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. 

The sorta-all-in-one guide

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, compendiums

Who wants to know everything? Pick me! Not many folks have four college majors (yes, it cost more than usual). Just peruse the contents of this blog's roughly 2,000 book reviews on all subjects. So I couldn't pass up the chance to read The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything*: Adventures in Math and Science [*Abridged] by Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry.

Since the book is admittedly extracts of a potentially universal encyclopedia (perhaps one for which Wikipedia is a rehearsal), the authors felt free to choose items of interest to them. The nine chapters are riffs on nine subjects. I'll touch on three of them:

Chapter 3, "The Perfect Circle" starts with an insult attributed to Fritz Zwicky, "spherical bastard." Since a sphere has perfect symmetry and looks the same from every direction, this hypothetical jerk is always and everywhere the same. But can there be a perfect sphere, or even a perfect circle? I suppose there could be if matter were continuous rather than quantized into atoms and other "elementary" particles. Just to keep things interesting, the authors get into what a 4-D sphere would look like. To us 3-D creatures, it would look like a sphere, because its intersection with our 3-D spacetime would be a spherical "cut" from its hyperspherical reality. As a hypersphere "moved through" 3-D spacetime, it would first look like a tiny sphere that grew, stabilized briefly, then shrank again to a tiny sphere that then winked out.

Fun enough. Can anything material be truly spherical or circular? Soap bubbles look like spheres, but are subtly distorted by gravity, and by even the tiniest, shifting breeze. The orb of the Earth isn't a sphere (ignoring mountains for a moment), but an oblate spheroid, the stable compromise between self-gravity and the centripetal force of its rotation. Even if it had no rotation, there are mountains and trenches, of course, but shrunk to the size of a cue ball, it would be smoother than the cue ball. The four metal spheres in a super-gyroscope in one of the satellites are considered the smoothest, most perfect spheres ever made, but a strong microscope would enable us to see ultra-tiny defects in their surfaces. If we could get rid of every defect, however, the atoms or molecules of the ball force a limit below which the smoothness cannot be reduced. Consider this printed circle:

It looks pretty good, even though I deliberately made it rather small. I instructed Blogger to display it "original size", so it matches the pixels on your computer screen. But that screen does have pixels. The "pixels" of a piece of paper are smaller, of course. Here is a 16x blowup of part of the red circle:

Somewhere in this jaggedy band of red and pink pixels would run a line that represents the ideal circle I had PowerPoint draw for me. Is it possible to make a circle that is actually perfect? Clearly not. Is it possible to place some atoms such that they are on the exact locations a circular arc would pass through? To my figuration, at most 12 atoms, plus a 13th to mark the circle's center, could be so placed, using equipment such as an atomic force microscope (AFM) to push around atoms on the surface of a perfect atomic lattice such as a surface of pure silicon, oriented in a direction such that the Si atoms are in a square array:

• Place atom #1 where you want the center to be, nestled in a pocket between four Si atoms.
• Place #2 in such a pocket, located 5 spaces to the right.
• Place #3 in a pocket 4 to the right and 3 upwards of the center; the 3-4-5 triangle has a hypotenuse 5 units long.
• Place #4 in a pocket 3 to the right and 4 upwards.
• Place #5 in a pocket 5 spaces upwards.
• Continue around the circle.

At the end, the twelve peripheral atoms are all exactly 5 units from the center atom. The first person to do this will be the first person to create a "dotted line" that traces a perfect circle (within the limits of quantum vibration of the Si atoms!). To avoid insanity, I won't think about what is entailed in creating something with atoms at some exact distance from a known center, to form such a tracery on a perfect sphere.

Chapter 5, "A Brief History of Time" centers initially on high-speed investment algorithms that take advantage of the time lags in communication between different stock exchanges. Such algorithms have caused half a dozen "flash crashes", which came and went in milliseconds, and briefly (and fortunately, reversibly) destroyed around a trillion dollars of equity in world markets. A couple pages in, the authors ask "what is a second?", and lose their way. Here is a pair of sentences to which I take strong exception:

"If you want to measure how long a second it, it should simply be a matter of pointing a telescope straight up at a star in the sky and waiting until the same star comes back around to the same spot the next night—that is, an exact day later. If you divide the time elapsed by 86,400 (the number of seconds in the day), then you should end up with precisely the length of one second."

Nope!! This will only work if the star you focus upon is the Sun; especially, some unchanging feature of the Sun such as its east or west edge. This is a confusion between solar time and sidereal time. During the day in which the Earth rotates once, to point at the same feature on the Sun's surface (or edge), one solar day passes (which is unlikely to be exactly 86,400 seconds long, as the rest of the chapter describes). During that day, the Earth moves just under one degree along its orbit, so that it has to rotate that extra most-of-a-degree to point to the same feature again. If you begin with any other star, the time that passes will be one sidereal day, which has a length of 86,164.0905 seconds.

In this chapter we find a version of this diagram, which describes the Equation of Time. This shows the cumulative effect of variations in the length of an apparent solar day, and is the expected error of a sundial at various times during the year.

Two factors create this effect. Firstly, the Earth's orbit is not a perfect circle, but an ellipse. Using slightly rounded figures, our distance from the Sun varies from 91,407,000 miles in early January to 94,510,000 miles in early July. That means that in early April and early October, the Sun is offset from the center of the ellipse, as seen from Earth, by about 1.5 million miles. Thus, the solar day varies from 86,379 seconds to 86,429 seconds. Note that the difference from 86,400 is not symmetrical. This is because of the Earth's axial tilt. 

The contribution of axial tilt to the length of the day is more complex, so I won't try to explain. Instead, we can see from this diagram that it has two cycles per year (the purple dashed line), while the variation caused by the elliptical orbit has one cycle (the blue dot-dash line). These add to the total equation of time (the red solid line). This graph is from the German language Wikipedia.

Another expression of this mess is the Analemma, the infinity-shaped symbol printed on globes. Hardly anyone pays attention to it.

This is an example. The analemma represents the subsolar point at Noon, mean solar time, at a particular longitude for every day of the year. Some globes, as this one, have some explanation about it. Others just show the figure without much explanation. Probably only one person in 1,000 knows what the odd "8" on their globe means…of those who even have one.

This is just part of what makes the definition of "one second" far from obvious!

Chapter 6, "Live Free" asks "What is free will?", proceeds to tell why some scientists think there is no such things, then describes some conditions in which the thinking and attitude of an animal or person is affected by a chemical or a parasite. And then we find the possibility that we are still, somehow, capable of making decisions that seem to be free, and perhaps they are. 

From the other side, that of predicting the fate of the universe (or any part of it), the authors discuss chaos and quantum mechanics. I find this funny, both "haha" funny and "so odd" funny: Mathematical chaos isn't actually chaotic. It is repeatable if you always start from the same point.

We read of the Lorentz Butterfly, a seemingly unpredictable figure that represents near-cyclical patterns of weather. The origin of mathematical chaos came when Lorentz ran a simulation for a while, then stopped his computer program and wrote down the values of the parameters he was tracking. Then he let the program run a while more, seeing how it would to. Later he started the program with the values he had written down partway through, and was surprised that the ensuing trajectory soon went differently from what he had seen earlier! He realized that the program was calculating things to an accuracy of 15 decimals (48 bits), but he had written down the numbers with "only" seven decimals. The seemingly tiny difference from where the program started from during the second run made all the difference.

Mathematical "chaos" is better described as "sensitivity to initial conditions". This is seen in orbital mechanics. Predicting the position of a planet over many orbits is tricky. Every time the planet makes one orbit, the numbers that were added in the first half orbit all get subtracted out again. Tiny rounding errors pile up, and after a few orbits, they add up to substantial errors in the planet's position and velocity. Actually, in most systems that rely on numerical integration, the initial position error's size is doubled with every iteration. That's why it's best to use methods that permit one to take larger steps (usually called "higher order" methods). An error that is initially one-trillionth of the starting value will, in ten steps, grow to about 1,024 trillionths, or just over one-billionth. That doesn't seem so bad. However: ten more steps, and the error is more than one-millionth; ten more and it is one-thousandth; then a further ten, and the error is as big as the initial starting value, meaning that the planet is as much as half an orbit away from where you thought it should be. Going to a higher order method is part of the solution to such issues. Astrophysicists have numerous methods to stabilize and correct their calculations so they can predict the positions of planets and moons thousands or millions of orbits later.

The situation is worse in weather forecasting, which is what Edward Lorentz was working on. The weather models that are running on the world's largest supercomputers have millions of coupled differential equations, and they are getting better and better. Weather.com and Accuweather confidently predict the weather for up to 90 days. But in most parts of the world, going beyond a 3-day forecast is still pretty chancy. The truth is, long-range forecasts are adjusted "pattern" forecasts, based on similarity of history. The weather models all fall apart in 5-10 days, and sometimes less. The atmosphere is too big, and too much happens on too big a scale, and we have too few reliable weather stations taking the atmosphere's pulse. It's a wonder that even a 3-day forecast is any good at all.

Thus, in actuality, "chaos" just means "impossible to predict because there is way, way too little good data".

The quantum situation is different. Quantum uncertainty can be stated "impossible to predict because at the smallest scales, genuinely random influences occur." That means that atoms and electrons and protons and so forth can't be pinned down; they are subject to randomizing influences. The reason we can predict where a baseball is going is that, when the system of interest is composed of a trillion trillion atoms or more, those random influences mostly cancel out, to such a degree that we can neglect them. We only care if the ball is in the strike zone, while quantum effects on a baseball's path are measured in trillionths of a trillionth of a meter.

Interestingly, quantum effects on the path of ions and electrons in our neurons, which have axons with a diameter between 1 and 10 microns, can cause variations in the timing of a signal, and sometimes quench it altogether. Also, "shot noise" is the scattered arrival times of ions, which can change when or whether a certain synapse is triggered. This is one possible mechanism behind "free will."

But I like this description better, from an researcher who studies rats in mazes and such: "Given specific conditions of light, temperature, and location of food, the rat will do what the rat wants to do." A statement like that was once the motto of the Rat Runner's Digest. So if we feel like we have free will, it's like the proverbial duck: "Does it quack like a duck? Does it walk like a duck? It must be a duck."

If you want to know everything about everything, be prepared for a long process…like forever, to be precise. However, if you can settle for an 80-20 solution, this book provides a good start.

When is a drug really a drug

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, drugs, entheogenic chemicals, plants

About 90% of the human race uses caffeinated drinks, including coffee, tea, "energy drinks", and caffeinated soft drinks. Every culture has some kind of stimulant(s) to keep intelligent people "on task" as they slog through their daily grind. Before caffeine became ubiquitous, Asia-Pacific areas had Betel, tropical South America had cocaine, and North America had tobacco (which is still the second-most-used stimulant). All of these are still in use, with caffeine thrown in for good measure.

Caffeine is the centerpiece (literally and physically) of This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan. He makes a case that Western civilization was largely enabled by its stimulation, as it replaced alcoholic drinks. Formerly, alcohol was needed to make as beverage safe to drink. Boiling water to make tea or coffee also kills germs, and the resulting drink was energizing rather than stupefying.

Personally, I don't like hot drinks and I abhor the taste of coffee (a good way to ruin a teaspoon of cream), so if I want caffeine, I use one of the more robust soft drinks such as Mountain Dew or Jolt (where it can be found). However, since I retired, I stopped using "cold caffeine", which I'd needed to keep going at work, particularly during meetings when the lights would be turned low for PowerPoint presentations. I guess even then, I wasn't ingesting as much caffeine as coffee drinkers, because I didn't suffer any withdrawal symptoms. The author did a 3-month caffeine break, and withdrawal affected him quite a lot. When he had his first cup of Espresso after the break, it was like a first hit of cocaine to him. Thanks, I'll pass.

The first third of the book is about opium. Many cultures also have their favored pain-killers (willow comes to mind), but the opium poppy spread far and wide, long ago. Much of that section dwells on his early experiments with growing poppies (which is legal!), and the kinds of trouble he could have gotten into if, at the height of the War on Drugs, he had "crossed the line" by so simple a matter as drying a few seed heads and brewing tea with them. There's much information on the history of poppies and opium.

When I was in college, you could still buy Paregoric (4% opium in alcohol, with a couple of other ingredients). It was "Grandmother's helper" with colicky or teething infants. The author mentions Laudanum, which is stronger; I never saw it in drug stores. I couldn't relate to much of what he wrote. I wasn't willing to break the drug laws, but he had fewer qualms, though he writes of having a few qualms!

The third plant is actually a family of cacti that includes Peyote ("mescal buttons"), with the active ingredient mescaline. While peyote is soon to be an endangered species—it's getting too popular and is very slow-growing—another group of cacti called San Pedro (among numerous other names) is much more common, easier to grow (Pollan had some in his garden without knowing it), and different species have varying amounts of mescaline. It made me think, just as with marijuana, if mescaline gets much more popular, growers of San Pedro will breed more potent varieties.

Peyote is legal to use only for certain religious groups of American Indians. As the author found, they have a cultural mindset that is less analytical, which helps them use the plant more appropriately, as a medicinal rather than recreational substance. The author writes of the effects of environment and attitude, on one's experience with mescaline in particular. Indians get quite huffy if peyote is called a drug. To them it is medicine for the soul. It is being called "Entheogenic", meaning it reveals (or produces: "-genic") the god within ("En-theo"). That's an attempt to remove the stigma of the "drug" designation.

The author's experiences with mescaline sound intriguing, but I think I'll pass here also, for the same reason I gave up alcohol before the age of 21: I don't like anything messing with my mind.

Michael Pollan self-experiments. We have here his record of some of those experiments. It is also an approach to a manifesto of sorts, against the war on drugs. I agree that the Federal government badly overreacted over the past 2/3 century (basically, most of my lifetime). What are the chances they will pull back? Although most US states have "decriminalized" marijuana use and possession, the Feds have not, putting the states in a curious position. The process is slow; perhaps, drug by drug, various "substances" will be removed from their "Schedule". It could take decades.

Animals and Law

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, laws, legal system, humor

Mary Roach make serious subjects both interesting and humorous. In Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, she writes of animals who cause problems to people (besides ants at picnics or in the kitchen), and the various officers who must deal with them. We're talking serious problems here, from killings to theft, and, in later chapters, "invasions" such as the imported rabbits in Australia and rats in New Zealand.

On the scale of danger:cuteness ratio, bears rank right at the top. A young cub like the one shown here is probably just curious. However, the mother is likely to be nearby, and will object to her baby being this close to a dangerous human. It seldom occurs to us that bears consider us a risk; we're big enough to do them damage, and too big to be worthwhile prey. I wonder what followed this moment. Most likely, the mother made a "Whuff!" sound, at which the cub ran to her, and they trotted off together. I hope so.

Bears are too smart to be predictable. They are also loners, and get cranky if someone gets too close without permission. A cranky bear can slap you as he or she would another bear, and it'll take your head right off. Then, surprised at the result, after some thought, the bear could opt to take advantage of the free meal. Now we have a "killer bear". What is a forest ranger to do with it? There's a chapter on that. Guess what: relocating, whether bear or squirrel, just makes room for another to move in…and so does killing the offender.

Bears are most likely to kill unintentionally. Not so carnivores such as leopards, nor elephants. Each rates a chapter, and the stories range from quirkily funny to spine-chilling. While in India learning about leopard attacks, one evening the author heard a ghastly scream that she concluded came from a leopard's prey being killed. She and those with her decided to wait, to check it out in the morning, leaving matters to resolve themselves overnight. The villagers called it a case of demon possession, which she took for a double entendre, because the villagers had also told her that any leopard that had killed at least two people was considered a demon. Well, whoever died that evening was definitely "possessed" by that leopard at that point!

I haven't been the subject of an attack by anything bigger than a jaybird. But that can be painful enough! I found a blue jay chick in the driveway once, and picked it up to put in a nearby bush. A parent bird bombed me. Had I not been wearing a hat, it would have drawn blood. I've managed to avoid sea gull attacks by eating only inside at the beach! This fellow, according to advertising copy, was trying out a gull repellent method that obviously isn't working. I did note that two species of gull are shown here. That's typical at almost any American beach.

A lot of the book deals with the futility of not just trying to eradicate unwanted species (such as invasive rats on islands), but even counting them to know how big the problem is. Cougars (AKA pumas or panthers) are so elusive that animal "control" officers' most effective method is scanning an area for feces, called "scat". Unlike domestic cats, cougars just "drop and walk off". With experience, the officers can estimate how old a scat is, so with a little knowledge of scat-dropping frequency and a bit of math, they can estimate how many cats frequent a certain parcel of land.

The next-to-last chapter gets into humane killing. It's not quite an oxymoron, but killing most animals "so they won't notice" is nearly impossible, and anything less abrupt than the killing bar on a classic mousetrap will entail a period of suffering, from seconds to minutes to hours. Thus the last chapter deals with genetic methods. The scariest is the gene drive. Scientists working on this have figured out how to "fix" the genes in a female mouse so she will have only female offspring. Ordinarily, releasing a lot of such mice is self-limiting, and won't eradicate them. But the gene drive somehow guarantees that all her daughters will have the same trait. Thus, any male mice remaining will get older and older, as few males get born, and eventually none. A generation later, the oldest females die, and Presto!, no mice. (At least, I think that is how it works. I may have something backwards. Anyway, they all eventually die out.)

Very late in the book, the author writes of a farmer who has a more phlegmatic attitude: Do your best to keep from spilling food all around, and live with a little "shrinkage", just as stores know they can't eliminate all shoplifting, but reduce it as much as they think reasonable, and adjust to it.

Animals don't know they are breaking human laws. I suspect if they could know somehow, they wouldn't care. After all, they were here first. We're the invaders, breaking "their" laws! The cynic's Golden Rule applies: Them that has the gold, makes the rules.

A food book to put you off your feed

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, food, history

On occasion I eat alone. When I do, I read while eating. If you do the same, I suggest you accompany your meal with something other than The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat, by Matt Siegel.

The book gets into the background of many—but by no means all—different kinds of foods, from pies, to the ubiquitous corn ("maize" across the pond), honey, and nightshades such as potatoes and tomatoes. (Fun fact, not from this book: you can cut a plug from a potato and graft a tomato plant into the hole; put the combined plant in a large container or raised bed with loose soil, and you'll have a harvest above ground all summer, and below ground in the fall.) However, the background the book gets into leans strongly toward the unpleasant bits, such as the amount of bee parts you are likely to ingest with your honey, or the relationship between "holiday season" feasting and the gluttonous "conspicuous consumption" debaucheries hosted by medieval and earlier "nobles". "Turducken" is a modern, pale shadow of the squab-pullet-goose-lamb-hog barbecues that were accompanied by inedible "desserts" garnished with gold dust.

Remember the nursery rhyme about "four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie"? Today, pies are mainly desserts, with flaky crusts you actually enjoy eating. Pies used to be quickly-baked meat-and-veggie concoctions (again, the chicken pot pies I hated as a child are a pale shadow), with very heavy crusts that were either thrown away or used as makeshift plates. 

It is a bit interesting to learn how many products, including a huge number that have nothing to do with food, are made from or include corn or corn oil or corn starch. But then we read of the back-and-forth "recommendations" of various authorities about eggs, or meats, or almost anything (today it'll kill you; two years later, it's superfood); all have a germ of truth, but little useful guidance.

Our ancestors survived all kinds of noxious things. The plants we eat, of course, don't "want" to be eaten, so they produce insecticides and other chemicals to deter herbivory. We call them spices. Animals also don't want to be eaten, but they tend to fight back more directly, although, for example, the puffer fish and other sea "foods" that contain tetrodotoxin are deadly to eat. We can survive a lot, and we thrive. I remember being told the difference between an American mother and an Italian mother. The one said, "Eat this, it's good for you," and the other says, "Eat it, it's good!" Is it good? Eat it.

Aaand, that's plenty, because I frankly don't recommend this book. The author writes well enough, but I wouldn't want to invite him for dinner.

Volcanoes, more common than you might guess

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, volcanology, volcanoes

My uncle, a geologist and geology professor, had a "volcano fund". He was ready, on short notice, to go wherever a volcano was erupting, to see it and study it. I have since learned that his fund was really just for "interesting volcanoes", or else he'd have seldom been at home. At any one time, at least twenty volcanoes are actively erupting, more than thirty have erupted within the prior week or month, and more than forty are considered to be "in continuous eruption status", according to the Current Eruptions site of the Smithsonian.

This map from the website shows the volcanoes in that status as of December 9, 2021

The symbol in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is for Kilauea in Hawaii, which erupted continually for 36 years, ending in 2018, and then started up again after a two year lull. The symbol near Africa is for the volcano Cumbre Vieja on La Palma in the Canary Islands, which erupted for 85 days, ending Dec. 13, 2021. It is considered in current eruption status because seismic rumblings haven't yet settled down, and it could erupt again in the near (very near) future.

At the peak of its eruption, the Cumbre Vieja volcano was amazingly active, as seen here. I think my uncle would have gone there, and perhaps stayed for most of the 85 days.

Whenever the map above is next updated, there is likely to be a new symbol for the eruption off Tonga that began just a day or two ago. It will be between the symbol at Hawaii and the next one to the southwest.

I learned much of the above from reading Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond by Robin George Andrews. This book surveys several kinds of volcanoes on Earth, including the largest of them all, totally hidden from view, that is the 40,000-mile-long system of mid-Ocean ridges. These are the "spreading centers" of plate tectonics, where bloops of magma are burped from the central crevasses of the ridge system to form "pillow lavas", and magma that cools against the sides of the world-circling slit below the crevasses forms sheet lava, which is brand-new oceanic crust.

At the opposite ends of the major plates, oceanic crust either dips below continental crust, such as off Japan and South America, or pushes one chunk of continental crust against another, raising mountains in between, such as north-moving India forcing up the Himalayas and the nearby mountain belts, which are still rising. The "ring of fire" around the Pacific Ocean is the volcanic expression of magma formed from the upper part of down-thrust oceanic crust and its burden of sediments, deposited during the tens of millions of years that the crust was crossing the ocean from the spreading center to the subduction trench.

The author doesn't dwell on the different kinds of volcanoes and their eruption styles to any great extent. That is a good subject for a different book. Rather, he aims to show how volcanoes are ubiquitous not only on Earth, but all over the Solar System. In many cases, such as the Moon and Mars, the heat engine inside the body has shut off, and the lava fields are old, very old. While there is a little evidence that tiny volcanic eruptions might be continuing on the Moon, the dark lava fields that form the "seas" (and the face of the Man in the Moon) are more than a billion years old.

He does spend a chapter on a curious volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai, which is currently the only active carbonatite volcano on Earth. Carbonatite lava, a combination of lime and the silicates that form more ordinary lava, is less hot (only about 550°C or 1,000°F) than the "fast" lava at Kilauea, which is more than 1,100°C or 2,100°F. You still can't swim in it!

Out among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, however, one finds cryovolcanoes that erupt warm (and sometimes downright freezing-cold) salt water. You might be able to swim there, as long as you can survive the surrounding vacuum! The "lava" erupting on Jupiter's moon Io is hotter stuff, or rather, several kinds of hotter stuff. Some is mostly molten sulfur, propelled by sulfur dioxide gas, with a temperature of a few hundred degrees. More "earthly" silicate lavas are also found there, with temperatures ranging up to 1,300°C (2,400°F), equal to the hottest eruptions on Earth.

What keeps Io hot? It is equal in size to the Moon, which has long been cold and dead (or very nearly so). Io zips around immense Jupiter every 42½ hours, and is in a resonant orbit with the next two moons, Europa and Ganymede, which have orbital periods of 85 and 172 hours. While all three (and the fourth major moon, Callisto) have orbits that are very nearly circular, as they swing by one another, tidal forces flex the moons. Io's crust rises ten meters or more each time, a few times weekly, causing internal friction that keeps it boiling hot and makes it the driest known body in the solar system. The smaller tides on the other moons seem to have kept them warm enough to have liquid oceans up to 50 miles deep beneath icy crusts. Europa in particular has a crazy-quilt surface that shows it is still active.

One very interesting (and reassuring) chapter describes the supervolcano known as Yellowstone. Or, according to the author, "former supervolcano". Yellowstone and Kilauea share this characteristic: both sit atop mantle plumes, which are apparently stable features of Earth's mantle, dredging up material from an area nearly as deep as the core-mantle boundary, and depositing it atop the crust. There are about twelve plumes known, and the one under Hawaii is the most active at present. As the Pacific plate moves along, the plume pops through from time to time ("time" meaning a million years or so), to produce a new Hawaiian island. The chain of islands and former islands (seamounts) stretches all the way to the Aleutian Trench off Alaska. 

As the North American plate moves along, the Yellowstone plume does something similar. There is a chain of old calderas stretching at least as far as Idaho, and possibly much farther. The author thinks the current round of Yellowstone volcanism ended more than half a million years ago, and if the plume busts through again, a couple of hundred miles to the east, it will have some pretty tough, old continental crust to punch through. It may instead just "plate" material against the bottom of that section of crust for a dozen million years, which will gradually raise the elevation of the northern plains. Just wait about 350,000 generations and we'll see what happens!

These are just tidbits from the flood of information in this book. When I saw the book's title, I thought it would have a lot more sensational stuff to say about Yellowstone. I didn't consider that the main title is two words. But they are apropos: Volcanoes are indeed super! They keep the planet interesting, and their role in releasing heat from below, and also gases such as water and carbon dioxide, moderate the atmosphere and oceans in favor of most living things, at a tragic cost to a smaller number of living things that happen to be "too close" when an eruption begins. 

Is Omicron the new Cowpox?

 kw: medical musings, pandemic, omicron, delta, sars-cov2, covid-19, omicold

These data from Worldometer show Covid-19 cases and deaths from about Memorial Day 2021 to today, January 5, 2022, for the US as a whole. The scale lines on the left represent 250,000 and 500,000 cases per day. Those on the right represent 2,000 and 4,000 deaths per day. The solid lines are 7-day running averages.

Wave 5, mainly from the Delta variant, peaked at about 167,600 cases on Sept. 2, and just over 2,000 deaths on and around Sept. 18, 2021, 2½ weeks later.

Wave 6, transitioning from Delta to Omicron, recently rose through 615,000 daily cases around the turn of the year, but the recent death rate is about 1,200 per day.

Clearly, the Omicron variant is quite different from Delta. The Wave 6 death rate is hard to estimate with the case rates rising so rapidly, but it appears to be in the range 0.1% to 0.25% of known cases. That is very similar to the average death rates for recent strains of influenza. 

The Wave 5 death rate was 1.2% of known cases. A complicating factor is that between 25% and 40% of the cases in Wave 6 are Delta, and it is likely that most of the deaths can be attributed to Delta. I sincerely hope so, because that would mean that Omicron is less than 1/10th as deadly as Delta, maybe less than 1/100th. It may be no deadlier than getting a cold!

It may take a few more weeks for Wave 5 to crest, if it hasn't already. Prior waves took two to three months to crest. A cautious forecast puts the crest in mid-February, with a peak rate of 1.5-2 million new cases per day. The Omicron variant could infect half the US population by the middle of March. If it infects less than that, it will most likely be because the mRNA agents being touted as vaccines provide robust cross-variant protection. About 2/3 (62%) of American adults are "fully vaccinated" (I don't count "booster" shots as adding anything useful), and another 15-20% have had at least one injection. Another thirty million (9%) have recovered from Covid-19; they were "vaccinated by God." That doesn't leave very many "unvaccinated" Americans. This implies something very hopeful!

A little history: The word "vaccine" traces back to the Latin word vaccinus, meaning "cow". The word "vaccination" was coined in 1800 by Edward Jenner to describe his method of injecting people with the virus that causes cowpox, and this protected them from the much deadlier disease smallpox.

Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins calls the current variant "Omicold," saying its effect is similar to a common cold caused by several other coronaviruses that have been circulating for many years. The Omicron variant, being similar to the Alpha and Delta variants, but much less virulent, is likely to be a "cowpox clone", philosophically speaking. I know twelve people, including my son and his wife, who have contracted Covid-19 during the past month. I presume they all caught the Omicron variant, because all have told me it is like a bad cold: a day or two or three of mostly bed rest, with lots of fluids, had them up and about again, and in another day or so their symptoms were over.

I pray that this pandemic has nearly run its course. The Omicron variant is likely to break the back of more damaging variants. Only time will tell if it will also break the back of the totalitarian impulse shown by many in government who have assumed draconian powers by taking advantage of our fears.

The billion-decade pie recipe

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geology, cosmology, astronomy, nucleosynthesis, cooking

This chart was mentioned in How to Make an Apple Pie From Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, From the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang, by Harry Cliff. The book's title, indeed its raison d'être, is a humorous aside by Carl Sagan on an episode of Cosmos: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider, specifically the experiment/detector called LHCb. The "b" means "beauty", for the Beauty Quark, which most physicists now call the Bottom Quark (the "t" and "b" quarks were initially called "truth" and "beauty"). The short answer to "What is 'scratch'?" would be, "Something smaller than a quark." Quarks are what we call the (possibly) indivisible bits that make up protons and neutrons, which with electrons, form atoms.

I think of the book as a microscope that uses higher and higher powers to probe the makeup of the universe. Dr. Cliff actually began his investigation by obtaining an apple pie and pyrolizing a few grams. That gave him a rough estimate of the phases present, gas/vapor, liquid, and solid. The final product of pyrolysis is charcoal, although he found later that he didn't cook it hot enough; his charcoal still had some volatile stuff in it. It matters little: the end product was mainly carbon, the "gateway element" to producing the entire suite of elements from hydrogen and helium. The chart above shows the various "ovens" in which the elements were made.

Much of the book is history, the history of the discovery of the chemical elements during the Enlightenment, then the discovery of subatomic particles a bit more than a century ago. Although I've read the stories again and again (because writers seem compelled to cover it all every time), I find it enjoyable to rehearse the way alchemy became chemistry, and experiments with "cathode rays" and pitchblende came together to discover that atoms (from "a-tomos", "un-cuttable") are actually cuttable, and the "easy" sub-parts are further cuttable.

The book skips over the range of magnification available to a light microscope. There is nothing about the plant cells in the apples, or the microstructure of a perfectly baked crust. We go from some burnt pie right to atoms, which can only be distinguished when the magnification exceeds 10,000,000X, the magnification of this STM image. The best electron microscopes are hard pressed to deliver magnifications greater than 1,000,000X. Thus STM, or Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, has to be used. The white spheres here are atoms of lead, on a silicon surface.

The reason for this omission is soon apparent. The author's quarry is smaller compared to an atom of lead than that atom is to a sports arena.

An ordinary light microscope "maxes out" when viewing items smaller than half a micrometer (or micron, or µ). An E. coli bacterium is about 2µx6µ. The photons of green light, with a wavelength of 0.55µ, have an energy of 2.25 eV. One eV, or one electron volt, is the energy of an electron that has "fallen" across the gap between an anode and a cathode when the voltage is 1V. Photon energies in the range 1.75 eV to 3.1 eV are used by the retinas of our eyes to detect "light". Things smaller than about 0.5µ, or 500 nm (nanometers), can only be studied using "light" of a shorter wavelength. And here is the important principle: shorter wavelength means higher energy per photon (or other particle).

Why is it hard to "see" an atom? It is because they are so much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The lead atoms in the image above are about 0.35 nm across. That's 0.00035µ. The silicon atoms in the surface below them are much smaller, with an interatomic spacing of 0.078nm. An electron microscope with beam voltage of a million volts uses electrons with energy of 1 MeV (million eV), and a wavelength of 0.0012 nm. However, such an electron beam simply blows off most of the electrons from the atoms you want to look at, while a more "modest" beam of about 16,000 volts, and a useful magnification of a million, can produce images without causing total disruption. The STM technique sidesteps this by using atomic forces to get higher-resolution information, with a limit in the range of 10 to 20 million X magnification.

When the biggest constituents of atoms were discovered, electrons, protons, and neutrons, they were soon found to be a whole lot smaller than the atoms. One analogy states that an atom of hydrogen magnified to the size of a stadium (a magnification of two trillion) would be "seen" to be an electron cloud with a speck at its center the size of a small pea, perhaps 6mm diameter: the proton.

How do you "see" a proton? Since it is about 50,000 times smaller than the atom, you would need 50,000 times the energy. At a minimum, 16,000 eV x 50,000 or 800,000,000 eV, just under a billion eV (GeV). Now, let's think a minute. A million-volt power supply needs a lot of insulation. In radio, the rule of thumb is that in dry air a spark will jump about a centimeter per 10,000V. So a million-volt potential can jump at least a meter. I remember seeing a picture of an early million-volt electron microscope. It was eight feet high. What do you do with a billion volts? Such a voltage can jump a few miles. Indeed, lightning has voltages in the billion-to-ten-billion-volt range.

Here it gets fun. Particle accelerators finesse the situation by using magnets and rhythmic pulses to take a bunch (that's the scientific term) of electrons or other charged particles from an "easy" energy of 10,000 eV to higher and higher energies. It's sort of like swatting a tetherball again and again to make it go around faster and faster, except these "tetherballs" are soon going 99% of the speed of light, or more.

When I worked at Cal Tech (as a machinist), I worked part of the time in a room with a dismantled synchrotron about 30 feet in diameter. Energetic electrons or protons lose energy when you turn them to go around in a circle, so the more energy you want, the bigger the circle has to be. The LHC, where Dr. Cliff works, is about 8.5 miles in diameter. It produces beams of protons with energies that exceed 10 trillion eV. It also runs them in both directions, and steers them into head-on collisions, so you get enormous penetration. All that to "see" the insides of particles a few thousand times smaller than protons, which is what it took to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson (but not see into its insides…if it has any).

Chapters and chapters earlier, the author discussed where the atoms came from. The chart that begins this article shows where. Things we can eat, and we ourselves, are primarily CHON, that is, Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. Hydrogen makes up 75% of the weight of the matter in the universe. Or, at least, of the matter that is either visible or potentially visible because it can respond to electromagnetic energy ("light"). We need to ignore dark matter and dark energy here, because we still have no idea how to interact with them. Most carbon and nitrogen are made in "dwarf" stars, main sequence stars smaller than 1.25 times the mass of the Sun. The jury is still out on whether the white dwarf stars that result from the demise of a main sequence dwarf star have to be blasted apart to release carbon and nitrogen, or if the red giant phase releases enough to amount for what we see in the sky. Most oxygen, at least most of it that gets into the interstellar medium, is forged during supernova explosions. So at an atomic level, that's where the basic ingredients of the apple pie arise.

The reason for using big atom smashers like LHC to dig into the protons for their smaller bits (quarks and gluons, mainly), and into the quantum fields that modulate (or create) their properties such as mass, is that we aren't really back to "scratch" yet. By the end of the book, if we have understood it all (I am not quite there yet), we have the beginnings of matter traced back to the end of the first one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. 

Does that sound pretty good? Not to a cosmologist! The Big Bang is thought to have begun with everything we might call space and time located within a radius of about the Planck Length, which is about 1.6x10^-35 meters. The initial "Bang" got rolling in Planck Time, or about 5.4x10^-44 seconds. Let's just call it 10^-45 sec., and compare it to a trillionth, or 10^-12 sec. There are about 10³³ Planck Times in a trillionth of a second; a little matter of a billion trillion trillion of them. A lot happened that we will be hard pressed to probe. The author describes the ultimate particle accelerator, wrapped around the center of the galaxy (where it has a chance of being gravitationally stable), with a diameter of several thousand light years. The biggest we have a chance of building might wrap the Earth at the equator. The particle bunches would circle the planet seven times per second, so we have long enough lives to do experiments with it, with energies as high as perhaps 50,000 TeV. That's still a long way from the Planck Energy, but it might be close enough to be "interesting".

Future beings with very long lifetimes—because each experiment takes a million years or more—might probe the Planck Length using the Galactic Collider. But beyond a certain level of energy, the only output of the experiment will be tiny black holes. According to Hawking's principle, such a black hole would soon explode into a shower of energetic particles, but they would carry no information about what was going on inside, so the fancy machine would simply be a huge fireworks generator.

The book ends with a description for beginning from scratch, to the point where matter exists, including a middling size planet with apple trees and wheat fields and such. Then it ends with a pretty good recipe for making an apple pie. There ain't a quark anywhere that can explain the great taste of fresh apple pie.

Give a dog a voice and she will use it

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, dogs, speech therapy

Meet Stella, subject of the book by Christina Hunger, How Stella Learned to Talk: The Groundbreaking Story of the World's First Talking Dog.

Ms Hunger, a speech therapist who works with pre-verbal toddlers and autistic children, got Stella as a puppy several years ago. She noticed that Stella's gestures and sounds were similar to the things a young child or other non-verbal person will do to communicate.

She frequently uses AAC (Alternative and Augmentative Communication) devices with her clients to enable them to begin speaking when it seems that the usual abilities aren't (yet) working. She bought four recordable "speak-back" buttons and placed them where Stella would go to request to go outside, or play, or eat. It took the dog a few weeks to first try pushing one of the buttons. During those weeks, whenever Christina would take her outside, for example, Christina would say, "Outside" and push the button that also said aloud, "Outside". Similarly for the others. Once Stella figured out what the buttons were for, she began using them.

Over time, Christina and her husband added more buttons, until they decided to attach them to a single board in one place, so Stella could use them in combination if needed (such as "outside" "play") without walking from place to place. It took Stella some time to get used to the new arrangement, but then she took off. The board shown here has 25 word buttons and one with the phrase "love you". That was a year or two ago. I think the number of words Stella can now use has grown beyond 40.

Throughout the book the author makes it clear how much repetition and patience are needed. She also discusses speech therapy issues that are common to Stella and the toddlers she works with, such as the frustration a child (or dog) experiences when she wants to communicate something more clearly. Sometimes Stella has used word combinations to express a thought not on the board, such as "water bad" when the bowl was empty; "empty" hadn't been supplied (this is my illustration, I couldn't find the place in the book where this first occurred, and the book has no index). Little children do the same thing, particularly those with an AAC that they are outgrowing. We learn that children pick up words faster than we expect, so she is always ready to add many words to a child's AAC. AAC devices for children can often use thousands of words. Time will tell how many Stella learns!

Christina's blog is here, and there are dozens of videos on YouTube about Stella's accomplishments.

The Man Who Shaved the Universe

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, philosophy of science

I was a developer of scientific software for forty years. One bit of my "Coder's Credo" is, "A complex system that works began as a simple system that works." In practical terms, this meant that I had to first "get the science working", which was usually simple, at least conceptually. The complications that had to be added all derived from the user interface (making the software usable for humans) and the data interface (coupling it to the database or knowledge base). I built my career on a minimalist approach: Add new stuff only when there is a clear advantage.

Millennia ago, the Universe seemed simple compared to the Earth. In the night sky, stars were thought of as distant lamps stuck to a "firmament". The Sun, Moon, and five rather bright "wanderers" (in Greek, πλανόδιοι, which became "planets") were a complication that most folks ignored. But certain curious ones began to theorize; they wanted to figure out how the sky worked.

Fast-forward to a mere 21-22 centuries ago. The prevailing theory of the sky, at least in Europe and north Africa, was a nest of concentric, "crystalline" spheres. The outer sphere held the "fixed stars", and the seven wanderers were each ensconced in its own sphere. Over time, observations of the motions of these "planets" showed something odd: they didn't all march across the face of the "fixed stars" at a steady rate, and some looped back on themselves. Also, the Moon's apparent size changed a little. By about 150 AD, a system of epicycles attached to the spheres had been developed to better model the movements of the planets, including the Moon and Sun.

This illustration from an Arabic document of the 1300's shows the epicycles needed to model the motion of Mercury, shown at four times during a particular year. This image is from Alamy (a commercial site), where its epigraph says,

"Ibn al-Shatir's model for the appearances of Mercury, showing the multiplication of epicycles using the Tusi couple, thus eliminating the Ptolemaic eccentrics and equant."

This shows that Arabian astronomers went beyond Ptolemy. At its height in the first half millennium of the Christian era, about 80 epicycles were needed for a "good" model, and the notion of "crystalline" spheres was politely ignored. Here, I count six epicycles needed to produce motions for Mercury that matched astronomical observations.

We all know that Copernicus tried to simplify the Solar system by recognizing the Sun as its center. However, he also needed epicycles to model planetary motions accurately, because he thought all orbits were perfect circles centered on the Sun…or, at least, the rotational center of a cluster of circular epicycles followed a circle about the Sun.

Leaving behind circles in favor of ellipses, Kepler, using Tycho Brahe's data for positions, produced a greatly simplified model of the Solar system, such as that seen here (this one leaves out Saturn, at twice the distance as Jupiter).

This particular image also shows the orbits of several major asteroids and three comets. Comet Halley's ellipse extends to 35 AU, seven times as far as Jupiter. The orbit that just brushes past Jupiter belongs to Comet Kopff, one we never hear of because it is visible only with a telescope at least 4" in diameter.

The older tradition of natural philosophers, exemplified by Ptolemy, resulted in models of natural phenomena with steadily increasing complexity. Something happened about the time that Ibn al-Shatir began writing his astronomical manuals, that began to turn the study of nature from natural philosophy to science as we know it.

Here I turn to a better authority on science history, Johnjoe McFadden. In his book Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe, Professor McFadden traces the progressive simplification of science and scientific theories, based on a 14^th Century meme we call Occam's Razor. This is expressed in several ways, as it was by William of Ockham in the early 1300's. I like, "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity." This statement does not disallow complexity, it discourages unneeded complexity. Einstein's version is, "Make things as simple as needed, but no simpler," which looks at the matter from the other end.

Either way one looks at it, the principle known as Occam's Razor slices away unnecessary encrustations from scientific models. Before reading Life is Simple, that's about all I knew of the matter. I didn't even know that William, born in Ockham, lived in the early 1300's, about 700 years ago. This was just before the era of Geoffrey Chaucer (Canterbury Tales), who was born just a few years before William of Ockham died. The "English" of the day was Middle English, when the use of "thee" and "thou" and "doest" for "does", still found in the King James Bible, were at their height. But William wrote in Latin, which requires just a tad more translation than Middle English.

Neither did I know how the Razor grew and spread among the literate people of Europe and the Middle East. By the time of Kepler, 300 years later, and Newton, a generation later, simplification of theories was accepted throughout the world of the Enlightenment. The thread of the Razor through history is followed in all its excursions, leading to its dominance today.

It has become the ambition of many scientists to determine a Theory of Everything, which can be expressed on a T-shirt as a single equation that unifies not just the Weak and Strong and Electromagnetic forces, but also Gravity and Quantum Mechanics. Such a theory would not be a theory that "explains" everything, for a corollary to the Razor is, "That which explains everything explains nothing." The prolific clusters of epicycles in cosmology are an example. The more cycles you add, to account for refinements in astronomical observations, the less you actually know about them. The laws of orbital areas derived by Kepler, and the three laws of motion of Newton, as modified by Einstein, allow us to calculate exactly where each planet, moon, asteroid, comet, and artificial satellite is going, for decades or centuries into the future, and where they were at any time in the past. The calculations are tedious, but not difficult, and modern computing machinery shoulders the load of the tedious part.

Sadly, many (most?) modern theorists have gotten bogged down in String Theory. Somehow, these mathematical models require calculations in at least 10 or 11 dimensions (some versions, as many as 26 dimensions). None of the string theories so far proffered can be tested experimentally, and the number of possible string theories is a gigantic number with about 500 digits. And we thought 80 epicycles are too many! At the moment, this is a lot more "hair" than the Razor can manage to tame.

I was quite enthralled by the stories, the history, of how modern science developed once it was freed from the cosmogony of Aristotle and Ptolemy, which somehow became the foundation of Roman Catholic cosmology (for the curious: cosmogony is about "what is there", and cosmology is about "how it goes"). In effect, the Razor removed God's hand from the tiller of the Universe, at least so far as science is concerned. William of Ockham was also far ahead of his time in political understanding, which is probably a consequence of his revolutionary understanding of nature: he insisted that rulers' legitimate power came through the consent of everyone. His understanding of natural rights is an embryo of the Bill of Rights in our Constitution.

While I recommend this book for its historical perspective, I have a few quibbles about statements made by the author when he stepped outside his area of expertise, which is molecular genetics. Those who think my objections are TMI can stop here. What follows touches on three items that surprised me the most:

• On p 271, discussing the Planck Law for the spectrum of a heated blackbody, he writes that such bodies "emit light in a narrow band that depends only on the black body's temperature." Not quite. The actual spectrum of a blackbody (note the absence of a space) covers all wavelengths, and the width-at-half-height of the spectrum is about 2.8:1. For example, for a blackbody at a temperature of 7,250K (~12,600°F), the half-height spectrum ranges from 240 nm to 680 nm. The peak of the spectrum for this temperature is at 400 nm. The location of peak radiation depends on temperature, and the relative shape of the spectrum follows. An analogy about whacking a piano and somehow getting only a single note is quite bogus. The range of "notes" so emitted is strongest over more than an octave (18 half-tones), and there is some resonance from every string on the "piano".
• On p 293, about symmetry, "…time symmetry implies energy conservation, translational symmetry implies conservation of momentum, and Newton's third law, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, is a consequence of rotational symmetry." About the last phrase: Where did that come from? Newton's third law is equivalent to time symmetry, and has nothing specific to do with rotation.
• On p 327, regarding the Bayesian likelihood of a particular combination of numbers being thrown in ten tosses of a 60-sided die, he states correctly that this is the tenth power of 60, or 60¹⁰, but then he evaluates it as 600 million to one. Hardly! 60¹⁰ = 6.05 x 10¹⁷, or 600 million times about a billion, or 600 quadrillion. Really! Don't any of his editors and readers know enough math to punch this out on a calculator?

That's enough of that. I can't blame him too much. Although I strive to be a generalist, I admit I know woefully little about molecular genetics, at least compared to Prof. McFadden. So, if I ever write a book that happens to wander into that arena, I'll see if he's willing to give it a read, and after he stops laughing, make the odd correction here or there.

Mathematics – behind the scenes of everything

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, applications

After a forty-year career as a scientific programmer, AKA "coder", I can look back to see that I was primarily a working mathematician. The scientists whose methods I embodied in computer code were, of course, having the computer "do the math", but I frequently had to correct their math. They were all brilliant, but one cannot always expect someone whose life has been devoted to chemical engineering or mineralogy or seismic analysis to have kept up their math skills over the prior couple of decades. On the other hand, I greatly enjoyed calculus and other "mid level" math operations, so I was "up" on what they needed and could make sure they used the math properly. I don't claim to understand perhaps 90% of the higher level math in the current literature. But I understand enough that I could make a career of it. 

In all that time, I developed only a few new methods, and published only a single peer-reviewed article, to be found at Science Direct. The abstract is open. Sadly, the article is behind Elsevier's paywall. But the key takeaway is this: I had to develop new methods to numerically solve the very stiff differential equations used by physical chemists studying the conversion of organic grunge (they call it kerogen) into crude oil. Relevant to the current book, I used methods called "convergence acceleration", which were developed before crude oil was a thing. In particular, one method was first used to study stresses in earthen dams, and another was used by Leonard Euler in the mid-1700's, for a project I don't now recall. I borrowed a couple of related methods from a theoretical dissertation by a colleague at my graduate school.

What's the Use?: How Mathematics Shapes Everyday Life, by Ian Stewart, a retired Professor of Mathematics who has at least five times my expertise, is based on a notion first expressed by Eugene Wigner in a 1960 article titled The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

Wigner was not remarking on math's broad effectiveness. That isn't hard to understand. Rather, mathematicians and others who use lots of math find that methods, perhaps derived for specific problems, or perhaps for their theoretical beauty, are found to be useful in realms so remote that it seems miraculous. As the author points out, some say, "The Universe must be made of mathematics!"

The book starts off with a brief historical survey, reaching back far beyond Leonard Euler. However, Euler is responsible for a breakthrough in complex analysis that led to a formula, called Euler's Identity, which displays the essential unity of all mathematics:

The five symbols, here related by two operators (the "+" and the "="), are combined into an astonishing expression. Let's unpack them, from right to left:

• 0, zero: Before the year 1200AD, the zero as a placeholder had been in use for about 500 years, but was not yet accepted as a number, outside of India and China. Only in the 1700's (in Europe) were zero and the negative numbers accepted as numbers, making subtraction, for example, immensely more useful.
• 1, one: The first of the "natural numbers" or "counting numbers" is the original number.
• π, pi (pronounced "pee" in Greek, but most of us say "pie"): This is the ancient symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Millennia of effort to "square the circle" were based on the belief that π is a rational number (one that can be expressed as the ratio of two natural numbers; 335/113 is a useful approximation, but is not exact). Only in the 1700's was it proven that π is an irrational number, which is expressed by a string of digits that never ends and never repeats. Being related to the circle means it is the basis of trigonometry, but that is only the beginning!
• i, the "imaginary" number: This is the square root of minus one. It has no place in any of the hierarchy of "number line" numbers: natural numbers, integers, rational numbers, and irrational numbers, which together constitute the "real" numbers. The combination of a real number and some real-number multiple of i is a complex number. Complex numbers became useful when it was realized that they represent coordinates in the plane.
• e, Euler's number: This was originally the base of natural logarithms, which show up in the solutions to many calculus problems. It is named for Euler, but was actually assigned by John Napier a century earlier, when he developed natural logarithms. Its value is approximately 2.7182818285… e and π are the first two irrational numbers to be proven to be transcendental, which has an esoteric meaning related to polynomial derivations. Many (infinitely many) irrational numbers are the solutions to polynomial equations, but most (more infinitely many!) are not. However, they are hard to find. Natural logarithms and their inverse, exponential expressions, are found everywhere in both calculus and complex analysis.

The hard part, which seems magical to many, is to evaluate e^ix, where x is some real number, and then to show that when x = π, the expression's value is -1. Endnote 50 in What's the Use? is a very short proof that exponentiation with i becomes a rotation, meaning a trigonometric combination: e^ix = Cos(x) - i*Sin(x). When x = π, the Sin part equals 0 and the Cos part = -1. This is the connection to π.

Why is this important? Much trigonometric algebra is much easier to carry out in this form. The operations automatically keep track of all the Sin and Cos functions that are embedded in the exponential expressions. Electrical engineering, frequency analysis, and a host of other disciplines would be either impossible or a great deal more difficult without complex analysis using exponential expressions.

What does this have to do with everyday life? Cell phone communications use digital decomposition and reconstruction of audio signals. Getting the digital signals transmitted efficiently requires some high-powered math. Turning a song into an MP3 file, so it takes up 1/10th or 1/20th the space on your hard drive (or phone memory) is a several-step mathematical exercise. Doing the same with a visual image to produce a JPG file is similar, and the five steps, drawn from five quite diverse realms of mathematics, are described—in brief!—in Chapter 10, "Smile, Please!".

Before getting to that point, however, the author discusses efforts to allot voting districts "fairly", describing several definitions of "fair", along with at least some hints of a proof that no matter what you may call "fair", it can't be done perfectly. He discusses the relationship between a problem involving seven bridges and two islands, that is actually insoluble, but is related to equitable ways to allocate kidneys for transplants, which is soluble. The way encryption works in your web browser (and email, I hope!) and your phone is based on "trap door functions" which are, of course, mathematical in nature. He also shows ways being developed to make much stronger trap doors to cope with the immense computing power that quantum computing just might deliver. Then, we have Einstein's theories of relativity (there are two, Special and General): both are needed to get GPS to function accurately, in addition to several other realms of mathematical operations.

There are 13 chapters showing that math is hidden behind a great deal of what goes on in the world. Civilization is impossible without it. In case this fills you with dread, remember that you don't have to be an automotive engineer to drive a car, but we do need some automotive engineers to have cars to drive. Thus, not all of us have to understand higher math to use our GPS, cell phone, or microwave cooker, but there need to be some pretty bright mathematicians out there to make these things work.

Don't shy away from this book because it is about mathematics. The author's writing is very readable, and he does his best to help us glimpse the way some of these things work. One book won't make much of a dent in your struggles with algebra, or calculus, or whatever. But it will yield an appreciation for the unreasonably diverse ways almost any mathematical development could be used for practical things later on.