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.