Why I don’t like the Caveman Diet

A few years ago I was introduced to the ‘Caveman Diet’.

The theory goes like this. Civilisation is an eye-blink in our history, and we’re not adapted to the things we eat today, which make us ill in consequence. We should be eating the same food that Ugh Ugh the Cave Man scoffed in 35,000 BC – raw nuts, grains, fruit, vegetables.

To which I said then – and still say now – rubbish!

Not only are humans geared to eat cooked food, we look like we do because of it. If we had to munch raw nuts, fruit and grains all day (and it would take all day to get the calories), we’d have jaws like an orang-utan. (I had breakfast with one once, but that’s another story…)

The science is clear. An ability to control fire – which may have begun 700,000 years ago – allowed early hominins to cook. Cooking reduces the energy needed to digest food, increasing the yield. One side effect was the drop in tooth and jaw size. It was also reflected in biochemistry.

As for the ‘cave man’ diet – well, there wasn’t one. A  lot depended on where people were. Even today, African hunter-gatherers have a wider range of foods available than people living on the edge of the ice sheets.

Neandertal family group approximately 60,000 years ago. Artwork by Randii Oliver, public domain, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The diet near the ice sheets was typified by that much maligned character, Cucu! the Neandertal. About ninety percent of the Neandertal diet was meat, and big game meat at that. Get this – Cucu! the Neandertal would head out armed with a heavy thrusting spears, and go into combat with mammoths and rhinocerii. Seriously. Skeletons have been found with upper body injuries identical, in form, to the ones rodeo riders get while steer wrasslin’. (What’s Neandertal for ‘yeeee-haaw!’?)

I’ve ridden elephants. There is no way I would want to go into combat with one, armed only with a spear. As for rhinos…well, uh…

The other issue is that there’s no return path to Ice Age foods for us.  We’ve selectively bred everything we eat today, and studies have shown that our biochemistry has adapted to suit. Today’s main wheat strain didn’t even exist 100 years ago (the guy who bred the super-wheat we use now only died recently).

The ‘cave man diet’, in short, is fantasy. Paleo-nostalgia.

So why does it work for some people? Part of the reason is that modern foods contain additives. Commercial chicken, for instance, is full of antibiotics, so if you’re intolerant to penicillins, it won’t do favours. All sorts of issues follow from immune system dysfunction – so, on the cave man diet, some people feel healthier.

So does this mean we’ll eventually adapt to being able to lie on couches with our Game Boys and TV remotes, surrounded by the detritus of chips, pizza and cola drinks?

Well, maybe, but something tells me not.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

A visit to Tyne Cot cemetery and the solemnity of remembrance

It is nine years since I stood under the Menin Gate on ANZAC day, with other New Zealanders, marking our day of national memorial for the wars of the twentieth century.

My photo of soldiers’ graves at Tyne Cot, 2004.

The gate spans the Menin Road that leads out of Ypres, a town in Flanders; and during the First World War, soldiers from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and other places walked down that road, usually to their deaths. Part of that road, not far from the town, was under German artillery fire from 1915 until 1918; Hellfire Corner, it was called, and hessian screens were raised – not to stop the shells, but to prevent anyone sniping the troops. The gate, a huge arch, is lined with the names of soldiers who disappeared, their bodies never found, in the churned muck of the trenches.

Later, my wife and I walked the quiet lawns of Tyne Cot cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the area and a silent reminder of the lethality of the Western Front. A rotunda carried names – including those of New Zealanders – who had fallen during the Western Front campaign, and were never found.

For me that campaign defined the futility of the human condition – the way we intellectualise ourselves into corners. Militarily it was a cleft stick; the triumph of defence over offence. Industrial technology could bring men to a battlefield in unprecedented numbers. It expanded the battlefield to colossal scales. However, it could not move men on it, nor could infantry overcome the barriers posed by machine gun and wire. Once that had developed it was difficult to find a military way out, without new technologies – which were developed. But that took time, and meanwhile men died, and political solutions were never explored.

At the time, of course, it seemed rational and logical. But that is true, I think, of every war humanity has fought through its long history.

We keep falling into wars, just as we keep insisting that we must never fight them again. It is a relentless cycle which, I fear, is a part of the human condition.

As I walked those silent gravestones in 2004 – and as I sit here now remembering the solemnnity of that day, and thinking about the intellectualised rationality, the stubbornness and the horrors of the war that led to these deaths - it gives pause for thought.

What do you figure on this one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

ANZAC Day 2013: remembering why we fought

It’s ANZAC Day this week in New Zealand – 25 April,  our equivalent of Memorial Day in the US or Armistice Day in Britain.

It’s iconoclastic. Most nations remember their military dead on days when a war ended – typically, for Commonwealth countries, 11 November, when the guns fell silent over the Western Front in 1918.

But not New Zealand and Australia. Here we remember our war dead on the day we began our first big overseas military campaign, the ground assault on Gallipoli that began on 25 April 1915.

The day is tied into our national identity. That wasn’t always the case. When the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) embarked on that campaign it was to do duty for Empire – for Britain, a country we called ‘home’ even though most of our young men had never been there.

I used to write histories of our twentieth century wars. In my final foray into that field, Shattered Glory (Penguin 2010), I explored the virtually spontaneous celebrations on 25 April 1916, the anniversary of the landings – at which time the Gallipoli campaign was turned, by sleight of hand, from an ignominious defeat (which it was) into a triumph of New Zealand’s contribution to Empire.

It became nationalist towards the end of the war, a spontaneous focus for grief flowing from the terrible death toll of the Western Front, New Zealand’s most lethal campaign of all time and the definition of what the First World War meant, socially and historically.

Of late, 25 April has become New Zealand’s de-facto national day – a moment to remember those who gave their lives – the young men who were never wearied by age.

To me it is also a day to ask a simple question. Why? Why did they go to war?

It is easy to suppose that young men were fooled by Boys’ Own images of war as glorious, a superior sports event that showered honour on soldiers, family and especially school.

I have found letters and diaries suggesting that this may have been true for the Boer War of 1899-1902, our first military campaign. But not the First World War. Not really. Most of the young Kiwis who went to fight even in 1914 knew what war entailed, even if they had yet to learn the true lethality of industrial age fire-power. That lesson had been driven home by 1916; and certainly most of their sons were cynical enough in 1939, when Europe again plunged into war and New Zealand’s young men flocked to sign up.

They did not go because it was glorious. They went because it was necessary.

We forget how close the world was, then, to a new dark age. In the 1930s democracy was but one of three competing systems, and it was on the back foot. In New Zealand of the day, the government of Michael Joseph Savage opposed fascism wherever it stood, even at risk of annoying a British government that felt appeasement was a cheaper option. But Savage was right. So was Winston Churchill, a politician, writer and historian who knew very well what both Nazi and Communist flavours of totalitarianism stood for. But such voices of warning were not heard until almost too late. And for a while in 1940-41, as Britain and her Comonwealth stood alone as the last main bastions of civilised western democracy outside the United States, things stood on a knife edge.

New Zealand’s part in that war took our fighting division from Greece to Crete to Egypt to the Western Desert to Syria, to Libya, Tripolitania, Tunisia, and finally Italy and – in the last hectic days of the struggle – Trieste. They did so under a remarkable commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC, DSO (3 bars), etc. (It is nearly a decade since Penguin published my biography of this incredible man; I still think it is one of my best books).

Other Kiwis fought with our navy, with the Royal Navy and with the Merchant Marine. Still others fought in the skies, with the RNZAF and RAF among other services. And we had a presence in the Pacific, where a New Zealander, Major-General Sir Harold Barrowclough, led forces that included a US contingent under Richard M. Nixon. Yes, that Richard M. Nixon.

All this was done not for glory, or rewards of heroism, but because it had to be done. Whatever it took. The alternatives – a world dominated by Nazi evil, fuelled by what Churchill called the ‘dark lights of perverted science’, were too horrible to contemplate. And we knew it.

Today we must remember those who died to make the world a better place, safe for democracy - who helped make the modern world what it is. Both here in New Zealand – and around the world.

Please join me in remembering them.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

A small tribute to the world’s greatest geek

In 1902, when Guglielmo Marconi broadcast the first radio signals across the Atlantic, Hungarian-American scientist Nicolai Tesla smiled. ‘Nice effort,’ he reputedly said. ‘Pity he’s infringed 19 of my patents.’

Nikolai Tesla with some of his gear in action. Public domain, from http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/monument-nearly-forgotten-genius-sought

Next time you flip on a light or use your smartphone or listen to the radio, watch TV or do just about anything in today’s teched-up world, spare a thought for the guy that made it all happen. Tesla. The world’s greatest geek. And the archetypal mad scientist – eventually complete with lab coat and shock of unruly hair.

Tesla flourished in the late nineteenth century and was responsible for discovering alternating current – with all that this implies. He explored everything to do with wave-forms, which are the basis of just about everything we do today with technology. He also figured out applications for what he learned – he had hundreds of patents to his name.

He didn’t always get it right, but that was part of the territory in this infancy of electricity. His key discovery was that high-frequency alternating current can be broadcast, wirelessly. That’s how transmission works – we give it many names, radio, TV signals, wireless, Bluetooth, but it’s all the same thing; high-frequency electromagnetic signals, broadcast in a wave.

The problem is that the power it carries isn’t high, compared to the power needed to transmit, and thanks to the inverse-square law it drops off pretty quickly with distance (double the distance, quarter the power). I have vivid memories of watching a bare fluorescent tube held inside a 25,000 volt AC field, less than a metre from the transmitter. It lit up, wirelessly – but not brightly.

Nikolai Tesla in 1895. Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.

Tesla thought the issue might be solved. He also thought it should be possible to harness the difference in electrical potential between ground and upper atmosphere –and his kudos by the 1890s was so great he was able to get hardware built – including a huge tower soaring into the skies above Long Island.

That didn’t work either. Nor did his earthquake machine.

But we can’t condemn him for that. The basis of everything we take for granted today – AC electrical systems, everything based on any broadcast from wireless computing to radio to TV to radar to microwave ovens, all came out of Tesla’s pioneering work. All? All.

Today his name is commemorated in an electric car. And the ‘Tesla Gun’ out of Wolfenstein, which could turn Nazis into small slices of steaming salami with one zap. Cool. Well, hot, actually. And all without a power cable. Wish I knew the trick.

Tesla thought he did. And for some reason Thomas Alva Edison apparently didn’t like him.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 14: what a Dickens about novels

As we saw last time, the modern novel had its genesis in the late eighteenth century as a literary form designed to carry the reader on an emotional journey.

During the nineteenth century writers refined that and took it in new directions. But perhaps the biggest change came with the way writers published.

Charles Dickens, 1858. Public domain, from Wikimedia commons.

It was the culmination of a 200-year evolution. For a long time, publishing was ‘self-publishing’, and those who wrote needed to be independently wealthy. That changed during the seventeenth century, when it became possible for writers to earn a living by being paid to write. At first this was frowned upon; paid authors – mostly, it seems, working for newspapers in London’s Grub Street – were known as ‘Hackney’ or ‘Hack’ writers, a term that remains today as a derogatory moniker for a bad journalist, or a writer who appears to write for the money, not the dream. Pretty much the meaning it started with.

Those with a yen to write books still had to self-publish. Publishing houses would take money in return for producing the title. Or they might accept a title and buy it from the author, who earned nothing more. That changed with the emerging rights of authors under copyright law, but it was a slow process. The road effectively began in Britain in 1714 with the Statute of Anne. Other developments followed in Germany.

Authors did not begin to assert real rights over their work until the nineteenth century, though copyright was still far from ‘modern’ form. But from this emerged the royalty system. By this the author licensed somebody to use (publish) their intellectual property. In return they received a fee – a ’royalty’, which was a percentage of the returns on the sales. The publisher took on producing and marketing the work.

This was entrenched by the late nineteenth century and remains a keystone of mainstream writing today.  (I’ll post on the transactability of these rights and ‘moral right’ soon).

The popularity of reading -  hence opportunities for writers – grew as society changed. The rising middle classes of the nineteenth century Britain, in particular, had the leisure time to read. Many of them were also educated enough to be able to read - also new. Into this burgeoning market exploded something else – the steam driven press. Suddenly readers could get newspapers and books relatively cheaply and in bulk.

Writers had a good deal to say by this time; the nineteenth century was an age of ideological ferment as the world shook down from the trauma of the industrial revolution. Some of the world’s greatest literature emerged from the mix, and the doyen of them all was Charles Dickens, whose novels were serialised and who became the hero writer of his day. The public couldn’t get enough of his stories, at once serious, funny, sad, happy and always imbued with a razor sharp social commentary.

But behind people such as Dickens – or for that matter, Jules Verne, Charles Dodgson and Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) were a host of lesser novelists, authors of the ‘penny dreadfuls’ – stories that appeared, serialised, in news-stands. Stories to be read once and disposed of.

And then something else emerged; genre. Stories of a particular type written to meet a specific market – something possible only as the audience for books exploded into life

Next time.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Celtic history conspiracies, anyone? No? Good.

As humans, I fear, we suffer from an uncanny ability to intellectualise ourselves into believing things that are really, really stupid.

Take the crackpot theories about secret history that have become popular ever since Charles Fort was a lad. Every country seems to have their variations – ‘ancient astronauts’ building pyramids, hidden past civilisations in the Americas, even Atlantis discovered in Google Maps, having eluded everybody on the planet including Google’s mapping teams.

Never mind that the ‘city’ on the Atlantic floor was actually an artefact of Google’s digital mapping process. Or that the ‘Atlantis’ legend itself has been shown to have come from Egypt, and was really about the destruction of Santorini (Thera) and the Minoan civilisation by volcano.

Here in New Zealand, crank ideas have included efforts to ‘prove’ that that everybody from Phoenicians to Celts arrived before Polynesians (always, wrongly, called ‘Maori’ in these accounts). The ‘proofs’, as far as I can tell, pivot on assigning human patterns to natural rock formations, or identifying boulders shifted by a county council during excavations as an ancient observatory. Literally joining the dots, though in a peculiar way.

Like overseas theories of similar ilk, these tell us more about the people proposing them than anything real. What’s more, some of these ideas – Celtic especially – float on a repugnant racial agenda, underscoring what’s actually going on.

New Zealand is far from alone. All this begs the question. How do these ideas gain traction?

Unconscious incompetence plays a part; often these theories are presented by people who are flat ignorant of the state of understanding of the field – so ignorant they don’t know how ignorant they are. That’s coupled with the assertion that ‘I don’t know myself, therefore nobody can know.’

A friend of mine argues it’s the result of people trying to fit the universe into their heads, it’s just a pity their heads are so tiny. It’s to do with their own sense of place, of identity; with constraining the wild unknowns of the world and controlling them – with, in effect, feeling secure, in their own way.

The other tack these fringe theorists try is claiming deliberate deception, a ‘conspiracy’ among ‘the establishment’ to ‘hide the truth’.

I’m part of that establishment, so any denial I make isn’t going to wash. Apart from one small point. Here in New Zealand, certainly, my experience has been that academic historians loathe each other – most of the ones I’ve run across regard the work of their peers as an assault on their own personal self-worth that must be avenged in kind. There is no chance whatsoever of a ‘conspiracy’ even being agreed on – still less sustained – in this viciously hostile intellectual environment.

Again, I think, the ‘establishment conspiracy’ notion is part of that phenomenon of the fringe thinkers keeping the universe small – of cutting the ‘system’ down to size.

Ultimately I don’t think there’s much point arguing against any of the crank theorists. They won’t accept rebuttals; and for every theory that is exploded – sometimes by simply falling out of fashion - a new idea always seems to arise to take its place.

But I still think it’s a pity. As I always say, the real world -  including its history – is wonderful and amazing enough, and still full of great and awesome things to discover, without us having to create fantasies about it.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Does Thatcher’s death mean the 80s are really over?

Former British PM Margaret Thatcher’s death this week has not, it seems, provoked a sense in Britain or even around the world that the deceased can do no wrong.

The ‘Iron Lady’ steered Britain away from a failed post-war course. But the cost was division, bitterness and dispossession. She polarised; and the bitterness re-emerged this week to the point where the Telegraph apparently had to shut down its twitter stream.

Thatcher was not alone. Many developed nations, one way or another, had their ‘Thatcher’ in the 1980s. Including my country, New Zealand.

It was unsurprising. Thatcher’s brand of conviction politics – certainties based not on pragmatic understanding of human nature, but theoretical dogma – was on the rise around the world. It was of its time, framed in the ideological oppositions of the late twentieth century, the moment when the new generation got hold of the tiller on various ships of state around the western world and, probably unintentionally, steered their societies unerringly into a riotous exaltation of self.

Eighties glitz and glam; a photo I took in a Wellington central city mall at the height of the yuppie boom, 1987.

On the back of it the eighties became an age of arrogance, of asserted certainties, of big hair, big shoulder pads, wedge-shaped cars, over-priced and under-sized food, greed, status, displays of power – and bad behaviour.

Was it any good for us? I was in my early twenties when New Zealand followed the Thatcher lead. There were winners, other young twenty-somethings around me who partied up large – for whom the display and assertion of power was an end in itself. The future didn’t matter. What counted was now.

And there were losers. Anybody over 40 was a has-been, unemployable – a dinosaur. Failures. Because they were old. Because they hadn’t made life exciting. Whatever.

Some of the young, selfish, upwardly mobile and badly behaved party animals in white shirts and wide ties crashed and burned in 1987. I don’t know where most of them are now. For myself, I recall it was hard to get work.

I survived; so did others who thought the same way I did. But it wasn’t easy. And every visit I made to my home province brought heartbreak; closures, derelict buildings, a sense of gloom – even as city office workers partied up amidst chromed, neon-lit bars with their revolting ‘goldfish laybacks’ (don’t ask) and Corona beer swilled straight out of the bottle.

With hindsight, I think that whole social mix of the eighties was symptomatic of its time, the antidote for the world wars that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century; a reaction to the safe, solid, protected, grey societies that followed. It made a selected few from a new generation into winners. But I cannot forget the way it also dispossessed. And the generation who had made that 1980s world possible – who had laid their lives on the line to defeat fascism and make democracy safe – were the generation who lost. A twentieth century phenomenon.

We’re well into the twenty-first now. The Cold War is long over. New technology is transforming the way we interact – and the way we can produce and earn. And yet, I have to wonder. It seems to me that the eighties, fundamentally, tapped into an aspect of the human condition. It’s always been around, one way or another, for our entire history. Sometimes society lets it out. And I wonder if that particular genie has really been put back into the bottle, even today.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Why go for woo woo when we have science? Checking out New Zealand’s amazing Moeraki Boulders

I am often amazed at the way perfectly explicable – if unusual – parts of the natural world get layered with what, politely, we might call ‘woo woo’.

Here in New Zealand we have a few – the ‘Kaimanawa wall’, for instance, a few ‘stone blocks’ that are meant to be part of a pyramid and therefore proof that a ‘pre-Maori’ nation existed in New Zealand, despite a total lack of any other evidence, including the rest of the supposed ’pyramid’. Actually the wall is part of an inigbrimite outcrop, naturally formed about 330,000 years ago and since cracked.

Best of them all, though, are the Moeraki boulders, which have attracted enormous speculation, probably because they are well known and easy to get to.

Back in 1848, early settler land buyer and moa enthusiast Walter Mantell – the man whose father, back in England, found the first ever dinosaur fossil – reached Kohekohe beach in New Zealand’s deep south. And beheld an extraordinary sight.

I took this photo of the Moeraki boulders in 2007. They fact that they are not perfect spheres is evident. Note the septarium (split) visible across the top of the boulder in the foreground.

It was strewn with boulders, some up to 3 metres across, weighing 7 tonnes or more, all roughly spherical. Just what they were – and how they got there – has been one of the more remarkable stories of New Zealand’s history.  Not because there is any mystery – but because of the way so many people seemed to think there should be.

Maori explained them by allegory; they were the remnants of calbashes and other cargo held by an ancestral canoe which, legend put it, piled up on this part of the coast.

Settler scientists had the physical origin pinned by 1856; the boulders were natural formations that had eroded out of the bank bordering the beach. That did not stop speculation from people who either didn’t know, or wouldn’t accept, the scientific explanation.

One of the silliest notions was that they were counter-weights for raising sails on 1200-foot long Chinese super-junks. Alas, there was not a shred of evidence, such as any sign that such vessels ever existed. (Technically, a wooden vessel that long would break in the first swells – it’s to do with the required strength of hull girder vs the tensile strength of wood. That is why even short sailing ships had a distinct sheer line, and really big ships had to wait on iron and steel – but I digress.)

Even sillier is the notion that they are alien eggs, some of which have hatched. Or some sort of alien dropping, anyway. Scarily, 27.2 percent of those who responded to an online straw poll thought this was the actual answer.

The reality? There’s no mystery. Spherical objects aren’t common in geology, but they occur. Similar boulders have been found on the Hokianga Harbour in northern New Zealand. There are other formations in Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota and also ‘Bowling Ball’ beach in California, among other places.

In fact the Moeraki boulders are septarian concretions of sand, clay and mud, held together with calcite, which formed in mud about 60 million years ago.

The shape – which is not perfectly spherical – is an outcome of the way this material diffused. It was an imperceptible process that took about four million years – maybe 55,500 human lifespans. To put that in another perspective, to make a 3 metre boulder in that time the calcite need have diffused at only 0.00075 mm a year.

This natural origin makes those boulders utterly ancient, utterly precious – and explains why it’s illegal to damage or deface them.

To me this is way cooler, and way more interesting, than silly explanations involving mystery ancient civilisations or aliens.

What’s more, spherical objects on a smaller scale – much like grapes – have been found on Mars by the Opportunity rover – evidence of past water flows. How cool is that?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

The truth behind the moon landing conspiracy – the real hoax was Soviet

I posted last week about the claims that NASA faked the Apollo programme.

Buzz Aldrin and the LM, 20 July 1969. Photo: NASA

This idea is so stupid it doesn’t deserve dignifying by engaging. Apollo happened. A demonstration of what can be done when political will, technology and funding come together, buoyed on a wave of popular enthusiasm.

Besides which, if there had been a hoax of this kind, the Soviets would have known at once - they were actively tracking American activities – and yelled long and loud. After all, the Soviets lost – and that highlights the real moon hoax. The Soviet pretence, after 20 July 1969, that they had never been in the race in the first place.

Actually they were in it, for real – they’d spent billions of roubles on everything from spacesuits to rockets to lunar spacecraft. The problem was that their programme started late, was under-funded,  and ran foul of in-fighting. Most of the top designers hated Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (1907-1966), the man responsible for the amazing R-7 rocket (still used today as the “Soyuz booster”) and who was behind the early Soviet space spectaculars.

It was Korolev who got the Soviets so far ‘ahead’ in 1957-61 that US President John F. Kennedy laid down the moon gauntlet.

What the Americans didn’t know was that the Soviet spectaculars were only possible because Korolev was a brilliant engineer. He could do stuff nobody else could. Then, in 1966, Korolev died – tragically – during botched cancer surgery.

The Soviet LK lunar lander (NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia).

His OKB-1 bureau carried on under Vasili Mishin. Efforts were made to send a manned 7K-L1 (‘Zond’) spacecraft on lunar flyby using the UR-500 ‘Proton’ booster, spurring NASA to send Apollo 8 into lunar orbit in December 1968, lest they be upstaged. Meanwhile the gigantic N-1 booster – the Soviet equivalent of the Saturn V -  was made flight-ready, but there were problems balancing the thirty first stage engines. The initial test flight, in early 1969, ended with a first stage failure.

If Korolev had lived, this might have been resolved. Alexei Leonov, first man to walk in space, certainly thought so. However, by early 1969 the best estimate was that the N1 would not be man-rated before 1974. There was hope that a disaster on the US side might set Apollo back – but it never did; and so, in mid-1969, the Brezhnev administration began insisting they had never been in the race, turning to a crash space station project which, they insisted, had been their goal all along.

Actually, it hadn’t. What’s more, they kept pushing their moon programme along – it wasn’t cancelled until mid-1972. And they kept working on the N-1, which flew (and failed) for the third and final time in November 1972. Back then it was a deadly Cold War secret; today the video, inevitably, is on YouTube – here. New bureau chief Valentin Glushko decided to cancel the N-1 on the back of that failure. And so the Soviet moon dream ended. But politically the cosmonauts probably wouldn’t have been allowed to go in any case.

The truth didn’t emerge until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Today the Soviet LK (Lunar Cabin) lander and space-suit are on public display, monuments to the Cold War – and to the real moon hoax, the Soviet denial that they’d ever been in the race.

All of which points to an interesting counter-factual. As matters stood the Soviets came close to beating the Americans on fly-by around the Moon, anyway, in 1968. If Korolev had lived, the race could have been very, very close indeed.

Sounds like fodder for a Stephen Baxter-style novel to me. Thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

The truth behind the Moon landing conspiracy

This week Jeff Bezos fished an F-1 motor from an Apollo mission out of the Atlantic. The biggest rocket engine ever used. That’s seriously awesome.

There is a reader of this blog whose Dad was pad safety officer for Apollo 11 – who was brought up in the middle of the whole project. Ultra cool (I am sooooo jealous!).

I still recall sitting in front of TV aged seven, while a shadowy, black-and-white Neil Armstrong descended to the lunar surface. It was an unforgettable moment. Armstrong – along with Aldrin, Collins and the other Apollo astronauts – were heroes in the truest sense.

Neil Armstrong in the LM, after the first moon walk, 20 July 1969. His face says it all. Photo: NASA

That was the real space age. Even New Zealand was seized by the dream; we had Apollo hardware kits in our cornflake packs, there were moon ice-creams. Humanity was doing what it does best -stretching the limits, pushing the unknown. Publicly, spectacularly. It was an exciting time to grow up.

Not that any of this has stopped lunatic claims that the whole lot was faked by NASA. The argument rests on a trawl for supposed consistency errors and gaffes perpetrated by the top scientific minds in the US, yet easily discoverable by enthusiasts. What’s more, the whole deception has, we are told, been kept secret for decades by tens of thousands of government and private-sector employees, officials, and others involved in the lunar programme, including international scientists such as New Zealand’s Sir William Pickering, who ran JPL at the time.

Quite. Needless to say, most of the pro-hoax arguments pivot on flat ignorance of the science involved. The claims are trivial to debunk – check out here and here.

Buzz Aldrin descends to the lunar surface, 20 July 1969.Photo: NASA, public domain.

I can show you a disproof myself. Check out Armstrong’s photo of Buzz Aldrin descending to the Moon. Notice how he’s lit on the shadowed side of the Lunar Module? That, hoax-advocates insist, is the smoking gun. Dumb old NASA had to add a second light to get around the fact that they’d lit the wrong side of the LM on their sound stage.

The reality?  The ladder was in shadow because Armstrong and Aldrin landed with the sun behind them soon after lunar dawn. No second light is needed in this photo; Aldrin is lit by reflected light from the regolith behind Armstrong, the photographer. You can see this principle for yourself. Here’s a photo I took of the Tom Parker fountain in Napier, New Zealand.

A photo I took of the Tom Parker Fountain, Napier, January 2013.

The shadow side of the fountain (facing the camera) should be as dark as the shadows under the topiary. Actually, it’s as bright as the sunlit side.  Yet the sole illumination is the sun, from top left. Sunlight reflected from the water on the side of the fountain to the right is illuminating the shadow side. The atmosphere makes little difference – it scatters the light, but not enough, evidenced by density of other shadows. Here’s how it works:

I made this myself. Oh man, I love being a geek!

What I’m showing here is the principle. Water reflects light in specular fashion, and at this angle it’s reflecting 90-95% – rendering the fountain’s shadow side over-exposed. By contrast, lunar regolith reflects about 2% light. And if you check out the moon photo, you’ll see not much light is reflected on Aldrin; Armstrong has set the camera to expose on that shadow. The regolith beyond (as bright as what’s illuminating Aldrin, from the other direction) is grossly over-exposed. That nails the point. Aldrin looks well lit. Actually, he isn’t – and that’s as you’d expect from lunar dirt reflectivity.

I have often wondered why something as stupid as the moon hoax claim could gain traction. Part of it is that we never went back – Apollo ended 40 years ago. Today it seems like a dream. But it also occurs to me that the hoax idea proxies one of the key aspects of the human condition. Humanity, it seems, likes to see patterns where none exist and attribute meaning without reference to context – or by referring to a context that isn’t the one shared by others.

The hoax traction is also, I think, derived at least partly from powerlessness - wanting to find explanations within bound of what the individual knows, as a way of asserting control over a huge and frightening world around. If we assert what we think we know, over what we don’t know, we regain a sense of control. It’s how conspiracies work – the detail of the hoax claim itself is merely symptomatic at this level.

It’s impossible to argue against such people, because what they assert is tied into their sense of self-worth.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next week: the real moon-landing hoax – Moscow style. And coming up, more how-to posts on writing, more fun stuff, and – well, you’ll see!