Cool Science

A year or so ago I stumbled across a book "The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest" by Lawrence Principe, reviewed at this link by American Scientist. I've been going through it slowly - it is a tedious read at times, to be honest, but a very interesting one too.

The historical problem is that Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was a major player in the advent of modern chemistry, but he also had a significant, practicing interest in alchemy. Alchemy, as Principe points out, needs to be well defined. But needless to say, Boyle was hoping to transmute metals. Alchemy is often ridiculed as the antithesis to modern chemistry, as an awful distraction, a silly idea, an embarassment to science. So among other things Principe blasts earlier historians who tried to gloss over Boyle's alchemical interests to spare supposed embarrassment. As an aside, this was particularly a problem with the history of Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Late in his life, Newton pursued alchemical experiments which very likely ultimately poisoned him since his reported symptoms were consistent with mercury poisoning and alchemists loved to work with mercury; histories/biographies were not always forthcoming about this.

But back to Boyle, who really did quite a lot for experimental chemistry. So why alchemy - how does that fit? Is it an embarassment? Principe makes a terrific point about this. Back then people who studied this sort of thing - 'Natural Philosophers' - just talked about theories and ideas and how they thought the world worked - science by guessing! They would write textbooks without doing anything. In contrast, the only people at this time who were doing experiments were the alchemists. They weren't running around willy nilly in purple robes pretending to be wizards: they were in labs, combining things, carefully writing down their observations, talking among each other, sometimes secretly. They were beginning for the first time in human history to methodically push the boundaries of chemical knowledge by taking a hypothesis - that metals might be transmuted into gold - and testing it exhaustively and learning from their experiments. What emerged was the foundation of modern chemistry.

Yes, apparently there were many antics, fakes, frauds, etc. throughout the history of alchemy. But for Boyle, Newton and others alchemy was a way to spurn the stagnant natural philosophers of the time and to engage in real experimental science to discover things. It's hardly an embarassment, but a crucially important step in the development of modern chemistry - it's sad that there were attempts at revisionist history that tried to overlook this instead of understanding it for what it was.

Posted by Dave at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Top 5 random reflections on why Christmas and science are so great:

1. NORAD has a real-time Santa tracker and we watched his progress throughout the night.

2. If you're one of those scrooges who forwards around that annoying santa physics email, you deserve coal in your stocking, and not that shiny, beautiful, energy-packed anthracite, but that grimy fresh-from-the-swamp lignite stuff. But if you insist, you can check out this fermilab article which tried harder to be in the right spirit. Let's hear it for a relativistc Santa!

3. I got a subscription to American Scientist from my parents. In a previous post I expressed my concern over the poor quality of science reporting in the popular press, and I should point out that American Scientist is another bright spot : highly reputable, terrific reporting/news/analysis on all important things in science.

4. I got the cologne "Pi, by Givenchy" from my in-laws, which not only smells great but, according to Sephora "celebrates...[my] intelligence, courage, and contributions." Behold, the power of Pi.

5. I got a t-shirt from Jenn which says "Mmmm, Pi" and has a picture of the greek symbol pi with a bite taken out of it because she totally awesomely loves me. Want more? Check these out!. With logos like "Derivers wanted" how can you go wrong?

Posted by Dave at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was walking through the hallowed halls of MIT (shameless plug) the other day. OK, actually I was in their athletic center and I was drooling at the ice rink wondering how to get in - never did though. So they have this painted glass ceiling which has all kinds of stuff that looks like it was painted on by students as part of the 'decor'. Among the abstract swaths of color I noticed a few formulas and I thought it was great that, hey, MIT is a place where there is no stigma to knowledge, where you don't have to gather in hushed circles looking at equations and posting lookouts for the local bully. You can paint it on the ceiling, the walls, anywhere without fear of a wedgie. It's a place where it's ok to view an equation as something artistic, something that I thought about in the previous post.

So there were a couple of the old standards painted on the glass ceiling. For example, I'm pretty sure I saw E = mc². But lingering in the big collage was : H = G + TS. Believe it or not, that's some where up there in my top ten favorite equations. Now THAT would make a good sidebar! I'll have to think about that. I like the equation partly because it involves the term for entropy, S. I think I won't go into the details, but the equation is an important consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, and I've always liked thermo. Some scientists treat thermo like Latin, as if it's a dead language or something. But it's just the opposite. It's a rare example of a complete theory in science. It's both accessible and abstract. You can lose yourself in it so easily like a painting. And of course thermo rules everything.

Posted by Dave at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I saw an episode of the Simpsons a long time ago in which Bart was mistaken for a genius and went to a school for the gifted. In one class the following exchange takes place (lifted from this web site)

Ms.M: So y = r³/3. And if you determine the rate of change in this curve correctly, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Class: [chuckles]
Ms.M: Don't you get it, Bart? Derivative dy = 3 r² / 3, or r² dr, or r dr r. Har-de-har-har, get it?

It blew me away! There was differential calculus on The Simpsons, and it was correct; although it is non-standard to write the differential dr in the middle of the answer, who cares. I always thought this was strange until I saw this Science News article on clever math in the Simpsons. For example, The Simpsons also once showed an apparent violation of Fermat's theorem - it will appear to check out on a typical calculator, but the difference is below most calculators' round off error:

1782¹² + 1841¹² = 1922¹² (close, but NOT true!)

For some reason this made me wonder if one could think of math as art. Maybe one can tackle it from a different angle - is math beautiful? Sure I think fractals are beautiful. And the Golden Ratio is considered to correspond to aesthetically pleasing dimensions in natural structures like conch shells. Many claim to recognize its influence in art, but this is often disputed and I tend to side with the skeptics.

These are aesthetic arguments, but is Math intrinsically beautiful? G.H. Hardy thought so and wrote about this in his wonderful book 'A Mathematician's Apology'. As an example of intrinsic beauty in math, Hardy pointed out Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers; I'll try to do a decent job here:

Suppose p_n is the largest of a complete sequence of n total prime numbers. Then form a new number: ((p₁*p₂*...*p_n) + 1). This new number is not divisible by any of the n prime numbers. Therefore this new number is either itself prime, and therefore is also larger than p_n, or is divisible by a prime number larger than p_n. Therefore for any prime p_n there must exist an even larger prime number.

Posted by Dave at 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NASA expected to have difficulty refolding a temporary solar panel on the International Space Station last week - it's still not folded. When the panel got stuck, the astronauts shook it for 2 hours to coax the grommets to slide further - and it actually helped. So much so, that they're planning to shake it some more. I love it - now THAT's science! It immediately reminded me of a saying we have (with many variations): chemistry is 90% plumbing, 10% research. This is a good message to get out - as science leaps ever forward, I think there are some ways in which the paying public feels less and less able to relate and connect with what goes on in research labs. So when a couple of astronauts go out and manhandle a solar panel like cavemen trying to crack open a coconut it has this sublime quality of demystifying the daily practice of science.

This hoopla about the space station is all over the internet news outlets. Sure, that's great, but they have a long way to go on their science portals. CNN's Science and Space portal is way too astronomy-centric and ignores chemistry, physics and math! Every week important and amazing things happen in science and math, and every week CNN misses it. But even at that CNN is doing better than MSNBC's Tech and Science portal which strays too far in the direction of being a gadget page. I noticed today that MSNBC challenges us to test our science knowledge with the question " Which apostle is believed to be under Rome's second basilica?". Interesting, yes, but how is this science? No math on MSNBC either. I wouldn't get your hopes up for FOX's Science portal. There are in fact sub-headings in math, chemistry, and physics and other topics; but they're not on the main science page and they're sparse and outdated. And unfortunately FOX relishes showing fringe scientific stories and portraying them as mainstream.

All of the above are free online sites, so you get what you pay for. But if you don't mind a very modest subscription, try Science News which gives terrific weekly news in science.

Posted by Dave at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I'd like to do a good job on this blog so I set out to look at other science blogs.

I just started to look at good math, bad math and like the substance in that blog. And although it's not a blog, Wikiepdia's math portal is really top notch. I like these examples because I come away from them feeling "smarter". Notice I said "feel" - who knows if I actually learned anything or not, but I should have...

I'm not so keen on science blogs that are anonymous. I won't call anybody out, but I believe scientists need to be accountable. A science blog is on some level an outreach tool; science is about credibility and objectivity. So feel free to check out my job page some time.

I like the bad science page, and also Bob Park's weekly column What's New , both of which are able to debunk pseudo science in a usually light-hearted and mature way. I'll try to do the same, but I've noticed other science blogs which revel a little too much in assaulting pseudo-science to the point that I think it serves their own egos more than it interests a reader. So I don't want to do that - I do want have fun and go on about cool and neat things in science.

This could go on for a while...so let's wrap it up. Earlier today I found a blog that I can't find again. Sigh. It was a blogger who succinctly took an objective look at science blogs. Some, he found, weren't about science - and I noticed this too - how strange. Anyway he raised the interesting issue that some blogs can become so content-oriented that they are sliding down the knife edge towards publishing results. That's kind of interesting. I worry a lot about the spiralling cost of science journals and maybe I'll mention that next time, but blogging preliminary or extensively analyzed data is not the solution.

OK, I love watching those mentos and coke vids on Youtube. I had a few guesses about the chemistry of how it works and started poking around online. Amazingly, it is not very well understood and there is some debate ! The mythbusters show that it is at least partly physico-chemical: you need a porous surface to start the CO₂ nucleation, and others claim this as well. But there's more going on I think (and Hyneman thinks so too). It's not exactly Fermat's Last Theorem, but it's a great chemical mystery that anyone can experiment on at home.

Posted by Dave at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been trying to read more, maybe because I'm too lazy to do neurobics. But probably because I used to read a lot in high school and college and it bugs the heck out of me that I lost touch. And no scientist can live without a steady diet of sci-fi pop-culture! I dove back in basically at random but I decided that I would pick out something that had been well reviewed. That turned out to be Card's "Ender's Game", an intelligent and focused sci-fi story about a kid with a gift for military strategy. Interestingly, Ender's Game may be a movie sometime. It was outstanding - a smart read with some complex themes and I still think about it a lot. I read several of the sequels and they were good, to be fair, but not in the same league as Ender's Game which is up there with Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai! which all of us pocket-protector types know were the two brilliant books that marked the beginning of the military sci-fi genre. Troopers (1960) and Dorsai! (1959) came out at the same time as far as I'm concerned and I wish people would lay to rest debates on who was first/better/cooler/etc...

Energized by the success of the foray into the Ender series, I decided to switch to classic Fantasy and read David and Leigh Eddings "The Elder Gods", a massive, brain-numbing mistake. For many passages and whole chapters I cringed in embarassment and looked over my shoulder to be sure nobody could see what I was reading. No, that's not blog-speak - it's really how I felt. But like a train wreck I had to read it to the end. It's really very sad though because I liked David Eddings' earlier writing and who knows what the heck went wrong here. Resolved to wash that bad taste out of my brain, I turned back to a well known fantasy standard that I had never read, Terry Brook's "Sword of Shannara", an unashamedly Tolkien-esque story but written intelligently and with confidence and it was a satisfying adventure from cover to cover. I'll venture into at least one sequel on its strength. But I'll need to try something new soon...

SO - if anybody has some good sci-fi/Fantasy recommendations lemme know...

Posted by Dave at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

What a great line! But what is a scientist? That's too deep for this blog... Needless to say, not too long ago we had our semi-annual viewing of Ghostbusters, and if you have not memorized Ghostbusters yet, you're missing out. Since this is a science blog: NO, sponges do not migrate, and you won't like what you find if you try to google it. A little bit like a sponge (ok, this segue is a stretch) are aerogels; silica aerogels (if we are to believe Wikipedia: caution!) hold the world record for lowest density solid. Although sometimes I think that title should be awarded to my brain, I'll concede for now. See, I'm already being dense!

Everybody probably read in the news about that big Danvers ink plant explosion. We're on leave and living in Salem and I heard it and felt it, but I chalked it up to a close lightning strike and slumped back to sleep. Even though it registered on the richter scale, the cause hasn't been determined. The plant was known to have toluene, methl ethyl ketone, and acetone in there (maybe other things) so I don't really think it's much of a mystery. One of them evaporated out (I'd bet on the acetone) and an unlucky spark (finding that could be hard...) took care of the rest. The Herald casually reported toluene as a base chemical of TNT (trinitrotoluene) and then let the insinuation hang out there for people to chew on. The Herald's "false authority syndrome" tempts us to speculate that there might have been TNT in that plant. But there are other precursors (like the nitro part) needed to make TNT; and then like Martha Stewart you actually have to follow a recipe and make it. You don't just stare at a bottle of toluene and think "uh oh - I hope it doesn't turn into TNT!". OK, really, this time I mean it, I promise not to complain too much on the blog!

Posted by Dave at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been having inward strife over what to do with my "cool science" page and asked Jenn to blogify it for me and "voila" here it is. So what do I do? Part of me wants to complain a lot about pseudo-science. I watched, in agony, a few moments of the tv show "Numbers" and was horrified at the technobabble. Star Trek has the patent on technobabble - nobody can touch them and their reverse polarity tachyon beams. But on Numbers there is an earnest attempt to make solving crimes with calculus seem 'real' and 'easy'; but it's just creepy and cringeworthy instead. But then at the height of my cynicism I find this totally hip website tying fun math activities for teachers to the TV show, and they have really great stuff like the birthday problem and pythagorean triples in this week's activities and it's all stuff that was on the show. Then it dawned on me that I had become a math-grinch, and so have I resolved that, while I'm still uncertain what do with this, I will not complain (much) in my reincarnated science blog.

Posted by Dave at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)