Second Breakfast

I was listening to NPR’s Science Friday this week, and Joe Palca was reporting on the recent Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics. During the segment, Palca repeatedly felt the need to apologize for the complexity of the subject at hand, and almost seemed embarrassed by it. After about ten minutes of this I was pretty annoyed, and penned this missive to the editorial staff of the program.

I always look forward to SciFri — its one of my favorite parts of the NPR lineup, and I happened to tune in during Joe Palca’s segment on the recent Nobel laureates. While I usually enjoy Joe’s coverage, I found his repeated need to apologize for the complex nature of the prize winners’ research project rather annoying and insulting. Several times during the interview Palca felt the need to explain that “this is complicated stuff and I don’t understand it, so its okay if you don’t”.

While its true that a detailed understanding of cutting-edge science requires significant expertise, I think its the job of journalists and scientists alike to work to explain these matters in terms that are meaningful to non-experts (Brian Greene at Columbia does a great job at this). What bothered me most about this segment was almost an implied feeling of “science is hard” (a la the famous talking Barbie “Math is hard!”). In the anti-intellectual climate created by the current political scene in Washington, I find this distressing.

The scientific achievements of Nobel prize winners represent important advances in our species’ understanding of our universe, a universe which is turning out to be more complex, more weird, and more wonderful than anyone could have imagined. NPR reporters should give a little more credit to their listeners. These achievements, and the amazing complexity that these Nobel laureates have mastered, requires no apology whatsoever.

I have not read anything by Bryson before, but he is apparently well-regarded as a travel writer. So in a strange way it is not surprising to have him pen this book, which attempts to tell, in about 500 pages, the entire history of our universe, solar system, planet, and all life on it — mostly from the point of view of the science and scientists that have over the past several hundred years in particular helped us to understand the rather insignificant place that we occupy in an increasingly vast and strange universe. Instead of traveling in place, Bryson takes us on a whirlwind tour of time (our time), and the very wierd and tenuous journey of life on this planet, and our understanding of it.

I like reading popular science and “history of ideas” books. While this is Bryson’s first attempt at science writing, I think it is quite successful, and Bryson is above all else a masterful stylist and humorist. In fact I suspect that it really takes a non-scientist to understand the story behind the science, and tell it in a way that preserves both the factual essence of the science and the human stories that always exist just under the covers of scientific activity. What you come away with most strongly is a sense of how utterly wrong (and confident in our wrongness) we have been about our understanding of the world, and how amazingly unpopular most of the correct (as far as we understand them) ideas have been when first proposed. Or, as Richard Feynman famously said: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.” Bryson draws upon some 250 “experts” in the reading that supports this book.

Although those literate in the sciences will probably find little new here, Bryson provides an extraordinary wealth of anecdote (for example, the rarest element on Earth is Francium [Fr] according to Bryson’s source who suggests that only twenty francium atoms exist in the earth at any given time [although a quick Google search suggests that Astatine [At] may be rarer, but there is still something like an ounce of Astatine extant in the earth’s crust at any given time]. Or the story of the Yellowstone park employees who went “hot-potting” in the warm pools at the park, and having left their flashlight behind, took a leap of faith right into a boiling pool, which none survived.

Many of Bryson’s quips are laugh-out-loud funny, particularly in the first two-thirds of the book. He tells about Thomas Midgley, Jr., an Ohio inventor with a penchant for inventing things with the most regrettably noxious side-effects. Midgely became famous as the inventor of leaded gasoline, which reduced engine knock, and in the process helped deliver tons and tons of lead into the environment and human nervous systems. Bryson writes:

Buoyed by the success of leaded gasoline, Midgely now turned to another technological problem of the age, refrigerators. [...] Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive, and safe to breathe. With an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs [..] which may ultimately prove to be just about the worst invention of the twentieth century.

Midgley never knew this because he died long before anyone realized how destructive CFCs were. His death itself was memorably unusual. After becoming crippled with polio, Midgley invented a contraption involving a series of motorized pulleys that automatically raised or turned him in bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the cords as the machine went into action and was strangled.

If you’re a fan of good science writing and enjoy dry, Python-esque humour, then you may enjoy Bryson’s foray into explaining just about everything there is.

We saw the Nova special by Greene based on his book on PBS recently, and I found his approach to communicating the complex and subtle ideas behind contemporary physics to non-scientists pretty effective (and he’s got a great, menschy-queer demeanor about him), so I thought it would be a worthwhile read. Greene is at least one million times smarter than anyone I know (although not as smart as Umberto Eco), but he comes across best as a passionate advocate of the science that he loves and advances as part of his work at Columbia University.

The book does a very good job communicating the essential ideas behind general and special relativity and quantum mechanics, the basic conflict between them, and how the development of string theory addresses these fundamental questions. Along the way he gives some great visualizations and metaphors that were for me novel and very helpful, and I’ve read a fair bit of popular science. For example, he uses this metaphor for talking about why time slows time for two observers as their relative velocity increases towards the speed of light — basically we can envision that, all other things being equal, that an observer “at rest” is moving through time at the speed of light. As one increases one’s velocity, one is robbing one’s momentum in time, and thus slowing down. For me that’s a really brilliant explanation that I’ve never heard before when talking about special relativity. Actually I think the earlier parts of the book are probably more accessible and effective: quantum mechanics and relativity have been around for a while and are relatively well-understood (as much as one can apparently really understand quantum mechanics), and the explanations are more straighforward. The string theory explanations get pretty subtle at times (although Greene of course makes his case well), and what worked best for me were the tools he provides about how to visualize multidimensional concepts using simplifying metaphors.

I always feel a little strange reading books about science — perhaps because I’m married to someone who practices science for a living, and I feel like “I’m just pretending to know about this stuff, its not like I understand the math”. However I think science literacy is in general an important thing to pursue, and the questions that string theory attempts to answer are as fundamental as you can imagine: what is the universe made of, why does it have the properties that we observe, and are there unifying underlying principles from which all of the variety that we experience emerges? That seems like something we should all be curious about.

If nothing else, I’m sure this stuff makes really good dinner party conversation.

Okay, this is really freaking creepy.

Yahoo! News - Mystery Martian ‘Carwash’ Helps Space Buggy

Tue Dec 21, 2:10 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - An unexplained phenomenon akin to a space-borne car wash has boosted the performance of one of the two U.S. rovers probing the surface of Mars, New Scientist magazine said on Tuesday.

It said something — or someone — had regularly cleaned layers of dust from the solar panels of the Mars Opportunity vehicle while it was closed down during the Martian night.

The cleaning had boosted the panels’ power output close to their maximum 900 watt-hours per day after at one stage dropping to 500 watt-hours because of the heavy Martian dirt.

By contrast, the power output of the solar panels of Mars Spirit — on a different part of the Red Planet — had dropped to just 400 watt-hours a day, clogged by the heavy dust.

“These exciting and unexplained cleaning events have kept Opportunity in really great shape,” the magazine quoted NASA (news - web sites) rover team leader Jim Erickson as saying.

Universe’s 6,000th birthday …

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1333008,00.html

Tim Radford
Friday October 22, 2004
The Guardian

Britain’s geologists are about to celebrate the fact that the universe is exactly 6,000 years old.

At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (below), who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation.

Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated that it began at 6pm on Saturday October 22, 4004 BC.

Actually, he put the date at October 23, and then pedantically realised that time must have begun the night before, because the Bible said that “the evening and the morning were the first day.”

The geologists selected the anniversary for a day-long conference on some of the fakes, frauds and hoaxes that have plagued geological and palaeontological research for centuries. “It’s not that we think Archbishop Ussher’s date was a fraud,” said Ted Nield, the society’s communications officer. “It’s just that it was spectacularly wrong.”

Dr Nield conceded, too, that in toasting the archbishop’s calculations the geologists were committing another error. More than 6,000 years have passed since 4004 BC. The symmetry is only apparent. The date is a mere numerological reflection. The real anniversary passed unnoticed, in 1997.