most prominent constellation would be Gemini. Actually, if I were to look into the night sky on my birthday, I’d probably see the Moon, Venus, Polaris, Sirius, the Empire State Building, and not much else. But that’s because I live in Manhattan and beside the point.

While refreshing my knowledge of astronomy, it became evident that Ophiuchus is in the same place in the night sky it’s been for centuries. The IAU, the same guys who decided Pluto wasn’t a planet anymore, listed as one of their 88 official constellations back in the 1920s.

The Students for the Exploration and Development of Space website’s entry on the constellation contains the following passage:

“Although this constellation is not part of the zodiac the sun passes through Ophiuchus in December each year. When the zodiac first was invented by the Babylonians 3000 years ago, the sun just passes through the twelve constellations to which we still refer as the zodiac. Due to the precession of the Earth the apparent way of the sun through the sky has changed through the millenniums [sic].”

While this passage contains a bit too much scientific lingo, the basic idea is pretty clear. When the ancient Babylonians devised their zodiac, they thought the Earth was fixed at the center of an orb, and the heavens were painted on the inner surface. They divided the night sky into twelve equal sections, and labeled each section with a star picture they saw in it. Over the next 3000 years, humanity realized that the Earth itself moves with respect to the stars. Therefore, our perspective of the night sky slowly changes. The change is unnoticeable year to year, but over three millennia all those little changes add up. We’re seeing the heavens at a different angle than the ancient Babylonians, so their labels no longer make any sense. However, the labels stuck, and although they no longer have the same connection to astronomical fact, some people still use them to figure out if that office romance will ever work.

All that happened this week was that some guy from Minnesota— who is NOT a capital “P” Professor — informed The Star-Tribune and several other Twin Cities News outlets of this fact. Astronomy and Astrology are exactly the same as they were yesterday, and some guy from Minnesota’s attempt to confuse the entire internet by claiming everyone "has a new sign" is a disservice to both disciplines.

Astronomy is a scientific discipline concerned with accurately observing and cataloging phenomena in outer space. Astrology isn’t, it is a form of art. A 3000-year-old understanding of the stars works just fine for Astrology’s purposes. The inclusion of Ophiuchus in the Astrological Zodiac wouldn’t make it any more accurate, because Astrology hasn’t been based in objective reality for millennia.

Science journalism at it’s finest. Keep Calm and Carry On.

Michael J Kennelly is a Senior Physics Major at Columbia University, where he holds a I.I. Rabi Scholarship. He has completed research internships at Columbia, Rutgers University, The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratories, and The Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He hasn’t cared about anything happening in Minnesota since a 41-year-old man was found concussed on the state university’s football field last month.

Image courtesy of Amadeus Varadi Hellequin

The innovative new opera by Tod Machover, Death and the Powers, opens this Friday for its world premiere in Monte Carlo at Opéra Garnier de Monte-Carlo. Machover gave Festival-goers a sneak peak of this hugely ambitious work earlier this summer at the 2010 World Science Festival, which included a thought-provoking conversation with AI legend Marvin Minsky.

The opera—a brainchild of Machover’s Opera of the Future Group at the MIT Media Lab in co-production with American Repertory Theatre—explores transhumanist and existential territory, such as mortality and theory of mind, as well as confronting the most fundamental question of legacy: what of ourselves do we leave behind when we die?

Plus, it’s going to be really, really cool. The opera incorporates a new technology developed by MIT called "disembodied performance": an elaborate system of multidimensional sensors that allows the actors to give life-like, rich performances via inanimate components from off-stage (hello, Avatar LIVE!). Oh, and did I mention that it involves a massive animatronic chandelier and a chorus of robots?

Death and the Powers comes to the US in March. More information and tickets here.

Update: The broadcast went really well. Thanks to everyone for participating. You can check out the replay and transcript with Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak here → Stay tuned for more interactive broadcasts to come. We’ve got some dingers lined up…

Join us tomorrow for a special interactive broadcast of The Search for Life in the Universe, originally taped during the 2010 World Science Festival. Accompanying the broadcast, we’re very excited to have live commentary and a Q/A session with the SETI Institute’s Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak.

Are we alone? It’s a question that has obsessed us for centuries, and now we have the technology to do more than wonder. From the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, NY, scientists on the hunt for distant planets and extraterrestrial intelligence discuss their expeditions into faraway galaxies and barely visible realms. Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse moderates this eye-opening conversation with Jill Tarter, David Charbonneau, Steven Squyres, and Michael Russell to contemplate what it would mean to have company in the cosmos.

Join the conversation!
During the 90-minute online broadcast, we’ll have live commentary from SETI Institute director Jill Tarter and astronomer Seth Shostak. Immediately after the program, there will be a follow-up discussion and Q/A session with these two scientists at the cutting-edge of the search for life in our universe. You can join the conversation by logging into the chat, or by using your Facebook or Twitter account.

You can also send in your questions via email or by Twitter (@WorldSciFest), and we’ll ask the scientists our favorites. And you can check back to read the transcript, even if you miss the broadcast.

Jill Tarter has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings through a systematic search for radio signals from Earth’s galactic neighbors. Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and she was the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact.

Seth Shostak is an astronomer, lecturer, and the author and editor of several books, including the 2009 Confessions of an Alien Hunter. The Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, he hosts the institute’s weekly science radio show, Are We Alone?

Tune in to worldsciencefestival.com on Wednesday, September 8, at 3:00 PM EDT to watch the show

Image courtesy of Jill Tarter and the SETI Institute.

The above video montage was kindly produced by multimedia artist and musician Claire L. Evans (of Universe) to open the WSF 2010 panel "The Search for Life in the Universe," which featured the likes of Jill Tarter, David Charbonneau, and Steven Squyres. Unfortunately, due to a production clusterWTF, it didn’t end up running. Which is a shame, because I really like its somewhat chilling but still hopeful subtleties. Claire breaks down her motivations for putting together the piece:

In 1977, taking advantage of a fortuitous alignment of planets, NASA dispatched two spacecraft named Voyager into space. These probes, now the farthest human-made objects from Earth, carry with them a unique recording, the Voyager Golden Record. Compiled by a team under Dr. Carl Sagan, the Golden Record holds images and sounds, ranging from pulsar beeps to x-ray photographs, the songs of whales and human heartbeats. In addition, the Golden Record holds spoken greetings from the people of Earth, recorded in 55 languages both dead and alive.

This video montage, Greetings from the People of Earth, is a meditation on these recordings, our loneliness, and the herculean, courageous task of SETI. The now-distant voices—all of whom make statements of earnest peace, curiosity, and goodwill, our best human attributes—are paired with images of the night sky from their countries of origin. It seems they are shouting out into the void; indeed, the people on the Golden Record (and perhaps our entire civilization) will be long gone by the time the Voyager probes pass within range of another star system.

Coincidently, we’ll be rebroadcasting "The Search for Life in the Universe" in its entirety online, complete with live commenting and Q/A with some of the original panelists and top-notch guest moderators. It’s one of several special interactive broadcasts from the 2010 World Science Festival that we’re scheduling over the rest of the summer. Check back for details, or sign up for email alerts to stay in the loop.

Numbers don’t lie, but they tell a lot of half-truths. We have been raised to think that numbers represent absolute fact, that in a math class there is one and only one correct answer. But less emphasis is put on the fact that in the real world numbers don’t convey any information without units, or some other frame of reference. The blurring of the line between the number and the quantity has left us vulnerable to the ways in which statistics can deceive us. By poorly defining or incorrectly defining numbers, contemporary audiences can be manipulated into thinking opinions are fact.

Charles Seife’s forthcoming book Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (out next month on Viking) lays bare, in remarkable clarity, the many trappings of trusting numbers a bit too much. While people are usually adept at recognizing numbers that are blatantly false, such as “85% of statistics are false or misleading”, more subtle manufactured numbers can have a dramatic effect on public opinion. Seife’s most oft-cited example of this phenomenon is the 205 suspected communists Joe McCarthy claimed were working in the US State Department, effectively sparking the Red Scare. While his list was never released, the unverifiable “205 communists” were enough to make an obscure junior senator from Wisconsin one of the most divisive politicians of the twentieth century.

Numbers don’t have to be manufactured to be misleading. One of the most common misunderstandings concerns the precision of a measurement. This problem is dealt with by significant figures, a concept that’s the bane of high school physics students nationwide (not to mention, playful fodder for another of Randy Munroe’s comics). Whenever you assign a quantity to something in the physical world, that number will only be as precise as your method of measurement allows. If I measure a table by comparing it to my wingspan, I can say it’s about six feet long, but if I use a tape measure I can acquire a more precise measurement of 6 feet 5.5 inches. Now, most people will accept 6’5.5" as the absolute length of the table, but using more sophisticated measuring devices I will always be able to make more precise measurements to smaller fractions of an inch (until I get to the subatomic scale, and quantum physics messes everything up). However, we’re hard wired to believe that the numbers we hear in everyday life were measured with infinite precision, and that can lead to complications. I always remember this from a lesson my physics teacher told me in the eleventh grade, “If you go to the Grand Canyon one year on a family vacation, and the tour guide says it’s 17 million years old, when you go back a year later, the tour guide won’t say it’s seventeen million and one.” We can’t possibly hope to know the age of the Grand Canyon that precisely because of the methods used to determine its age.

Most of the time, believing that a measurement is more precise than it actually is isn’t really a problem. But, in 2000, the US Government certified that George Bush had 2,912,790 votes in Florida while Al Gore had 2,912,253 (And to be bi-partisan, the state of Minnesota claimed Al Franken received 1,212,431 votes in 2008 to Norm Coleman’s 1,212,206). However, the methods for tabulating votes will always be prone to human and mechanical error (For a complete discussion, check out Seife’s book). There is no way anyone could know, down to the vote, how many any of these four candidates had. As far as anyone can say for certain, both races ended in a tie, and no amount of recounts will change that.

A recount is an attempt to eliminate a systematic error, or problems with the process of collecting data. Lost votes and misinterpreted ballots will lead to imprecise vote totals, but another type of systematic error is more common today. Visiting ESPN’s SportsNation produces a perfect example of systematic error almost daily. It seems that people in New England believe Tom Brady to be a more legendary quarterback than Brett Favre. Asking a group that is largely comprised of New England Patriot fans will introduce a systematic error biasing Brady. While internet polls may create something easy news stories, they are plagued by systematic errors. How else do you think Stephen Colbert almost got a part of the International Space Station named after him?

The Internet has opened up a whole new forum for mathematical misleading. Even bogus mathematical falsehoods like The Timecube and the “50 million” 2012 websites that Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson playfully debunked in an informal chat during a star party this year’s World Science Festival can gain traction. And, with no offense meant towards Dr. Tyson, the 50 million figure holds about as much weight as McCarthy’s 205 communists. But Tyson’s other points in this video are what’s important. “I could just tell you it’s all bunk,” he says, “but then you wouldn’t be empowered to understand why… It’s my duty as an educator to empower you to think, so that you can think accurate thoughts…Science literacy is…how is your brain wired for inquiry. What is the next question you ask when someone wants to sell you something.”

Michael J Kennelly is a Senior Physics Major at Columbia University, where he holds a I.I. Rabi Scholarship. He has completed research internships at Columbia, Rutgers University, The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratories, and The Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He currently is making up numbers for the World Science Festival.

Hey gang! Remember when we set up a model of the new James Webb Space Telescope in Battery Park? If you don’t, the people at Behind the James Webb Space Telescope have produced the cool little video above about the telescope’s visit to NYC and the World Science Festival.

I got into this stuff because of science fiction. I was a huge nerd in high school. I remember there was a time that between UPN, TNN, and The SciFi Channel you could watch six straight hours of Star Trek on a Friday night. None of those networks exist anymore. I built a Stargate in my parents’ basement freshman year (see above)–though I never got it to send me anywhere. When my Junior English teacher told me to write a paper on John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or another famous American author, I wrote it on Phillip K. Dick.

As I grew older, and my knowledge of science fact began to catch up with my encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, I realized that the fantastic science I had seen and read about matched up with actual science less and less. This semester, I took a class in Quantum Mechanics with Prof Brian Greene (If you’re on the World Science Festival website, you’ve probably heard of him). And I learned why all the cool utilizations of Quantum Physics we see on TV wouldn’t work with our actual understanding of the theory. The “spooky action at a distance” of Quantum Entanglement can’t send a message faster than the speed of light. Quantum Teleportation is light years—metaphorically—away from “Beam me up, Scotty” even if the news keeps on insisting otherwise every few months. And while the Many Worlds Approach may be a legitimate method for understanding the universe, we can’t jump to other universes like Quinn Mallory or Spock with a goatee.

In 1995, Professor Lawrence Krauss wrote a book called The Physics of Star Trek. Over the past decade and a half, several other similar titles have been written, on topics ranging from Baseball to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The latter is a surprisingly good review for the AP Physics exam). These authors recognized that the ideas that fascinated us as children can help us to understand the physical world. In their own right, they may not be teaching methods, but they inspire us to learn.

It was never about how accurate the science was in science fiction.

It’s about the wonder and excitement of the unknown. It’s about the attitude of characters like Spock and Data, how they attacked problems head on and came up with creative solutions. It’s even about building a interdimensional portal in your basement. That’s what inspired me to want to become a scientist. And maybe this means we’ll never have warp drive or transporters like they have on the Enterprise. But we’ll create something better.

Michael J Kennelly is a Senior Physics Major at Columbia University, where he holds a I.I. Rabi Scholarship. He has completed research internships at Columbia, Rutgers University, The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratories, and The Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He suffers from terrible insomnia, which he treats by watching Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda.

In the run-up to this year’s Faith and Science panel at the 2010 World Science Festival, there was some concern expressed (here and here) about our sponsors’ influence on programming. In light of such criticism, we thought it would be a good time to reiterate the Festival’s absolute editorial independence, as addressed last year by World Science Festival co-founders, Brian Greene and Tracy Day, in response to similar concerns:

The World Science Festival produces programs according to the strictest standards of editorial integrity. It goes without saying—but for clarity’s sake we shall say it anyway—that in keeping with standard journalistic practices, the World Science Festival does not accept financial contributions that come with any expectation or stipulation for participation in editorial decision-making. And just so it’s clear that this is not a platitude, we’ll note that the Festival has turned down sponsorship opportunities, some quite substantial, because the sponsor sought to blur the Festival’s requirement of a sharp and inviolable distinction between financial support and editorial control. All of the Festival’s sponsors respect this distinction fully.

We feel strongly that it is thoroughly and completely appropriate for the World Science Festival to have a program focusing on Science, Faith, and Religion. We conceived the World Science Festival as an annual gathering that would take science out of the classroom—where for far too long it has been consigned—and allow the general public to immerse itself in this most wondrous and insightful of human undertakings.

As such, the Festival has programs that not only focus on the content of science traditionally defined, but programs that seek to illuminate how science interfaces with other disciplines and outlooks. We’ve had dance programs interpreting unified theories through choreography and music, plays seeking the human saga paralleling great scientific discoveries, debates focused on policy implications of scientific developments and breakthroughs, readings and discussions of literature influenced by science, among many other forays into ‘non-scientific’ disciplines. For the Festival to have programs exploring the art-science relationship, the government-science relationship, the business-science relationship, the literature-science relationship, and yet to willfully ignore the prominent and tumultuous religion-science relationship would be a strange and, dare we say, cowardly omission.

If there is an opportunity for compelling discourse with the capacity to yield a deeper understanding of scientific thinking, its role in exposing the nature of reality and humankind’s place within it, then there’s room for such a program in our Festival.

The bottom line is that we’re resolute in our belief that an honest discussion about faith and science is an important one, and that it should take place in an open, editorially independent manner. And where else to have such a conversation than at a function dedicated to the celebration of rationality and the power of science? We recognize and respect that there are differing views on this. And for that reason, we will continue to invite thinkers from all points of the spectrum—even those who disagree that the conversation should happen in the first place.

As for this year’s Faith and Science panel—featuring Francisco Ayala, Paul Davies, Elaine Pagels, and Thupten Jinpa—see Kristopher Hite’s comprehensive coverage of the discussion on his blog, Tom Paine’s Ghost. Kristopher Hite is a biochemistry PhD candidate from Colorado State University, who volunteered at this year’s Festival and was on the scene to cover Faith and Science at his own request. He lays out his motivations and thoughts going into the event:

This was my first time attending the World Science Festival as I signed up to volunteer months ago, otherwise I have no affiliation with WSF or any of the funding foundations. My thoughts are my own and I feel I am in a position to judge this event without bias. I have kept my finger on the pulse of the "new-atheist" vs. "religious apologist" debate for years and always come to the same conclusion. Talking about something controversial, whether it be cold fusion, God, or intrinsically disordered proteins, is better than not talking about it. I am a biochemist and not religious but I do see great value in discussion, even among those diametrically opposed. One of my favorite philosophers, Dr. Bernard Rollin said in thanking his colleagues at the front of his book Science and Ethics, "Plato is right; thought is dialogue, people in lively discussion, not Rodin’s isolated Cartesian." Though I understand the criticism flung at this event, I feel an event whose mission is to bring science into the public sphere must include such a discussion, as religion plays such a prominent role in the lives of so many around the globe.

What follows is an almost play-by-play account of the entire program. In the end, Hite concludes:

The utility of this panel became clear to me after it was over. While waiting to talk to the panelists I overheard one audience member say to Dr. Davies "I’m a layman, so to me all I hear in the faith/science debates are the loudest most vocal of the two sides." This illustrates to me why calm discussion is necessary, it is through thoughtful and nuanced discussion that we move radicals away from the edge of zealotry, into a realm of moderation so discussion can continue. I disagree with many assumptions made in the discussion I just transcribed. I see no reason human beings can not derive "meaning and purpose" while maintaining a secular humanist world-view. I see no reason to invoke ancient traditions as necessary for maintaining cultural identity or having a rich understanding of significant historical events such as the bombing Guernica. I do however see a real need for more, and wider, OPEN discussions such as this! Thank you for reading and thinking with me.

But I urge you to have a look at his complete wrap-up of the panel to judge for yourself. And if you come to a different conclusion than he did, that’s okay, too.

The full replay of Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace, featuring Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, Shamit Kachru, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, is now available for streaming for a limited time. If you haven’t had your mind blown yet this morning, I recommend you head over to our livestream replay pages pronto, grab a tall cup of coffee, and prepare for perspective-scrambling kernels from some of the greatest living physicists.

Watch now >>

The fine folks at NPR’s RadioLab have produced a new episode based on Strangers in the Mirror, which features Oliver Sacks and Chuck Close (and was moderated by RadioLab’s own Robert Krulwich).

Have a listen over at their site. Or add to your cue wherever podcasts are sold for free (ie, iTunes). And check out their amazing back catalogue of archived shows while you’re there.

I’ve been asked by several people about the famous people recognition demonstration used in this program. To take the actual test developed by go-to prosopagnosia experts, Brad Duchaine and Ken Nakayama, that I based the demonstration on, CLICK HERE. And visit faceblind.org to learn much more about prosopagnosia.