Anomalous biography

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, bathysphere, biographies

Naturalist William Beebe (1877, Brooklyn, NY – 1962, Simla, Trinidad) was already a noted scientist when he and Otis Barton made 35 descents using the bathysphere, designed by Barton. Funding was mostly provided by The National Geographic Society.

The descents were made to increasing depths as Beebe and Barton and the diving crew gained confidence in the equipment. The deepest descent, on August 15, 1934, reached 3,028 ft (923m). The dives were made off Nonsuch island, in Bermuda.

Had there been another 253 feet of cable on the drum, they could have reached one kilometer, but that probably would not have changed the title Beebe used for his book about these experiences, Half Mile Down (Published Dec. 1934). The final descent with Beebe in the bathysphere was on August 27, 1934.

None of the items above, except for the Nonsuch Island location, is found in The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths by Brad Fox. It is a biography of the bathysphere itself, not of Dr. Beebe. However, much of the material is derived from Beebe's writings, so naturally he is at the forefront. The painting above is by Else Bostelmann, who painted many of the species Beebe described over the telephone installed in the bathysphere, recorded topside by Gloria Hollister.

One matter Beebe studied was the increasing blueness of the light reaching the bathysphere as it descended. He carried a spectroscope and colored sheets. In early dives there was still a trace of light from above, of an intense blue color that Beebe despaired of describing. Below 1,000 feet or so, however, Beebe would sometimes be heard (by Hollister) muttering, "Black, black, black". He and Bardon would turn the searchlight off for periods of time, and back on again to see what creatures were present. Many of the animals of the deep are luminescent; what appears as a row of blue dots in the dark sea would be seen, with the light on, as a fish such as those shown in the painting. Not all creatures were so clearly seen; several times something large, barely visible as blackness against the black deeps, kept its distance.

The author makes much—more than he should have, in my opinion—of the love affair between Beebe and Hollister in the 1930-34 period, and a later, longer-term affair with Jocelyn Crane. I find it sadly interesting that so many modern writers, supposed heirs of the sexual revolution my generation brought about, are galvanized by supposed misdeeds, when the desired result of the SR was that we all would say, "Who cares?"

After the last dive, the bathysphere was displayed in a few places, including at the 1939 World's Fair, and used by the U.S. Navy to study the effects of underwater explosions. Now it resides at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island.

I read Half Mile Down in the late 1950's, one of many books of popular science that cemented my desire to be a scientist. As I recall, it was in 1958 or '59 that my father and I built a small telescope, which I still use.

The Bathysphere Book has a unique style, similar in concept to the "mosaic memoir" I have been writing about my own life, but my work is much better "glued" together. Each of the fifteen chapters is composed of vignettes ranging from one or two sentences to at most three pages, accompanied by illustrations, many of which are paintings by Else Bostelmann. 

Other painters include George Swanson, who spent about a year on Nonsuch Island. He apparently had plenty of time on his hands, as this list indicates. I find some of these items utterly mystifying; how can a sane person not only do that, but write about it?

Quite a number of the 2- to 3-page vignettes are mini-biographies of seemingly random persons. It takes some care to discern their connection with Dr. Beebe or others in the text.

One later item describes the dive by Jacques Picard and Don Walsh in 1960 to the 7-mile-deep Marianas Trench in the first bathyscaphe. Alfred Wegener's early theory of continental drift had been discussed just before it. But then the text states that samples collected at the Marianas Trench included recently-erupted new crust from the central valley, supporting Wegener's theory. This is clearly a blunder: the bathyscaphe did not collect samples. The samples of nearly fresh lava, collected by a different submersible, were from the central trench of the Mid-Ocean Ridge, hundreds of miles away in much shallower waters (but still a couple of miles deep). They did indeed support sea-floor spreading, a key part of Wegener's theory.

In spite of the very choppy nature of the book, it is mostly quite enjoyable to read. However, I would recommend a first reading of Half Mile Down, which is still available in reprint.

A big SciFi compendium

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, anthologies, short stories

Androids and AI's and Bots, Oh My! It isn't hard to figure what is on people's minds: just look at what is popular in science fiction.

I see that it has been two weeks since I posted. The current volume contains 31 stories, many of which reward close reading: The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 (2022-2023), edited by Neil Clarke. It has been an enjoyable fortnight.

Unlike any other volume of SciFi stories in recent years, this time there were no stories that I actively disliked. I awarded at least one "+" to all but three, and to those I gave a "~", for "ordinary, but not bad." The majority received "++", meaning, "I'm glad I read it", and three of them I marked "+++", for "good and full of great ideas".

Had I had time for more than reading these past two weeks I'd have reviewed a few stories at a time, daily. As it is, what I have time for is to touch on the three "+++" stories, and leave you with this chart of my notes:

As I finished each story I wrote a one-line impression on a copy of the table of contents. Now, on to the stories I liked best:

• "Aptitude" by Cooper Shrivastava – My one-liner is, "Interviewing to be a god—Parable of Gödel's Incompleteness". The woman being tested is one of the last humans, the last denizens of our universe, among a "room" full of singular persons—they appear mostly human to her—who are presumably from other universes. The interview candidates are each tasked to build a model universe, on a much-too-short timeline. Without giving away too much, let us just say that she and another interviewee collaborate to sidestep the process, using recursion to break the system.
• "Jaunt" by Ken Liu – Here I have, "Telepresence robots!! Reaction – Counterreaction". Imagine a very capable, roughly hobbit-sized, robot on a farm in Myanmar through which you can experience much of what it is like to work on that farm. Further, imagine hosting such a robot as it shadows you and your work or leisure activity, conversing with you as though the person "riding" the robot were actually with you. Of course, governments will want to either get involved or control such activities. Imagine the dollars lost by traditional tourism companies! Naturally, an encrypted system is developed to get around the totalitarian restrictions. It resembles TOR, the first incarnation of a hidden Internet.
• "Bots of the Lost Ark" by Suzanne Palmer – I wrote, "AI vs AI – Artificial Initiative almost as good as the real thing". Like in many of the stories, here Bots are small, ranging down to barely visible, and exist in huge numbers. They can conglomerate to perform more complex functions, even carrying out a human's duties; the word "glom" is coopted for such groupings. But these bots and gloms get a mind of their own, and the superintelligent Ship needs all the help it can get from a small number of more loyal bots to regain control of mutinous gloms.

I note that a recurring theme is subversive activity. It runs throughout this anthology; not in all the stories, but a majority. It makes sense from a societal perspective: those who still trust Government are seen as threatening to a majority who have lost that trust. The feeling is mutual. So, modern "saviors" and "heroes" are those who get the better of the powerful persons and organizations that are seen as dominating our lives, or attempting to do so (Does anybody want to know why Mark Zuckerberg is building a house the size of a football field in the middle of a 4,000-acre self-sufficient farm in Hawaii?).

Get this book, read the stories, write your own one-line summaries. You'll be the better for it.

A nearly-erased legacy

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, scientists, entomologists, botanists, female scientists

The Hessian fly or Barley midge, Mayetolia destructor (former genus name Cecidomyia) is the most destructive pest of wheat plants. Barely exceeding 3mm in length, a female such as the one shown can lay 300 or more eggs in her adult life span of 2 days. The larvae eat into stems and prevent the plant from reproducing.

During a huge outbreak of the pests in 1836, entomologist Margaretta Morris studied these flies intensively. She noted that most Hessian fly females laid eggs on the stems, while others laid eggs in the culms (where the leaves met the stems).

Considering that there might be two species of near-identical appearance, she collected culms with egg masses and raised them under a bell jar in her study room. She documented the lifestyle, noting how it differed from the lifestyle of the "traditional" Hessian fly (already well known for a generation or more). She described the new species as Cecidomyia culmiculo and sent the description and numerous specimens, including all stages of the life cycle, to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. There they were ignored, and over time the specimens were destroyed by "cabinet pests", the bane of every insect collector who doesn't keep specimens in cedar boxes or in sealed trays with moth balls. To this day, the species goes unrecognized, being grouped with C. destructor as a variation; after all, economic entomologists reason, the same pesticides kill both species/varieties, so there is little incentive for a still-male-dominated discipline to validate a woman's scientific work.

To compound the slight, Miss Morris had found that the 17-year cicadas of what is now called Brood X (10), which erupted in the Philadelphia area in 1834, contained two populations of differing sizes, which she suspected might be two species. This photo compares a periodical cicada on the left with a larger annual cicada, which is green with brown eyes, rather than black with red eyes. The periodical cicadas were initially thought to range in size from 18-38mm, whereas the annual cicada is 40-45mm. She concluded that the "dwarf cicada" was 18-26mm, while the other was 30-38mm.

She corresponded about the phenomenon with a number of scientists, but she was focused more on another matter, that cicada nymphs were ruining fruit crops, particularly of apples and pears. She hosted visitation by numerous scientists to her garden, where her groundskeeper would dig up roots from an apple or pear tree, so they could see the nymphs lined up by the dozens, sucking sap from the roots. She invented a method of root pruning plus fertilization and mulching, to cut off the food supply of the nymphs and strengthen the tree, a method that is still the most effective. Her neglect proved nearly fatal to her legacy as a scientist. Entomologist James C. Fisher named the dwarf cicada Cicada cassini after his friend John Cassin in 1852; it is now known as Magicicada cassini.

It required much detective work and a few lucky breaks for Catherine McNeur to winkle out these facts and others about Margaretta Morris and her sister Elizabeth Morris, a botanist. She has documented the lives of these remarkable sisters in Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science. It is a big book, eminently readable.

Both women had loved natural science since they were little, and they became prominent scientists in an era of pervasive misogyny. They did indeed transform science in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, firstly by diligent and extremely thorough study and work—which family wealth enabled—and by equally diligent correspondence with numerous scientists and collectors. Their studious care for correspondence networks had a political undercurrent: they knew they needed allies, allies, allies, in their fields of study and related fields. They befriended scientists, sharing and trading specimens and ideas. They hosted many, and some became lifelong friends and supporters. They held demonstrations of their ideas, such as the "cicada digging" parties mentioned above. Later in life their correspondence was equally in support of younger, up-coming scientists, particularly young women.

Ms McNeur notes frequently how a number of male scientists, who might be quite friendly early on as they built their careers, became more distant and abrupt in their correspondence as they became prominent, taking the women for granted as "helpful collectors" but little else. Some men were openly hostile, and the book details a couple of battles-royal engaged in (via letter) by Margaretta, in which the men were at least abashed if not distinctly disproven. One scientist, to his credit, if belatedly, came to respect her and promote her after about a decade.

Elizabeth, the elder by two years, lived from 1795-1865. She was less assertive than Margaretta, but in the end, a trace of her legacy remains in the public record. Here I provide an illustration with its caption. I trust that Trinity College Dublin still retains the specimen named for her. The online biological database WoRMS (World Register of Marine Species) calls the status of the species "uncertain" and its Original Description "not documented". Perhaps someone in Dublin can clear this up! 

The Cladophora seaweeds are very common, bright green, and some are pests. This one from an estuary near Delaware Bay is more of an entangle-your-feet-as-you-wade alga.

The last chapter of the book, "Forgetting", is sad indeed. Step by step, perpetrated by generations of thoughtless and ambitious scientists, the Morris sisters' work was almost entirely erased from the public record. Much of the material used by the book's author was found, sometimes by happenstance, in private collections of letters and other documents. 

While misogyny is not dead in America, or in the West generally, it is much less pervasive than before. But it is not stamped out. In fact, the odd phenomenon of the 2020's titled "Wokeness" is increasingly misogynist, favoring false females over the real article!

In my experience, scientists who are insecure in their standing are more prone to oppose and marginalize others, particularly women (if they themselves are men); such persons deserve their obscurity. Those of prominence who are still insecure are shameful.

Mischievous Creatures is excellently researched and written, full of information and stories of these two remarkable women. I looked for the phrase "mischievous creatures" as I read, but didn't find it (maybe I read some parts too fast), so I don't know if the author intended to refer to the Morris sisters thus, or something else. This book is a must-read for all who are interested in the history of science, particularly in early America.

Saving the day at any age

 kw: book reviews, fantasy, heroes, anthologies

When I saw the title, Never Too Old to Save the World, I first imagined something like this (the cover illustration of a woman with a rifle had some influence…).

On further thought, I wondered if there would be more of this. Bibbity bobbity boo, anyone?

As it happened, the editors, Addie J. King and Alana Joli Abbott, both of whom contributed stories to the volume, had a broader imagination, and had selected a broad range of stories by incredibly creative authors. Having read the stories, I find that all the protagonists but one are women, from middle age to old age, plus in two cases there is a handoff to a younger generation.

Also, there were at least a couple of stories that I would characterize more like this (The artist is Egle Bartolini. Sorry, I couldn't find clip art with an older host). The last story in particular, "The Mountain Witch" by Lucy A. Snyder, has the aging champion, who decades earlier lost a battle with the witch, who is thought capable of unleashing a dragon, trying again. But she is instead invited in for tea and conversation. This story, more clearly than the others, tells of changing views with maturity.

Every story includes magic or magical characters. The least magical is "Launch Day Milkshakes" by Jim C. Hines. The brain of a resourceful "cat lady" has been rendered immortal and is built into the first starship. On launch day, the mission controller is being bullied by a male (of course) administrator, but she holds him off while the starship fends off a terrorist attack in a very surprising way. To say more would be spoiling the very pleasant surprise.

The second-least-magical is "My Roots Run Deep" by John F. Allen. The woman, Mia, gains an infallible B.S. detector in the form of hearing what a speaker is saying inside. I think most of us would say that all grandmothers, and plenty of mothers, can read minds anyway. Allies prompted by Mia gather information needed to foil the plans of a predatory banker and have him arrested.

All but a few of the stories are better described as "…Save the Day", but a few really do portray saving the world. One is "Utopia" by Vaseem Khan. The Invaders in a starship fleet have taken over the world, abolishing all frivolity. Here the savior is an aging man, who earns the trust of an alien. The story ends before the denouement, but with it firmly in view.

I noted a big "+" or "++" alongside eleven of the nineteen stories, and a "–" for only two of them, two which went nowhere. For all nineteen, the writing is top tier, and I enjoyed reading them all.

If only one thing were enough

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, explanations, interdisciplinary

For Marcus Chown, explaining things isn't just a "man thing," it's a lifelong passion. He bites off a very big chunk to chew, to explain 21 science ideas most people find hard to comprehend, in The One Thing You Need to Know: The Simple Way to Understand the Most Important Ideas in Science. Dr. Chown seems to be used to juggling a passel of sciences.

The best I can do with a book this comprehensive is to limn a sampling:

• The Second Law of Thermodynamics – For the sake of background, the First Law of Thermodynamics is Conservation of Energy, or in cosmological terms, Conservation of Mass-Energy. The Second Law can be stated a few ways: "Work requires a flow of energy" and "Entropy must always increase" are two easy ones. Implied in these two statements is the prefixed caveat that "In a closed system…" Thus, building a house decreases entropy (a measure of disorder), but it does so only locally. In total, there is a great increase in overall entropy. Think of a huge pile of sawdust and other wastes… For you or I to grow from a fertilized egg cell into a baby, then to an adult, decreases entropy within our body, but increases entropy even more in the Universe as a whole. There's a curious statement on p61: "…the energy of a photon is proportional to its temperature…" The author is making the case that for each photon the Earth receives from the Sun, it emits 200 photons of lower energy. Photons don't really have a temperature, but in a thermal regime, it takes a hot object to emit photons of higher energy, so the statement is useful shorthand. The "average" photon from the Sun conveys a greenish color to our eyes and has a wavelength near 550 nm, and an energy of about 4.4 eV (look up electron-Volts). Of course, the Sun emits photons with a very wide range of wavelengths and thus energies. The average temperature of the Earth is 15°C (59°F), so it radiates infrared photons into space with and "average" wavelength of about 10,000 nm or 10 µ, and an energy of 0.124 eV. The ratio 4.4/0.124 = 35.5. That's rather different from 200, but it would take a much more elaborate analysis to produce a more definitive value, and that's not what this book (or this review) is all about.
• Atoms – This is a simpler concept, as long as we stay with pre-quantum-mechanical explanations. The word "atom" comes from the Greek word atomos, meaning "un-cuttable" or "indivisible". The philosopher Democritus 2,400 years ago asked, "If I cut this piece of pottery in half, and then do it again, and again…could I go on forever?" He declared, "No." But there was no way to prove it. Now we have abundant proof and demonstrations, including a microscope called AFM, for "atomic force microscope", that can produce an image, magnified several million times, of the atoms on a surface. X-ray methods allow us to visualize the arrangement of atoms in a crystal. But they are not longer "un-cuttable". When I was a physics student, "atom smashers" of a few types, including a synchrotron at my college, routinely banged ions against one another, "splitting" atoms into smaller pieces. Now, we think that electrons and quarks are the truly un-cuttable entities. Probably, but stay tuned…
• The Standard Model – I got out of physics because I was a college senior during the heyday of the "particle zoo", when the number of "-ons" and "resonances" and other items showering out of atom smashers had grown to a list of 100 or more. A few years later physicists proposed the "Eightfold Way", which was tweaked and modified and added to, until now we can make this diagram:

Ordinary matter is entirely composed of the leftmost column of 4 "leptons" and the 5 "bosons". There is a caution, though: all the leptons have anti-matter "twins", such as the positron, which is the anti-electron. The gluon, photon, Z, and higgs have no anti-bosons, or one can say they are each their own antiparticle. The W has an anti-W.

Thus, the particle zoo is smaller now, with "only" 30 "fundamental" particles, rather than a hundred or so.

This is a great synthesis, but it is still incomplete. We don't know if gravity is quantized, or what to do with a "graviton" if such a critter exists. I presume it would be a boson.

The introduction to this chapter (#15) includes the quote, "People want to know about what's going on with what's in the universe, what are particles like, what are the basic rules of nature. There's a lot of curiosity out there." by Sheldon Lee Glashow. I'd say, for "people" he really meant "scientists" or even "cosmologists." For the rest of the human race, the curiosity is mainly directed to "What's my next meal?" and "Where can I sleep safely?" and "Can I get laid tonight?"

• Quantum Computers – The hype about these is like entropy; it is ever-increasing. And so we find it here. One useful point is made, and this must be the "one thing" for this chapter: Quantum mechanical math only applies to an isolated thing, whether an electron, an atom, a buckyball, or anything else, in a very low-temperature vacuum chamber (i.e., isolated from the Universe; I guess gravity doesn't count). Constructs larger than single particles need to maintain "coherence," such as that seen in Bose-Einstein condensates. Anything at all from the outside that interacts with the "thing" will cause it to "decohere" and enter a fixed state that is described by classical mechanics, not quantum mechanics. That "anything at all" includes photons with extremely low energies, which is why Bose-Einstein condensates can only be created in an extremely rarefied vacuum at a temperature less than one degree above absolute zero. Apparently, thermal photons emitted by the walls of a chamber at such a low temperature are either too sparse to disrupt the condensate, or too low in energy to do so. Anyway, the math of quantum multiplicity shows that adding a single qubit to an array of qubits doubles the number of final states it can use, thus doubling the complexity of the problems it can solve. The trouble is, a quantum computer can only produce a single output, so it is best suited to doing something like cracking a single password. Like second-grade math teachers, for a quantum computer there is "only one right answer". I guess matrix math is out of reach. If you know how passwords are cracked with current equipment, you know that they cannot be tackled one at a time; a hacker typically gathers the "hashes" from thousands to millions of passwords and cross-matches them against a "universal hash generator". If a hacker can extract a few or a few hundred passwords that way, he can make a ton of money exploiting just those, and the uncracked ones can be left for a later, more rigorous attempt. I really haven't seen another problem that quantum computers are suited for, and the author doesn't suggest any either. But along the way he makes a wonderful statement about the current state of science: "Something physicists never like to admit is that they have only ever solved one problem exactly: the two-body problem." That's the orbit of two objects about one another under the force of gravity only. He is right! Everything else is approximated. Science has some distance yet to go.
• The Big Bang – If you begin with the current state of the Universe, and the observation that all the galaxies are separating from one another at a rate that varies primarily with their distance, you can "extrapolate to zero" and wind the Universe back to the initial state of zero volume and infinite temperature that "must" have begun everything. This was determined before 1930. More detailed observations and analyses since then have found three "hangups":
1. The background "temperature" is too uniform; it should express more of the initial turmoil unless there was time for the temperature to equalize. It is posited that a slightly slower start, during the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, was followed by a very brief period of enormous expansion, dubbed Inflation, for about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, at which time the Universe was the size of a softball, and then continued expanding at a more "sedate" rate comparable to what we see today. This is kind of like blowing up a weather balloon with C-4.
2. The gravity of all visible matter is too small for galaxies to have formed in the calculated time (13.8 billion years) since time-zero, and the gravity of all visible matter in a galaxy is too small to hold the stars in their measurable orbits. It is posited that the actual mass of gravitating "stuff" is about seven times as great as what we can see; the extra "stuff" is called Dark Matter. So far, we can only know it from its gravity.
3. Observations of distant Type 1a supernovae seem anomalous; calculations based on their brightness indicate that universal expansion is speeding up. It is posited that a kind of negative gravity extracted from "vacuum energy", dubbed Dark Energy, is responsible. I personally think that we don't yet know enough about how Type 1a supernovae behaved in the first billion years or so, when the "metals" content (everything except hydrogen and helium) of the Universe was very, very small.

The author concludes this chapter (#21) by saying, "…there is a strong suspicion that there is a deeper, more fundamental cosmological theory to be found, which will merge inflation, dark matter and dark energy into a more appealing, seamless entity." I would think that a proper theory would make all three superfluous. Time will tell

It's a very enjoyable book. I'd have preferred each chapter to begin with an introductory blurb, stating "the concept to be grasped" and "the one thing that'll help you grasp it". I don't really see any "one thing" in any of the chapters. But it's cool anyway.

Exoplanets survey

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy, astrophysics, exoplanets, surveys

Imagine what planetary astronomy would be like if there were frequently two or even three planets visible in the sky that appeared similar in size to the Moon as seen from Earth. And I do mean "frequently." The planet currently known as Trappist-1e, the fourth planet around the small star Trappist-1, has a six-day year. From a dark-sky location, on the side away from its sun, the next planet outward (-1f) would reach superior conjunction about every dozen days, having a visible size of 34 arc-minutes; we see the Moon as about 33 arc-minutes across. The apparent size of -1g, another step outward, ranges up to 19.5 arc-minutes, nearly 2/3 of a "moon unit". From locations near the terminator (the star-rise or star-set line), the next planet inward, -1d, approaches 32 arc-minutes at inferior conjunction, as a crescent, just as Venus at its brightest is seen as a crescent because it is nearly between the Sun and the Earth. Even when the other six planets are at opposition (on the other side of the star), they always appear larger than any of the planets in our solar system ever do: even Venus at near-conjunction is too small to show a visible disk, except to a few folks with test pilot vision. All the Trappist-1 planets are always seen as disks.

From planet -1e, however (and any of the others, from -1b through -1h) there probably is no star-rise or star-set. So far as we can tell, they are all in tidal lock with Trappist-1, the way the Moon is with the Earth. It is also unlikely that three big neighboring planets can be seen in the sky at the same time because the orbital periods are all in resonance, which keeps them from lining up in the sky simultaneously.

If you were on the brighter side of the planet, the star would appear much larger than the Sun, about seven times its size. But its surface brightness is lower, by far, than the Sun's. It would still be risky to look right at it. Imagine looking at a ball of near-molten tungsten at a temperature of about 2,560K (~2,290°C or ~4,150°F), just slightly cooler than the filament in an incandescent light bulb. Although astronomers call this star a "red dwarf", one of the reddest known, visibly it appears orange-white. It would be dazzling, even though our Sun is 1,800 times as bright.

All of these facts are consequences of the small size of the Trappist-1 stellar system. The outermost known planet, Trappist-1h, revolves at a distance of only 8.8 million km from the star (from Earth to the Sun is 149 million km). The star's faintness, however, means that the habitable zone is between 3 million and 5 million km. Both Trappist-1d and -1e are within this zone, and maybe -1f and -1g, while -1h is "out in the cold" and always frozen (like Mars) and -1b is rather like Mercury and subject to searing heat (from 125°C to 230°C, or 255°F to 505°F).

All of this has been learned from viewing the Trappist-1 stellar system using several telescopes (at least 3 of them in space) and spectroscopes. The procedures and the kinds of data needed to discover and characterize exoplanets are described in a very understandable way by Joshua Winn in The Little Book of Exoplanets. Considering that there are more than 5,500 known exoplanets presently known, Dr. Winn makes a good point that we need to set aside the term "exoplanet" and just call them "planets." Our stellar system, which includes eight planets, is just one of more than 4,100. More planets, and more systems having two or more confirmed planets, are being discovered daily.

All of the earliest discoveries were made using the Doppler method, which measures how much the star is moved back-and-forth by a planet. Naturally, the easiest sort of planet to discover, by nearly any means, is one that is large (that is, massive) and close to its star. Big Doppler shifts are easier to discern, and shorter orbits take less time to confirm (days or months rather than years or decades). For one method, though, direct observation using a coronagraph, big planets that are far from the star are easiest to see. Finding smaller, less massive planets, in years-to-decades-long orbits is between difficult and (so far) impossible. None of our current methods could reliably discover Mercury, Venus, Earth, or Mars, and also Uranus and Neptune. Saturn and Jupiter are on the "possible edge". So it is no surprise that systems similar to our own have not yet been observed. Proclamations that our system represents something very rare are premature. We don't yet have a way to know!

The most prolific method so far is the transit method. When the system is lined up just right, one or more of its planets will periodically cross in front of the star, which dims its light a tiny bit. This illustration compares observations of a transiting planet made from Earth's surface with observations made using the Kepler Space Telescope. The atmosphere, even using adaptive optics, is a big handicap to precise observation.

During the useful lifetime of the Kepler telescope I used Zooniverse to make some of the measurements in a Citizen Science project called Planet Hunters. I don't think I made any new discoveries, but I think my work helped others confirm at least a few of them; the stats show that I made 6,866 classifications. Most of them were "no planet".

This image, Plate 16 in the book, shows the Starshade concept: A space telescope will have a co-orbiting daisy-shaped shade that blocks the light of one particular star with sufficient efficiency that direct observations of planets near the star can be made. The shape of the bladed disk is optimized to "spread around" diffraction effects so that a star's light can be reduced by a factor of several million or even a billion, while the nearby space, within a fraction of an arc-second, is unimpaired.

Such a system could see Earth, probably Venus, and maybe Mercury. "Co-orbiting" in this case means the telescope and the shade are about 30,000 km apart in a very high orbit! They would need to be supplied with large amounts of fuel to allow for frequent re-positioning and re-aiming. Perhaps by the time these are commissioned, paid for, built and orbited, we'll finally have a successor to the Space Shuttle that can reach high orbits so they can be refueled. Running out of fuel is the bugaboo of space observatories.

This is more than just curiosity. Every space observatory since Hubble has had as part of its ambit, "Help find habitable planets and planets with life, even intelligent, communicating life". Whether or not Earth is utterly unique in the Galaxy (if not the whole universe) is the biggest question science can address. (My note: It's curious that the budget of NASA is in the range of 1/200th of the Federal budget. The yearly spend of SpaceX and all the other private rocket companies that have sprung up in the past decade or so totals between 1/10 and 1/5 of NASA's budget. To get a "supershuttle" into operation and to genuinely support "big space astronomy", these numbers have to increase by a factor of ten or more.)

I am quite enamored of exoplanetary science. This "little book" is packed with great info and stories about its current condition.

Loneliness and Solitude are on different dimensions

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, sociology, loneliness, short biographies

I was seventeen, a member of a folk music group, and I'd been asked to join a small (five-member) Dixieland band made up of boys at my high school. Their clarinetist wanted to play saxophone and I wasn't too shabby a clarinet player. I could also play banjo. The folk group was breaking up because two of the guys were going away to college, so I was glad to have another music group to join.

After a number of practice sessions over a couple of months, the other members held a meeting but didn't ask me; I heard about it almost by chance from one of them. I went anyway, thinking it an oversight. The other guys were all in Explorer Scout uniforms with numerous merit badges on their sashes and other insignia. There was also a cameraman there and a reporter!

I knew they were all Explorer Scouts, and they knew I'd been a Boy Scout but inactive for a few years. They'd never invited me to join up as an Explorer; I was soon to find out why. The five of them were the entire membership of an Explorer Post, and they had all achieved Eagle Scout status that year, the only such Post in history. A newspaper story was being prepared.

Once I'd taken in all the facts, I sidled away and went home. I never spent time again with any of them. That day was the loneliest day I'd ever experienced. To use a term apparently coined by Richard Deming, it was my first experience of Exquisite Loneliness: loneliness that can make or break you, but it will surely change you. Deming explores this dimension of loneliness in This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity.

Loneliness is not solitude. Being alone can be restorative (is sure is for me!). Being in a crowd is different from being with a crowd, or with some people in a crowded situation. Loneliness happens more frequently when we're among others than when we're alone. I've experienced perhaps the usual amount of loneliness, but, fortunately, only a few incidents of such overwhelming loneliness.

Several years after high school, bushwhacked by a different kind of betrayal, I was making plans to clean up my affairs and head for the hills. Vague ideas of being like Jeremiah Johnson (a movie mountain man) flitted through my head. Fortunately, I had one friend left, though we'd been out of contact for months. I wanted to see him before I left town. I called, and he came over.

As background for what comes next, it's helpful to know that I had been a Christian for nine years, but part of the betrayal I mentioned led me to pull away from the church congregation. I was badly enough hurt that I'd decided to abandon "church". My friend's first words were, "Guess what happened to me while you were away? I got saved!" I blurted, "How did that happen?" (I'd thought it impossible) He told me of a different church without the troubles I'd seen where I'd been. I went, and he and I have been "in the church life" for 51 years and counting.

Being active in a congregation of believers doesn't eliminate loneliness but it helps.

Richard Deming had things a lot rougher than I did growing up. I had a short spell of heavy alcohol use, then gave it up. I experimented with drugs just a tiny bit, and abandoned that. I don't like things that mess with my mind. Deming became a blackout drunk and at one point spent a night in jail over it. Having read his confessions to us, I am still not sure how much loneliness he suffered because of repeated, crushing experiences, and how much he is predisposed to more loneliness than "average", whatever that might be. His book explores the lives of six creative people—a psychoanalyst and writer, a painter, a photographer, two other writers of different genres, and a screenwriter; all of them celebrated in their time, or part of it—, all of whom experienced and expressed great loneliness. All of them morphed their loneliness into creative genius.

I also wonder, what is the proportion of people who experience "exquisite loneliness" and are broken by it, rather than motivated to heal? …or at least to grow?

As an introvert (INTP in Myers-Briggs terms), I enjoy social experiences, and I also enjoy periods of solitude. At a leadership training camp I was paired with my M-B opposite, a man who is ESFJ. He is almost compelled to sociality and suffers from solitude. I suppose the world needs us both.

Deming is a writer who, in self-revelation, motivates his reader to self-examination. That's valuable. Loneliness isn't a "problem" to be "solved". It's a signal that we need to reassess something. Over time, we might gain sufficient wisdom to know what to reassess.

The first empire

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, archaeology, antiquities, paleography, surveys, biblical connections

It takes a while to read through a 450-page book, even one as interesting and well written as Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire by Eckart Frahm. While Assyria may not be a hot topic to most people, it is familiar to anyone who reads the Old Testament, where Assyria and the Assyrians are mentioned 141 times, and all the Assyrian kings that could be called emperors are named: Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmaneser, Sargon, Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal (called Asnapper in Hebrew), and Esarhaddon. These six "great kings", who collectively reigned from 744 BCE to 631 BCE encompass nearly the entire time span that Assyria can be reasonably called an empire. By 631 the empire had begun to fall apart, by about 620 it was moribund, and by 609 it was no more.

When I saw the designation, "first empire" I thought, "Wasn't Akkadia an empire before Assyria? And could the Sumerians, during their expansion era, be considered an empire?" The author discusses just these things in Chapter 5 – The Great Expansion, which begins the section denoted Empire. He describes a change in style, not just size, that differentiates Assyrian hegemony from the earlier expansionist kingdoms. It is one thing to subdue a number of external polities for the sake of tribute, and quite another to rule them administratively. Having chosen to draw the line there, the author can fairly claim Assyria as the first true empire. In a later chapter he points out that Babylonian, Persian and later empires, right up to modern times, learned administrative and political lessons from the Assyrian example.

I was quite taken by a somewhat side point, that the Assyrian language was, in early and middle times, written in cuneiform on tablets, such as this one from about 1900 BCE. It is housed at The Met.

Clay tablets are durable, so there are tens of thousands of them, in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and both early and late Assyrian languages. This is a letter about buying textiles.

"Cuneiform" means "wedge writing". The stylus has a triangular profile, and a scribe could write just by tapping. It was faster than you might expect (my brother and I tried to learn to do it, but it takes tons of practice to tap with both speed and accuracy).

Assyrian in particular was to be read from left to right, in lines down the page, like most modern writing systems. The earliest Sumerian tablets, however, were in columns from top to bottom and the first column was on the right, like classical Chinese.

By 2200 BCE, when this tablet was written, Sumerian was also being written from left to right. The content of this tablet, the oldest one in the collection of Cambridge University, is about commercial transactions. Note the difference in scribal style. In particular, this tablet has deliberately inscribed lines between rows of text, while the Assyrian tablet has the glyphs "hanging" from horizontal top lines produced as each glyph is written, much like Sanskrit.

The huge number of tablets that have been found throughout Mesopotamia enable a rich view into the people who wrote them. Monumental inscriptions, also in cuneiform, concern kingly affairs and stories of conquests in war. However, many tablets are from merchants writing to merchants and other people writing of mundane matters.

A note on dates. In daily life I am like most people, using "BC" and "AD" (which mean "Before Christ" and "Anno Domine", meaning "After the Lord") to refer to historical dates. However, it is well known that Jesus was not born in the year just before 1 AD, which we would call 1 BC; there is no Year Zero. The "AD" era was determined when less was known about the death of Herod the Great, the king who attempted to have the baby Jesus killed shortly before his own death (from a few months to a year, most probably). Based on his interview with the Magi, Herod ordered babies in Bethlehem to be killed "up to age two", because of the time the "star of Bethlehem" first appeared. In Matthew, when the Magi found Joseph and Mary and Jesus, they were in a house, while in Luke, when the shepherds found the family, they were still in the stable where Jesus was born. It is implied, but not clearly stated, that the star appeared when Jesus was born. If so, he was two years old when the Magi visited (so Crèches are anachronistic). The gifts of the Magi funded the flight of Joseph and his family to Egypt until Herod died. Even now it is not certain which year Herod died. There was an eclipse at that time, but it may have been either in 1 BC or 4 BC. So Jesus was born some time between 2 BC and 7 BC. By the way, we know the crucifixion was in April of 32 AD, and the story in Luke implies that He was born in the springtime, so the age that Jesus attained was between 33 and 38. The common Christian meme that He died at the age of 33½ is certainly wrong by at least half a year, and possibly by 4½ years. Now to the point. In Assyria the author uses the archaeological convention of "CE" instead of "AD" and "BCE" rather than "BC", where "CE" refers to "Christian Era". That removes the theological element from archaeological calculations. Herein, I follow the same convention.

Assyrian culture developed over a millennium and a half, centered initially on the city of Ashur, which was also the name of their god. The town lay on the Tigris River, now in northern Iraq, east of northern Syria. The first "king" of Ashur, more of a mayor I would say, was in the 23d Century BCE, or 2250 plus or minus 50 years. About 2000 BCE the king of Ashur began expanding his realm, and incorporated Nineveh, which had already been an occupied place for 4,000 years. This began the Old Assyrian Period. The author places the beginning of a transition period in about 1735 BCE, and its end about 1400 BCE, when the Middle Assyrian Period began. In the following century Calah, the third major Assyrian city, was founded. Archaeological dates are more reliable beginning about 1114 BCE, with the accession of Tiglath-Pileser I (the one named in the Bible, in 2 Kings and the two Chronicles, was Tiglath-Pileser III). After Tiglath-Pileser II died and was replaced by Ashur-Dan II in 934 BCE, a more definite expansion of territory began, called the Neo-Assyrian Period, leading up to the the founding of the empire under Tiglath-Pileser III, who reigned from 744-727. The empire fell in about a decade, attacked by Babylonians, Medes, and a coalition of others including Elamites, all former provinces or tributaries of Assyria. It was all over by 609 BCE.

I found it fascinating that the mocking dirge over "the king of Babylon" in Isaiah 14 refers to the just-murdered Sargon II. Babylon at the time was a province of Assyria, and Sargon lived there. Although the author denigrates the theological understanding of Isaiah's lament, that verses 12-15 look through history to the fall of Satan, here called "day star" (Lucifer), this is to be expected of someone who takes the Bible as a literary work only. Christians believe that God uses the exclamations of His prophets to enlighten His people about matters such as this, without stating them directly. As Jesus stated, He used parables because "to you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of the heavens, but to them it has not been given." Jesus spoke in such a way that one had to ask Him a question to learn the interpretation. A similar reference to Satan in prehistory is found in Ezekiel 28:12-16.

While we are at it, the author also disparages the statement in Isaiah 37:37 that an angel killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, which prompted Sennacherib to return to Assyria. Perhaps it was the plague, he says, or some other sudden epidemic. He even considers that the same illness struck Hezekiah the Judean king. No Assyrian source mentions the destruction of about 2/3 of the Assyrian army. But none would! The kings only commissioned inscriptions lauding their successes. This goes for all the ancient kingdoms and empires. The author does mention that Sennacherib, who lived another 20 years until his sons murdered him (as the Bible notes), didn't send the army out for several years after returning from Judea. It's easy to conclude that he needed a couple of years to rebuild the army.

Whatever happened to the Assyrian army in 701 BCE is unrecorded by any source besides the Bible. We must recognize a principle of the miracles of God. If the Bible is true, and God created the Universe (whether 13+ billion years ago or something much more recent, as some believe, it makes no difference), then God is not a part of the Universe. What He does is not subject to the scientific laws that we have deduced over the centuries. Miracles have no "natural" explanation. People have for centuries tried to attribute things like the plagues in Egypt recorded in Exodus to sundry natural causes; some such as Immanuel Velikovsky posited fantastic scenarios such as Venus sideswiping the Earth before settling into its orbit (a process that would take billions of years, if it could occur at all). No such explanations are needed.

For such reasons, some Christians may be uncomfortable reading this book. It is best to take the phlegmatic attitude that Dr Frahm is a renowned scholar who happens to be a nonbeliever. His science is good. We can take his conclusions with a grain of salt, knowing he does not believe as we do. I am not threatened if he believes that one story or another is fictional. He has to believe that, really. I choose to believe the Bible. Assyria sheds light on things the Bible didn't mention, but not on the Bible itself. I enjoyed reading it a great deal, and I learned much from it.

Eight times the fun

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoology, psychology, animals, naturalists, memoirs

Preparing to write this book, Sy Montgomery fell in love with an octopus; actually, four of them, in sequence. She is a naturalist and a popular writer. This publicity photo shows her "holding hands" with one of them; this is at the New England Aquarium in Boston, where they have housed a series of them quite far from their West Coast origins.

Dr. Montgomery's book Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness brings us inside an aquarium that offered her exceptional access to several giant Pacific octopuses over a span of several years, and tells us of her interactions with octopus specialists on both coasts of North America.

Although octopuses are not social—for most species, they meet only to mate, and that only once near the end of their lives—many are quite willing to interact with humans. In an aquarium setting, if an octopus likes you, he or she will enjoy physical contact. When one is red, as in the picture, it signals excitement (not anger). A calm and contented octopus will be white or nearly white, and in some moods it will change colors almost like a kaleidoscope. In the ocean they can behave in similar ways, although "holding hands" with a wild octopus is rare. (I "met" a middle-sized octopus in a tide pool near Newport Beach, California many years ago. When I poked at it with a stick, it unrolled an arm along the stick and took hold of my wrist! I pulled away quickly. I should have held still; it wanted to taste me to see what I was.)

Octopuses are curious, inquisitive, mischievous, and playful. They are the most intelligent invertebrates, particularly the large ones such as the Pacific giant, which has a brain (plus 8 sub-brains in the arms) totaling 300 million neurons, about 3/4 as many as a dog. Based on the author's experiences, they put them to good use.

For such a smart animal, an octopus has a very short life, usually less than four years. They grow very fast, from an egg the size of a rice grain to full size in half a year to a year. For the common octopus, Octopus vulgaris ("vulgaris" means "common" in Latin), with its 3-foot arms as an adult, and adult weight of 9-10 pounds, that's impressive enough; for the giant Pacific octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini, which has arms in the 6- to 8-foot range and an adult weight of 40-100 pounds (or more), it is amazing.

The stories in the book highlight the consciousness of the animals. They recognize people, and each other. We learn that even much simpler animals, including insects, suffer as much as we do from sleep deprivation: a fruit fly disturbed persistently gets into such a state that it cannot fly straight, and behaves like a drunk. Badly sleep deprived humans also appear drunk. Many animals are now known to think things through when confronted with a puzzling situation. They are not just bundles of "instincts", whatever those are.

The author complains that it is still difficult to study consciousness in animals because of a strong prejudice against "anthropomorphism", leveled as a criticism of people who conduct the "wrong" kind of research. How rare is humility among scientists! Can they not realize that the reason we have emotions is because species ancestral to us had emotions, and ours are not necessarily much more developed than the emotions of an ape, a horse, a mink or a mouse (or even a bird, reptile, frog or fish, not to speak of invertebrates); the reason we can reason is because ancestral species reasoned; the reason we cheat and lie is because we come from a long line (hundreds of millions of years long!) of cheaters and liars. They are not "similar to us", we are similar to them! This book shows just how similar, in many ways, our thoughts and reactions are to those of that brightest of all mollusks, an octopus.

I can't find a way to write more; just read the book! The author packs more information and lyrical writing into this 250-page book than most writers can manage in twice the space. 

The dark side of genetic medicine

 kw: book reviews, partial reviews, nonfiction, medicine, genetics, corruption

I began to read The Tyrrany of the Gene: Personalized Medicine and its Threat to Public Health, and soon realized that I could see where the author was going. The Introduction and first chapter lay out his thesis. I read the last chapter, titled The "Gleevec Scenario", and for me, the picture was complete.

Genetic Medicine, AKA Personalized Medicine and Precision Medicine, is the current fad in medical and pharmaceutical circles. However, it is miraculous for a few, useless to most, and incredibly expensive: even the few who can benefit from a precision therapy cannot afford it; without a very robust insurance plan (hard to find or afford), they often cannot even afford the copay.

The Introduction features the sad story of the author's father, who died of lung cancer thirteen months after trying to get out of bed one day and finding that his legs were paralyzed. A metastatic cancer had damaged the nerve trunk to his legs. He had fourth stage lung cancer. When one of the bits of cancer was surgically removed and tested genetically, it was found to be susceptible to a new medication that helps a few percent of lung cancer patients. The cost was a few thousand dollars per month. What kept this from becoming a million-dollar story? The father's life was extended by only a few months. At first, the tumors receded and his body began to heal. He was able to wiggle his toes. Then the tumors became resistant to the medication and resumed growing. Whether his life was extended by two months or ten, from his original situation, is not known. What is known is that the "miracle" was temporary. The author cherishes the memory of those few extra months. Fortunately, his family could afford the medication over that period of time.

Why are such treatments so costly? The author tells of medications that can cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly. The reason, we are told, is that it costs millions or tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars for a pharma company to research and test a drug, and to comply with all the regulations to bring it to market. If the number of people who can be helped is only a few thousand, or perhaps a million, the sunk cost has to be recouped by high prices. This is true, but the last chapter focuses on another factor.

When Gleevec was developed it was miraculous, for a small number of patients. Here, "small" is in proportion to the millions of people who have a certain kind of leukemia that Gleevec can't help. The number of people that could be helped was still large enough that the original developer and manufacturer, Novartis, made billions of dollars in profit. Right away I smell a rat: Gleevec did not cost billions to discover and bring to market. Its cost could have been reduced by a factor of ten and Novartis would still have made tens of millions in profit.

The second factor is "Because We Can". The last chapter shows that over time several medications similar to Gleevec were developed, and then put on the market at even higher prices. So much so, that when generic Gleevec appeared (after a few years of legal delays of the end of patent protection), the generic cost more than the original had at the beginning!

The pharmaceutical industry is an astonishing mixture of blessing and curse. Let us not forget that "big pharma" is the largest lobbyist in Washington (and other national capitols in which lobbying, AKA bribery, is permitted). Yet many, but probably not most, of the industry's products are lifesavers, or at least life-enhancers.

From time to time there is a flurry of interest in radical life extension, and a certain debate arises: If it becomes possible to extend almost anyone's life to 150 or 200 years, but it costs a few million dollars for each extra year, is it ethical to develop it? If only the super rich can afford it, won't they become an oligarchy? Of course, America and other Western nations are already de facto oligarchies, and many of the super rich are already taking advantage of better medical treatment, and frequently have longer lives than most of us. Precision/Personalized Medicine fits right into this scenario.

We have to think this through…except most people are unwilling to think, living on autopilot. 

The author's second theme is public health. There is less emphasis on public health measures as more and more funding and interest are focused on genetic medicine. This is a mistake. Public health advances such as separating sewage from drinking water sources and promoting hand washing have been responsible for most of the increase in average life span and general health since the middle-to-late 1800's. We still have more to do, but now it is being done more slowly or is neglected.

I read an article or book by Lewis Thomas years ago, about the three kinds of medicine:

1. Medical repair, as exemplified by surgery and cancer chemotherapy. This is the most intrusive and costly.
2. Maintenance medicine, ranging from analgesics such as aspirin and ibuprofen to symptomatic relief such as cough medicines and to antibiotics. Such remedies are mostly in the form of pills or injections and are usually inexpensive.
3. Preventive medicine, not only vaccines and antitoxins but also vitamins and other supplements that improve our health or prevent disease. These are usually the least costly (but not always!).

Public health measures could be considered meta-preventive medicine. They remove causes of disease and damage. The author's father had been a smoker for part of his life. Very, very few lifelong nonsmokers get lung cancer. He also had a couple of other "risk factors", secondhand smoke as a child, and a period of time exposed to asbestos. Had his history been different, all three factors would not have occurred. Yet, the two most prevalent addicting drugs, alcohol and nicotine, still plague a large proportion of the population, causing great amounts of premature death. Further, overuse of sugar is behind "metabolic syndrome", which includes Type II Diabetes and, as in the case of my uncle, frequent amputation of toes or feet, and reduction of life span by ten to thirty years (my uncle died in his early 70's; his widow lived more than 100 years. Based on family history, he could have lived to age 85 or 90).

Public health is not "sexy"; genetics is. But it's more effective for more people.

I decided not to read the whole book because it is suffused with the author's pain, and he had made his points well enough in the parts I read, that I get the picture. It's worth reading at least a few chapters of this book; it may induce you to help with the tough Thinking part.

Magic in disguise

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, physics, magical thinking

If people think about it at all, they might imagine that an astronomer's work bears some resemblance to this beguiling image. Dr. Felix Flicker takes advantage of this impression in his new book The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life. His focus is on quantum physics and quantum mechanics, which still seem magical to me and nearly everyone. (The image came from a Pinterest pin, which pointed to Kai Fine Art, a digital art aggregating site.)

Just for fun, consider this picture, an architect's rendering of the Extremely Large Telescope being built at the site of the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The center of the Milky Way is in the southern sky, so a lot of big telescopes are in use or in the works to study that part of the sky. The high plains of Chile are high and dry, with very clear sky, so they are a great place for astronomy.

A real astronomer works nowhere near the telescope, unless a new detector is being added to its arsenal. Usually, the work is done from an office at lower altitude, directing the actions of the instrument over an Internet connection. Ah, science! These days far too much of it is done in an office, at the keyboard. The primary mirror of the ELT has an area of 0.3 acres, and its focal length is about 120 feet. Most suburban houses, and the lot they sit on, could comfortably fit inside, stacked two or three deep! Note: That's inside the telescope, not just inside the (much larger) dome, which is the size of a small stadium, rolling roof and all.

Reading through, I realized how disconnected I am from contemporary culture. It isn't just that I'm old; I've never been well integrated into the culture around me. I took notes. The author mentions at least 30 books, TV shows and movies, clearly expecting them to be familiar. Several more classic works such as Tao Te Ching (Daodejing) are given the same treatment, while other subjects, classic or modern, are at least given a bit of introduction. Of the 30, I had never heard of 14, I had seen or read at most three, and the rest were just names I'd heard before. The author is really, really trying to be "with it" (does anyone say that any more?).

Dr. Flicker is particularly interested in the ways quantum physics gets into various areas of everyday life, "the middle realm" (not microscopic, not cosmic). For example, polarization is a quantum phenomenon—and so is reflection off a pane of glass: which photon bounces, and which one passes through, is a "quantum choice". The interaction of light with most surfaces causes the reflected light to be at least partly polarized. These pictures illustrate it:

The picture at the right was taken through a polarizer, the lens of my sunglasses. The purpose of the glasses is to reduce glare; the company logo near the top of both pictures shows the effect. If you look closely in the right picture, it reads "Craftsman", upside down. The blue effect on the body of the mower is because the polarizer is less effective for blue light, so some gets through. Metal objects, such as the throttle lever at center left, don't polarize scattered light, only insulating materials such as plastic, rubber (the tires) and asphalt.

Our eyes can detect polarized light, just a little. The author describes how to activate the Haidinger Effect, or Haidinger's Brush, which allows us to see whether light is polarized, and determine its direction. So far, the method hasn't worked for me, but I'll look into it more. Seeing polarization is useful in a sunlit environment, because the light scattered from the sky is polarized. The effect is strongest 90° from the Sun. If you are wearing polarizing sunglasses, look at the sky with the Sun off you your right or left, and tilt your head (or remove the glasses and turn them). The sky will be darkest when the top of the glasses points toward or away from the Sun. There is no explanation in classical mechanics for polarization, but we use it frequently. The screen on your phone or computer or TV uses polarization to regulate the colors on the screen. Photographers use a rotating polarized lens to adjust the darkness of the sky in landscape photography.

One discussion that puzzled me was about Maxwell's Demon (illustrated by a friend of the author). The idea is this: a box has a divider with a hole in it, and a sliding gate that can let through molecules of a gas. Gas molecules at any temperature have a range of velocities. The gate is controlled by a demon that watches the molecules, letting the faster molecules pass from left to right, and the slower molecules pass in the opposite direction, but blocking them otherwise. This heats up the right side (making it toasty warm for the demon) and cools the other. What is missing from the book? The fact that seeing takes energy. How does the demon detect a molecule's speed and direction? 

This may puzzle us because we don't realize the energy needed for us to see the house across the street. Light from the Sun bounces off the house and to our eyes. Millions of photons pass through the pupils of our eyes every second, to be detected in our retinas. Houses and eyes and retinas are big and heavy compared to photons of light. The molecules the demon is watching are very small and light. At least two or three photons must bounce off a molecule and into the demon's eyes, in the span of a few billionths of a second, for the demon to determine its path in time to open or close the gate.

A little math fun: The kinetic energy of an atom of argon or a molecule of oxygen or other gas at the freezing point of water, 0°C, is about 0.035 eV (1 eV is an electron-volt). The energy of a visible photon—let's pick a reddish one at a wavelength of 620 nm—has an energy of about 2 eV. If it bounces off an oxygen molecule, the molecule will receive a kick about 50 times greater than the energy it already has. It would pop off in a new direction with a velocity commensurate with a temperature of 10,000°C or more. The chance of such a photon-molecule collision is very low. It would take such a bright light shining into the chamber for the demon to "see" the molecules that he would enjoy a truly toasty environment! However, his seeing would be useless, because the molecules would scatter about such that he couldn't gather any useful information about sorting them by velocity.

Photons that wouldn't affect the molecules very much would need to have a very low energy, as low as 0.01 eV. That corresponds to a wavelength of 124 microns. The demon's eyesight would then be rather blurry; these far-infrared photons are almost microwaves. It couldn't see sharply enough to know whether the molecule would go through the hole if the gate were pulled back.

I was happy to see something on page 236, that the environment "measures" what quanta are doing. A tenet of quantum theory is that a quantum has no fixed location or velocity until a measurement is taken, whereupon its position and velocity become known, within the bounds of accuracy imposed by Heisenberg uncertainty. The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics insists that the measurement must be by an intelligent agent, such as an experimenter in a laboratory. I consider that point of view to be nonsense. Fortunately, our author never mentions the CI, so while he may "believe" it, at least he doesn't press it upon us.

Consider what happens in your eye. Back to the millions of photons per second that enable us to see. As a single photon with a wavelength of 620 nm travels from the red roof on the house across the street to your eye, it doesn't matter if it is a wave or a particle. It makes the trip in a ten-millionth of a second (from the photon's point of view, were it to have one, no time at all would pass). Upon arriving at the cornea, the photon behaves as a quantum particle, with a 5% probability of bouncing off. Let us assume it enters, at a slightly deflected angle because of refraction (also quantum effect). A few mm further on, passing through aqueous humor behind the cornea, it encounters the lens, which is denser. There, assuming it doesn't reflect, it is refracted again, and yet again when it passes from the lens to the vitreous humor that fills most of the eye. In bright light the pupil of your eye is about 2 mm in diameter. This causes a slight deflection of the photon's path because of diffraction, but in the eye, the difference is smaller than the size of a detector cell, so we can neglect it. About 20mm behind the lens, the photon encounters a rod or cone cell in the retina, where it is absorbed, and its energy is deposited in the cell, with a probability depending on the color sensitivity of that cell. If the cell is R type this red photon is probably absorbed; a little lower probability if it is G type, and much lower if it is B type or if it is a rod cell, which is also blue sensitive, and can't see 620 nm photons at all. In the space of less than 25 mm this photon "acts like" a wave at some points, and like a particle at others. There are at least five interactions, and all are described by different quantum mechanical computations. Which is the "measurement"?

Let's look further at diffraction. As an amateur astronomer I am deeply familiar with it. Diffraction limited optics are the goal of telescope makers, and the greater the width of the primary lens or mirror, the less diffraction is experienced. For example, the little telescope my father and I made 65 years ago has a three-inch mirror. I usually use it with a magnification of 30x or 60x. At 60x, the planet Jupiter appears to be about 2/3 of a degree across, or a little bigger than the Moon appears without magnification. The maximum useful magnification is 120x, because of diffraction. Here is why. Three inches is 76 mm. The wavelength of light usually used to determine visual acuity is 550 nm, or 0.00055 mm. Their ratio is 1:138,000 or 0.00000724, which is the tangent of 0.000414 degrees, or 0.0249 arc minutes or 1.49 arc seconds. About 1.5 arc seconds is the resolving power of a 3 inch diameter telescope. Human vision varies, such that the smallest separation between two points that someone can see is between one and three arc minutes, or between 60 and 180 arc seconds. Divide these two numbers by 1.5 and we find 40 and 120. For someone with very sharp vision, even using my telescope at 60x, they'll see the image as slightly blurry, while other people need 60x, or 90x, or 120x to see everything the instrument can show.

If a telescope has a larger mirror, the details it can show will be smaller, in exact proportion. Thus, a 30-inch diameter telescope could see (or "resolve") details as small as 0.15 arc seconds...BUT! The atmosphere messes things up. Except in very rare cases, a telescope on Earth cannot resolve better than 1/3 of an arc second. So an amateur astronomer will rarely buy or make a telescope larger than 14 inches. This is why professional astronomers either use telescopes outside the atmosphere (Hubble and Webb, for example), or they use costly "adaptive optics" that can mostly compensate for the vagaries of atmospheric distortion.

With that windy explanation behind us, I can get to the point. A photon is typically millions of times smaller than the largest telescope mirrors, yet it can "detect" the size of the mirror, and its path after entering the instrument is modified a little as a consequence. This is also true of a hole of any size is placed in the path of light going from anywhere to anywhere else. If you have a searchlight on the Moon (where there is no atmosphere) with a beam 36 inches wide, and half a mile away you place a board with a 24-inch circular hole in it, and then a further half mile away you put a screen, the bright area on the screen will not have a sharp edge. It will be a little blurry because the "diffraction limit" of a 24 inch hole is 0.186 arc seconds, or a ratio of 1.1 million to 1. Divide a half mile by 1.1 million: 0.0024 feet or 0.029 inch, about 3/4 of a millimeter. It isn't much but it's visible. If you put a lens with a diameter of 24 inches and a focal length of half a mile in the hole, it would focus the light to a point about 3/4 mm across. Back to the question above: where was the measurement made? The 2-foot hole participated in the measurement, as did the eye that observed the screen.

A consequence of such reasoning is this: Every quantum interaction is affected by the whole Universe. No matter how big a "hole" a photon passes through, or how far it is from the "edge", its path is affected. No matter what kind of quantum weirdness we want to measure, we can't perfectly isolate the interaction from the "environment" (everything else). In all our experiments, we just reduce "outside influences" to an acceptable minimum that allows the phenomenon we want to examine to occur.

Dr. Flicker writes in terms of wizards and spells, taking advantage of a humorous milieu to help us understand how things like "holes" can move through a semiconductor as though they were electrons with a positive charge, but are not positrons, which would energetically annihilate nearby electrons; things like fractional charges exhibited in some instruments, that have nothing to do with the 1/3 and 2/3 of an elementary charge that our Standard Model theory posits for quarks; things like MRI machines (that used to have the word "nuclear" in their name but that scared the public), which work because of superconductivity, a quantum effect we don't understand well but have learned to employ.

I hope you enjoy the humor and the allegories (each chapter begins with an allegorical story). I sure did. Physics is a long-held love of mine, and I like this fresh take on it.

I must make a few corrections (sorry, Doc!). On page 186, we read that a diode, a rectifier, "detects" an AM radio signal, converting the oscillating radio-frequency voltage to direct current. A key word is missing: the radio signal is converted to fluctuating direct current. In AM radio the audio frequencies cause the carrier wave's strength (amplitude) to fluctuate. When the rectified signal goes into earphones, the steady direct current is ignored, and the audio frequencies activate the earphone speakers, so we can hear the audio that has now been separated from the radio-frequency carrier wave.

On pages 190 and 191, explaining transistors: the example mentions adding arsenic (a Group V element) to silicon to make it n-type (negative, because it has added electrons), and adding germanium to make it p-type. Germanium is Group IV, the same as silicon. One must instead use a Group III element such as gallium (I am sure that is what the author meant!). Gallium "robs" the silicon of electrons, making it p-type (positive). 

Babies outnumber all

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, zoology, population, embryology

I couldn't think of a better illustration of the book's theme than the cover art. It shows the larval or infant form of several dozen animals, from tadpoles to veligers to baby monkeys and birds. 

"Veligers?", you ask? A veliger (soft "g": "vell-uh-jer") is the larval form of most kinds of mollusk, like this tiny snail shown at 50x.

The book is Nursery Earth: The Wondrous Lives of Baby Animals and the Extraordinary Ways They Shape Our World, by Danna Staaf. The author's enthusiasm for these small-to-tiny-to-invisible animals will soon become your own as you read.

We seldom pay much attention to baby animals of any kinds besides kittens and puppies, because they are small and mostly unseen. However, in numbers they dominate the biosphere! Think about it: we usually relate everything to our human milieu and to the most familiar animals, which are mostly domestic. These familiar animals live a long time as adults (if not slaughtered for food), compared to their lives as infants and juveniles. 

When we think "animal", what comes to mind is mainly mammals and possibly birds…and maybe lizards and fish. Mammals and birds, in particular, care for their offspring, and we were all told in a beginning science class that "other animals" such as fish and turtles and "everything else" simply leave newborns to fend for themselves. Maybe we've seen documentaries of newly-hatched, nickel-sized sea turtles struggling down the beach to reach the water. Now, step back a moment: How many of those little sea turtles will survive to adulthood and produce more baby turtles? A few out of hundreds, or of thousands? It is easy to conclude that, by numbers, the vast majority of sea turtles alive at any one time are the babies, even as they are being gobbled up by predatory fish or dying of diseases. This is true for nearly every living animals species. Most animals alive now are babies, but most are hidden.

Even for backyard birds, the nestlings may number four or five or six, like these little robins (there are four, but one had just closed its beak) in a nest outside our kitchen window. But on average, only two grow up and have their own families, from a lifetime of nesting, not just from one nest. A pair of robins may produce five or six clutches of eggs in their lifetime; only two nestlings will survive to reproduce. Birds care for their young with great diligence, but they still need to lay many eggs to ensure a stable population. It's a similar case with most mammals. Infant and juvenile mortality is very high, so they must have many cubs or kits or joeys or puggles so that the next generation will not be less numerous than the present one. 

Now, what of fishes? There are a few notable species of fish that care for their young, but only a few. Salmon may represent the opposite end of the spectrum: they struggle upstream to their birthplace and lay millions of eggs, and then die. The fry (newborns) have been bequeathed a yolk sac, which nourishes them until they learn to catch their food. They look like fish, but not much like they will appear when grown. This is because of a theme of the book, that the environment of a newborn animal is quite different from the adults' environment, so they need a different kind of body to thrive in it. This is more evident among animals that develop through stages, with partial or full metamorphosis. The conversion of a caterpillar into a moth or butterfly, or of a grub or mealworm into a beetle, are familiar examples. Even baby grasshoppers, that have "partial metamorphosis", and thus look a lot like adults, don't grow wings until they reach full size.

Most people have seen caterpillars, or inchworms, or lawn grubs. Particularly for insects, the larval stage (or stages) of life can last much longer than the adult period. A mayfly nymph grows underwater for several months, then surfaces and metamorphoses into the adult, flying form, which lives just a few days, mates, and dies. Periodical cicada larvae live underground for 13 or 17 years. When they emerge, the adults "serenade" us (really, each other) for a month or so, and die before winter arrives. Therefore, at any one time, there are trillions of cicada babies hidden away underground, and then for a short time, this year's crop emerges to amuse and irritate us while they hurry to reproduce. Crops of other years remain hidden until their time comes.

Many details about many of these baby animals fill this very enjoyable book. The author, who has children of her own, circles back to the human condition. We don't think of mammals, or humans in particular, as experiencing metamorphosis. While a human baby doesn't pupate and melt away, to be radically reorganized to a new form, we do change a lot between birth as a seemingly helpless wiggle-wormy, squirmy baby, and the competent (we hope!!) grownup we become after 15-25 years. Baby humans are actually very well adapted to the environment into which they are born. And at birth they have already undergone the greatest period of growth of their lives: from a single cell to around 3 kg, complete with all major organs, the motivation to find a nipple and suckle at it, and a brain about 1/3 adult size; everything is primed to go through the decades-long metamorphosis we call "growing up." As adults, we may not remember that much of going through puberty. It is a huge metamorphic change in both body and mind. (For neurotics, many of the outdated defense mechanisms that plague us were formed during adolescence.)

Here's the takeaway: The vast majority, in number, of animals alive at any time are babies.