Earlier this week, the Templeton Foundation announced the 2009 winner of its $1.4 million Templeton Prize, French physicist and philosopher Bernard d’Espagnat. He is best known for his work to understand and test one of the strangest predictions of the theory of quantum mechanics: that particles are uncannily good players of The Newlywed Game. Pairs of them can give exactly the same responses to measurements conducted on them at the same time in isolated booths.

In the 1960s, physicist John Stewart Bell derived a set of mathematical inequalities that the responses would obey if the particles had some kind of a built-in cheat sheet. But d’Espagnat, Alain Aspect, and other experimenters found that particles violate these inequalities. Somehow the particles retain an intimate connection that transcends space. Physicists, even the most romantically inclined among them, have yet to fathom it.

LONG BEACH, CALIF.—One of the oddities of the universe revealed over the past decade is that galaxies and the giant black holes at their hubs fit together as if they were made for each other. This is one of those facts of life that sound obvious at first glance, but get stranger the more you think about them.

A giant black hole is a formidable beast, surely able to bend the surrounding swarm of stars to its will. Yet even a giant black hole is still fairly small by the standards of a galaxy, so the galaxy should pay little heed to the monster within. The monster, for its part, is in direct contact with only a fairly small neighborhood and should be oblivious to what happens in the galaxy at large.

Yet astronomers find that black holes consistently have about 0.1 percent of the mass of their galaxies—or, more precisely, of the portion of their galaxies that has an spheroidal shape (which, for an spheroidal galaxy, is the whole thing and, for a spiral galaxy such as our Milky Way, is only the innermost parts). Some astronomers argue that the black hole mass is related not to the mass of the galaxy per se, but to the velocity of the stars, but it amounts to much the same thing: black holes and their host galaxies are blood brothers.

LONG BEACH, CALIF.—You might think that the universe 11.5 billion years ago was in a more primitive state than it is today. Barely two billion years had passed since the big bang, our Milky Way galaxy was still taking shape, and billions more years would pass before the sun pulled itself together. Yet astronomers have come to realize that the universe was actually quite precocious. Even by that early stage, much of it had already seen many cycles of stellar birth and death.

The latest hint of its precocity came yesterday when astronomers announced that cosmic gas in that period, seen when backlit by a gamma-ray burst (a gigantic stellar explosion), contained molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide—the first time astronomers have discovered molecules, as opposed to isolated atoms or ions, in the light of a gamma-ray burst. The molecules’ presence indicates that the galaxy where the burst occurred was nearly as chemically developed as the present-day Milky Way. Jason Xavier Prochaska of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues announced the discovery at the American Astronomical Society’s meeting being held here this week.

LONG BEACH, CALIF.—One of the unnerving aspects of astronomy as a science is how astronomers continue to argue over measurements you’d have thought they settled long ago. A good recent example is the mass of our own Milky Way galaxy. Estimates keep swinging back and forth, and our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy periodically switch places as the alpha galaxy of the local cosmos. A new study announced at the American Astronomical Society's conference suggests that astronomers may finally be starting to converge on a consensus—and, in a counterexample to the usual trend of relegating humanity to the cosmic backwaters, our Milky Way looks like the bigger one after all. (My colleague Steve Mirsky also describes the study on today’s podcast.)

To weigh the Milky Way, Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues tracked the motion of bright gaseous clouds in 12 star-forming regions scattered over the galaxy. They observed the clouds with the Very Long Baseline Array, a network of radio telescopes stretching from Hawaii to St. Croix which work in unison as a single planet-sized telescope. The network is so sharp-eyed that it can see clouds on the other side of the galaxy inching across the sky. The team combined these observations with measurements of the Doppler effect to deduce the clouds’ full three-dimensional orbital velocity: 254 +/– 16 kilometers per second.

The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

Oh geez. Is Anderson saying this just to get a rise out of the rest of us? Does he really think that the ability to reproduce observations counts as understanding?

John Timmer of ArsTechnica has a good critique of this argument. I'd just add that the data-mining examples Anderson offers are themselves based on models (for example, Venter's gene-sequencing system requires knowledge of the basic structure of genes) and that fundamental physics works because the underlying reality of nature has proven to be less complex than what we directly see.

The average shuttle flight costs $450 million, so a rescue would amount to $65 million per astronaut saved. (It would, of course, also save one other life: NASA's.) That is 10 times as much as society typically spends to save lives through, for example, environmental or workplace safety regulations. To be sure, there is a wide range of cost per life saved -- people are notoriously inconsistent about risk.

I offered some mild criticism of my own in my podcast, but I think the harsher criticism misses the point. Shyamalan is not a deep thinker about science. He never claimed he was. He's in the business of mass entertainment. Moreover, he has been fairly explicit about the film's religious themes, so nobody should be surprised by them.