Sam Kean
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The famed tip on the Parker 51 was actually 96 percent ruthenium and 4 percent iridium. The company advertised the nibs as being made of super-durable “plathenium,” presumably to mislead competitors into thinking that expensive platinum was the key.
“which Remington turned around and printed anyway”: The text of the letter Twain sent to Remington (which the company printed verbatim) is as follows:
GENTLEMEN: Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the Type-Writer, for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe the machine, but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc., etc. I don’t like to write letters, and so I don’t want people to know I own this curiosity-breeding little joker.
Yours truly,
Saml. L. Clemens
15. An Element of Madness
“pathological science”: Credit for the phrase “pathological science” goes to chemist Irving Langmuir, who gave a speech about it in the 1950s. Two interesting notes on Langmuir: He was the younger, brighter colleague whose Nobel Prize and impudence at lunch might have driven Gilbert Lewis to kill himself (see chapter 1). Later in life, Langmuir grew obsessed with controlling the weather by seeding clouds—a muddled process that skirted awfully close to becoming a pathological science itself. Not even the great ones are immune.
In writing this chapter, I departed somewhat from Langmuir’s description of pathological science, which was rather narrow and legalistic. Another take on the meaning of pathological science comes from Denis Rousseau, who wrote a top-rate article called “Case Studies in Pathological Science” for American Scientist in 1992. However, I’m also departing from Rousseau, mostly to include sciences such as paleontology that aren’t as data driven as other, more famous cases of pathological science.
“Philip died at sea”: Philip Crookes, William’s brother, died on a vessel laying some of the first transatlantic cables for telegraph lines.
“supernatural forces”: William Crookes had a mystical, pantheistic, Spinozistic view of nature, in which everything partakes of “one sole kind of matter.” This perhaps explains why he thought he could commune with ghosts and spirits, since he was part of the same material. If you think about it, though, this view is quite odd, since Crookes made a name for himself discovering new elements—which by definition are different forms of matter!
“manganese and the megalodon”: For more details on the link between the megalodon and manganese, see Ben S. Roesch, who published an article evaluating how unfeasible it is to think that the megalodon survived in The Cryptozoology Review (what a word—“cryptozoology”!) in the autumn of 1998 and revisited the topic in 2002.
“The pathology started with the manganese”: In another strange link between the elements and psychology, Oliver Sacks notes in Awakenings that an overdose of manganese can damage the human brain and cause the same sort of Parkinson’s disease that he treated in his hospital. It’s a rare cause of Parkinson’s, to be sure, and doctors don’t quite understand why this element targets the brain instead of, like most toxic elements, going after other vital organs.
“a dozen African bull elephants”: The bull elephant calculation works as follows. According to the San Diego Zoo, the hugest elephant ever recorded weighed approximately 24,000 pounds. Humans and elephants are made of the same basic thing, water, so their densities are the same. To figure out the relative volume if humans had the appetite of palladium, we can therefore just multiply the weight of a 250-pound man by 900 and divide that number (225,000) by the weight of an elephant. That gives 9.4 elephants swallowed. But remember, that was the biggest elephant ever, standing thirteen feet at the shoulders. The weight of a normal bull elephant is closer to 18,000 pounds, which gives about a dozen swallowed.
“a better, more concise description of pathological science”: David Goodstein’s article on cold fusion was titled “Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion?” It appeared in the fall 1994 issue of the American Scholar.
16. Chemistry Way, Way Below Zero
“proved an easier thing to blame”: The theory that tin leprosy doomed Robert Falcon Scott seems to have originated in a New York Times article, although the article floated the theory that what failed was the tins themselves (i.e., the containers) in which Scott’s team stored food and other supplies. Only later did people start to blame the disintegration of tin solder. There’s an incredibly wide variation, too, in what historians claim that he used for solder, including leather seals, pure tin, a tin-lead mixture, and so on.
“and go roaming”: Plasma is actually the most common form of matter in the universe, since it’s the major constituent of stars. You can find plasmas (albeit very cold ones) in the upper reaches of the earth’s atmosphere, where cosmic rays from the sun ionize isolated gas molecules. These rays help produce the eerie natural light shows known as the aurora borealis in the far north. Such high-speed collisions also produce antimatter.
“blends of two states”: Other colloids include jelly, fog, whipped cream, and some types of colored glass. The solid foams mentioned in chapter 17, in which a gas phase is interspersed throughout a solid, are also colloids.
“with xenon in 1962”: Bartlett performed the crucial experiment on xenon on a Friday, and the preparation took him the entire day. By the time he broke the glass seal and saw the reaction take place, it was after 7:00 p.m. He was so keyed up that he burst into the hallway in his lab building and began yelling for colleagues. All of them had already gone home for the weekend, and he had to celebrate alone.
“Schrieffer”: In a macabre late-life crisis, one of the BCS trio, Schrieffer, killed two people, paralyzed another, and injured five more in a horrific car accident on a California highway. After nine speeding tickets, the seventy-four-year-old Schrieffer had had his license suspended, but he decided to drive his new Mercedes sports car from San Francisco to Santa Barbara anyway, and had revved his speed well into the triple digits. Despite his speed, he somehow managed to fall asleep at the wheel and slammed into a van at 111 mph. He was going to be sentenced to eight months in a county jail until the victims’ families testified, at which point the judge said that Schrieffer “need[ed] a taste of state prison.” The Associated Press quoted his erstwhile colleague Leon Cooper muttering in disbelief: “This is not the Bob I worked with…. This is not the Bob that I knew.”
“almost”: Now, to back off my rigid stance a little, there are a few good reasons why many people conflate the uncertainty principle with the idea that measuring something changes what you’re trying to measure—the so-called observer effect. Light photons are about the tiniest tools scientists have to probe things, but photons aren’t that much smaller than electrons, protons, or other particles. So bouncing photons off them to measure the size or speed of particles is like trying to measure the speed of a dump truck by crashing a Datsun into it. You’ll get information, sure, but at the cost of knocking the dump truck off course. And in many seminal quantum physics experiments, observing a particle’s spin or speed or position does alter the reality of the experiment in a spooky way. However, while it’s fair to say you have to understand the uncertainty principle to understand any change taking place, the cause of the change itself is the observer effect, a distinct phenomenon.
Of course, it seems likely that the real reason people conflate the two is that we as a society need a metaphor for changing something by the act of observing it, and the uncertainty principle fills that need.
“than the ‘correct’ theory”: Bose’s mistake was statistical. If you wanted to figure the odds of getting one tail and one head on two coin flips, you could determine the correct answer (one-half) by looking at all four possibilities: HH, TT, TH, and HT. Bose basically treated HT and TH as the same outcome and therefore got an answer of one-third.
“the 2001 Nobel Prize”: The University of Colorado has an excell
ent Web site dedicated to explaining the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), complete with a number of computer animations and interactive tools: http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/.
Cornell and Wieman shared their Nobel Prize with Wolfgang Ketterle, a German physicist who also created the BEC not long after Cornell and Wieman and who helped explore its unusual properties.
Unfortunately, Cornell almost lost the chance to enjoy his life as a Nobel Prize winner. A few days before Halloween in 2004, he was hospitalized with the “flu” and an aching shoulder, and he then slipped into a coma. A simple strep infection had metastasized into necrotizing fasciitis, a severe soft tissue infection often referred to as flesh-eating bacteria. Surgeons amputated his left arm and shoulder to halt the infection, but it didn’t work. Cornell remained half-alive for three weeks, until doctors finally stabilized him. He has since made a full recovery.
17. Spheres of Splendor
“to study blinking bubbles full-time”: Putterman wrote about falling in love with sonoluminescence and his professional work on the subject in the February 1995 issue of Scientific American, the May 1998 issue of Physics World, and the August 1999 issue of Physics World.
“bubble science had a strong enough foundation”: One theoretical breakthrough in bubble research ended up playing an interesting role in the 2008 Olympics in China. In 1993, two physicists at Trinity University in Dublin, Robert Phelan and Denis Weaire, figured out a new solution to the “Kelvin problem”: how to create a bubbly foam structure with the least surface area possible. Kelvin had suggested creating a foam of polygonal bubbles, each of which had fourteen sides, but the Irish duo outdid him with a combination of twelve- and fourteen-sided polygons, reducing the surface area by 0.3 percent. For the 2008 Olympics, an architectural firm drew on Phelan and Weaire’s work to create the famous “box of bubbles” swimming venue (known as the Water Cube) in Beijing, which hosted Michael Phelps’s incredible performance in the pool.
And lest we be accused of positive bias, another active area of research these days is “antibubbles.” Instead of being thin spheres of liquid that trap some air (as bubbles are), antibubbles are thin spheres of air that trap some liquid. Naturally, instead of rising, antibubbles sink.
18. Tools of Ridiculous Precision
“calibrate the calibrators”: The first step in requesting a new calibration for a country’s official kilogram is faxing in a form (1) detailing how you will transport your kilogram through airport security and French customs and (2) clarifying whether you want the BIPM to wash it before and after it has done the measurements. Official kilograms are washed in a bath of acetone, the basic ingredient in fingernail polish remover, then patted dry with lint-free cheesecloth. After the initial washing and after each handling, the BIPM team lets the kilogram stabilize for a few days before touching it again. With all the cleaning and measuring cycles, calibration can easily drag on for months.
The United States actually has two platinum-iridium kilograms, K20 and K4, with K20 being the official copy simply because it has been in the United States’ possession longer. The United States also has three all-but-official copies made of stainless steel, two of which NIST acquired within the past few years. (Being stainless steel, they are larger than the dense platinum-iridium cylinders.) Their arrival, coupled with the security headache of flying the cylinders around, explains why Zeina Jabbour isn’t in any hurry to send K20 over to Paris: comparing it to the recently calibrated steel cylinders is almost as good.
Three times in the past century, the BIPM has summoned all the official national kilograms in the world to Paris for a mass calibration, but there are no plans to do so again in the near future.
“those fine adjustments”: To be scrupulous, cesium clocks are based on the hyperfine splitting of electrons. The fine splitting of electrons is like a difference of a halftone, while the hyperfine splitting is like a difference of a quarter tone or even an eighth tone.
These days, cesium clocks remain the world standard, but rubidium clocks have replaced them in most applications because rubidium clocks are smaller and more mobile. In fact, rubidium clocks are often hauled around the world to compare and coordinate time standards in different parts of the world, much like the International Prototype Kilogram.
“numerology”: About the same time that Eddington was working on alpha, the great physicist Paul Dirac first popularized the idea of inconstants. On the atomic level, the electrical attraction between protons and electrons dwarfs the attraction of gravity between them. In fact, the ratio is about 10^40, an unfathomable 10,000 trillion trillion trillion times larger. Dirac also happened to be looking at how quickly electrons zoom across atoms, and he compared that fraction of a nanosecond with the time it takes beams of light to zoom across the entire universe. Lo and behold, the ratio was 10^40.
Predictably, the more Dirac looked for it, the more that ratio popped up: the size of the universe compared to the size of an electron; the mass of the universe compared to the mass of a proton; and so on. (Eddington also once testified that there were approximately 10^40 times 10^40 protons and electrons in the universe—another manifestation.) Overall, Dirac and others became convinced that some unknown law of physics forced those ratios to be the same. The only problem was that some ratios were based on changing numbers, such as the size of the expanding universe. To keep his ratios equal, Dirac hit upon a radical idea—that gravity grew weaker with time. The only plausible way this could happen was if the fundamental gravitational constant, G, had shrunk.
Dirac’s ideas fell apart pretty quickly. Among other flaws that scientists pointed out was that the brightness of stars depends heavily on G, and if G had been much higher in the past, the earth would have no oceans, since the overbright sun would have boiled them away. But Dirac’s search inspired others. At the height of this research, in the 1950s, one scientist even suggested that all fundamental constants were constantly diminishing—which meant the universe wasn’t getting bigger, as commonly thought, but that the earth and human beings were shrinking! Overall, the history of varying constants resembles the history of alchemy: even when there’s real science going on, it’s hard to sift it from the mysticism. Scientists tend to invoke inconstants to explain away whatever cosmological mysteries happen to trouble a particular era, such as the accelerating universe.
“Australian astronomers”: For details about the work of the Australian astronomers, see an article that one of them, John Webb, wrote for the April 2003 issue of Physics World, “Are the Laws of Nature Changing with Time?” I also interviewed a colleague of Webb’s, Mike Murphy, in June 2008.
“a fundamental constant changing”: In other alpha developments, scientists have long wondered why physicists around the world cannot agree on the nuclear decay rates of certain radioactive atoms. The experiments are straightforward, so there’s no reason why different groups should get different answers, yet the discrepancies persist for element after element: silicon, radium, manganese, titanium, cesium, and so on.
In trying to solve this conundrum, scientists in England noted that groups reported different decay rates at different times of the year. The English group then ingeniously suggested that perhaps the fine structure constant varies as the earth revolves around the sun, since the earth is closer to the sun at certain times of the year. There are other possible explanations for why the decay rate would vary periodically, but a varying alpha is one of the more intriguing, and it would be fascinating if alpha really did vary so much even within our own solar system!
“from the beginning”: Paradoxically, one group really rooting for scientists to find evidence for a variable alpha is Christian fundamentalists. If you look at the underlying mathematics, alpha is defined in terms of the speed of light, among other things. Although it’s a little speculative, the odds are that if alpha has changed, the speed of light has changed, too. Now, everyone, including creationists, agrees that light from distant stars provides a record, or at least appears to pro
vide a record, of events from billions of years ago. To explain the blatant contradiction between this record and the time line in Genesis, some creationists argue that God created a universe with light already “on the way” to test believers and force them to choose God or science. (They make similar claims about dinosaur bones.) Less draconian creationists have trouble with that idea, since it paints God as deceptive, even cruel. However, if the speed of light had been billions of times larger in the past, the problem would evaporate. God still could have created the earth six thousand years ago, but our ignorance about light and alpha obscured that truth. Suffice it to say, many of the scientists working on variable constants are horrified that their work is being appropriated like this, but among the very few people practicing what might be called “fundamentalist physics,” the study of variable constants is a hot, hot field.
“impish”: There’s a famous picture of Enrico Fermi at a blackboard, with an equation for the definition of alpha, the fine structure constant, appearing behind him. The queer thing about the picture is that Fermi has the equation partly upside down. The actual equation is alpha = e2/c, where e = the charge of the electron, = Planck’s constant (h) divided by 2π, and c = the speed of light. The equation in the picture reads alpha = 2/ec. It’s not clear whether Fermi made an honest mistake or was having a bit of fun with the photographer.
“Drake originally calculated”: If you want a good look at the Drake Equation, here goes. The number of civilizations in our galaxy that are trying to get in touch with us, N, supposedly equals
N = R* × fP × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
where R* is the rate of star formation in our local galaxy; fP is the fraction of stars that conjure up planets; ne is the average number of suitable home planets per conjuring star; fl, fi, and fc are, respectively, the fractions of hospitable planets with life, intelligent life, and sociable, eager-to-communicate life; and L is the length of time alien races send signals into space before wiping themselves out.