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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
The Science Magpie is Simon Flynn's bestselling collection of enthralling facts, stories, poems and more from science's history, from the Large Hadron Collider rap to the sins of Isaac Newton. With Antiques Roadshow regular Marc Allum as your guide, go in search of stolen masterpieces, explore the first museums, learn the secrets of the forgers and brush up on your auction technique with The Antiques Magpie. And with acclaimed nature writer Daniel Allen, join naturalists, novelists and poets as they explore the most isolated parts of the planet and discover which plants can be used to predict the weather in The Nature Magpie.
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For Kate and Alice
The Science Magpie
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
‘Hymn to Science’
How do they do IT?
The scientist
Value judgements
The true measure of things (part 1)
As easy as Al, Be, Cs
The square of scientific delights
Variations on a theme of Ockham’s Razor
Name that number
The ‘greatest equation ever’
To marry or not to marry, that is the question
‘A chemic union’
Binary basics
The energy of Richter
Science’s Molecule of the Year/Breakthrough of the Year award
Geological time piece
‘Twin limb-like basalt columns’
Mnemonic for remembering the geological timescale
‘Mosquito Day’
The etymology and scrabble score of some common scientific words
Taking acid
A good indicator of …
I holy see the error of my ways
Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit-rabbit, rabbit-rabbit-rabbit, rabbit-rabbit-rabbit-rabbit-rabbit
Ban dihydrogen monoxide!
Solar eclipses galore
‘A remarkable book, sure to make a mighty stir’
‘The Four Stages of Public Opinion’
‘Endless forms most beautiful’
Are you cleverer than a fifteen-year-old … from 1858?
By degrees
Biological classification
Threatened species
The Big Five
The last 500 million year evolution of vertebrates
The Torino impact hazard scale
The $10 million book
The poets’ scientist
When left can be right and right can be wrong
The scientific equivalent of: have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
You can’t win, you know
The Mpemba effect
Maxwell’s Demon
Hotter than Hell
On the other side of silence
‘The Chemical History of the Candle’
When it comes to what’s in your genes, size isn’t everything
Would you Adam and Eve it?
Euclid’s algorithm
The periodic snail
Making the standard model
The Large Hadron Collider rap
The relative hardness of being
Your reading list for this week is …
What are you made of?
Why is the sky dark at night?
Unweaving the rainbow
The New Atlantis
A plurality of worlds in every earring
A law by any other name …
Just not my cup of tea
A prime determiner
For goodness sake, show your working
‘The degree of opacity’
Real molecules with silly names
The music of the spheres
Britain’s first professional female scientist
The birth of the quantum
The definition of a planet
The interstellar pioneer
The true measure of things (part 2)
Nature and nurture
One clear, unchanged, and universal light
Another hue unto the rainbow
On a new kind of ray
Centenary icons of science and technology
Measuring the speed of light using chocolate, a microwave and a ruler
‘Space shifted about like a swan that can’t settle’
Relatively speaking
Royal Society prize for science books
The book that caused a paradigm shift
Practical politics
Types of ionising radiation
The dose makes the poison
To decay with precision
Going nuclear in a sports hall
An unholy trinity
In cold blood
More than the germ of an idea
A short history of the atom
Would the real Schrödinger’s cat please stand up
To a measurable infinity and beyond
Truth to their fictions
The Life of π
A slice of Indiana π
Meet Tom Telescope and friends
The sins of Newton
Mendel’s law of segregation
The monkey trial
The three laws of robotics
Five, four, three, two, one … we have lift-off
Blowing hot and cold
‘There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball’
Conceding to the laws of metre
First, do no harm
The size and gravity of the situation
Top of the pop-sci chart
A party of famous physicists
An unacknowledged debt
Elements of colour
Congratulations, you’ve won a …
The ten greatest ever equations … according to Nicaragua
Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?
Great scientists by nation
‘Successive generations bloom’
It has been long known that …
What if earth can clothe and feed amplest millions at their need
Appendix: Back to school
Double science
Chemistry is full of bad jokes because all the best argon
Cell-u-like
Who do you think you are?
By a force of nature
Permissions
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
science, n.
5.b. Science. In modern use, often treated as synonymous with ‘Natural and Physical Science’, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws …
magpie, n. and adj.
B. adj. (attrib.)
1. Magpie-like: with allusion to the bird’s traditional reputation for acquisitiveness, curiosity, etc.; indiscriminate, eclectic, varied.
Oxford English Dictionary
Science. What does that word conjure up in your mind? Writing over two hundred years ago, the great German authors Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gave this rather neat (if slightly silly-sounding) description in their collection of poetic epigrams, Xenien:
To one, it’s a high, heavenly goddess. To another it’s a cow that provides them with butter.
You might want to read that again. What they appear to be saying is that science can be viewed in terms of powerful ends (I’m thinking of the very best metaphorical butter here) and almost spiritual, aesthetic means. In Schiller and Goethe’s eyes, at least, people’s responses tend to depend on which of these they focus on. But why not consider both? Why not acknowledge that one reason why science is so special is that both these aspects can be true?
There is more though. Science isn’t just about laws, theories, formulae, processes and experiments. At heart it’s a human activity. Without the incredible individuals who have occupied themselves with uncovering the workings of nature and applying them to our benefit where would we be? That’s the last rhetorical question, I promise.
This miscellany is intended to showcase just some of the many and varied facets of science, plenty of which are unashamedly and idiosyncratically human. It’s people who provide great stories and heart-warming anecdotes. Partly for this reason, the story of Erasto Mpemba, an African schoolboy who didn’t give up in his quest to understand something (and who has a physical effect named after him as a result), and Darwin’s note on the pros and cons of marriage are among my favourite entries in these pages.
Although this book is a miscellany, certain themes and ideas echo through its pages. One of these is mathematics. You may have noticed the ‘…’ at the end of the definition of science given at the start of this introduction. That’s because I cheated slightly – the definition actually continues ‘sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics’. However, this magpie sides firmly with Roger Bacon, who said ‘mathematics is the door and the key to the sciences’ and, as such, it is included. At least I’m being honest.
A non-scientific realm that features rather heavily in the book is the arts, and poetry in particular. In contrast with science, artistic expression of any kind is typically felt to possess a power beyond the material. I’m not sure quite how fair a view of science this is. But I believe that an appreciation of both realms of human endeavour can only be for the good, given the great wonders each offers. So, as writers are often told, ‘show, don’t tell’. That has been the intention in those entries in the book where the two cultures overlap, such as ‘The poets’ scientist’ and Siv Cedering’s ‘Letter from Caroline Herschel’.
And so to the final big theme in The Science Magpie. The splendid short story writer Katherine Mansfield once wrote, it is of ‘immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves’ and I couldn’t agree more. From a smattering of groan-inducing jokes in some of the boxed fillers, to moments of more delicate wit from practitioners of science in entries such as ‘Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?’ and ‘A chemic union’, science’s lighter side is very much on show because, as another writer, Colette, put it, an ‘absence of humour renders life impossible’.
Science has the power to enrich people’s lives, both figuratively and practically. What follows is a celebration of it, warts and all. I hope you enjoy it.
Simon Flynn, 2012
P.S. In case it has been a while since you last did, or read, any science, I’ve put together a brief back-to-school appendix (see page 256), which will hopefully remind you of some of the science you were taught at school and which may be useful to recall when reading this book. Don’t worry, there won’t be any exam at the end of it.
‘HYMN TO SCIENCE’
It seems only fitting to open The Science Magpie with a ‘Hymn to Science’, which first appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1739 when its author, Mark Akenside, was only seventeen. The son of a butcher, it was around this time Akenside switched from preparing for a life as a nonconformist clergyman to training in medicine. He soon became a member of the Medical Society, eventually securing the position of physician to the Queen a little over twenty years later. Akenside wrote poetry throughout his life, including continuously revising his most famous work, The Pleasures of the Imagination, which Dr Johnson described as ‘an example of the great felicity of genius’.
From the ‘Hymn to Science’
Science! thou fair effusive ray
From the great source of mental Day,
Free, generous, and refin’d!
Descend with all thy treasures fraught,
Illumine each bewilder’d thought,
And bless my lab’ring mind.
But first with thy resistless light,
Disperse those phantoms from my sight,
Those mimic shades of thee:
The scholiast’s learning, sophist’s cant,
The visionary bigot’s rant,
The monk’s philosophy.
O! let thy powerful charms impart
The patient head, the candid heart,
Devoted to thy sway;
Which no weak passions e’er mislead,
Which still with dauntless steps proceed
Where Reason points the way.
Give me to learn such secret cause;
Let number’s, figure’s, motion’s laws
Reveal’d before me stand;
These to great Nature’s scenes apply,
And round the globe, and thro’ the sky,
Disclose her working hand.
Next, to thy nobler search resign’d,
The busy, restless, human mind
Thro’ every maze pursue;
Detect Perception where it lies,
Catch the Ideas as they rise,
And all their changes view.
Say from what simple springs began
The vast ambitious thoughts of man,
Which range beyond controul,
Which seek Eternity to trace,
Dive thro’ th’ infinity of space,
And strain to grasp The Whole.
[…]
There is no science without fancy and no art without facts.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
HOW DO THEY DO IT?
Astronomers do IT in the dark.
Mathematicians do IT in numbers.
Biologists do IT in the field.
Chemists do IT periodically on the table.
Geologists do IT in folded beds.
Palaeontologists do IT in the dirt.
Computer scientists do IT bit by bit.
Electrical engineers do IT until it hertz.
Physicists do IT with force.
When seismologists do IT, the Earth shakes.
Zoologists do IT with animals.
Quantum physicists do IT uncertainly.
Polymer chemists do IT in chains.
Cosmologists do IT with a bang.
Theorists do IT on paper.
Geneticists do IT in their genes.
Statisticians do IT with 99% confidence.
Planetary scientists do IT while gazing at Uranus.
Philosophers only think about doing IT.
What is IT? Why, science of course. And shame on you if you thought otherwise.
Adapted from Jupiter Scientific (www.jupiterscientific.org)
THE SCIENTIST
Have you ever wondered why we use the word ‘scientist’ to describe someone who works in science? Probably not – after all, it seems a pretty obvious term to use. In fact, however, its selection by the scientific community was made relatively late in the day and was a matter of some controversy.
At the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which had been founded just two years earlier, the English Romantic poet and polymath Samuel Taylor Coleridge raised the question of what to call someone who worked ‘in the real sciences’. William Whewell, then Professor of Mineralogy at the University of Cambridge and an ordained priest, put forward the word ‘scientist’. A year later he made a more public proposal when anonymously reviewing Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in The Quarterly Review:
Science … loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings at York, Oxford and Cambridge in the last three summers … Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, …; savans was rather assuming, …; some ingenious gentleman [William Whewell is modestly referring to himself here] proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist – but this was not generally palatable.
However, Whewell persisted and in 1840 wrote in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences:
We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist.
Fierce opposition remained. The Cumbrian geologist Adam Sedgwick scribbled in the margin of his copy of Whewell’s proposal ‘Better die of this want [of a term] than bestialize our tongue by such a barbarism!’
Although use of the word ‘scientist’ dramatically increased over the following years, science practitioners didn’t adopt the term immediately and even more than 50 years later someone as eminent as the biologist, and ertwhile president of the Royal Society, T. H. Huxley would write ‘to any one who respects the English language, I think “Scientist” must be about as pleasing a word as “Electrocution”’.
VALUE JUDGEMENTS
When William Gladstone asked Michael Faraday what the practical worth of electricity was he is reported to have responded ‘Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it!’ Science, as we know, is many things to many people but, as Faraday’s comment implies, to politicians it’s typically something to get excited about only when it’s clear what its contribution to the country’s coffers might be. Ditto a private company and its shareholders. However, as Homer Adkins’ witty quip that ‘basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target’ shows, it’s not always obvious what areas of research within science will provide a return. Judging investment is a difficult task.
The bar chart below details the fifteen countries with the highest percentage of GDP spent on R&D in 2008 as given by the World Bank, along with a selection of countries from further down the list. Are you surprised to see the top three are Israel, Finland and Sweden? That R&D is usually important to developed countries, along with the fact it’s of relatively low priority to less developed nations, is clear. But which is the chicken and which is the egg may be harder to determine.
THE TRUE MEASURE OF THINGS (PART 1)
AS EASY AS Al, Be, Cs
There are a great many popular songs inspired by love, loss and, oh, did I mention love, but only one can claim to have been inspired by an object of adoration quite as unusual as the periodic table of elements.
Tom Lehrer, born in 1928, is a retired mathematician, lecturer and satirical songwriter who released a number of very successful albums in the 50s and 60s. One of these included ‘The Elements’. It’s a song version of the then 102-element periodic table to the tune of the Major-General’s Song from The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan. Versions by various people can be found online, including one by Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who played Harry Potter. However the best undoubtedly remains the live version sung by Lehrer himself.
*
Now if I may digress momentarily from the mainstream of this evening’s symposium, I’d like to sing a song, which is completely pointless but it’s something I picked up during my career as a scientist. This may prove useful to some of you some day, perhaps in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances. It’s simply the names of the chemical elements set to a possibly recognizable tune.
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium
There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium
(Isn’t that interesting? [Audience laughs] I knew you would. I hope you’re all taking notes, because there’s going to be a short quiz next period)
There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and caesium
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium, palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium
There’s sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha’vard
And there may be many others but they haven’t been discavard
THE SQUARE OF SCIENTIFIC DELIGHTS
London’s Leicester Square has long been regarded as a centre of entertainment. But what might come as a surprise is that of the various diversions that have been found there through history, quite a few have been scientific in nature.
On 4 February 1775, the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser ran the following advert on its front page:
Museum, Leicester House, Feb. 3, 1775
Mr. Lever’s Museum of Natural and other Curiosities, consisting of beasts, birds, fishes, corals, shells, fossils extraneous and native, as well as many miscellaneous articles in high preservation, will be opened on Monday 13th of February, for the inspection of the public. […] As Mr. Lever has in his collection some very curious monkies and monsters, which might disgust the Ladies, a separate room is appropriated for their exhibition, and the examination of those only who chuse it.
The Holophusicon (‘embracing all of nature’), as it was sometimes called, was located at Leicester House on the northern side of Leicester Square. It held the natural history collection of Sir Ashton Lever, with tickets for entrance costing half a guinea. Totalling around 27,000 objects, the collection included a hippopotamus, an elephant, hummingbirds, pelicans, peacocks, bats, lizards and scorpions as well as many artifacts picked up during the explorer James Cook’s second and third voyages. Writing in 1778 to her cousin Frances (author of the bestselling Evelina), Susan Burney described the infamous room that might ‘disgust the ladies’ as
… full of monkeys – one of which presents the company with an Italian Song – another is reading a book – another, the most horrid of all, is put in the attitude of Venus de Medicis, and is scarce fit to be looked at.
The collection had initially been shown at Lever’s country house, Alkrington Hall, near Manchester, before moving to London because it wasn’t making enough money to sate Lever’s addiction for collecting. Unfortunately, the London museum couldn’t sustain itself either, despite being extremely popular and visited by George III and the Prince of Wales. Lever ended up having to sell it by lottery in 1786 (Lever offered the collection to the British Museum first but they sadly declined and it ended up fragmenting). Never quite able to cope with this loss, Lever committed suicide less than two years later.
In 1783, while the Holophusicon was still going strong, the anatomist John Hunter began renting a large house in the square, where he was able to run a medical school and museum. Hunter was another prodigious collector, and people now had the opportunity to view skeletons of kangaroos from one of Cook’s voyages, as well as that of Charles Byrne, an Irishman measuring 7′ 7″. The acquisition of the latter, which cost Hunter the equivalent of £50,000 in today’s money, is at the centre of Hilary Mantel’s 1998 novel The Giant, O’Brien. Unlike Lever’s collection, Hunter’s was thankfully bought by the government after his death and now forms the core of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.
Seventy years later, in the aftermath of the hugely popular Great Exhibition of 1851, Leicester Square witnessed the creation of its most ambitious scientific establishment yet. Sadly, it also proved to be its last. Dominating the eastern side of the square and built in the Moorish style with a ‘towering minaret’, ‘lofty dome’ and ‘abundant use of chromatic decoration’, The Royal Panopticon of Science and Art’s aim, according to its Royal Charter, was ‘to exhibit and illustrate, in a popular form, discoveries in science and art’. It opened its doors to the general public in 1854 to considerable fanfare. No expense had been spared inside either. Placed beneath the dome was a fountain, the central jet of which shot up almost 100 feet; at the entrance of the western gallery was the largest organ in England at the time and a lift (referred to as an ‘ascending carriage’) that could carry eight persons at a time, transported visitors to the photography gallery. Among the displays were an aurora borealis apparatus, which enabled the creation of artificial ‘northern lights’, a ‘crystal cistern for diving’ and a gas cooker (a reviewer lamented it not being put to better use by cooking his dinner). In the basement could be found lecture theatres where demonstrations were regularly given. The Royal Panopticon was clearly a place that you would have to visit many times in order to appreciate all the marvels it contained. It was, the Morning Post enthused, ‘the most magnificent temple erected for the purposes of science’.
The Alhambra theatre, formerly the Royal Panopticon, dominating the eastern side of Leicester square just after the square’s new garden had been opened in 1874.
It may well have been, but few of the public paid homage. Despite its royal charter, Queen Victoria failed to grace the altar of this ‘temple’ and two years later it was declared bankrupt. The building was renamed The Alhambra and became a circus, then a music hall and finally a theatre before being demolished in 1936 to make way for the Odeon cinema. The organ was sold to St Paul’s Cathedral and the scientific gods fled Leicester Square never to return.
VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF OCKHAM’S RAZOR
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary
The above is the standard version of Ockham’s Razor, named after the 14th century English Franciscan monk, William of Ockham. It is also known as the ‘principle of parsimony’ and has often been held up as a useful rule of thumb with which to judge the relative merits of two competing scientific theories that predict, or account for, the same experimental results. The razor is generally understood to mean applying a preference to the one that is simpler.
However, the point of the razor isn’t primarily about simplest always being best. Instead it’s a call to include only what is necessary (the two often go hand in hand but it’s the latter that’s the driver). The problem with this is that it isn’t always clear in science what is necessary or even whether all the relevant information to enable a judgment is available. As such, the principle isn’t embraced universally, which explains its heuristic, rather than absolute, value.
William of Ockham appears to have written a number of versions of the principle, and many others before and since have expressed their own versions.
Perhaps the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe put it most succinctly of all when he said simply, ‘less is more’.
God made the integers; all the rest is the work of Man.
German mathematician
Leopold Kronecker
TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY, THAT IS THE QUESTION
During the summer of 1838, Charles Darwin, then aged 29, found himself in a bit of a quandary. The subject worrying him was whether he should marry or not, and, if so, when. To help him come to a decision, he wrote a note listing the pros and cons of having a wife and, as would be expected from the man who would revolutionise evolutionary theory through the examination of argument and evidence, he really cut to the heart of the matter:
This is the Question
Marry
Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with.— — better than a dog anyhow. — Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. — but terrible loss of time. —
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.— Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.
Not Marry
Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)
Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —
Darwin’s eventual conclusion?
Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.,
Darwin proposed to his cousin Emma Wedgwood on 11 November 1838, writing in his journal ‘the day of days!’ They were married two and a half months later on 29 January 1839.
‘A CHEMIC UNION’
Constance Naden (1858–1889), an admirer of the philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, published two volumes of poetry during her relatively brief life. Writing in The Speaker in 1890, William Gladstone named her as one of the best ‘poetesses’ of that century in a list that also included Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rosetti.
Naden was an unusual poet for the Victorian age she lived in. For a start, she was a woman who was interested in, and who studied, science – an area assumed by many to favour the male mind. Her poetry often touched upon the realms of science and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in her witty series of four poems, ‘Evolutional Erotics’. In these she presents the relationships of four couples, using the sciences to great effect in her metaphor and imagery. Below is an extract from the first in the series, which describes how a young scientist’s passion for his studies is transferred to an, at best, unsuspecting, at worst, uninterested, Mary Maud Trevalyn.
From ‘Scientific Wooing’
I WAS a youth of studious mind,
Fair Science was my mistress kind,
And held me with attraction chemic;
No germs of Love attacked my heart,
Secured as by Pasteurian art
Against that fatal epidemic.
[…]
Alas! that yearnings so sublime
Should all be blasted in their prime
By hazel eyes and lips vermilion!
Ye gods! restore the halcyon days
While yet I walked in Wisdom’s ways,
And knew not Mary Maud Trevalyn!
[…]
I covet not her golden dower—
Yet surely Love’s attractive power
Directly as the mass must vary—
But ah! inversely as the square
Of distance! shall I ever dare
To cross the gulf, and gain my Mary?
[…]
Bright fancy! can I fail to please
If with similitudes like these
I lure the maid to sweet communion?
My suit, with Optics well begun,
By Magnetism shall be won,
And closed at last in Chemic union!
At this I’ll aim, for this I’ll toil,
And this I’ll reach—I will, by Boyle,
By Avogadro, and by Davy!
When every science lends a trope
To feed my love, to fire my hope,
Her maiden pride must cry “Peccavi!”
I’ll sing a deep Darwinian lay
Of little birds with plumage gay,
Who solved by courtship Life’s enigma;
I’ll teach her how the wild-flowers love,
And why the trembling stamens move,
And how the anthers kiss the stigma.
Or Mathematically true
With rigorous Logic will I woo,
And not a word I’ll say at random;
Till urged by Syllogistic stress,
She falter forth a tearful “Yes,”
A sweet “Quod erat demonstrandum!”
A modern poet has characterised the personality of art and the impersonality of science as follows: Art is I; Science is We.
Claude Bernard (1813–1878),
French physiologist
SCIENCE’S MOLECULE OF THE YEAR/BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR AWARD
In 1989, echoing Time magazine’s Man of the Year, the journal Science began awarding the title of Molecule of the Year, ‘honouring the scientific development of the year most likely to have a major impact on scientific advances and societal benefits’. If we’re being pedantic, the winner wasn’t always a molecule but was sometimes a process. In 1995, there was a further shift when the award was given to a ‘state of matter’ that had been hypothesised 70 years earlier and finally produced that year. Perhaps not surprisingly, the award was subsequently given the more all-embracing title Breakthrough of the Year. Here’s a list of the winners:
GEOLOGICAL TIME PIECE
Sometimes, discovering when something happened only begins to make sense when it’s seen in relation to other events. This is particularly easy to do if the total time is shown in the form of a clock. The age of Earth is about 4.5 billion years – on the clock, 1 second equals approximately 52,000 years and one hour is 187.5 million years.
‘TWIN LIMB-LIKE BASALT COLUMNS’
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away’.
‘Ozymandias’, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
You may very well have encountered Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ somewhere before – it’s a much anthologised poem, not to mention the inspiration for The Sisters of Mercy’s cracking song ‘Dominion’, which includes the final line of the poem in its lyrics. Being so ubiquitous it’s perhaps not surprising to discover that the poem has also come under scientific scrutiny.
The following spoof is an extract from a comic letter from N. S. Haile that first appeared in the correspondence pages of the journal Nature in 1977. Of course any scientist should strive to be precise and meticulous in their methods but this suggested rewrite of Shelley’s poem to make it acceptable for publication in a scientific journal does, I hope, show that scientists are also able to laugh at their own peculiarities:
Suggested re-written manuscript (summary)
Twin limb-like basalt columns (‘trunkless legs’) near Wadi Al-Fazar, and their relationships to plate tectonics
Ibn Batuta1 and P. B. Shelley2
In a recent field trip to north Hadhramaut, the first author observed two stone leg-like columns 14.7m high by 1.8m in diameter (medium vast, ASTM grade scale for trunkless legs) rising from sandy desert 12.5km southwest of Wadi Al-Fazar (Grid 474 753). The rock is a tholeiitic basalt (table 1); 45 analyses by neutron activation technique show that it is much the same as any other tholeiitic basalt (table 2). A large boulder 6m southeast of the columns has been identified as of the ‘shattered visage’ type according to the classification of Pettijohn (1948, page 72). Granulometric analysis of the surrounding sand shows it to be a multimodal leptokurtic slightly positively skewed fine sand with a slight but persistent smell of camel dung. Four hundred and seventy two scanning electron photomicrographs were taken of sand grains and 40 are reproduced here; it is obvious from a glance that the grains have been derived from pre-cambrian anorthosite and have undergone four major glaciations, two subductions, and a prolonged dry spell. One grain shows unique lozenge-shaped impact pits and heart-like etching patterns which prove that it spent some time in upstate New York.
There is no particular reason to suppose that the columns do not mark the site of a former hotspot, mantle plume, triple junction, transform fault, or abduction zone (or perhaps all of these).
Keywords: plate tectonics, subduction, obduction, hotspots, mantle plume, triple junction, transform fault, trunkless leg, shattered visage.
The scientific man is merely the minister of poetry. He is cutting down the Western Woods of Time; presently the poetry will come there and make a city and gardens. This is always so. The man of affairs works for the behoof and use of poetry. Scientific facts have never reached their proper function until they merge into new poetic relations established between man and man, between man and God, or between man and Nature …
Sidney Lanier, ‘The Legend of St. Leonor’,
Music and Poetry, 91
1School of Earth & Planetary Sciences, University of the Fertile Crescent.
2formerly of University College, Oxford.
MNEMONIC FOR REMEMBERING THE GEOLOGICAL TIMESCALE
For those of you who have always had a burning desire to be able to recite the periods of the geological timescale – help is at hand in the form of this indispensable mnemonic:
Camels Often Sit Down Carefully. Perhaps Their Joints Creak. Possibly Early Oiling Might Prevent Premature Harm
Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Palaeocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene.
Now you need never be without a party trick!
‘MOSQUITO DAY’
A year after their inception in 1901, Sir Ronald Ross (1857–1932) became the first Briton to be awarded a Nobel prize. Five years earlier, while combining his research with medical service in India, Ross had shown the Anopheles mosquito to be a necessary factor in the transmission of malaria. It was a finding that would have an enormous impact on the fight against the disease. For a man who had failed the licentiate examination of the Society of Apothecaries as a medical student, the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine 1902 and subsequent knighthood was quite a change of fortune.
A published poet and novelist – his memoirs won the James Tait Black memorial prize in 1923 – Ross wrote the following poem, now inscribed on a monument to Ross at the Presidency General Hospital, Calcutta, describing his famous discovery on 20 August 1897, which he later called ‘Mosquito Day’ and celebrated annually thereafter.
This day relenting God
Hath placed within my hand
A wondrous thing; and God
Be praised; At his command,
Seeking His secret deeds
With tears and toiling breath,
I find thy cunning seeds,
O million-murdering Death.
I know this little thing
A myriad men will save.
O Death, where is thy sting?
Thy victory, O Grave?
It’s okay to sleep with a hypothesis, but you should never become married to one.
Anonymous
THE ETYMOLOGY AND SCRABBLE SCORE OF SOME COMMON SCIENTIFIC WORDS
TAKING ACID
pH (short for ‘power of hydrogen’) is a logarithmic scale regarding the concentration of hydrogen ions (H+) in a solution – the lower the pH, the greater the concentration of hydrogen ions. The scale is used to measure how acidic or alkaline a solution is. Pure water has a pH of 7.0, which refers to a hydrogen ion concentration of 10–7 mol dm–3 (you don’t need to worry exactly what that means), and is considered neutral. Any solution with a pH less than 7 is said to be acidic and anything above, alkaline.
Because the scale is logarithmic, when the concentration of hydrogen ions changes by a factor of ten, the pH changes by only one unit. To put that in perspective we can look at the powerhouses of Britain’s 18th- and 19th-century industrial revolution, such as Manchester and Huddersfield. The cities almost completely surround the peat moorland at Blakelow in the Peak District, now an English national park. A century and a half of sulfurous emissions from these cities have resulted in the park’s peat now having a pH of 2 (a hydrogen ion concentration of 10–2 mol dm–3), as opposed to the typical peat value of 4 (or a hydrogen ion concentration of 10–4 mol dm–3). The difference between 2 and 4 on the scale perhaps doesn’t sound like much, but in fact it means the concentration of hydrogen ions in Blakelow peat is 100 times greater than it would ordinarily be expected to be.
The pH scale was originally developed by the Danish scientist Søren Sørenson (1868–1939) while working at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Denmark. Shown overleaf are the approximate pH values of some everyday solutions, several of which might surprise you, especially if you consider your teeth’s enamel is affected at pH 5.5 and below.
A GOOD INDICATOR OF …
Using just a red cabbage, a kettle, a pan and some glass jars or bottles, it’s possible to make a pH indicator solution that will let you know whether something is acidic or alkaline, as well as indicating roughly to what degree. Here’s how:
Slice and dice the red cabbage and put it in the pan. Now cover it with boiling water and give it a good stir. Let it stand for about fifteen minutes.
Use a sieve to remove the cabbage, leaving you with just the liquid. This is your indicator. It should be stored in a clean bottle, preferably in the dark.
When you want to use the indicator to test something, put some in a clear jar and then add whatever it is you’re testing, such as apple juice, baking soda or even colourless shampoo. Make sure you always have a ‘control’, that is, some indicator to which nothing has been added so that it’s easy to see the change caused in other jars by whatever you’re testing.
Observe the change in colour that occurs when you add the substance you are testing to the indicator. The table below gives an approximate guide to the pH that the various possible colours correspond to:
The indicator works because red cabbage contains a pigment belonging to a class of molecules called anthocyanins. This pigment changes colour depending on the concentration of H+ ions, because they very slightly change its chemical structure. As such, the same species of cabbage can be planted in different locations and, depending on the pH of the different soils, the resulting cabbage crops can differ in colour.
I HOLY SEE THE ERROR OF MY WAYS
Born in Pisa in 1564, Galileo Galilei is now widely regarded as one of the most important scientists ever to have lived. But in his own time he was effectively persecuted by the Catholic Church for daring to propound what is now a generally accepted truth about the structure of the Solar System.
Galileo left university in 1585 without the degree in medicine he’d been studying for. However, since he showed an exceptional aptitude for mathematics his family were able to help him secure a professorship in this subject four years later.
By 1610 he was living in Venice, and it was in this year that Sidereal Messenger was published – his work describing the discoveries he had made using his own improved version of the recently-invented telescope. It quickly brought him to the attention of Europe’s intelligentsia. Included in the book were the moons of Jupiter, the uneven surface of the Earth’s moon and the observation that there were many more stars in the heavens than could be perceived with the naked eye.
The Church fêted Galileo for his findings the following year. However, it was becoming clear that the Ptolemaic view of the Solar System – in which the Sun, the Moon and all the planets orbited the Earth – was no longer supported by the evidence. This left two alternatives: one which had been proposed by Nicholas Copernicus almost 70 years previously and one put forward by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.
If we look at Brahe’s theory first. His astronomical observations led him to stick with a stationary Earth at the centre of things, but with only the Sun and the Moon orbiting it, while the planets now orbited the Sun. As far as the Church was concerned, this was okay – it was still consistent with a literal reading of the Bible (sections such as Ecclesiastes 1:5 ‘The Sun also arises, and the Sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rose’), while also accounting for many of the anomalies in Ptolemy’s arrangement, which had dominated thought for the previous 1,400 years.
Copernicus’ system, however, had the Sun at the centre and the Earth orbiting it, along with all the other planets.
Galileo and Kepler (more on the latter later in the book) argued for the Copernican system, pretty much everyone else for Brahe’s. One of the key issues in the debate was to what extent the Bible was the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Since his theory seemed to directly contradict the Bible, in 1616, the Church condemned Copernicus – any book propounding his work was banned. Galileo was effectively given a warning. However, he took the view that the Church needed to be convinced of its mistake.
Five years later, Urban VIII – formerly Maffeo Barberini – became pope. Galileo’s previous book, the Assayer, has been dedicated to Barberini. This gave Galileo the confidence to begin a new one, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: the Ptolemaic and the Copernican, his intention being to persuade non-specialists to his view of a heliocentric (sun-centred) system. It was published in 1632. The Church’s censors, the Congregation of the Index, allowed its publication, but when the pope came to read it he is reported to have ‘exploded into great anger’. On 12 April 1633, Galileo was forced to stand trial. Incredibly, his defence was a denial of holding a Copernican view. On the 22 June 1633, Galileo signed the recantation reproduced below and was sentenced to house arrest. In failing health, and going blind, he went on to write what many consider his masterpiece – Discourses on Two New Sciences. He died on 8 January 1642.
*
I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei of Florence, aged seventy years, being brought personally to judgment, and kneeling before you, Most Eminent and Most Reverend Lords Cardinals, General Inquisitors of the Universal Christian Republic against heretical depravity, having before my eyes the Holy Gospels which I touch with my own hands, swear that I have always believed, and, with the help of God, will in future believe, every article which the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome holds, teaches, and preaches. But because I have been enjoined, by this Holy Office, altogether to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre and immovable, and forbidden to hold, defend, or teach, the said false doctrine in any manner […] I am willing to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of every Catholic Christian, this vehement suspicion rightly entertained towards me, therefore, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I abjure, curse, and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect contrary to the said Holy Church; and I swear that I will never more in future say, or assert anything, verbally or in writing, which may give rise to a similar suspicion of me; but that if I shall know any heretic, or any one suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor and Ordinary of theplace in which I may be. I swear, moreover, and promise that I will fulfil and observe fully all the penances which have been or shall be laid on me by this Holy Office. But if it shall happen that I violate any of my said promises, oaths, and protestations (which God avert!), I subject myself to all the pains and punishments which have been decreed and promulgated by the sacred canons and other general and particular constitutions against delinquents of this description. So, may God help me, and His Holy Gospels, which I touch with my own hands, I, the above named Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and, in witness thereof, with my own hand have subscribed this present writing of my abjuration, which I have recited word for word.
*
The English poet and polemicist John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, visited Galileo during his house arrest. This event would later feature in his Areopagitica, a stirring defence of free speech and attack on censorship. It’s fair to say the church’s actions towards Galileo would go down as one of the worst PR disasters in its history and a building block in the belief of some that there is a natural antagonism between science and religion.
RABBIT, RABBIT, RABBIT-RABBIT, RABBIT-RABBIT-RABBIT, RABBIT-RABBIT-RABBIT-RABBIT-RABBIT
In 1202, the mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, better known today as Fibonacci, published Liber Abaci (TheBook of Calculation). It was via this book that Hindu numerals (the numeric symbols we still use today) were first introduced to Europe. It also contained a problem regarding the breeding of rabbits that was to have a considerable impact on the history of mathematics. Fibonacci asked how many pairs of rabbits could be produced in a year from a single pair in an enclosed space if: each pair produced a new breeding pair every month, including the initial pair in the first month; each new pair started reproducing at the age of one month; and no rabbit ever died.
The answer, it turned out, was:
