Beyond solipsism

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, cosmology, theories, biocentrism

Near the end of the book I reviewed last week (here), the possibility that the observer creates the universe was discussed. The next book I read, The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality, by Robert Lanza, MD and Matej Pavšič, PhD, with Bob Berman, presents the theory in detail.

Quite a number of physicists have said things like, "We are the opening through which the universe examines itself." While this is typically uttered as a self-referential metaphor, some, including Drs Lanza and Pavšič, take it more literally, and in this case in particular, attempt to offer proof.

The authors take their time building up to the real meaning of Biocentrism. Things seem to proceed by easy stages, then in mid-book, they get more explicit. On page 145 I find this: "There remains a certain fluidity—a certain degree of uncertainty—to anything that is not actually observed." They go on to explain that whatever has not been observed, such as most of the Earth beneath our feet, exists in "a range of possible states, and it's not until observed that they take on real properties."

At that point, I thought, "As a kid I hunted fossils in a limestone stream bank near our house. Were those fossils 'not there' until I went looking for them?" Later on the authors write of "the consensus world we're aware of during the day" (p 183), discussing the seeming unreality of many dreams, supposedly not constrained by that "consensus world." So now, the world is whatever we all agree it is? Wow! Soon (p 186) I read, "By observing your world, you keep collapsing probability waves, and thus you effortlessly create an ever-more detailed world that includes reinforcing memories," and a few sentences later, with no irony at all: "It is amazing how far we've come by following the implications of quantum mechanics in an unbiased way." At this point, it is clear that their view is so biased there is no meeting of minds with realists like me. They go on in the following chapter to posit this (my paraphrase): All the past, all 14 billion years of it, is brought into existence by observations in the present and near-present.

They have the gall to claim that this is not solipsism. By a strict definition ("The view or theory that the self is all that is known to exist"), they are right. But they turn it on its head, making the universe not just "in our head", but created ex nihilo because of our observations. All of this supposition (and that is all it is) is based on a few experiments that seem to prove that an observation taken now can affect something that happened in the past. Here I must dwell a little.

The starting point for all this is the Copenhagen Interpretation, propounded and promoted by Neils Bohr. Werner Heisenberg had determined the limits of accuracy of measurement, particularly as applied to quanta (elementary particles such as electrons and force-carrier particles such as the photons of light). Thousands, perhaps millions, of versions of the two-slit experiment have made this clear. If one allows a beam of light or of low-energy electrons (electrons with an energy more than about 10 eV have a wavelength too short to be useful here) to pass through a pair of narrow slits, separated by a small distance, ideally between 10x and 100x the wavelength, a suitable detector or screen will show an interference pattern. This experiment shows that not just light but also electrons (and more recently buckyballs and even larger molecules) express a wave nature. Much is made of "collapsing the wave" to get the particle that is finally detected when it strikes the detector.

(An aside: photons act as waves as they enter your eye, being diffracted by the pupil and refracted by the lens, something particles can't do, then within 18-19 millimeters, express particle behavior when they deposit their energy onto the opsin proteins in the retina so they can be "seen".)

The fun comes when we get to Bohr's expression, "Each particle must pass through both slits and interfere with itself." We don't know that. No experiment yet done has shown that, because any attempt to discern where a photon or electron or whatever "is going" between the emitter and the detector, messes up the pattern and there is no interference. Many physicists, including me, would say that the measurement cannot discern where or how fast the particle is moving without disturbing it so much that the measurement's accuracy is limited. In this case, it is limited such that the uncertainty of position is large compared to the separation between the slits.  Bohr claimed that the particle was really "fuzzed out" to be bigger than that, and "really goes through both slits". Baldly put, that is the Copenhagen Interpretation. For photons, maybe; for electrons, I am not so sure. For buckyballs, the idea is ludicrous. I think Bohr was wrong.

Consider this: all matter has an electronic nature, and is always accompanied by electromagnetic (EM) fields. The slits are holes in a material. They disturb the symmetry of the EM field of the otherwise smooth material membrane or plate (frequently a metallic foil or thin ceramic sheet). The moving particle is affected by the EM field. The disturbed EM field in the vicinity of two slits is different from that near a single slit. I haven't seen any attempting to calculate what effect that EM field may have on the moving particle, all by itself.

Do you know what is the Airy disc of a star image in a telescope's focal plane? It is the expression of the diffraction of the telescope's diameter. The wider the mirror or lens, the smaller the Airy disc. That is why one needs a really wide telescope to see small or distant things. Resolution (angular accuracy) is inversely proportional to the diameter of the aperture. That's why the new Webb telescope's mirror is 21 feet (6.5m) in diameter. Big area to gather a lot of light, but even more importantly, big diameter so see tiny things far away. The Airy disc seems to indicate that the incoming photons can sense how big the mirror is. Taken to an extreme, the phenomenon of diffraction indicates that the path a photon takes is affected by the presence of everything in the universe. If you don't mind doing the calculations to a few thousand decimals, you could probably calculate how the shape of the Airy disc of any particular telescope would be modified by the presence of the Moon or any of the other planets, in the general direction the telescope is pointed. That's probably true.

Some physicists get around the Copenhagen view by considering "observer" to be anything that is "close enough" to affect a particular particle. Bohr claimed the observer had to be "intelligent". So what? (Neils, Baby, sayin' it don't make it so.) It is a claim, and a claim only. A huge superstructure of physics calculations has been built upon it, including the nonsense in this book.

I took the trouble to closely read the two articles at the end of the book, in its Appendices. They contain a ton of calculations. It was hard because it's been fifty years since I last worked with Hamiltonians (a type of obtuse mathematical expression, needed to do anything useful with Schrödinger's equation). The articles are intended to prove that an intelligent observer is needed to bring the universe into being. The authors truly believe that, before there was a living mind to think about it, the entire universe, and all its billions of years of history, existed as a great lot of potentiality, a universal wave function (a really complex version of Schrödinger's Equation, with a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion—I think that's enough trillions—partial differential equations). The first eye with a brain behind it "collapsed the wave function" so that at least a few trillion trillions of particles, making up that animal or person, and its surroundings, could exist in a more concrete form. (By the way, one gram of matter consists of about 1.2 trillion trillion particles).

I eventually saw a pattern in all the math. A few equations would be presented, then there would be a statement such as, "Equation 12a is similar to the Jim-Dandy formula, when expressed thus", and a rather similar equation would follow, numbered 13. Then a little later, a reference to "the formalization of Glock and Winchester", turning Equation 24 into Equation 25. And so forth and so on. There were several such shifts of perspective. I consider each to be a potential disconnect in the logic. I didn't dig deeply enough to discern which ones are true disconnects…but I am sure there are several!

Here is my analogy: A friend asked her neighbor for the recipe for her wonderful German chocolate cake. It required many ingredients, and numerous steps. Later she invited the friend over to taste it. The new cake tasted very good, but the neighbor said, "It's not quite the same, is it?" "Oh, no!" my friend said, "Of course, I substituted <brand D> chocolate for <brand A>, and I boiled some milk and added a little brown sugar in place of the evaporated milk, but it's really the same cake." The neighbor was diplomatic and didn't complain further. We all could tell, it wasn't the same. When you get down to it, with enough substitutions, you can start with the recipe for cherry pie and wind up with pineapple upside-down cake.

What we have in this book and the carefully crafted documents it contains is upside-down physics.

Sadly, the godlike powers that lie behind the authors' supposition are useless without volition. If the universe has to be created by us, why did we have to create one so full of frustration? If I create the universe by observing it, why is my wife always late? If you want to be a god, be prepared for theodicy: "if God is good, why is there pain?"

I'll be careful not to use the term "believe" here, because of its religious overtones. Here is my view of the universe. The fossils I found as a child were there millions of years before I was. Could a Trilobite be an "observer" in terms satisfactory to Bohr, or to these authors? Could a coral, or a sponge? The universe existed for at least nine billion years before the Sun and Earth and the rest of the Solar system came into being. They were as real then as they are now. Their existence was not affected, either then or since, by the "observing" animals that arose on Earth about one billion years ago, or by the "observing" humans that arose perhaps a million years ago, or at the very latest, 200,000 years ago. Nor were they affected by supposed aliens that may have arisen five or ten billion years ago.

Every article I have read that describes an experiment on a photon or electron or whatever, being "entangled" with another, and somehow "deciding" to point its spin axis "up" because a scientist forced its entangled partner to point "down", is flawed by circular reasoning. From their creation (emission), the pair of particles had opposed spins, which may have been detected at different times and places, but were there already. Period. Oh, and speaking of time: the authors claim that time is a construct of our perception, and doesn't otherwise exist. It's interesting that so many of the equations in their articles are time-dependent!

I've exhausted my interest in pursuing this matter. I'll read about real stuff in the future.

Errata: 

• On page 39, in a footnote, we read of the size of an atom, "It's 0.0529 nanometer, or about 1/200th of an angstrom in width." There are three errors in this statement:
• A nanometer is 10 angstroms, so the fraction should be 1/2.
• The Bohr radius of neutral Hydrogen is 0.0529 nm; the Bohr radius is the mean distance of the electron from the proton. This isn't just "any atom".
• The word "width" implies diameter, not radius.
• Bonus error (because this should have been specified): every neutral atom has a different radius, and hydrogen is one of the smallest; only atomic oxygen, fluorine and neon are smaller. The radius of a neutral, isolated carbon atom (this rarely occurs!) is 0.067 nm, and that of gold is 0.174 nm. Gold atoms are by no means the largest.
• On page 50 it is stated, "Longitudinal (vertical) waves can pass through liquids and gasses while transverse (sideways) waves require the material to be solid." Remove the parentheses, and this is a correct statement. However, "longitudinal" is not "vertical"; it is a compression-rarefaction wave that varies in the direction of travel, while "vertical" is just transverse on the vertical axis as compared to the horizontal axis.
• On page 128 we read, "…unlike all the other major moons in the solar system—our moon doesn't orbit around its planet's equator." (The point of the paragraph is that the moon's off-equator orbit helps stabilize Earth's axis of rotation.) A more accurate way to state this is that most (not all) other natural satellites orbit nearer their planet's equator, as compared to the Moon. Most of the major satellites' orbits are inclined within a degree of the host planet's equator. However, Triton and Nereid, satellites of Neptune, are inclined 130° (or -50° retrograde) and 27.6°. The inclination of the Moon's orbit is 5.1°. The real issue here is the Moon's large size relative to Earth; 1/80th of the Earth's mass. A tiny satellite, whatever its orbital inclination, would have little effect on the axial direction of Earth.

As the universe darkens

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, cosmology, dark energy, dark matter

I had one expectation when I saw the title: Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider's Guide to the Future of Physics by Stephon Alexander. I surmised that it was literal, though metaphor is always possible. As it happens, Dr. Alexander means it both ways. He is black, and in the physics community, that makes him an outsider. Sad to say, institutional racism is more entrenched in academia than it is in most of suburbia, where I dwell.

I will not dwell on the author's reports of prejudice. Being white (or, having no more than about 1/16th African ancestry), I've seen such things from a different perspective than he has. Some aspects of what he is, he has been forced to become. Whether in spite of such handicaps or because of them, he is an excellent scientist (Neil deGrasse Tyson, another black scientist I admire, freely admits he "over-achieved" in reaction to being discriminated against). Suffice it to say, it was clear that the colleagues who denigrated him did so out of fear, thus the book's title. His significant achievements indicate that their fear was well-based, though ill-conceived.

This illustration explains why the universe is becoming darker, tending toward a future of infinite, unending blackness.

According to the cosmology accepted by a great many, something, dubbed "dark energy", is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Some conjecture that at a time between one and 10 billion years in the future, the acceleration will increase rapidly, leading to a "big rip", eventually even dragging atoms apart, leaving nothing material remaining. Others expect something more sedate, but still leading to the "nearest" galaxies being too far away to see, and resulting in the dissolution of galaxies. If living beings remain on any planets in such a universe, there won't be a starry sky. The "sun" will be the only star visible.

Much of the book describes in laymans' terms the observations and hypotheses behind the understanding of "dark matter" (stuff that gravitates but doesn't shine) and "dark energy" (something about space that pushes it apart, ever more rapidly).

Cosmology is a difficult science. If you were to study chemistry, you could do experiments that take place in minutes or hours or days, typically…although I do recall a reaction that required about a month's exposure to the UV light in sunlight. The second term of my Organic Chemistry course, we performed a synthesis that began with the usual "measure carefully, mix thoroughly" stuff, and then we stoppered our flasks and set them on a windowsill until halfway through the term.

There's no such alacrity possible if your subject is the history of the universe. Tons of interesting stuff happened billions of years ago, that doesn't happen now, so astrophysicists have to infer what it was by looking for subtle signals in the light (loosely construed: wavelengths from gamma rays to radio waves) arriving from space. No "experiments" are possible. How can you repeat something that took 12 billion years to happen?

Modern supercomputers can simulate really huge systems at incredibly high speed. That's not enough (yet?) to permit a useful model of the whole universe to be built and run in a useful amount of time. So a lot of theorizing goes on. A LOT!

Dr. Alexander likes string theory. After reading his explanations, however, I was no closer to understanding string theories than before. "Theories": there are a lot of them; the most recent estimate is upwards of 10⁵⁰⁰ of them (that's a number with at least 500 digits. The number of atoms in the universe can be counted with 80-85 digits).

In the last chapter or two the author writes of the theory that, based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics, nothing exists until it is observed. The Copenhagen Interpretation was the brainchild of Niels Bohr. Quite frankly, I disagree, but I'll get into that when I review another book on that subject in particular, which I've just begun to read.

I am also skeptical of the existence of dark energy, or the cosmological constant, or whatever it is currently called. I have read a number of journal articles challenging the premises on which it is based. It posits a kind of "vacuum energy" that, if it exists, should be 10¹²⁰ times as large as it is claimed to be. To me, that's the largest error so far to be found in any theory I know of. Dr. Alexander has a humorous possible solution to that dilemma: Aliens, great multitudes of them, who can harness dark energy for their own uses, using a "gravitonic computer". The amount of dark energy we observe is the trickle that is left over, leakage from their technology. If that were so, there's a lot of waste heat that has to go somewhere, enough to boil every planet and star in the known universe trillions of times. Second-biggest error? Maybe!

So, the book was enjoyable to read, but I am afraid I didn't gain much enlightenment. Dr. Alexander is a brilliant physicist. I'll have to read more, multiple times, to grasp where he is going.

If you don't like errata, you can stop here. I noticed a couple of things that slipped past the proofreader or copy editor:

• On page 184, discussing the gravitonic computer, two numbers are presented, shown as 10,120 and 10,100. These should have been represented as 10¹²⁰ and 10¹⁰⁰. These are just typos.
• On page 197, two theories of gravitational wave spectra are discussed. One is said to be more "red", the other more "blue": "In inflation the power spectrum is said to be red. This simply means that the longer wavelength perturbations have slightly less power than the shorter wavelength ones." No, "red" means longer wavelengths are stronger, while "blue" means shorter wavelengths are stronger.
• On page 205, John von Neumann is said to have "proved that when a quantum system exists in a superposition of states, a chain of measurements ultimately leading to the consciousness of an observer is what collapses the wave function into one definite state." This is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation, and it is a claim, that so far has not been proved. It cannot be proved. All experiments that purport to prove it, and I have read about many of them, ultimately depend on circular reasoning.
• Two things on page 206: Firstly, Erwin Schrödinger is said to have predicted the basic helical structure of DNA. He actually predicted a regular, aperiodic structure, akin to a crystal but with variable items at each node, so it could carry information. Language is a useful analogy. The helix was posited later, by others. 
• Secondly, Schrödinger "argued that living things fight against entropy, otherwise known as negentropy." He did indeed, but better reasoning has overtaken that theory: living things take advantage of the flow of energy in non-equilibrium environments, and thus they take advantage of the flow of entropy as well, producing small, local reductions in entropy at the expense of larger increases in entropy in their surroundings. That's not "negentropy", it is redirected entropy.

The last item may not be a copy error, but a conceptual error on the part of the author. He goes on to discuss the "observation creates reality" theory, based on the assertion by von Neumann, which has been developed by many others. This isn't physics any more, it is metaphysics, and ought to stand on its own two feet and proclaim so. That's enough at the moment.

Swedish spiders?

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

Well, that's a hoot! I checked blog stats to see that about 800 hits came yesterday (a normal day is about 50). Guess where they were from this time? Not Russia:

Sweden! And that was all yesterday. The 14 from Russia (in a week) are a bit more than usual when Russian spiders are inactive, but not excessive. But...Sweden!!

The dance of climate and biology

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, bioclimatology, climate change

The title of the book caught my eye: Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change, by Thor Hanson. Midway through the book I found the stories behind the title. This illustrates the first. The three overlaid images show an anole lizard clinging to a branch in artificial winds of 35, 55, and 85 mph.

Anole lizards on Caribbean islands are frequently caught in gales or hurricanes. In the article that is the source of this image, "Lizards, toepads, and the ghost of hurricanes past", by Raymond P. Huey and Peter R. Grant, the authors report mapping the frequency of past hurricanes and comparing the forelimb strength and toepad size of anole lizards with each island's "hurricane index". They used the simple expedient of bringing a high-powered leaf blower to island after island, and measuring how much wind it took to blow a lizard off a branch it chose to cling to when the "wind" began blowing. Islands with more frequent hurricanes harbored stronger lizards with bigger toepads.

I'll leave it to you to check out the story of the lifestyle plasticity of certain species of squid. Such plasticity is one characteristic that helps some species thrive in spite of change, compared to less plastic species, which are more likely to go extinct. Perhaps bears and roaches really will outlive all of us.

Dr. Hanson spends little time discussing climate change as such; leaving that to others, he begins with the fact that climate warming is happening, and chronicles the various ways animals and plants are changing along with it. 

Some change by moving, either poleward or uphill. Census surveys of mountaintop species over many years reveal just how rapidly such changes can occur. The species that "liked" the crest of a mountain in cooler times find themselves with nowhere to go (unless they are birds), and die out, even as species that had been living at lower elevations move upward. I was quite interested by the description of just how rapidly some tree species can "move" by sending fruits and seeds on their way. Some can move many miles per generation, if they produce a fruit that is eaten by a mobile creature. Others are restricted to the distance a nut might be blown during its fall from the treetop. But the love some birds such as jays have for acorns means that oaks can be dispersed quite a distance, by acorns that birds hide but forget about (the trees are hoping for imperfect memories!).

Evolution is generally considered too slow to help creatures survive a warming as rapid as the one currently going on. That is probably true in many cases, but not all. The anoles shown above are actually evolving fast enough that some will survive a doubling or tripling of the number of category 5 hurricanes across their island. Initially, adaptation keeps some anoles alive through a season, but there is also the weeding-out of weaker-limbed individuals, so the next generation includes a larger proportion of stronger lizards. Random genetic drift ensures that a few will be extra-strong, as the occasional helpful mutations accumulate. This can go pretty fast in animals with a generation time of a year or two.

How far will climate change go? Dr. Hanson describes a "kitchen experiment" with carbon dioxide and a heat lamp, originally done a couple centuries ago in a brewery (where huge amounts of CO₂ are produced), that illustrates the heat-blanketing effect of the gas. It roughly confirms a calculation that I learned to do before I was in high school (I had smart parents and a couple of good mentors): it shows that greatly increasing CO₂ seems to top out the heating at 4°C. That may not end civilization, but it won't be pretty. It certainly won't "destroy the earth" or the biosphere, but it will make some big changes. So of course the author asks us, "What can we do?", answering, "As much as we can, in as many ways as we can." For me, that includes convincing Limousine Liberals to drop out of the jet set. A single cross-country or cross-ocean flight produces, for each person aboard, as much CO₂ as a few months of driving an SUV.

Meantime, I'm a homebody, married to a homebody. Out total miles driven for two cars is less than 12,000 miles yearly, while the average distance driven by most cars in the US tops 14,000 miles. It doesn't mean we are particularly virtuous, just boring. This book is anything but boring. It's a fun read, with many interesting stories. 

Blueness makes me happy

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, colors, nature, blue

When I was ten years old my parents bought a set of four drinking cups of different colors to use in the bathroom, and sets of similarly-colored breakfast plates. I was the oldest of four boys; the others were 6, 4 and 2. Mom had prepared for the coming moment by questioning each of us privately, what was our favorite color. The 2-year old didn't understand the question, the 6-year old said, very definitely, "Red!" and while I had also said "Red" at some point, I also liked blue, so when she showed us the four cups, I was quite happy to pick the blue one—it was really a lovely, dark blue—leaving green and yellow to the two youngest boys. The 4-year old was happy enough with green, so the youngest got yellow by default. In later years, I learned that blue is the most common favorite color. It made me wonder, if that is so, why does "feeling blue" mean sadness?

That latter point is scarcely touched in Blue: In Search of Nature's Rarest Color by Kai Kupferschmidt, but the book abounds with lore and learning about Blue: how we see it, use it, and value it. I did wonder, how is it so rare, when the sky is blue? As I soon learned, "blues you can use" are hard to come by. Thus, there are a number of blue minerals, also many blue flowers and fruits, but stable blue pigments made from minerals are historically scarce and thus highly valued, and blue dyes from plant sources even more so.

It's true that though there are a number of blue minerals, only one or two make useful pigments, and the primary one is lapis lazuli (lazurite to a mineralogist). It's scarce and hard to produce because it seldom occurs with much purity, being intergrown with pyrite and other minerals of similar solubility. One must almost pick it apart with tiny tweezers to get the blue mineral grains separated from all the others.

It's also hard to grow, unlike chalcanthite, AKA hydrated copper sulfate. I grew this specimen of copper sulfate in a jar, rather quickly. It is very water soluble, so as a mineral it only occurs in deserts, associated with copper deposits. Good pigments aren't water soluble!

I happen to favor blue minerals, as does Dr. Kupferschmidt. The two pictures below show one natural mineral, light blue fluorite, and a jar-grown phosphate (apatite, chemically).

There is also a chapter on color perception, with quite a discussion of the way some languages have only one word that covers both green and blue hues. Does this mean that some people can't see the difference, or that it just isn't important in some cultures? I do know this: my wife says the phosphate crystals are clear; she doesn't see the aqua color that is so distinct to me. She also tends to see some of my clothing as green, which I see as blue, but the Japanese language has quite distinct words for blue and green colors (she is Japanese).

Another chapter deals with plant dyes, which seem to produce every color except blue, with two exceptions: woad, Isatis tinctoria, and the indigo bean, Indigofera tinctoria. The Latin word tinctoria is from tinctura, meaning "dye". The two plants' extracts are the same chemically, but that from the indigo bean is more concentrated. Denim is dyed either with natural indigo, or a synthetic version. It has the charming characteristic of gradually coming out in the wash, so that older blue jeans and jean jackets (etc.) fade with many washings. If you want blue underwear, wash it with new blue jeans!

I was surprised that mollusk dyes were not mentioned (I happen to work in the mollusk collection of a natural history museum). Of course, "royal purple" is the most famous dye to be made from snails of the genus Murex. It was even more surprising to me because I found this statement, quoting philologist Lazarus Geiger, that "the Bible found 'no opportunity' to mention the color blue." This is blatantly false! viz:

The Hebrew word tekelet occurs 50 times, and nearly every version translates the word as "blue". Historically the word describes the blue dye produced from a secretion of the cerulean mussel; both Mytilus edulis and Mytilus galloprovincialis are found on the Phoenician coast where the purple-yielding Murex species are found. Jewish sources describe the color of "Tyrian purple" from Murex snails as having a range of colors, depending on how much ultraviolet the dye solution is exposed to during processing. The more UV, the bluer the result. Apparently, in the mix of dye chemicals, the red one(s) are bleached by UV. Thus, begin making dye in the late afternoon to get a more magenta, almost reddish color, or begin early in the day to get a sky-blue dye. The dye from the mussels tends more toward blue hues than from the snails. The common name "cerulean mussel" refers to sky blue, which is the color of the fresh shells. And here we mean the darkish blue of a clear winter sky.

The tapestries of the Hebrew tabernacle and later of the temple in Jerusalem, as well as the garments of the priests, were to be of linen embroidered with "blue and purple and scarlet", all colors that can be produced from mollusks. Now, perhaps Lazarus Geiger only had a New Testament available; the word "blue" does not occur in the Greek New Testament, where either kyanos or galazios would have been used. The NT does mention red, scarlet, green and purple.

On a further note, some consider the Hebrew word cappiyr, translated "sapphire", may refer to lapis lazuli, but from the root of the Hebrew word, it refers to the extreme hardness of the stone, and can only refer to corundum; sapphire is blue corundum. The "sapphire pavement" before the throne of God is intended to appear as the blue sky seen from above.

All that aside, It was great fun to read this book. There is much to learn about blue, including why its manufacture was so hard in the past, but is so common now. So I could have a dark blue plastic cup to use when brushing my teeth as a child. P.S. I still have that cup, and still use it!

Can fusion arrive soon enough?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, controlled fusion, renewable energy

Could this power our future?

This is the inside of a Tokamak, a bagel-shaped magnetic "bottle", as the temperature in the plasma (the violet stuff) is ramping up toward 100 million degrees or so, a temperature needed to trigger fusion between deuterium and tritium nuclei.

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet, by Arthur Turrell, is a hopeful progress report of sorts, on the one near-renewable energy technology that just might secure the future of the human species on earth.

I expect that the technology will soon drop the adjective "nuclear", and just be called "fusion" or "fusion energy", because of intense public antipathy towards all things nuclear, based on hyped-up fears of future disasters such as those at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Maybe we can invent a new adjective to distinguish between "fusion" meaning fusion energy, and other uses of the word, such as "Asian fusion", for eclectic Eastern cuisine, and "The fusion of enlightenment and entertainment", the purview of media host Glenn Beck.

The recipe for sustaining energy-producing fusion reactions is simple. For any type of nucleus, or pair of nuclei, a specific combination of temperature and pressure is needed to initiate the fusing of nuclei into bigger ones, and there is a well known function that relates the amount of fusion energy produced, per kg of "stuff", at any combination of pressure and temperature increase beyond that threshold. As Dr. Turrell describes, the "easiest" reaction is between deuterium (hydrogen with a nucleus containing one proton and one neutron) and tritium (hydrogen with a nucleus containing a proton and two neutrons). In the conditions a Tokamak is aiming for, with a pressure of a few millibars (about 1/100 atmospheric pressure), the threshold temperature is 150 million K (=150 million °C, minus 273, a trifling amount we can ignore; also equal to about 270 million °F).

It might seem trivial to work with a low pressure like that, but the issue is not pressure, but the consequences of searingly hot plasma touching the materials of the "bottle", such as the metal walls of a Tokamak. Consequence 1: the metal boils. Consequence 2: the plasma cools off, quenching any fusion reaction. Result: the device won't make energy, and it may be destroyed.

Thus, there are three ways to keep the plasma "in the bottle": magnetic confinement, inertial confinement, or gravitational confinement. Gravitational confinement is what every star uses to keep its fusion engine working.

A star with a mass of at least 0.075 that of the Sun, or about 25,000 times the mass Earth, has a dense enough core, at a high enough temperature, for about one in a trillion collisions between two hydrogen nuclei (protons, with no neutrons at all), to fuse into a deuteron (a deuterium nucleus), absorbing an electron (or kicking out a positron) in the process to convert one proton to a neutron. Deuterons more readily fuse with more protons to produce tritons (tritium nuclei) and then again to form helium nuclei (also with the absorption of another electron or ejection of a positron). The threshold temperature is several million K, at a pressure of a few million atmospheres.

On Earth, gravitational confinement is out, so magnetic or inertial methods must be used. The Tokamak is one kind of magnetic "bottle", and is currently favored as the most likely to "work." A version called the Spherical Tokamak, shaped more like an apple than a bagel, is described and may wind up working better. Current research is aiming to deal with huge amounts of instability that occur when you try to keep a superhot plasma "in the bottle."

Inertial confinement is based on methods that compress a pellet of fusible material by a factor of a hundred or so (in diameter; a million-fold in volume), which pushes the temperature to millions of degrees, and any fusion that is going to happen is completed in a few billionths of a second. Nothing works that fast except laser light.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses the world's most powerful laser system, 192 lasers that create about 400 megajoules of infrared energy. A megajoule is a million watt-seconds, or 278 watt-hours. A "shot" begins with a pulse, 20 nanoseconds long, in 192 beams, with a total of 53 kilowatt-hours of energy. The light is up-converted twice to become about 2 megajoules of UV light, still compressed into 20 ns, which gets focused into two tiny openings, each a little bigger than a pinhole, at the ends of a barrel-shaped gold capsule called a hohlraum, that contains a fuel pellet (hydrogen isotopes at the center of other layers). This deposit of an incredi-jillion watts per square whatever, on the inside surface of the hohlraum, produces X-rays that compress the fuel pellet. Fusion has to happen in one or two ns, while inertia keeps the pressure in the now-compressed capsule at some unimaginable number of gigabars (billions of atmospheres) of pressure, at millions of degrees. NIF was built for research. A power plant using the technology would have to drop a fuel pellet every few seconds (and that consumes a lot of gold), for years and years, to be a commercial energy-producing reality. After every shot at NIF it takes days to repair damage caused by the immense power of the lasers.  Yeah, I'd say the odds are pretty long…

As of the writing of Star Builders, a Tokamak has achieved 67% of "ignition", and NIF has hit 3%. Commercial power production requires not just ignition, not just break-even (power out = power in), but 10x to 100x of break-even. What if running a 500 MW power plant consumed 400 MW? The remaining 100 MW that could be sold will be costly indeed, and there will be an incredible waste heat problem. A 500 MW fusion plant must consume no more than 1% to 10% of its own energy.

Other than waste heat, other wastes represent an area where fusion energy excels. Current nuclear fission power plants produce radioactive waste, which must be safely stored or disposed of. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, does produce some radioactive waste, but only in very small amounts, comparatively. Any nuclear process releases lots of neutrons, but a fusion plant can be built of materials that either don't absorb many neutrons or do not become radioactive by doing so.

The big question is this: How soon will any of these schemes be ready for prime time? From that point, how long will it take to build a few thousand power plants, worldwide, to take over electricity generation from coal (still #1 worldwide), natural gas, oil, and all the rest. I'd include windmills in that, because they aren't really renewable; they are an arcane way of turning electricity in one place into steel, aluminum and other materials, and using wind to recover most (but NOT ALL!) of the original energy used to make the windmill, until the windmill must be replaced.

The only energy technology that is (only since about 2010) renewable over its life cycle: Solar-electric panels. But this has big drawbacks, the biggest being, the Sun shines only half the day. Battery storage is still too costly and its energy density is too low, to make much of a dent in the problem.

Dr. Turrell is optimistic. To him, we are dramatically under-invested in fusion research. If throwing money at the problem could speed it up, so a facility somewhere achieves commercially-ready fusion power by 2024, that would be great, but could we then ramp up fast enough to save ourselves from the climate change that is growing around us?

Disclaimer: I know "warming" is in part human-caused. I am not convinced it is an absolute negative. The impact will be negative in some places, and positive in others. Bet on it.

But can we grow fusion power enough to stop making carbon dioxide completely? Can we do it fast enough to avert a climate crisis? Not without making more use of fission energy, while the research is completed and fusion (when it arrives) gets rolled out worldwide. The sideboards on my estimate of the time frame are between 2040 and 2140...or later. A lot is still not known. Interesting times are ahead! This book will be a useful reference in years ahead.

Digging In

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, paleontology, burrowing, trace fossils

Are we still cavemen, somewhere deep inside us? Some folks are. The people who live in a certain part of Cappadocia certainly are, if not cave dwellers, certainly burrow dwellers. The soft volcanic stone in the area is easily dug. Several thousand people live in underground, or within-rock, dwellings. Some of these unique burrow-houses, along with churches and other public places, were carved in the rock as long ago as 300 AD.

Does this make humans the largest burrowing animals? Actually, that distinction belongs to grizzly bears, as we read in The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath Our Feet, by Anthony J. Martin.

Dr. Martin is an ichnologist, a scientist who studies trace fossils: fossilized tracks, trails, and burrows made by animals. His book shows how knowledge of the ways animals have trod on, dug into, and tunneled underground have created the natural environment. For example, a motto in his field is, "Without animals that tunnel and poop, there would be no mud." Geological forces tend to mix clay and silt and organic sludge into larger-grained sediments. Animals that tunnel within those sediments are frequently like earthworms and marine worms, that ingest the "dirt", digest the organic part, and defecate pellets of the remaining mineral bits mixed with mucus, typically onto the surface (look for little piles of pellets near wormholes after a rainstorm). These pellets glomp together into "mud". (Yes, Virginia, dirt is mostly silt and clay mixed with animal poop and poop eaten and re-pooped. Now, don't you want to wear gloves when you garden?)

It is likely that ants plus termites make up more than half of the total mass of all animals. And they are nearly all inveterate tunnellers. How far back did "bioturbation" (the stirring of the sediment by animals) begin? The book has a tentative answer: Around 541 million years ago, or a little before, during the transition from the Ediacaran Period to the Cambrian Period.

The Ediacaran Period, from 635 to 541 million years ago (mya) is named for a region in Australia where these unusual soft-bodies fossils were first found. In this image the scale bars are either 1/2cm (black) or 1cm (white). The best analysis of the environment of these animals, or proto-animals, is of quiet seabeds with a surface composed of bacterial mats, which sometimes humped up into stromatolites, which originated about two billion years earlier. None of these critters had shells or teeth, and they seem to have fed on the waste products of the bacteria and perhaps a little bit on the bacteria themselves. It seems they did not feed on each other; there were no predators yet.

They apparently did not have the wherewithal to dig into or under the bacterial mats. At the very end of this period, transitional animals called the Small, Shelly Fauna (SSF) appeared, and they did begin to dig in. They also seem to have fed on the soft-bodies feast around them, because the "softies" soon vanished.

The SSF quickly gave way to the animals of the Cambrian Period, from 541 to about 485 mya, which were shelled creatures such as the beloved trilobites, but included all modern phyla plus a number of phyla that have gone extinct. Here we see a trilobite and a blastozoan (distant relative of sea stars).

The book has quite a chapter on the trackways left by trilobites, and the confusion that sometimes results when other many-legged creatures leave tracks that look similar at first glance.

Cambrian animals didn't just leave tracks in the bottom. Burrowing as a lifestyle seems to have begun among nearly all phyla during the Cambrian Period.

Why burrow? For some, food is found there (ask any mole or earthworm). Protection and privacy: it is easier to defend eggs and babies when they are in tunnels or bunkers or burrows. Making babies is safer in a burrow also; the blissful couple is less likely to be interrupted. There are actually birds that tunnel to protect their eggs and young.

The creatures that survived the "big five" extinctions were mostly burrowers. This is seen on a small scale in a description that begins Chapter 9, "Viva La Evolución: Change Comes from Within". Pocket gophers that happened to be in their tunnels during the Mount St. Helens eruption of May 18, 1980, found their tunnel mouths buried under loose ash, through which they had to tunnel upwards to attain the new surface of the ground. They did so, in large numbers, all over the area that was devastated and incinerated by the nuée ardent ("glowing cloud") of superheated gas and melted glass that roared off the mountain. 57 humans that were within around a 10 mile radius of the volcano died. Thousands of pocket gophers, including some very much closer to the mountain, were safe in their dens and emerged to repopulate the area with their own mini-population explosion.

Chapter 8, "Rulers of the Underworld", surveys the breadth of kinds of animals that live literally underfoot, from ants to armadillos, and some that are (or were) a bit too big to be literally underfoot, such as the giant ground sloths that left tunnels you can almost drive a car through in parts of South America.

A major theme of the book, found in most chapters, is that the diggers all around us are ecosystem engineers. The gopher tortoise is a superstar of ecosystem engineering. These middlin-sized tortoises tunnel industriously, making spaces not only for themselves, but for about 400 species of animals that get the opportunity to dwell in those spaces, or in side tunnels off of them. A foot-long tortoise makes a one-entrance tunnel 5-15 meters long, going as deep as 3 meters, to an enlarged den. If you were to excavate a well-used tunnel, however, you would find numerous side tunnels made by mice and toads, also by dung beetles and other insects. The tortoises move tons of earth about, and areas with many burrowing animals in general are well-aerated because they are to well-perforated! The constant digging and mixing means we live amidst an extensively re-worked landscape…or, at least, those of us who live outside cities.

Even in my suburban area, a typical shovelful of garden soil contains one or two dozen earthworms (multiply by the thousands of square feet in my yard). There are also the burrows and tunnels of mice, voles, camel crickets, and a dozen species of ant.

It's good to be reminded, or enlightened, regarding the many uses of the underground and the wildlife that inhabits and creates it. A thoroughly enjoyable book.

Pardon me for continuing with a criticism or two; you can stop reading here if you prefer. The points below don't diminish the value or enjoyment of the book.

More and more I find myself wishing authors and publishing houses would make more and better use of copy editors and proofreaders. A spell-checker is only 10% of the task. Some examples:

• On page 142 I found this in a description of the impact of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago: "The impact…instantly converted its potential energy into kinetic energy…". Hardly! The rock was moving about 30 km/s, and that's all kinetic energy. It was converted, first to thermal energy (melting and evaporating rock and ocean water), and then to more kinetic energy of the "splash stuff", molten rock lobbed halfway around the planet. The copy editor needs to know some physics.
• The word "had" was omitted from a phrase that should have read, "…cobbles of sandstone that had fallen off the slope…" Page 148.
• Faulty math: the statement that ants probably outweigh humans (true), is followed up by "one million ants per person". Hmm. I weigh just under 100 kg, or 100,000 grams. One millionth of my weight is 100 mg. I suspect a 100 mg ant would be a fearsome critter! Large (12mm) carpenter ants weigh 20-30 mg; maybe the colony's queen approaches 50 mg. The average worker ant of all species weighs about 2 mg, so it would take 50 million ants to balance me on the scales. Page 226.
• The author in one place states that a hectare is 100 square meters, but a hectare is actually 100 meters squared, or 10,000 square meters (107,639 sq ft). That is 2.471 acres. I found a few places (p. 235 is one), where the ratio is reversed, indicating that the author (or someone he quoted) calculated 2.5 hectares per acre. That's quite different from both 100 sq m and 10,000 sq m.

To be honest, these complaints total half a page; out of a 400-page book, that isn't bad. I like Dr. Martin's writing.

Science Fiction is Growing Up

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

This image doesn't illustrate any of the stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6, edited by Neil Clarke. I stumbled across the picture and it appealed to me. It isn't lost on me that everyone except the girl is in an environmental suit. Is it for the sake of the cheesecake? Or just a broad hint that this is on Earth, in some future time? I surmise the latter.

Of the 32 stories in The Best, for most, whether they take place on Earth isn't relevant. The ones I liked best presented new takes on writing from the viewpoint of The Other. "Exile's End", by Carolyn Ives Gilman, portrays two viewpoints equally deftly, that of an Ordinary Human (or a descendant thereof) and a descendant of humans who took to the stars so long ago that they are quasi-alien, and have a culture almost beyond the grasp of OH's. Crossing that divide is the crux of the story. "Tunnels" by Eleanor Arnason presents sympathetic aliens, including one who partners with the human protagonist because, as it tells her, "You saw me. You asked my name."

"Sinew and Steel and What They Told" by Carrie Vaughn presents a human so seriously modified (but all inside) it's hard to think he's still human. At the core, he is human, which makes all the difference in the end.

I am a musician who appreciates fine instruments. The luthier in "An Important Failure" by Rebecca Campbell spends a lifetime gathering the right tone woods and structural woods to make a violin, the first in centuries to compare on an equal basis with the famous violins of the 17th Century such as Amati and Stradivarius. In the author's view the secret to the fine sound of violins of this era is the climate, which was unusually cold for a century or two, producing trees with exceptionally fine grain. Even with the finest woods, it takes a violin about a century of frequent play to achieve its greatness. The milieu of the story is a warmer world that just doesn't grow fine-grained wood any more.

"Red_Bati" by Dilman Dila is the story of a robot dog with the body type of a red basenji. This dog has sufficient AI to create a "ghost" of a beloved human, as a companion, and to take over a spaceship (sorry for the spoiler). The author is one of several Desi (Indian subcontinent) authors in this volume. I found their stories particularly evocative.

Perhaps a quarter of the stories have a warmer Earth in their background. While I don't agree that "global warming" will proceed as far as the dire predictions of the IPCC, nor that its effects will be all bad, this is one area of speculation that richly rewards the investigation and mental experimentation that makes science fiction so great. "Textbooks in the Attic" by S.B. Divya sets the rich, in high-ground walled enclaves, against all others, in their flooded world, struggling to reinvent antibiotics while books that didn't get moved to attics fast enough rot away.

Science fiction before about 1965 was mostly of the "gee whiz" variety, though many great writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and Lester Del Rey wrote with much more sophistication. But many of my early favorites were the Lensman series and stories such as Venus Equilateral by George O. Smith, stories more about technology, with characters that were rather two-dimensional.

Later, as the "sexual revolution" got under way, triggered by court rulings that "porn is in the eye of the beholder", authors of all stripes, but particularly science fiction authors, went hog-wild. Most science fiction for the next generation seemed to be extended wet dreams, mainly by male authors airing their most erotic fantasies. I didn't read hardly any science fiction for many years, except to "check in" from time to time to see if it was wearing off. By about 2000 much had worn off, and writers were again exploring themes of greater breadth and wider interest. When I started this blog in 2005, I was again reading science fiction regularly, but only as about 10% of my "intake"; most of my reading for many years has been nonfiction, and most of that on scientific subjects. If you peruse this blog, you'll note quite a variety of subjects.

I am glad to note that I skipped only two stories in The Best, and that because of egregious violence, not overdone eroticism. I can again say, after reading most of the stories in this volume, "I am glad I read that."

Studying trees from top down

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, forestry, canopy research, eighth continent, environmentalism, ecotourism

Behold Canopy Meg, Dr. Meg Lowman, called "Your Highness" by friends, a pioneer in forest canopy research, doing what she loves best.

In The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us, Dr. Lowman describes her life, beginning as a shy, nature-loving girl, to become a pioneer in forest canopy research. She describes the twists and turns of beginning a scientific career when women were actively discouraged from doing so. A big turn was when she decided she needed to get into the treetops to study how the leaves differ between those near ground level, and farther up. They differ a lot!

In Australia, with the help of friends who are cavers, who use ropes and ascending equipment, using a slingshot she welded from some metal rods (It is illegal to buy power slingshots in Australia), she shot a line over a branch 75 feet up a coachwood tree, and learned to climb.

It didn't take long to learn that leaves in the upper part of a tree are different from those lower down. At ground level, where all earlier research had been done, it is darker and more humid, and the air is still. At the crown, the sun is relentless, the air is dryer or even arid, and the wind is almost constant and sometimes quite strong. Thus, the leaves lower down are larger, greener, and softer; the higher you go, the smaller, yellower, and tougher they are.

There are so many aspects to Canopy Meg's life and career that it is hard to remember more than a few. In spite of the bias against women in science and the roadblocks and the "glass canopy" even in tree research, she persisted—quietly and shyly, as is her wont—and is finally recognized as the pioneer she really is. But not without numerous scars from the "glass" she had to break through. She left a few prestigious positions, after having built viable educational and scientific organizations, when a board of directors changed course and hired a supervising manager, who made it his (always, his) first order of business to "put her in her place."

Earlier in her career she focused as much on the technology as on the science, developing or co-developing the techniques of bringing people to the treetops safely and with some measure of comfort. While she has rope-climbed Eucalypts upwards of 200 feet, a sweaty task you may be sure, some of her students who study Redwoods have been faced with climbing nearly 400 feet. That's a lot of rope work, and a heck of a daily commute! Enter the tree crane, for those scientific programs with sufficient funding (a million dollars or so for equipment, and thousands per day to pay the crew), and the canopy balloon (maybe less costly, a little). The crane shown is in use in Papua New Guinea, and the balloon in French Guinea.

The balloon is used in conjunction with several kinds of "tree raft" such as this one, light structures that can be left in the treetop for a few days at a time. Why, it looks quite comfortable! But the author writes that she makes sure not to drink much before ascending. It's a long way down to a lavatory, and she declines to carry a jug the way many men do.

There is much more to treetops than leaves and leaf research. Bromeliads and other epiphytes, including orchids, inhabit the branches, and sometimes seem to coat them. In this complex ecosystem there could be as many species of animal, from nematodes to insects to bats to rodents to the ubiquitous primates, as are found as ground level. Everywhere she and her associates and students have looked, they have found new species. Not just a few here and there, but hundreds. She writes of one collecting "bioblitz" that collected so many new beetle species that her systematist friends will be 10-20 years getting them all described and properly published. This is partly why she calls the forest canopy "the Eighth Continent".

And guess what all those insects are doing? Eating leaves (and each other, and trying to avoid being eaten by birds, and each other). Early estimates placed the amount of defoliation trees experience at 5-10% yearly. Not so; it is typically 30% or more. In some climates, where the trees are always adding leaves, it is 300% per year! When climatic stress or other ills weaken a tree, that level of herbivory soon kills them, hence the author's concern with a warming climate, which is a definite stressor.

Her work has always included education. That is becoming a primary focus. Firstly, education of students of all ages. Canopy walkways such as this one allow easy access for children, and other designs are wheelchair-friendly. Take a group of youngsters a hundred feet or so into the treetops, and you'll change a few lives. That goes for their parents and grandparents also.

She is equally involved in creating and maintaining opportunities for women in biology and the sciences in general. I suspect she would be heartened by an article I recently read about the number of women astronomers, which are becoming a majority at many institutions. But it is not just numbers. It is promoting pay equity and raising the prestige of productive female scientists, removing barriers to their growth as scientists.

Just as a side note: In a career of 40+ years writing scientific software, I have had both male and female supervisors and managers. While I have had a few bad bosses of both sexes, I have had a larger number of good female bosses than male. My two lifetime favorites are a man and a woman, so I don't consider sex either a benefit or detriment to being a good supervisor or manager.

One more branch (he-he) of Dr. Lowman's career has been promoting ecotourism, such as by using canopy walkways, as an alternative to "extractive forestry" (logging!). A thriving forest is really like the goose that will lay golden eggs one after another, while a logged forest may yield gold once, but then that's done. In many places, plantations that replace forests are less lucrative than ecotourism.

Canopy Meg is more than a great scientist, she is a great communicator. Her book is a joy to read. She has instantly become one of my favorite people of all time.

I don't support MADD any more

 kw: musings, disappointment

I used to support MADD (Mothers Against Driving Drunk), but over the last dozen years they have become more strident, and now they've jumped on the scare tactics bandwagon.

I heard an ad today that claimed, in a very foreboding tone, "Someone is killed in a drunk driving accident every 50 seconds." I went, "Whah??"

Just for context: An hour has 3,600 seconds. Divide by 50 and you'd have 72 deaths per hour, which is 1,728 per day, or about 630,000 per year.

The total number of traffic deaths in the US each year is about 33,000, and about 10,000 are due to drunk driving. That's about one every 52 minutes (MINUTES, not SECONDS).

The total number of traffic deaths worldwide each year is about 1.3 million, and about 300,000 are due to drunk driving. Compare that to 630,000. Of course, the ad didn't say whether the US or the world was their scope. Either way it is dramatically incorrect.

It doesn't matter. I won't support an organization that tries to scare us into donating.

Too few of the little things

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, invertebrates, conservation, rewilding, polemics

I have read that there are about 1/4 to 1/3 fewer insects on the Earth than there were half a century ago. For some insect groups, the remaining amount must be much lower. I remember driving cross-country in the 1960's, when we needed to wipe or clean the windshield of the car, and the grill, at the end of the day, and sometimes at midday also. That doesn't happen much anymore.

It's harder to collect butterflies than it was when I was a kid. I grew up in several places across the country. Whether in California, Utah, or Ohio, during the warmer months there were always several different kinds of butterflies in view. I just had to pick which one(s) I might like to add to my collection. 

Once, at age eleven, I picked up a praying mantis that was on a tree, where we were taking a walk in the forest. It was more than five inches long. It fought back a little—those spikes on the front legs can draw blood! But when it was warmed by my hand it settled down. I wondered if I could make a pet of it, so I tied kite string to it, just a bit loosely in the middle of the thorax where it wouldn't slip off. I tied the other end to my bedpost that night. In the middle of the night I awoke. Hearing a small noise I sat up, and nearly jumped out of my skin when the mantis flew right into my face. With wings and clawed "arms" outspread, it looked the size of a dinner plate! When I regained my composure, I untied it and let it out my window. Whew!

Children have a natural affinity for insects and small animals, if their parents and others don't drive it out of them. That affinity is the first emotion Vicki Hird draws upon in her book Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things That Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More. While insects are the main "stars" of the book, the author expands the common term "bug" to include earthworms, garden snails, and other small, invertebrate animals.

Perhaps you know that most almonds are grown in California's central valley. Did you also know that keeping that almond crop pollinated every spring requires the services of most (some say 80-90%) of the honeybees in the U.S.? Millions of beehives and billions of bees are trucked to and from California every year. That by itself may have a lot to do with "colony collapse disorder", which leads to ever-increasing losses of honeybees across the country.

For several years I participated in the Great Sunflower Project, growing a certain species of sunflower each spring and counting how many native bees, and what kinds, would visit a particular plant during a daily 15- or 30-minute viewing session. Near the end of the season, when most of the flowers had ripening seeds, I had the added bonus of seeing goldfinches come for the seeds; I seldom see goldfinches otherwise. This endeavor is important because, if our honeybees fail, native bees must take up the slack! Fortunately, most sweat bees and mason bees and bumblebees are even more diligent pollinators than honeybees. There just aren't as many of them. One of the suggestions in Rebugging has to do with making homes for mason bees and other native bees, to increase their numbers in our gardens. In our case, we grow garlic chives, which has white flowers that draw bumble bees and at least 15-20 other species of bees (and hoverflies and certain wasps) for 2/3 of each summer.

Going through the book, one learns that pollination is not the only "service" provided by insects. Another has to do with rot. You may know that fungi work at breaking down fallen plant matter, from tree trunks to leaf litter. Fewer know that fungi are just one part of the "cleanup crew", which includes insects, slugs and snails, and earthworms. Some years ago I learned why, in pre-Colonial America, the natives ("Indians") were so famed for moving silently through the forest. There were no earthworms in North America before the 1600's, when some arrived in soil brought with plants from Europe. The forests before about 1650 were deep with leaf litter, which was only slowly decomposed by fungi and native snails and beetle grubs. Modern forests are almost litter-free because of European earthworms. The soil in my garden has one or two dozen per shovelful of dirt.

Another "service" is that insects in particular are "served up" to birds and mice and other small animals. A Little Brown Bat, for example, eats 1/4 to half its body weight in insects each night. Some portion of those will be mosquitos, though the bats prefer moths and "meatier" flies when they can get them. I've observed on farms that chickens will run down grasshoppers and crickets, which are big, fatty and calorie-rich.

Much of the book is advice about "rebugging" here, there and everywhere. So much so that it has a preachy tone that grows more and more intense. That's unfortunate, because nobody responds well to nagging. The last chapter or two are so exhortation-dense that I could hardly stand to read them. I remember reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the quintessential environmental polemic. It was so very influential because it exposed the huge problems with pesticide use without adopting a nagging tone. Vicki Hird is tilting at the "windmill" of the big pesticide companies and Agribusiness. So was Rachel Carson. Ms Hird will have better success if someone with Carson's sensibility helps her produce a major rewrite of  Rebugging.

Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs!

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, paleontology, dinosaurs, science

Searching for "dinosaur hunter", I had this in mind:

This image is from the Anyone4Science website, which caters to educators and children.

It is way cool to go out in the field, do a bit of digging, and find a big skeleton like this. I have been to Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, where you really can see scenes similar to this, and a preserved cliff has bones sticking out everywhere.

Typically, fossil hunting is rather humdrum. When an animal dies, usually by predation, it doesn't take long for its killer and scavengers to thoroughly dismantle it and scatter the bones while picking them clean. In most environments the bones also are soon dissolved or digested, and nothing will remain. A fossil skeleton such as the one shown is the result of an unlikely series of events, such as sudden burial by a landslide, in either a dry climate or one with a handy bog with reducing conditions. There are also "water traps" such as the La Brea pits in Los Angeles, California or the Mammoth Site near Hot Springs, South Dakota (but there are no dinosaurs in either of those places). So you more typically find scattered bones, or bits of bones, and they have to be sorted and fitted together to assemble a skeleton, or some part of a skeleton.

The recent book The Science of Jurassic World: The Dinosaur Facts Behind the Films, by Mark Brake and Jon Chase, touches on this matter, but focuses more on the science behind the question, "Can dinosaurs really be cloned from ancient mosquito guts?" Spoiler alert: In a word, NO. But it made for a fun premise, as handled by author Michael Crichton for his book Jurassic Park and the series of films still being made in the Jurassic World franchise.

Also, to keep the book from being no more than a pamphlet, the authors dug into quite a variety of matters, such as, "Was Dr. Alan Grant's job a walk in the park?" (Sure, after 3+ decades of study and research), "How Did Dinosaurs Get So Big?" (Call it an arms race, between herbivores that needed to be too big to kill, and predators "growing" to meet the challenge), and "Tyrannosaur family life" (some tyrannosaurs may have hunted in family group packs, but we don't know if T. rex did).

I don't know whether it is a lack of education, or a new habit among writers of the X Generation (and since): Every few pages I encountered a partial sentence. It's like they never discovered the semicolon. Two examples:

"For more than 150 years, people have been mounting dinosaur skeletons for display. Skeletons that were discovered, dug up, and diligently prepared for subsequent analysis and potential mounting." (p 61. The period before "Skeletons" should be replaced by a comma. The second "sentence" doesn't stand on its own.)

"So, dinosaurs evolved relatively rapidly. No doubt driven by shifts in our planet's oceans, climate, and continents." (p 68. While a comma can replace the period before "No", a semicolon is better because of the comma-delimited list later on.)

In either case, the second "sentence", if viewed in isolation, is meaningless. They should actually be dependent clauses. Such instances appear at a rate of one or two per chapter, primarily in the first half of the book. Doesn't anyone employ copy editors any more? Or are copy editors equally at fault?

Out of more than 25 chapters taking up such questions, they could have dispensed entirely with one that was crafted to slander President Trump. There is no science in that chapter; it is a quintessentially ugly bit of polemical politics. As Solomon wrote, 3,000 years ago, "As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor." The authors lost all the regard I had had for them from reading the earlier chapters.

To close the loop: When I searched for "dinosaur hunter", this is typical of what I found:

The image is from an advertisement at ArtStation. 

That hunter looks rather passive in the face of a charging T. rex. Also, he has no hope of surviving unless he is carrying an RPG.

The deep sea – salvation or ruin?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, sea life, bioluminescence, seabed mining, polemics

The red tide can be beautiful at night. The tiny animals, so toxic in large concentrations, are also luminescent, flashing when they are disturbed. In the red tide season—when it isn't safe to swim anyway—the best time to watch the surf is late at night, when the waves flash and glow with green and blue colors. That's the only kind of bioluminescent sea life I have seen.

Oceanographers and marine biologists (such as my supervising curator at the DE Museum of Nature and Science) get to see much more, at least through the video eyes of underwater robotic vehicles (ROV's), such as this one shown in an advertising image. Studies using ROV's are finding entire ecologies that nobody knew could exist, and they exist right down to the bottom of the deepest trenches in the sea floor, up to seven miles down.

But in midwater, where it is safe to do so, when they turn off the lights, it isn't all the stygian darkness of the deep ocean. They see sparks of light everywhere. It may be that bioluminescence is the rule, not a rarity, among sea creatures.

This montage of images shows some of the branches of the tree of life that include well-lit creatures. Clockwise from top left, a "firefly squid", one of many squids that light up (and other cephalopods such as cuttlefish can also do so); a jellyfish; a small shark, with lights that help it "vanish" against the light from above; and a siphonophore, of the same phylum as jellyfish but sort of like a coral colony without the rocky shell (this species gets more than 100 feet long, longer than the largest whale).

The discovery of deep water habitats and the creatures that live there are lovingly described in Part One of The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean and the Looming Threat That Imperils It, by marine biologist Helen Scales. It is interesting that species of fish and insects that become permanent inhabitants of caves have lost their eyes, yet deep in the ocean, most creatures have eyes, and in some cases, eyes that can see in not just three colors (as we can), but ten or more. In the deep ocean, they don't see by sunlight, but they see each other.

Deeper than 200m (~650 feet) in clear ocean water, there isn't enough light for our eyes to see, but some ocean creatures have eyes that see by the trickle of light that reaches as deep as a kilometer (~3,300 feet). The upper 200m includes just 7% of the oceans, and the upper kilometer contains about 30%. Yet in the deep abyss, from 1km to 11km, there are eyes everywhere, and there is plenty for them to see, including friend and foe, mates and prey. There are squid that, when threatened, squirt a blob of glowing ink, turn off their own lights, and jet away. Anglerfish bob glowing lures to draw in prey, while hatchetfish put on a variety of light shows, which some think could be communication. Some animals light their whole body and then darken smaller areas, like characters on a computer screen.

Part Two of the book describes the slow flow of ocean currents, and then discusses the possibility that cellular life arose in the deep sea, at or near places where the heat from below breaks through at the deep-ocean ridges and hot spots such as the one that has formed Hawaii and its island chain for millions of years. The author goes on to tell of medicinal uses for chemicals found in deep sea life. In the chilly depths, where food is more sparse, we find corals and other creatures that are hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years old. Living slowly, but persistently. Some have special proteins that help them resist incredible pressures that literally bend the molecules of life out of shape (and shape is what makes a protein do its job). Some have other components that heal wounds, protect tissues from decay, or fight microbes, and some of these have found pharmaceutical uses.

Part Three delves through the history of our "use" of the oceans, both extractive (fishing and whaling, for example) and as a repository for our waste. That latter isn't just the oceans; when I lived in Cleveland in 1961, the "sewage system" consisted of pipes five miles long that took raw sewage into the middle of Lake Erie! A north wind would bring turds ashore. Coastal cities worldwide used to do the same. There are areas of dumped radioactive waste. Do you fancy eating fish caught in those waters?

The third and last chapter of Part Three introduces seabed mining. Interesting "stuff", potentially valuable "stuff" has been found in three areas:

• The abyssal plains, at an average depth of several kilometers, include large areas carpeted with nodules made up of metallic oxides. The most abundant metal is manganese, which isn't particularly valuable, and iron is second in abundance, but they also contain cobalt, nickel and copper, and a little chromium. These are valuable, but make up only a few percent. A typical nodule the size of a walnut took several million years to form. Their composition varies from place to place, depending on what is available in the regional seawater.
• The "caps" of seamounts, their upper few meters, contain a similar suite of metal oxides. There may be a million or more seamounts, most of which are extinct volcanoes. Although their "caps" constitute only one or two percent of the sea floor, they are thick and would be easier to mine for minerals, compared to the abyssal plains.
• Vent communities form on and near the crests of the midocean ridges, which form a chain 40,000 miles long, or 65,000 km. The superheated, mineral-laden water that flows from "black smokers" and "white smokers" (in cooler areas) builds up "chimneys" of metal sulfides and metal oxides, which are like concentrated ores.

Each of these is being considered as mining targets for future exploitation, and some experiments have been performed. So far, the economic story isn't all that attractive, but that hasn't stopped the momentum of the undersea mining interests.

The biggest targets are the nodule fields on the abyssal plains. This area near Tonga is about average. Some places are so densely covered one can hardly see the sand between the nodules.

Just as on land, however, areas that contain desirable "stuff" are already inhabited. A careful look at this image shows whitish spots and blobs, which are some of the larger creatures that live, not just among, but rooted onto, nodules. I carefully scanned a larger version of this image, and found about 100 creatures. Many more are smaller or have a darker color. Most likely, every nodule has something living on it.

Part Four discusses the need to preserve the deep sea and all the habitats included within it. This montage, from a scientific article in ResearchGate, shows some of the creatures that live among metallic nodules in the Clipperton Fracture Zone, a prime target of mining interests.

Here the author becomes quite polemical, in a very good way. We must admit that we know only a tiny fraction of what is going on in the deep sea. We do know that it regulates global temperature, buffers the rise and fall of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and either preserves or destroys the great ice caps in north and south. Do we know enough to disrupt it with impunity?

The author points out the few very valuable pharmaceuticals that have been found in deep sea creatures, and the promise of whole new classes of antibiotics, for example. I find it a shame that the "Save them to make future drugs" argument is used so frequently, by many, many authors, not just De. Scales. Is there none other? Is there no way to persuade mining interests to hold off, besides trying to counter one financial interest with another? Is money the only bottom line that matters?

Sea bed "resources" are not renewable, not on a human scale. Vent communities take thousands or tens of thousands of years to form; a potato-sized nodule took 10-20 million years to form; the "cap" of a seamount may have grown over 100 million years. Every extractive technology grows exponentially. What is costly and difficult today gets easier and cheaper with time. People always say, "We won't take everything." It's a lie. Of course we will.

There's an apocryphal story of a Canadian chief talking with a geologist who is exploring in his tribal area. He said, "When white men first came to Canada, they shot all the big game and hauled away the meat. Later, more white men came to trap all the smaller animals, and they hauled away the furs. The next time white men came, they cut down the big trees and hauled them away for lumber. Then, other white men came to cut down the smaller trees, and hauled them away to make pulp for paper. And now here you are, coming for the rocks!"

To a scientist, the only reasonable path is study first, before mining anything. I don't expect that to happen.

Asteroids, the reality

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, asteroids

Chances are, the word "asteroids" conjures up an image a lot like this for most people. We hear about the millions of rocks of all sizes roaming the spaces between the planets, especially between Mars and Jupiter. We think of that space as crowded with space debris.

The reality is somewhat different. Before getting into that, however, I want to recommend a book about the asteroids, about how we came to know about them and what they are like. Asteroids, by astronomer Clifford J. Cunningham, doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive survey. Rather, the author has two aims: to survey the history of our knowledge, and theories, of asteroids and "small bodies" in general; and to show how they are classified.

The telescope was invented in the early 1600's, just over 400 years ago. Galileo made it famous by seeing craters on the moon and discovering satellites around Jupiter. Although several asteroids are bright enough to be seen using small telescopes, even binoculars, you need to know where to look. Two centuries were required to gather sufficient knowledge of the skies, until the first "new planet" was seen January 1, 1801.

It took a number of years for astronomers to determine that this new planet, Ceres, was 1/11 the diameter of the Moon, and even longer to discern its mass to be 1/800 that of the Moon. By then a number of small, "new planets" had been found. Over the decades, the number grew to hundreds, then thousands, and the current number of asteroids whose orbits have been worked out is more than a million.

Astronomers also discovered that these little bodies weren't evenly spread out in the "asteroid belt", the realm between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where more than 90% of them are. There were some gaps, which are caused by gravitational "pumping" by Jupiter either adding or removing orbital energy so that those special orbits stay clear. There are also certain "families" of asteroids, most famously a small number of Trojan asteroids that are in the L4 and L5 orbital points ahead of and behind Jupiter about 60° in (and near) its orbit. More recently, a small number of asteroids have been found to precede or follow Earth, Mars, Saturn and Uranus, so the designation "Trojan asteroid" has been expanded to include them all.

Other orbital subtypes are focused on the ones that could threaten Earth. Four classes of Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) are defined by orbital parameters. The ones of most concern are those that pass through Earth's orbit ("through" meaning anywhere within a few thousand km of the exact orbit). It's just a matter of timing before one of them winds up on a collision course. So far, though, none are known with certainty. But we only know about half of the NEAs that are there, which are big enough (more than 140m, or 460 ft), to devastate an area 100 km across or more.

Even though there are tens of thousands of NEA's, we are saved by the bigness of space. At present, I see a notice at least every month in online news about some asteroid "as big as the Empire State Building" or "school bus sized" that is going to pass "near" the Earth. It always turns out that the "near miss" will be a million miles or so. This is not to discount that some big, possibly devastating asteroids are out there, and we may not know about them yet. But the last asteroid hit to cause a "nuclear winter" happened 65 million years ago. Our portion of "asteroid space" has a low population. (At this point, I'll stray from what's in the book.)

What if Earth sat right between Mars and Jupiter? Then we'd have between 10x and 100x the chance of getting a significant collision in our lifetimes. But that chance is still low. We know that because many spacecraft have been sent to Jupiter and beyond, right through "the Belt", without mishap. Let's see why. This table lists the approximate (more approximate with smaller size) number of asteroids in the main belt, from 100m (0.1 km) and larger:

The 100m sized ones are big enough to cause plenty of trouble if they hit Earth. But what about a spacecraft, such as Voyager or New Horizons? Even a centimeter-sized pellet that hits a craft going 20 km/s can destroy it. Spacecraft can be shielded from smaller bits, so we need to know how many tiny bits of millimeter size there are. It isn't easy to extend this table to smaller sizes, because there are a few theories about the size distribution. Many publications posit a "scale free" distribution, which I think is extreme, but we'll use that for one sideboard of our estimates. The Theory of Breakage by Andrey Komolgorov predicts a lognormal distribution, which some think is too conservative, because the tail of small objects dies away so much faster. I happen to favor that hypothesis; I'll use it fo rthe other sideboard. Here is a table of the sideboards:

Diam.  Scale free N   Lognormal N
100m     25 million    25 million
 10m      4 billion     1 billion
  1m    300 billion    35 billion
100mm    22 trillion  1.1 trillion
10mm  1.7 quadrillion  33 trillion
 1mm  125 quadrillion  1 quadrillion

The volume of the main belt is about 4 billion billion cubic miles, or 10 billion billion cubic km. If the lognormal hypothesis is correct, there are a quadrillion (million billion) sand grain size bits in that volume, each has 10,000 cubic km to itself. That puts it about 25 km from its nearest neighbors, on average. On the other hand, the scale free hypothesis has 125 grains in that same 10,000 cubic km, and the average spacing is "only" 5 km. 

However, we want to sail through this mess, hoping to hit nothing. The appropriate analysis is to figure the collision cross-section, as though everything along the path were pasted to a surface the craft must pass through. This is like wrapping a big, big ribbon 40 million miles wide between Mars and Jupiter, and sticking all those sand grains to it, pulling or pushing them along radii from the Sun. This ribbon has a total area of about 80 quadrillion square miles, or 200 quadrillion square km.

This puts each sand grain "in possession" of either 200 km² or 1.6 km². Now the spacing, for the lognormal case, is 16 km, and for the scale free case it is 0.7 km.

Whichever way one analyzes the distribution, there is either a "pretty good" spacing between possible collisions, or a huge space. In any case, plenty of fragile spacecraft have passed through the main belt without incident. That crowded picture above is just not the way things are. From any particular asteroid, you can't see any others without a good telescope.

A word about "kinds" of asteroids. Most asteroids are dark colored, and some are extremely black. Some are comparatively bright, but even the metallic ones have a dusty surface, so the albedo (reflectivity) of a few asteroids may be 0.25 (25%), but most are in the 0.1 to 0.05 range, with some as dark as 0.02. That makes them hard to see, and it is harder yet to find out how big they are. Is a new body, just spotted, dark and large, or bright and smaller? Gathering observations over several days and then several weeks, we can figure out how far away they are. Size and albedo are harder.

One tool to help determine this is the reflection spectrum. The darkest asteroids are akin to the darkest meteorites (because the latter originate as the former), the carbonaceous chondrites. They not only reflect less light than other types, the distribution in the spectrum is different; they are called "red" (really a blackish brown). The brightest are metallic, with their own spectral distribution; and in between are the stony asteroids, with spectral features all their own. Although the book discusses these types and several subtypes, much is still being learned. Spacecraft that have visited asteroids, and the one or two that have brought back samples, are increasing our knowledge of them.

Finally, there is no "lost" or "exploded" planet that once resided in an orbit where the main belt is now. The pre-planetary bits didn't get organized into a planet, and Jupiter is probably mostly to blame. The empty gaps testify to Jupiter's power to eject objects from certain areas. Over time, it must have ejected a lot; the total mass of all the asteroids is thought to be less than 1/250th that of our Moon.

As we learn more about them, perhaps we'll learn enough to be able to detect and deflect any NEA that is found on a collision course with Earth. Perhaps.

I greatly enjoy books like Asteroids. I didn't know what to expect, and I learned a few things about the different kinds and different "places" of asteroids.