A nearly-erased legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A scientist - up by the bootstraps

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, scientists

Psyche is asteroid #16, the 16th to be found, discovered in 1852. It's the largest metal-rich asteroid, so intriguing that NASA, in a project initiated and led by geologist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, intends to send a spacecraft to have a close look. No collision is intended! The hammer is a metaphor for the actual instruments that will be used (next paragraph).

Psyche is about 226 km (140 miles) in average diameter. The instruments that will peer at and into the asteroid include a magnetometer, a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, and a dual-camera multi-spectral imager. All for just under a billion dollars. Launch was initially set for this year, but is delayed a year while an instrument that was delayed is finished and tested.

Dr. Elkins-Tanton's memoir A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman outlines the paths that led her to a scientific career and sufficient prominence to become a Principal Investigator (PI) on a NASA mission.

She writes of several threads: childhood and growing up but having different interests from many others;  a very brief and concealing sideswipe at the childhood sexual abuse she suffered; education at MIT and elsewhere, where she was sometimes informed flatly that she didn't belong and was there "on sufferance"; a courtship, marriage, childbirth, and breakup (fortunately not a bitter one but any divorce is traumatic); renewed love with a more compatible husband; a growing career dogged by continued symptoms of the "glass ceiling"; field work in Russia, where they are openly dismissive of women in science; building a leadership-facilitation business with her husband and her son; growing leadership roles, one of which led to the Psyche mission with NASA; and her growing leadership in fostering a scientific culture that is more welcoming of women and others formerly left out.

If you didn't just think or say, "Wow!", I don't know what it takes to impress you. For myself, I am overwhelmed. This is one admirable woman and a scientific rock star. For me to write much more than this would be a disservice. Get the book!

How we have better veggies

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, scientists, botanists, adventurers, agriculture

Had your kale lately? How about some quinoa in your soup? Do you like navel oranges, mangoes, or avocados? Have you been to Washington, DC (or several other cities in the region) in the springtime to see the cherry trees in bloom? Thank David Fairchild. His life and adventures are shown in The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats by Daniel Stone.

As a young scientist in the 1890's, David Fairchild caught the interest of a wealthy, globe-trotting dilettante and raconteur, Barbour Lathrop. The rich man claimed to have circled the world many times (the number varied with the telling, usually around 20-40), but his life was otherwise aimless.

Fairchild had met Alfred Russell Wallace, who entranced him with tales of his travels in Malaysia and Indonesia, particularly Java, and the strange and wonderful plants and animals he'd encountered in the tropics. For a Kansas boy, it seemed a faraway planet. A few years later he spoke of it to Lathrop—when he could get a word in edgewise—and Lathrop remembered it; later on he visited Fairchild with an offer to sponsor a plant-collecting trip to Java. Fairchild was at the time in the employ of the infant Department of Agriculture; he eventually quit his job in favor of globetrotting plant collecting, but retained ties to the Department so as to have somewhere to send his discoveries.

Eventually, Lathrop and Fairchild traveled together for several years, giving more purpose to Lathrop's life, and affording Fairchild the opportunity to gather new species and new varieties of plants, in hopes that American farmers and orchardists could enrich the variety of foods on offer.

I didn't know that all the citrus fruits we enjoy, in such amazing variety, were all bred from just four progenitor species: citron, pomelo, mandarin, and papeda (a bitter fruit, but one parent of the Key lime). Nor that there are hundreds of varieties of avocado—yet only a few that can be shipped—or mango—ditto. I'd heard of Meyer lemons, and even had a dwarf Meyer lemon tree in a container for many years, but in this book I read about Frank Meyer, hired by Fairchild to scour China for plant varieties, including new citrus hybrids.

Every good story has a nemesis. The best man at Fairchild's wedding, his boyhood friend Charles Marlatt, serves the rôle here. He was an entomologist, fighting crop pests, particularly those that came from elsewhere. When Fairchild arranged to have Japanese Yoshido flowering cherry trees brought to Washington, D.C.in 1910, Marlatt found them infested with at least 8 pathogenic insects and a fungus or two. The entire shipload (2,000 young, mature trees!) was burned on orders of President Taft. The Japanese were very apologetic, and prepared a new shipment of trees, grown in "virgin soil" and carefully tended, that were brought in 1912, 3,000 this time, and planted around the Tidal Basin, along the Mall, and extras sent to nearby cities. The real "damage" incurred from Marlatt, in Fairchild's eyes, came with legislation such as various Quarantine Acts. They restricted plant exploration by requiring so much paperwork and inspection that most of the plant explorers that were following in Fairchild's footsteps went on to other pursuits.

However, there is a certain amount of right on both sides of the introduce-versus-ban dichotomy. After all, Fairchild introduced Kudzu, grew it in his own yard, then found he had to go to a lot of trouble to exterminate it! Too bad he didn't get it all. It is a scourge in the southern half of the U.S. But more good than bad has come of plant exploration and introduction. We need both Fairchild (and Meyer et al) and Marlatt.

Kudos to Daniel Stone for reminding us of David Fairchild and others, who may have been famous in their generation, but are nearly forgotten. Remember him the next time you enjoy a mango.

Pioneers of celestial measurement

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, scientists, astronomy, astrophotography, spectroscopy

Look carefully at the white line across the gray band, where the ink marks are in each section. The ink marks were made by Edward Pickering in 1889, when he noticed the doubling of the Calcium K line (λ=393 nm, near UV) in the upper photo of the spectrum of Mizar. Mizar, also known as Zeta Ursa Majoris, is the brighter of the Mizar-Alcor double star in the "corner" of the handle of the Big Dipper. One needs keen eyes to see that it is double.

Mizar itself was found to be double by comparison of these two spectra photographed a week apart in 1887. It is the first known "spectroscopic binary". Two stars of roughly equal brightness circle each other in about 20½ days. The splitting of the K line (and all the other lines shown if you look closely) is because of the Doppler effect: when one star is moving toward us, and the other is moving away, the wavelength of the light that reaches us is shifted, one toward the blue, the other toward the red end of the spectrum.

This discovery was made possible by the "glass universe" being compiled at Pickering's behest by pioneers of astrophotography and astrospectroscopy whom he had commissioned to photograph the whole sky, over and over, on glass/emulsion plates using telescopes owned by Harvard Observatory.

This immense photographic effort, and the numerous women—and a few men—who made literally hundreds of thousands of discoveries using the plates, are chronicled in The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, by Dava Sobel. I believe I must declare this book the most fascinating I have read so far this year. I have known for many years of "Pickering's Harem", the female "computers" who carried out manual calculations for the Harvard Observatory, and I knew of a few astronomers, names now to conjure with!, such as Annie Cannon, Mina Fleming, Cecelia Payne, and Henrietta Leavitt, whose work in the late 1800's and early 1900's literally opened the heavens by classifying the stars, discerning nebulae, measuring stars' temperatures, and discovering the period-luminosity relationship that became the yardstick for measuring the size of the Universe. This book brings them all to life for us.

Please forgive me a sort of quibble at the outset (not about what the author wrote, however): I read the Large Print edition by Thorndike Press. On the copyright page the publisher put a standard disclaimer for a work of fiction. I contacted Ms Sobel, and she assured me that there is no fiction in this book. I am very glad of that!

There is a common notion that the Harvard computers were given mainly "grunt work" and had little else of value to contribute. Not so! When Edward C. Pickering assumed leadership of the Harvard Observatory in 1877 a number of computers already worked there, most of them female, and he added more and more, eventually hiring more than 80. He always looked for hidden talents and helped the computers develop as far as they could. Williamina ("Mina") Fleming was originally hired as a maid, but he soon found she was a capable computer, and she went on to co-develop the system for classifying stars that we still use, based on the mnemonic "O, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me", which sorts the spectral types by temperature from hottest to "coolest" (still hotter than the filament in a light bulb). In this picture, Mrs. Fleming is standing, and the computers of the day, including Annie Cannon just below her, are shown searching photographic plates and calling out their readings to a compatriot seated nearby.

Ms Sobel presents the life stories of a dozen or so of the computers-turned-astronomers and their colleagues, and shows equal interest in the instruments and methods used to make their discoveries. And the entire narrative is wrapped around the philanthropy of two women whose fortunes underwrote much of the work. Firstly, Anna Draper, wife and collaborator of astronomer Henry Draper, came to Pickering after her husband's untimely death in 1883 and offered to support a continuation of the stellar spectroscopy and cataloging work that Henry had begun with her assistance. The support continued until her death in 1914, and her bequest to the Observatory allowed the rest of the Henry Draper Catalog (still in use) to be completed thereafter. Stars with labels such as HD217014 (AKA 51 Pegasi, the star around which the first exoplanet was discovered) are cataloged therein. Secondly, Catherine Bruce funded the production of the Bruce Telescope, a 24-inch-diameter refractor, which was used first at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1893, then in Peru and finally in South Africa until 1950. This telescope and several of smaller size were used to take the photographs that make up the bulk of the Glass Universe, a four-dimensional archive of the sky from 1885 to 1993!

This is a small segment of one of the glass plates, showing the globular cluster 4 Tucanae. Astrophoto plates are negative images, and were read directly by researchers such as the Harvard computers, one of whom has inked directly on the plate a few arrows and lines to point out certain stars of interest, most likely variable stars.

A technical note: Very early on it was found that the best discernment of star images could be had by exposing a plate until the background skyglow produced a "density 1" gray, which passes 10% of the light when the plate is back lit. Depending on the darkness of the sky at the observing location, and the photographic speed of the plates used, this would usually take an exposure of between 30 and 90 minutes. In one night of observing at a very dark site with fast plates, one might take 20 or more exposures.

A very major part of the work at HAO was to discover variable stars and chart their variation over time. The stars marked in this plate were found by comparing plates taken over several days' or weeks' time. The long- and medium-period variables were typically the most consistent, and this was fortuitous, because Henrietta Leavitt later discovered that the greatest number of these are Cepheid variables whose period of variation is proportional to their brightness at its peak.

Cepheid variables are giant stars with masses 4 to 20 times that of our Sun, and are as much as 100,000 times as bright. This makes them visible over very great distances, up to tens of millions of light-years, using larger telescopes. The Leavitt Law, or Period-Luminosity Relationship, allows measurement of the distance to galaxies within that range of distance. Such measurements led to Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the Universe.

If you look at a group of bright stars such as the Orion constellation or the Hyades cluster (the horns of Taurus, the Bull), after a while you can notice that a few stars are yellowish or reddish compared to the rest. Orion, in particular, has the star Betelgeuse (and, yes, it is pronounced "beetle juice"), which is visibly rather orange, in one corner. Most of the rest of the stars in Orion are quite bluish.

For stars, blue means very hot, white means "sorta hot", yellow is not as hot, and orange-red is the coolest. To put numbers on it, Rigel, in the corner of Orion opposite Betelgeuse, is a blue-white giant star with a visible-surface temperature of 12,000 K (over 21,000°F), as compared to our Sun, a yellow-white star of temperature about 5,800 K (9,900°F). Betelgeuse, while not the coolest visible star, comes close at a temperature of 3,500 K (5,800°F). The tungsten filament in a (now nearly obsolete) halogen light bulb typically has a temperature of 3,300 K (just below 5,400 °F), so a "piece" of Betelgeuse brought into your living room would look slightly less yellow than a halogen lamp.

The observers and computers at Harvard took advantage of spectroscopy to do much better than just making visual color estimates. The gray and black streaks on this plate image are spectra of stars, photographed with the help of an objective prism. The objective prism for the Bruce Telescope was a thin wedge of glass more than 24 inches in diameter that turned the whole telescope into a multi-stellar spectrograph. It also incorporated a slight curvature in one direction to turn a stellar point of light into a thin streak, so that the spectra would have useful width.

These little streaks may not look like much but they record an amazing amount of information about a star. Much more than the proportion of blue to red light—which are hard to determine from such photos, though it is not impossible—, the spectra include Fraunhofer lines. These are absorption lines caused by elements in the gaseous upper atmosphere of the star. The kinds of lines that are present are a much more sensitive indication of both the composition and the temperature of the star.

If one were to look through a telescope set up in this way, it might look something like this, from a photo taken at the University of Virginia. This shows the Hyades cluster; if you concentrate on the position of the red end of each spectrum you can see the tilted "V" shape of the cluster.

This photo as shown here is too small for Fraunhofer lines to be seen, so I made this clip of just a few of the spectra:

The dark lines are the more prominent Fraunhofer lines. The K line mentioned above is barely visible in one of these spectra at the far right. Its wavelength of 393 nm is just beyond the traditional edge of Ultraviolet (400 nm), but that wavelength is actually visible to most people if the spectrum is bright enough. Each line is characteristic of a particular element. A dark line in the narrow yellow area would indicate Sodium, for example, just as the K line indicates ionized Calcium. The very strong lines for Hydrogen and Helium found in the spectra of the hotter stars of categories O and B led to the discovery that stars are primarily made up of Hydrogen, about ¼ Helium, and all the other elements add up to no more than about 1%.

Annie Cannon and others excelled in looking at the gray streaks, the hundreds to thousands of them that populated each plate, and categorizing each star by temperature and "spectral type" such as G2 (the spectral type of our Sun). Miss Cannon eventually categorized a third of a million stars.

I could go on and on, but this is long enough already. I love a book like this, that tells about the people and the work they did and why it is important. Without the "boring" work of the Harvard computers and astronomers, nearly all female, we would know only a tiny fraction of what we have learned about the Universe.

Follow-up: The Harvard plates are presently being digitized for Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard, or DASCH ("Dash"). Have a look, but beware, there is a large learning curve. If you want to have a turn at stellar classification, check out Stellar Classification Online Public Exploration, or SCOPE., a Citizen Science project. While a few million stars have been classified, the great majority of the billions of stars, just in the Milky Way galaxy, have yet to be classified. Enjoy!

The human side of gravity science

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, gravity, general theory of relativity, LIGO, scientists

Because I pay attention to the news, I knew the end from the beginning. So we'll start with the climax:

This is a screen clip from this YouTube video of the detection, just over a year ago, of gravitational waves, by the two facilities of the Laser Interferometer Gravity-wave Observatory, or LIGO. The video lasts just 12 seconds, and plays the sound as heard in each detector several times. The sonic spectra show that, when detected, the gravitational waves (GW's) indicate two black holes that are already very close to one another, revolving around one another about 30 times per second, and spiraling inward, in about one or two tenths of a second, whirling up to about 400 times per second before colliding and merging into a single black hole. So the subtle chirp is very quick. That's why those who made the video repeated the chirps so many times (4 times for each signal, in pairs).

As of this writing, three such black hole collisions have been detected, most recently this past June. You can read more about it here. What you will not find on that page, or hardly anywhere, is a chronicle of the LIGO project and the projects and people that led to it and its successes. For that, we must read Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space by Janna Levin. While I find the technical accomplishment quite fascinating, the people are enlightening in their own right.

The stereotype of the white-coated, impassive mega-brain does severe injustice to actual scientists. Just like the rest of us, they have their tastes, quirks, habits, obsessions, relationships, and loves and hates. The kind of brain power needed to detect such extremely faint signals, just a few days short of 100 years after Albert Einstein proposed their existence, practically guarantees a collection of very unusual people. It has been said that reasonable people don't make changes, because they are satisfied with the status quo. Thus all change, for better or for worse, is made by unreasonable people. Gravitational "astronomy" attracted some of the least reasonable people of the past generation or two, with the proviso that they are able to carry out useful work.

The singular characteristic of the most unreasonable people is that they are predisposed to be bad team members. They have to work really, really hard to work together. Some never learn the knack. In Dr. Levin's chronicle, chief among these are two exceptionally talented experimentalists, Joe Weber and Ron Drever. Joe Weber came along first, inventing the suspended-mass GW detector, consisting of a ton or more of aluminum in the form of a solid bar, that would ring in response to space distortions of a certain frequency. It was designed to ring out the "song" of an end-stage black hole collision. Dr. Weber claimed he detected all kinds of GW signals with his device. Nobody else ever could get one to work.

Kip Thorne, a cheerfully unconventional man, as unreasonable yet as personable as they come, somehow shepherded a herd of "cats" over a period of four decades, to achieve LIGO. Scientists came and went. Directors of the project came and went. One early "cat" was Ron Drever, famed for inducing almost any detector to have almost supernaturally low levels of noise, so as to winkle out the signal. He was equally famous for insisting on his own autonomy and total authority.

But what kind of signal are we talking about? If two black holes collided somewhere "nearby", say, within a couple of light years, the resulting gravity waves would hurt, and hurt bad. You'd hear them, feel them, and possibly suffer brain death as a result. Since no such event is known to have happened in historic times (I suppose a latter-day Velikovsky could re-interpret some Biblical event thusly), Dr. Thorne and others were able to set a probable lower limit on the likelihood of such collisions per cubic megaparsec. The reality was even more sparse. At LIGO's present level of sensitivity, based on three detections to date, it can detect about one event per 2-3 months within a volume of about 700 trillion trillion parsecs. Such a volume has a radius of 2 billion light years.

At that kind of distance, the gravity signal is very weak. The "arms" of the two LIGO instruments are 4 km long. Over that distance, the gravity signals that were detected caused a fluctuation in the scale of spacetime that measured about a twentieth the width of a proton. The laser beams in LIGO don't just go down to a mirror and return. They bounce back and forth thousands of times (I didn't learn the precise figure) to amplify the motion such that the phase shift in light of wavelength around 600 nm becomes detectable and even measurable in magnitude.

Kip Thorne, Rai Weiss and others had to convince the National Science Foundation to spend, initially about $200 million, and eventually around a billion dollars. The first director of the project, "Robbie" Vogt, shepherded just the right mix of congressmen and scientists to obtain the early funding and keep it flowing. But he, being one of the "unreasonables", got fired after a few years, and for a while, directors of LIGO came and went almost with the seasons.

It seems miraculous that a physics project of this scope could actually be brought to completion, given the anti-science bias among American politicians. It was canny to tout LIGO as a physics endeavor rather than astronomy (in spite of the word "Observatory" in the title); supercolliders such as LHC set a high expectation for physics funding, while astronomers typically get stubborn resistance to spending more than a few percent of such amounts (LHC's budget is about $1 billion yearly).

By the time the author had completed her manuscript of the book, LIGO was just barely running in test mode, and simultaneous runs of the two facilities had yet to be performed. Fortunately, she held off publication long enough to "enjoy" learning of the first detection in September, 2015. This story really needed a happy ending, and her Epilogue describes it. I found it interesting, and comforting, to get to peek under the covers of a science project of this magnitude.

From lab girl to lab woman

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, scientists, botany, autobiographies, memoirs

The stereotype of a career scientist is of someone rather dour, square, dispassionate, and driven; one who cannot be deterred; someone who knew what he (rarely she) wanted in a career and thus majored in a chosen field, obtained degrees (at least two or three), excelled at research, obtained a university position, published (and published and published), obtained tenure, and eventually has come to rule a scientific domain as an éminence grise (best translation: "grizzled crag"). A straight line from birth to near-godhood.

Ha! Not in my experience!! The few grizzled crags I've known were either really harsh SOB's who attained eminence while leaving behind a trail of shattered foes, or (much better!) perpetual children who still aren't sure just what they want to be when they grow up, but have mightily enjoyed the ride along the way. The best scientists breathe curiosity, emit questions with every breath, and seldom take anything for granted. They know that great discoveries frequently began when someone said, "That's funny! What IS that?"

But the one adjective above that is accurate is "driven". Driven to know, driven to find out what and how and perhaps even why. Driven to learn endlessly and hoping, if not to find ultimate truth, to carve a new step or two along the path. Sometimes they know this for what it is. Sometimes not. Either way, a scientist worth knowing seems always to have a twinkle in his or her eye.

Getting to know Hope Jahren through her memoir/odyssey Lab Girl, it seemed at first that her dour Minnesota Scandanavian upbringing might have squashed all the twinkle out of her. She remembers her mother as unendingly stern and undemonstrative, and nearly always angry. But as we learn of her own nearly catastrophic level of bipolarity, and that she hints how it ran in her family, a more sympathetic picture emerges: that her mother kept herself under supremely strict control, not liking it but seeing no other way. The twinkle was suppressed in order to conform to the stultifying reserve inherent in the Minnesotans. Too bad they didn't run into Garrison Keillor very early on! He showed the fun under the stiff collar. Clearly, Dr. Jahren had twinkle enough left in her to have a stellar scientific career. But it came slowly, laboriously.

Lab Girl is half memoir and half an introduction to the botany of trees. At first, a chapter on herself and her life alternates with one on the growth of a seed, a sprout, a sapling. By the end of the book, the segments begin to mix. Dr. Jahren has become the tree she writes about, having survived stage by stage of growth, succeeding in spreading her canopy to take in enough sun to thrive.

We look on human life as though success were a right, a given; that "infant mortality" were an aberration; that poverty of body and soul ought to be rare. The mathematics of reproduction in a forest are grim: A tree produces millions of seeds yearly, and at the end of a life that may be no more than 25 years for a Mimosa or as long as hundreds to thousands of years for oaks and redwoods, if two of those seeds have sprouted, grown, and become mature trees, that counts as reproductive success. We count it unusual for a baby or child to die. But even in this most "enlightened" part of Western culture, we pay little attention when dreams die, when millions labor at nearly useless "work", when the bad (i.e. paranoid) kind of "grizzled crag" crushes the hopes of one perceived opponent after another, whether in science, business, art, governance, or industry.

For much of Dr. Jahren's career she was frequently, almost constantly, in danger of being crushed by more established fellow scientists. Like a sapling in a forest, frequently overshadowed and starved of sunlight, she had to struggle to make her way. But make it she did. And I don't think she is at the peak of her career. Perhaps writing this book indicates that she has a nagging suspicion that she has indeed peaked. Not likely. She has too much drive, too much spunk.

Her blog is hopejahrensurecanwrite.com, and I agree, she sure can write! She writes so well, it might actually be a negative in the eyes of some. My younger brother, now an established professor, was denied admission to a History department's PhD program largely because of jealousy: he was already a published author with a very readable writing style, and history professors are well known for writing either badly or abominably. His "judges" felt diminished in his presence. So he got into an Archaeology school instead and the rest is (giggle) history! However, as Hope Jahren tells us, early on she became proficient at writing "a language few read and nobody speaks", the dry, ultra-precise prose of the scientific article or monograph. Rather than let it stultify her popular writing, she learned to use the lessons of scientific writing to sharpen and brighten it. Thus, when she isn't trying to impress a granting agency, she writes sparkling, need I say, twinkling, prose. I think she has another book or few in her. I hope so.

Faster than the wind, and perhaps he saved your life

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, scientists, safety, rocket sled experiments

There is a name you need to know: John Paul Stapp. If you have been in a car accident, it is likely that you owe your life and health to him. That is, if you were wearing a seat belt.

Step back about 70 years. World War II had just ended, and a young physician was wondering why so many military pilots were dying, when they didn't have to. During that war, getting shot down was a death sentence in one of two ways: you died when the plane crashed, or you died trying to exit the plane. After the war, ejection seats were found to be, far too frequently, tickets to oblivion. Their design was based on, at best, random guesses about the amount of stress the human body could survive, and the forces the aircraft frame could handle.

Dr. Stapp set out to gather accurate and usable data. What he did and how he did it are detailed in the first half of Sonic Wind: The Story of John Paul Stapp and How a Renegade Doctor Became the Fastest Man on Earth, by Craig Ryan. The second half shows what he, and the country, did as a result.

Before the 1940s, a smattering of centrifuge experiments had established that, with training and with minimal support from a flight suit, a fighter pilot could avoid blacking out at accelerations of about 6 G's. The G is a one-gravity acceleration force. If you weigh 150 lbs (68 kg), that is the force a mattress must apply to hold you up. If you and the mattress are put in a centrifuge and spun so as to apply a 6 G acceleration, the centripetal force the mattress (and the frame holding it) must now apply to hold you is 900 lbs (408 kg). When your body weight is spread out by a mattress, if the area of your body against the mattress is about 5.4 sq ft (0.5 m²), you'll feel a pressure of about 28 lb/ft² or 136 kg/m². That comes to about 0.19 psi. Now, multiply that by six, and you'd feel almost 1.2 psi. If your normal blood pressure is 120/75 (what doctors currently recommend, but maybe yours is higher), that 120 mm translates into 2.3 psi, and the 75 mm into 1.5 psi. So you can see that sustained acceleration of 6 G's tends to draw the blood in your body towards the mattress. If you are sitting rather than lying down, it doesn't take long for an acceleration of 6 G's to pull the blood from your brain, and you black out.

At this point it is all about sustained G forces. It makes sense that you could survive larger forces if they occurred briefly and were rapidly abated. Somehow, a factor of three became dogma, so that a brief acceleration of 18 G was considered the threshold of death. Yet, common observations of people surviving falls calls this into question. One of my brothers fell 20 feet out of a tree, landed on his back on the lawn, and had the breath knocked out of him. But he got up after a minute or so and was OK. Now, a grassy lawn is softer than landing on concrete, but it doesn't have much give. The main thing keeping this from being an "instant stop" (physically impossible) was the flexibility of the body, which squishes out briefly. I calculate that my brother's body touched the ground going about 24 mph (39 kph) and stopped in a distance of about 4 inches. That works out to a stopping force of 60 G's. If instead we allow him a little more flexibility to squishing, perhaps the stopping distance was 6 inches, and he experienced 40 G's. Either number is a far cry from 18 G's.

Over about a decade, Dr. Stapp used himself as the primary experimental subject (not the only one; he also used chimpanzees and on rare occasions, another volunteer) in rocket sled experiments. The rockets would get the sled going to some high velocity, and a braking system would then stop it over a prescribed distance. Here are parameters that might describe a typical experiment:

• Rocket acceleration: 4 G's
• Burn time: 4.6 s
• Burn distance: 410 m (1,340 ft)
• Peak speed: 644 kph (400 mph)
• Stop distance: 20.5 m (67 ft)
• Stopping time: 0.23 sec
• Average stop G's: 20
• Peak stop G's: 30 (measured by camera)

Early experiments were conducted with the seat on the sled facing backward, so the subject was pressed into the seat by the stopping forces. Experiments were also conducted with the seat in various orientations, including "butt forwards", to determine the forces of an ejection seat's kick-off blast.

Later experiments were conducted with the seat facing forward, and the subject exposed first to the wind blast, and then to deceleration against the webbing holding him into the seat. Dr. Stapp used chimps to determine the edge of lethality, though it turned out that they are much, much tougher than humans, so getting the calibration right for human experiments was tricky. With humans (mostly himself), he gradually raised the G forces and observed his own feelings and had doctors note what injuries he sustained. Thus, as time went along, the design of the seat was improved to avoid points that exerted extra forces and were causing injury. Over time these design changes were implemented in pilot seats.

The final, most definitive experiment was conducted with a chase plane flying above the rocket sled, to observe and film it from above. The pilot was astounded when the sled outraced the plane, reaching a top speed of 639 mph (1,028 kph), or Mach 0.9. This earned Stapp the title of "fastest man on earth" in a ground-bound vehicle. The title stood for about 30 years. During the deceleration, though, he sat forward-facing, getting the full wind blast, and being jammed against seat restraints with a crushing 45 G's, peak, during a stop that lasted less than 1.5 seconds. He was a mess when he was helped out of the seat. His eyes looked like pools of blood; he was lucky they had stayed in his head. It took weeks for all his sight to return. He had several broken bones. Though he had the ambition to go 1,000 mph, or at least Mach 1 (about 715 mph; authorities vary), it was not to be. He had advanced to Captain, Major, and was now a Colonel, and was moved by the Air Force command to a more administrative role. His sled, named the "Sonic Wind", was retired.

What he did next is the subject of the second part of the book. Dr. Stapp had performed his experiments, often against opposition, on a shoestring. He had to scrounge and cadge for equipment and apply verbal tricks to get some semblance of permission. Such skills were even more necessary after about 1956. He had long lobbied and clamored to Air Force brass about the safety, and its lack, in fighter aircraft and also transports. One result of his nagging was that many transports in war zones had the seats for the troops facing backwards. Then they were much more likely to walk away from a crash. But even during his earlier experiments he was also lobbying for the use of seat belts in automobiles.

By 1956, about 36,000 Americans were dying every year in automobile crashes. The population was about half what it is today, so in proportion, there could now be 72,000 auto deaths yearly, but instead, there are about 33,000. It took Colonel Stapp and his allies another 14 years to bring about the changes, primarily in laws, that have, since about 1970, saved at least 800,000 lives. Over the last 17 years, some of the difference is also due to airbags, something Stapp heartily approved of; he died in 1999, the year after airbags were mandated.

During his "lobbying years", he fought resistance in both government and industry against mandatory seat belt installation and use. The auto manufacturers were a lot like the tobacco lobby of the same era, denying that their products' quality had anything to do with the deaths that were occurring. Fortunately, there were at least aftermarket seat belts available, and many members of the public didn't wait for Washington or anyone else. Over a decade's time, sufficient statistics were compiled that a growing number of lawmakers became convinced of the belts' value, and in 1968, factory-installed seat belts were required by law. I remember an ambulance EMT who said he'd never unbuckled a dead body.

I bought my first car in 1967, a 1964 VW beetle. A couple of years later I bought a set of aftermarket 3-point lap/shoulder belts and installed them. Fortunately, Europe had been ahead of the curve, and though the car didn't have belts already installed, it did have threaded mounting holes, so the installation was easy. I have used seat/shoulder belts ever since. But growing up, we did many road trips, hundreds of miles yearly, in a big station wagon with no belts, and a mattress in the "back-back" for us boys to nap on. We were lucky.

Since 1984, one after another of the U.S. states has passed laws requiring seat belt use. Compliance varies, but averages 85%. Nearly all of those 33,000 highway fatalities in recent years, has come from the 15% who don't wear seat belts. In spite of the air bag in most vehicles, they either crash around inside during a collision, or are ejected. Driving in California with my brother several years ago, we saw an SUV hit the median barrier on the freeway, and the driver burst through the side window and landed on the highway almost in front of us, on his head. One of us (I don't recall who) said, "We just saw someone die."

Two things to remember about Colonel Dr. John Paul Stapp: He risked his life, incidentally becoming the fastest man on earth, to gather safety data; then he used those data and traffic statistics to practically crowbar the United States into becoming quite a bit safer as a place to drive or fly. Craig Ryan's exciting biography brings us the man and the stories, a portrait of someone to whom you just might owe your life.

Science Slip-ups

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, scientists, errors

I couldn't pass up the title: Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein, Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe, by Mario Livio. I was hoping it would be something better than one-upmanship ("See how much more we know now; aren't we good?"), and I was happily right. I've read an article or two by Dr. Livio—anyone has who has read publications by the STSCI—but none of his books. This one is a pleasure.

There isn't a way to review this book in detail without giving too much away. The concept, however, is clear. Those scientists we call truly great had such useful intuition that even when they were wrong, their errors pointed the way for others who'd never have gotten a better theory otherwise.

To take one example of the five in the book, Lord Kelvin (né William Thomson) calculated an age for the earth, based on temperatures in deep mines, and certain assumptions of thermal conductivity and initial temperature, of 100 million years. He was wise enough to do a bit of sensitivity analysis, and stated that the actual value would probably fall in the range 30-400 my. When others later showed that his assumption of solid conduction may not be correct, and that the earth could be much older, he stubbornly denied it. Yet, he was but one who had said the earth might be older if a source of energy other than remnant heat were involved. He died in 1907, so he didn't learn that radioactive decay is just such an energy source.

I wonder, is Kelvin's earlier underestimate really a blunder? Under the assumptions he made, it was quite valid. And his aim was not quite what we think. There were, at that time, two opposed camps. Biblical literalists maintained the dogma that the Earth is no more than some 6-8 thousand years old. Bishop Ussher's calculations putting Genesis 1:1 as the evening preceding October 23, 4004 BC was well known, but not without competitors. Yet few theologians, whether Christian or Jewish, were amenable to the geologists' contention that, as James Hutton had written in 1788, the Earth showed "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end." Kelvin wished to correct both errors. He showed first that the rise in temperature with depth in mines indicated an Earth that had not always been as it is now. This should give pause to a geologist who might surmise there is infinite time for modern landforms to develop. Yet Kelvin then showed that deep time was still pretty deep, at least some tens of millions of years, not a few thousands. I find it astonishing that so many today (mostly in America) still deny a "geological" age for the Earth.

In the last section, the author explores the Cosmological Constant, Λ, which, the folklore tells us, Einstein called his "biggest blunder". Then he digs further, and determines that the "biggest blunder" statement probably originated with George Gamow, not Einstein. Einstein himself thought it might be an error once cosmological expansion was discovered. But he was unsure if it ought to be eliminated. Considering that Λ is now called "dark energy", and contributes about 75% of the gravity in the universe, his "error" or "blunder" (pick your favorite) makes up 3/4 of everything!

Oh, and just by the way, I am not certain if this interpretation of Λ is true. It is based on finicky measurements of supernova brightnesses, particularly in the 6-7 ga range of ages. I have yet to learn of a proper study of the effect of metallicity on peak luminosity of Type 1a supernovae, particularly the C/O composition of the original star. The general metallicity of the universe some 7 gy ago was about half what it is today, and was even less some half a billion years earlier when the stars that went "boom" at 7 ga were formed. Do we have another blunder in the making?

It has been occasionally said that some errors are so bad they are "not even wrong." The "blunders" limned in this book might be said to be "not quite wrong". We now have a better way to explain (theorize) each, but will future scientists look back at today's best theories as "not quite wrong, yet not quite right either"? Count on it.

Encouraging science

kw: science, scientists, rewards, athletes

In an old "Wizard of ID" strip, the knight asks the king why athletes are paid millions while scientists are poorly paid. The king answers, "Would you pay to watch a scientist?" In a more recent strip, the king asks a youngster what he wants to be. The child answers "A college professor." The king asks, "What are you doing to prepare yourself?", and the kid says, "Working two days a week."

Scientific and technical productivity in the U.S. continue to fall. Every week I see more articles listing the ratio of new PhD's of American birth compared to foreign, and that those born elsewhere are increasingly choosing to return home to work. As attested by the ongoing Olympics (which I am enjoying immensely), we are getting what we pay for: more and better athletes. We are running neck and neck with China in the medal count, in spite of having one-fifth the population, and, now a slightly smaller gross economy. And China has been investing heavily in its athletes for propaganda purposes. They are taking the place of the USSR in a new Cold War (another subject I'll have to defer until I've thought about it some more).

But the fastest-growing group of new millionaires in the U.S. has been, for more than a century, professional athletes. John L. Sullivan was the first sports figure to earn a million dollars, in the 1880s. A recent contract for Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels totalled $144 million for six years.

Prior to the days of John L. Sullivan, some scientists were real celebrities. Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday were very popular scientific lecturers, and there were many more. In 1890 C. V. Boys published Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces Which Mould Them, a compendium of his lectures using a "magic lantern", a type of projector. The book is still in print. A few more recent scientists have achieved celebrity status, most notably Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and Carl Sagan. More recently, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a rising star.

Quick, how many famous, living scientists can you name? Was there anybody not on the list above? Now, how many famous, living athletes can you name? Was it more than ten, twenty, or even more? The number of players in big-league baseball, the NFL, NHL and NBA totals about 3,500. Baseball's minor leagues add another 4000, which are at least locally famous, though they don't earn millions. Those 3,500 nearly all do earn millions yearly. What do we spend on professional sports? Ten or twenty billions? If you add in their endorsement contracts, it is almost incalculable.

What would be the result if a top scientist could earn a million dollars yearly? Sure, some top schools pay "full professors" up to a quarter million yearly, though the average is far lower. There are 1.6-1.7 million post-secondary teachers in the U.S. Those on the Tenure track (about a third) are doing most of the research. A smaller number of those who have Tenure still do research; they don't have to. And they are the reason for the kid's retort to the king above.

There is a way that some scientists earn more than academia pays. They form companies. Sometimes it works, but administering the business detracts from their own research. For many, it is a way to give up your research and go broke. Is it worthwhile allowing the scientist whose work leads to a commercial product to participate in the profits, without leaving academia?

Scientists working for larger corporations with research departments might get a bonus for obtaining a patent, but I think they ought to get a percent of the profits for a product based on that patent. What would that do for our national scientific productivity?

And what of those who do the "blue sky" research that doesn't lead to "products"? Astronomers and particle physicists come to mind. The salary budget for the use of big-ticket instruments such as the Keck telescopes or the LHC needs to be commensurate with what it cost to build it.

You get what you reward. When our researchers are again our heroes, and appropriately compensated, we will get more of them, and the best work will get better.

To think is to . . . what?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, scientists, biographies, neuroscience

Let's see, the process goes something like this:

• Neural theta bursts occur about five times per second (the rate of a small mammal's sniffing, which is significant).
• Theta bursts open neural channels AMPA and NMPA, in sequence.
• Ions enter, inducing disassembly of portions of the cytoskeleton.
• The cytoskeleton reassembles via actin polymerization, making certain synapse bulbs larger (they are about a micron or two across, smaller than an E. coli cell).
  
• Molecules called integrins lock in these shape changes, that make room for more channel receptors.
• The greater numbers of receptors increases the likelihood this neural circuit will be retained.

And that is how a memory is made. The process is called LTP or Long Term Potentiation. The early steps take milliseconds, the ones in the middle take seconds to minutes, and the later steps take up to an hour and can persist for a lifetime.

Figuring it all out did take a lifetime, that of Gary Lynch, PhD, in his lab at 101 Theory Drive in Irvine, California. The lab's address provides the title for Terry McDermott's book 101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory. This is a biography not just of Dr. Lynch, but of the lab itself and the motley collection of graduate students, postdocs and others he assembled over the past thirty-plus years as he drove single-mindedly to determine the mechanism of memory.

By all accounts, Gary Lynch is a champion jerk. He is as famous for his feuds as for his science. Luckily for him, his science made him rich, in spite of a long list of offended collaborators and competitors. Nearly from the beginning, he has commercialized key discoveries, and it may be that the recent ones, including ampakines, may yield effective treatments for memory diseases such as Alzheimer's Syndrome and RETT.

As I read, I remember wondering, "What if Superman had a bad personality? Would he retain his popularity?" Lynch is like Superman with an attitude. He spent much of his life knowing he was right, frustrated by the lack of tools to prove his ideas (his lab partners had to invent most of those tools over the past thirty-plus years), and alternating between elation and despair. Even in his sixties, he wears his heart on his sleeve as clearly as any four-year-old (a man after my own heart!). Though a lot of people don't like him, very few try to deny he gets results, tons of results!

Early on, he realized that the key to the great memory abilities of the mammalian brain is the very randomness of the cortex. Instinct works like pre-stored programs, which never change. Learning changes all the time, as Lynch said, "…the thing's random. The key to understanding it is, ninety percent of the human brain uses the same basic circuitry." But this randomness has its drawbacks:

We've made a deal with the devil here. It isn't the secret of our existence that we have so much plasticity. It's that we have so much stability. These dendrites have to last a lifetime. Now, if anything happens to one of them…you can't get it back. (p 105)

Put another way, we know neuron death occurs at a steady rate. Those that encode a particular memory might last a century, but whenever they die, that memory is gone. Memories are made and committed at a low rate to begin with; we have no room to recall every little thing. What we do remember is remarkable, but it is less than a percent of what we could remember if we were like DVD recorders with an infinite number of disks to fill. So we keep only the "memorable" memories, plus an assortment of less critical ones that happened to, quite randomly, rise above the noise level long enough for LTP to fix them permanently.

It is all a testament to the contingent nature of evolution. However the first collection of randomly-assembled neurons arose, they were found useful for learning stuff, and the newly-"invented" cortex just grew and grew ever since. It must have started in the olfactory bulb (the "smell center"), where a small mammal's sniffing rate of five per second became fixed as the theta rhythm that triggers learning. Smell is the oldest of the senses that utilizes learning as a key element in its working. Other parts of the LTP mechanism were cobbled together from existing molecules, such as the ones that cause blood platelets to stick together during clotting.

One albatross around the neck of neuroscience has been the term Engram, popularized by Karl Lashley. While in neuroscience an engram refers to the physical "whatever" that make(s) up a memory, the term was co-opted by Scientology to refer to only painful memory traces that their "auditing" is supposed to erase. Actually, if you remove all your engrams you'll become a wholly blank slate, no memory, no language, no nothing. The science is thus still devoid of a good replacement term. LTP is a poor substitute because it refers to only part of the process, strictly speaking.

McDermott's book covers the whole of Dr. Lynch's career, but focuses on the past ten years, during which the most sensitive tools were developed that finally proved the LTP hypothesis. The cover of the book is dominated by an image from the microscopic evidence for synaptic rearrangement on the dendrites during learning. You'd think Lynch would be ready to rest on his laurels at that point (late 2008), but you can't get an old plow horse out of the traces quite that easily. Science never stops, and neither will he.

Of apes and the women who love them

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural science, scientists

Last evening I watched a short item on ABC's Primetime about pet chimpanzees, and the great dangers that result. It was stated that a mature male chimp weighs 200 pounds (95 kg) and has seven times the strength of a human male. I believe it is more accurate to say that a male chimp who is not obese might weigh 150 pounds (70 kg), and while the animal may be seven times as strong as I am (or any other sedentary office worker), it is more likely that the figure is three times, compared to a fit man in his prime. Considering the poor impulse control of primates in general, keeping such an animal at home rates right up there with hanging hand grenades from your belt by their pins. Chimps really don't belong in our bedrooms.

It is quite another thing to put oneself into their bedrooms. Yet this is indeed what Jane Goodall did in 1960, and has continued to do for 39 years since. She is the first of Louis Leakey's "Ape Girls", and as Sy Montgomery tells us, still the best known. Second in order, and in recognition, is Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas from 1967 until her murder in 1985; and the third, least known in the West, but a power in her own right in Indonesia, is Biruté Galdikas, who has been studying orangutans since 1971. These womens' lives and work are limned (there is too much material for any one book to comprehensively cover) in Ms Montgomery's 1991 book Walking With the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, which has recently been reissued in paperback.

The book reveals three aspects of each woman's life: as the Nurturer who gained the apes' confidence and, perhaps, respect; as the Scientist who revealed the animals' lives to the rest of us; and as the Warrior who championed the preservation of the apes and their homes. While the opening section shows the similarity of these three women's approach to their subjects, the third shows their differences most starkly.

We could consider the work of each of them as a two-step drama. Each spent a number of years gaining information (one could hardly call it data) and becoming as habituated to the apes as the apes did to them. At the same time, each strove to earn the credit they expected to need in the world around, though each saw that world in very different terms. Subsequently, each became an advocate for the animals, and here they differ starkly.

Jane Goodall has become a globe-trotting diplomat, deftly working the politics of the powerful Western countries to build support for the preservation of chimp habitat and for severe restriction of their "taking" for purposes such as being laboratory animals, circus/zoo entertainers, or pets.

Dian Fossey took a more direct, vigilante approach. She recruited a private army and attacked poachers and the cattle of encroaching ranchers. She paid little regard to national or international politics, taking the slogan "politics is local" about as far as it can be taken. Her murder was inevitable.

Biruté Galdikas became totally conversant in Indonesian cultures and political habits, and has gained recognition, at least in Asia, as a highly respected authority, one who, as she quotes Prince Charles, has "no power, but plenty of influence." She is gaining, and has largely gained already, the favor and regard of the people who matter most to the orangutans' survival, the people and the governmental leaders of Indonesia.

The book closes with an epilogue subtitled "Shamans", an author's musing about the women's becoming one with their subjects. It is not surprising at all, considering how similar many people become to their favorite pets! And in spite of the fact that "the apes don't need us [socially]," which all three of them say, the apes have gained something also. One incident is related of a chimp who has learned to understand and respond to spoken English, though no effort was made to teach her. That isn't surprising at all. Nearly any dog is a better linguist than his owner; the dog learns to respond well to many spoken words, while few humans ever learn a single word of Dog!

The cover of the book shows two orangutans, mother and infant. The infant, chewing on a leaf, bears an open look of not-quite-curiosity. The mother's look is far from friendly, not quite a glower. Will the foreboding her face seems to bear come to pass with her species' extinction? The history of human greed does not allow me much confidence that the apes will survive into my grandchildren's generation.

The polymath that inspired Jefferson

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, scientists

Joseph Priestley was very fortunate to have a very sunny, optimistic disposition. Few men could have borne becoming the most hated man in England, then in exile a target of the Alien and Sedition Acts, and remained sane. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson is a biography not just of "Dynamite Joe" (from a quote falsely attributed to him at the time), but of the progressive view of science, religion and politics that he embraced and its effect on three of the most famous figures of the late 18^th Century: Ben Franklin, Tom Jefferson, and John Adams, all of whom Priestley counted as dear friends.

For these four men, the conceptual barriers we experience today—because of which a politician can get away with putting his scientific views and his faith in compartments and claiming they'll have no bearing on his public service—did not exist and would be considered both ludicrous and criminally counterproductive.

Thus, Priestley was not "just a natural philosopher", an inspiration to both Franklin and Lavoisier, but an ordained minister who helped found Unitarianism as a denomination, and a first-rate writer of political tracts. As a proto-scientist, he is best known for discovering "dephlogisticated air", which Lavoisier determined was a positive, not a negative, quantity and named Oxygen. Yet prior to this he was one of the foremost "electricians", as electrical experimenters were then known, second only to Franklin, and the first to produce soda water.

But it is as a dissenting preacher that he experienced the most severe life changes. Firstly, his deconstruction of all supernatural elements in the Bible, and of Jesus's divinity, in his book An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, which convinced Jefferson that he himself was indeed a Christian, led to public fury throughout England, the burning of his house, and his eventual flight to the new republic "across the pond".

Secondly, once in America, during a breakfast with President John Adams, Priestley enthusiastically (he did everything enthusiastically) discoursed on his millennial views of world politics and America's place in it, something that thoroughly alarmed Adams. While Adams claimed in later letters to Jefferson (a decade after Priestley's death) that he did not have the old dissenter in mind when enacting the Alien and Sedition Acts—his real target was French spies—, the fact remains that Priestley had good reason to expect a second exile should his protection by Vice President Jefferson ever fail.

One other stellar quantity he had: he never kept a secret. He (enthusiastically) shared the results of all his experiments immediately, to his current correspondents and often in tracts or books for the public. He might have been richer had he kept a trade secret here or there (such as for his invention of seltzer water), but he thought the benefit of openness, and avoiding the damage that secrecy does to scientific advancement, was worth the "trivial" loss he might have incurred. He and his openness thrived in the coffee-house culture that nourished so many scientists and philosophers of the time, and brought so many diverse minds together to cross-pollinate one another.

He wrote copiously on scientific experiments, religion, philosophy, education and politics. The sum total of his published writings is probably exceeded by none except possibly Isaac Asimov (However, Asimov's nonfiction was largely explaining or repackaging the work of others, while Priestley nearly always wrote from personal experience).

Looking back more than 200 years, the author takes what he calls a "long zoom" approach, placing the cultural history of two great English-speaking nations in a context not just of centuries, but millions of years, as he fits the British Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution eras into the emerging, ever (so far) increasing concentration of energy, both chemical and social, that an individual could muster.

Consider that today, the mayor of a medium-sized city such as Oklahoma City (half a million) wields more political power than the emperor of the Akkadians did in 1000 BC, or that the average teenager has more raw power at his disposal (100-400 horsepower) when he borrows the family car, than entire societies did before the invention of the steam engine. Rewind history to just before 1800 AD, and you can just about take the square root of either quantity, for an assessment of available energy and influence.

Priestley was a great genius, there is no doubt, and it is equally true that he rode the ascending cusp of a wave of innovation powered by both coal and a rising urbanization of society. And, there was so much to discover! It is a bit too late for any of us to discover new elements using a few beakers and a laundry tub.

Priestley's influence can be seen most clearly, however, in the famous spate of letters written between Adams and Jefferson after 1812. References to Priestley greatly outnumber references to either Washington or Franklin! His political writings, his dissenting faith and writings, and his scientific inspiration had shaped their world most of all.

The great gulf between the two old Presidents encompasses today's political pendulum swings. If today's US President could exchange letters with Ronald Reagan, I suspect the polarization would not quite reach that between Jefferson and Adams (And it is largely due to that polarization that the "second-place becomes Vice President" provision was changed to make it a "candidate plus running mate" race). Their common link, the factor that allowed the aging statesmen to communicate at all, was a cheerful, brilliant Englishman who embodied the best of America at least as much as the two of them.

It is not just the belts

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, scientists

There is little I could say, or ought to, about a recent biography, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles by Abigail Foerstner. So much is written already—about him and about the book— since he passed away in August 2006. See the University of Iowa's James A. Van Allen page, and particularly their tribute page (the first link). By the way, I'm puzzled why the Library classifies the book in the 523 section (Specific celestial bodies & phenomena): I suppose for his cosmic ray research, a lifelong passion. It ought to be a BIO.

The book itself is great, but the man is greater. He, more than anyone, "invented" science rocketry. Before that, however, he invented and developed the radio proximity fuze (I found out that "fuse" refers to burnable fuzes; "fuze" is the more general term).

Prior to the development of nuclear weapons, the proximity fuze was the anti-aircraft weapon that was winning the war, in both European and Pacific theaters. My Dad spent a couple years in New Guinea and nearby islands in the 1943-45 period, at times sheltered by the A-A shield these shells provided. Interestingly, Van Allen was there in 1943 with the Navy. Dad, an Army man, doesn't remember meeting any sailors, and we had tens of thousands of troops of all military branches there.

Of course, his name is nearly a household word for the "Van Allen Belts", two concentrated tori of radiation that encircle the Earth. They are composed of energetic particles trapped by the magnetic field; the protons and electrons form distinct belts, segregated by their mass-to-velocity ratio (each has a single charge, but their masses differ by a factor of 1,800).

Dr. Van Allen exemplified the unusual scientist who excels both in hands-on science and as an administrator and executive. Primarily for the latter reason, whether driving the scientific use of captured V-2 rockets in the 1950s or the development and deployment of the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft in later decades, his skill as a motivator made him the father of space science. The subtitle of the book indicates that, by the time of his death he was continuing to monitor the information being received by three of these spacecraft at distances of eight billion miles (about 86 AU's).

36 fireside chats

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, scientists, interviews

The trouble with a book like Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time is that it is all to easy to read one interview, then set the book aside and spend quite a bit of time musing. Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset are listed as the Editors, but in actuality, Dr. Punset conducted these interviews over a number of years, then he and Dr. Margulis organized them as to content. He is very well known in Spain for his science writing and on-air interviews.

Most of the chapters begin with a bit of commentary by the former, from a line or two to a page or more; the rest is a condensed interview (most of them began as a transcript of a conversation lasting an hour or two). From time to time, the latter Editor adds comments of her own as footnotes.

The content of each chapter is meaty enough to fuel a book of its own...and is often extracted from a meaty book or two by the interviewee. The Editors allowed each scientist to recommend two, and only two, books or articles, their own or others', for further reading. The seventy-plus items in "The Readings" would constitute a good starting library of science and ideas.

The "Great Scientists" of the subtitle is a bit hyped. Each of the thirty-seven scientists (one interview was of two of them together) has won renown—quite a number are Nobelists—, yet not that many are household names. I am better read than most, but recognized just under half the names. Guess I've a bit more reading to do!!

Anyway, because of the "think time" needed, I am at this point just over halfway through the book, and thought it best to report on it without further delay. It has been four days, after all. I'll begin something lighter, while I continue reading these interviews and giving each appropriate thought.

A few highlights that I have enjoyed so far:

• For those who think office work burns them out, Robert Sapolsky might say, "For the typical mammal, stress is induced by another who is intent on eating you in the next two minutes."
• Robert Hare says of psychopaths, "In a Utopian world, psychopaths would stand out, as they would be predators,... Even if we could achieve a perfect social utopia, the psychopaths would not disappear." I guess this is why Jesus said we must be "wise as serpents but harmless as doves." Those who are only "wise as doves" are the serpents' victims.
• While interviewing Kenneth Kendler, Dr. Punset mentions work that indicates people with loose joints have higher anxiety. The ensuing discussion, however, seems to indicate the loose joints are the cause; to me, they are the effect: the anxious are prone to giving up.
• I have no simple quote from the interview with Jane Goodall, but it was clearly brought out that she caused us all to re-define "human" several times during the forty years she studied Chimpanzees. Had we not done such re-definition, we'd have had to admit that chimps are human, or at least hominids (and I think they are hominids and belong in the genus Homo).
• Diana Deutsch discovered a number of auditory illusions. Her web site has links to sound files that illustrate them. My favorite is the Tritone Paradox, in which two computer-generated, slightly buzzy notes are sounded: one, then the other. For some pairs, the first note sounds higher, and the reverse is true for other pairs. I had a colleague from Korea standing next to me as four of these were played. We agreed on three, but for one of the pairs, she thought the second note had a lower pitch, while I thought the second pitch was higher.

I may have further highlights later. I plan to copy the "Readings" list, and gather at least a few of the volumes therein.

Quantum giants humanized

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, quantum theory, scientists

A "simple" thought experiment: Suppose the Universe consisted of four items, two moving particles, an edge, and a sensitive screen. The first particle moves past the edge and strikes the screen. The second particle, moving in exactly the same path as the first as it approaches the edge, moves past the edge and strikes the screen.

The salient question: Does the second particle strike the screen at the same spot as the first? This question cannot be answered. Suppose both particles do strike the same spot on the screen. We must first ask, How can we know whether the two particles actually followed the same path?

The concept known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states that we cannot measure both the position q and the momentum p (including direction) of any object with infinite precision. Heisenberg quantified his insight: pq≥ћ, where ћ is Planck's Constant, a very small quantity that has popped up everywhere since Planck first derived it to describe the quantization of "blackbody" radiation.

The philosophical question: does the attempt to measure either q or p by itself affect both quantities so that we can't be sure of their values, or do these quantities have a built-in "fuzziness" that attempts at measurement simply unveil?

In 1926 and 1927 Neils Bohr and a number of the giants of theoretical physics wrestled with the implications of quantum mechanics and quantum theory, and produced the Copenhagen Interpretation, which decided in favor of the latter, and furthermore, requires the presence of an "observer" to discern the result.

My own dissent against the Copenhagen Interpretation is this: In the thought experiment above, the Edge is "observer" enough. Its presence affects the path of the particle. No matter how far the particle "misses" the edge, its path will be changed, it will not continue as if there were no edge.

There is also some finite probability that the screen may record nothing. That is, the equation that describes diffraction near an edge has a sinusoidal shape of decreasing magnitude, but while that magnitude is zero for a series of angles, it is nonzero at all points except that specific series of angles, even near 180º.

Well, I may rant about these things further some day. These are some thoughts that arose after I finished reading Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics by Gino Segré. This book actually says little about such things. Segré presents to us the persons involved.

It is a combined biography, first of seven giants of quantum physics (Niels Bohr, Paul Ehrenfest, Lise Meitner, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, and Max Delbrück), then to a lesser extent, of their collaborators, including Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Enrico Fermi.

I'd always thought Bohr something of a jerk. I just knew the stories of his notorious tendency to argue until his opponent collapsed. Indeed, once when Heisenberg fled to his bed, Bohr sat at his bedside and argued him into insensibility. I never wondered why they tolerated it and came back for more. They loved him...no, they adored him. They knew he loved them even more.

The author, nephew of Nobel laureate Emilio Segré, a lesser giant among these titans, shows Bohr as a family man (he and Margrethe had six children, including a son who won a Nobel of his own), one whose "family" included dozens of physics students. Niels Bohr is the prototype of the scientist who needs others to do his science. He simply had to discuss in order to think. So if you went skiing with him, you could be sure of plenty of physics with your evening toddy.

Even the more, this collective biography shows that genius isn't the unique possession of any personality type. Paul Dirac was the nearest thing to a Vulcan, Paul Ehrenfest was insecure and eventually suicided, and Wolfgang Pauli could be as caustic as Jackie Leonard, yet was almost as beloved as Bohr.

The human side of science is clearly shown in books written in 1929-30 by Heisenberg, Pauli, and Dirac. Their subject and goal is the same, and their understanding of the subject was equivalent, but only Dirac's The Principles of Quantum Mechanics is still in print and in use. What they say is much the same, but the way they each connect with the reader differs. It is paradoxical that Dirac, the least personable, has the clearest writing style.

And what of the book's title? The last major meeting that the seven were supposed to attend (Pauli had to miss it) was Bohr's Copenhagen conference of April 1932. Those attending wrote and produced a skit, as they had before. This one was based on Goethe's Faust, in which the Lord (Bohr) and Mephistopheles (Pauli) dispute the fate of Faust (Ehrenfest). Quotes from Goethe's play are found throughout the book.

By 1932 the Copenhagen Interpretation was considered settled truth by most (Einstein was a notable exception). The skit was a loving look back at the wrangling that produced it, a chance to blow off some steam and mend fences.

World War II scattered the attendees, and many of them became developers of the nuclear bomb, which made their choice of Faust for their last revel all the more striking.

Mr. Think Different, in his own words

kw: book reviews, scientists, letters, correspondence

I worked at Cal Tech in 1974 and 1975—as a machinist. I made parts for a new design of microwave telescope. One day, walking across campus, I caught sight of Dick Feynman striding across my path. I had no chance to greet him, and it was the only time I saw him. I wish I'd been bold enough to give chase and at least meet him.

I've been fascinated by Dr. Feynman (hereafter RPF, as he often signed his letters) most of my adult life. While in graduate school, I had a friend who owned a set of his Lectures on Physics. I read quite a number of the articles over a year or so. I recall that first one, though, on the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg. When I finished it, I had a visceral understanding of the principle. I have a set I bought, many years later, and this summer, my son is required to read through at least Volume 1.

My son was born late in 1988, just eight months after RPF died. That was nearly twenty years after I learned to use Feynman Diagrams to understand subatomic interactions. Now, sixteen years after he said, "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring," his daughter Michelle Feynman has edited a wonderful collection of his letters: Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track published by Basic Books. The material is arranged roughly in chronological order, one or a few years per chapter, and topically within chapters.

RPF is seen to be a master of both the long, witty, discursive essay-in-letter genre and the short, punchy note. Here is a piece of the former (To Dr. R. B. Leighton, my boss when I worked there):

"...There is one direction of computer science that has particular personal appeal to me. (It is called by the unfortunate name of 'artificial intelligence,' unfortunate because in the past several obviously naïve ideas went under that name.) Virtually all computer programs today simply follow step by step instructions—they do exactly what you tell them...The programmer does a great deal of work to write a program of instructions for a computer to do what you wish. To what degree can we use machines to help in this programmers work—ultimately to make machines which program themselves with little more information than we now give the progammer who at present makes the program?"

In succeeding paragraphs, he discusses language learning ("We are far from learning how it is done"), time-sharing computer systems and how they might compare with a person doing several things at once, and image processing; all in the context of discussing an offer to be made to a visiting professor.

My favorite among the latter form (to Dr. George Beadle, who'd offered him an honorary doctorate):

"Dear George,

Yours is the first honorary degree that I have been offered, and I thank you for considering me for such an honor.

However, I remember the work I did to get a real degree at Princeton and the guys on the same platform receiving honorary degrees without work—and I felt an "honorary degree" was a debasement of the idea of a "degree which confirms certain work has been accomplished." It is like giving an "honorary electricians license." I swore then that if by chance I was ever offered one I would not accept it.

Now at last (twenty-five years later) you have given me a chance to carry out my vow.

So thank you, but I do not wish to accept the honorary degree you offered."

I learned something I'd been only peripherally aware of. RPF gave much effort to evaluating textbook, particularly math texts. The title of the book is from his discussion—lament, really—of the "one way to do things" approach in nearly every text. Mathematics, in particular, must be done by any and all means, and every 'problem' has at least half a dozen methods of solution. Only one or a few may be considered, "elegant", but all will work. As a matter of fact, "checking your work" is really a way of saying, "OK, do this problem a different way to see if you get the same result," or ,"Now do it backwards, to see if you get back to the beginning."

Well, I may rant more on this later. I'd like to give one example though, of something nearly all of us learned one way, but can be done different ways: Multiplication.

Long Multiplication: This is the way we learned it. The only variation is the way carries are handled. Some above the middle section, some below, some digits, some more cryptic marks. Other than that the method is uniform. Yet it is not the only way to carry out multiplication.

Russian Multiplication may be apocryphal, but it is a method I remember seeing once or twice as a boy. Here is how it works:

Put the smaller number on the left, and leave room for a wide column on the right with the larger number.

Divide the smaller number by two repeatedly, discarding any remainder, until you reach one.

Double the larger number to match each entry on the left.

Cross out any line that has an even number in the left-hand column.

Then add the numbers in the right hand column, that are not crossed out.

The wonderful thing about this method is that it matches very closely the way computers add numbers. The doubling and halving correspond to the way computers keep numbers: in binary, so that 19 is 10011 and 23 is 10111. To double a binary number, shift it to the left and append a zero. To divide it by two, shift it to the right and discard any bits (1 or 0 digits) that fall off the end. The computer puts both numbers into Shift Registers, and shifts one to the left, the other to the right, adding the number in the first Shift Register to a third Sum Register every time a 1 bit drops off the second Shift Register. When all the shifting and adding is done, the result is in the Add Register.

Pascal's Multiplication method is a different way of arranging the digits, to carry out Long Multiplication. This works with numbers of any size, though it gets cumbersome with larger numbers; so does Long Multiplication, but it has the virtue of taking the smallest amount of paper. To use Pascal's method, first make a box, divided as shown, with diagonals from every corner, and leave plenty of room for a carry digit.

Multiply the digit above each box's column with the digit to the far right of its row, creating a 2-digit number that you split across the diagonal line as shown (2x1 = 02; 3x9 = 27. See how they are shown in the figure).

Once all the boxes are filled, add the numbers in each diagonal section, down and to the left. Put any carry digit near the border of the main box.

The digits at the bottom left of each diagonal section make up the result.

Why do I go into this discursion? To show that even in something we think of as a very standard math method, there are several ways of getting the same result. RPF made this point again and again in his reviews—complaints, really—of math textbooks.

I love the book.