Tag Archives: royal institution

Life, Talk To Me About Life

Search for Life at the Royal Institution
Search for Life at the Royal Institution (Photo Tim Jones)

I kind of expect to see demonstrations at the Royal Institution, an association with the Christmas Lectures I guess.

So it was nice to see a few props at Lewis Dartnell’s talk on astro-biology yesterday evening:  a Geiger counter, a jar of fluorescent quinine, a piece of Mars.   A piece of Mars !!! That got a reaction from the audience – along with an intelligent question – “how do you know it’s from Mars?”  As it happens, matching isotopes between the 1911 meteorite sample and material tested in-situ by the Viking lander on Mars leave little doubt about its origins.  Whether it contains signs of former Martian life, as some claim, is another matter.

Lewis Dartnell & Naomi Temple (Royal Institution) with the famous RI bench.  Photo: Tim Jones
Lewis Dartnell & Naomi Temple (Royal Institution) with the famous RI bench. (Photo Tim Jones)

The evening’s bottom line was that no extra-terrestrial life has yet been found; but there is particular hope for Mars and/or Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Dartnell structured his lecture from the Earth outwards: Earth, solar system, galaxy, etc.   With ‘Earth’ came a definition of life, and what an excuse that was to show some clips from this amazing Harvard Biovisions simulation of how a cell works; fast forward to 4:00mins for the best bit with vesicles being dragged along by ‘motor proteins’.

Moving out from the Earth, we find that the combination of salinity, pH, and temperature on which earth’s more ‘extremophile’ lifeforms thrive: thermophiles, acidophiles, psycrophiles in the lingo, are the exact same as those prevailing on Venus, Mars, and Jupiter’s moons.  Further out in the galaxy, there are candidate stars with Jupiter-sized planets at the right sort of solar distance for Earth-like temperature conditions to exist at their supposed moons (HD28185 and Gliese581 were the examples given).  So there’s hope.  Information, metabolism, blueprint  = Life.

Dartnell could see Martian material being brought back to earth for analysis at some point, but not for another ten years or so.  In the meantime, the European ExoMars probe, due for launch in 2011, will drive around the surface, drilling holes and taking samples.  It will also illuminate the landscape with ultraviolet light, organic molecules betraying themselves with their fluorescence.

No discussion on extra-terrestrial life is complete without some sort of Saganish ‘Billions’ illustration of how many stars – and presumably planets – there are in the universe: the implication being that we have a large sample size even if the odds are thin (which they aren’t necessarily).   Lewis Dartnell showed it last night.  Astronomer Stephen Warren showed it at his inaugural lecture at Imperial College tonight.  This is the now iconic Hubble deep field image showing a section of sky equivalent to only 1/30th the moon’s diameter (Warren reckoned a 1mm square at the end of your arm – sounds about right).  And most of the objects  here are galaxies.

Hubble Deep Field
Hubble Deep Field

The insufficiently humbled can check out higher resolution versions at Hubblesite.org.

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

“Life, don’t talk to me about life….”

🙂

Postscript

As a quick aside.  Before Lewis Dartnell kicked off, the organisers called for a show of hands of any first time visitors to the Royal Institution, and that turned out to be a fair chunk of audience; less than 50% I reckon, but a good number.  With my SciCom hat on, that’s really encouraging – folk taking an interest in science and technology (and they didn’t look like the UFO squad either).

Run Over From Behind By A Bus

Run over from behind by a bus.  That’s how physicist and skeptic Professor Robert Park wants to go when his time is up.

Professor Robert 'Bob' Park and Jo Marchant, NewScientist  (Photo Sven Klinge)
Professor Robert 'Bob' Park and Jo Marchant, NewScientist at the Royal Institution this evening (Photo Sven Klinge)

I joined Bob Park at the Royal Institution this evening to hear him talk about his  new book – ‘Superstition: belief in the age of science’.

To be candid, I’m not sure we got much of an insight into the book, and with a good showing of the ‘usual suspects’ (purely based on my memory of familiar faces – National Secular Society, British Humanist Association, Brights, and atheists of other flavours no doubt – not to mention scientists) in the audience, this was pretty much preaching to the converted.  But it didn’t matter; Bob came across as a great guy – gentle and sharp at the same time; but most of all –  human.

Bob Park at the Royal Institution
Bob Park at the Royal Institution (Photo: Tim Jones)

Following an introduction by Jo Marchant from New Scientist, Bob launched straight into the tale of how two catholic priests had given him the last rites, having stumbled across him, unconscious, under a fallen giant oak.   He had photographs to prove it, and that pretty much set the tone for the evening.

We, Bob explained, as homo-sapiens, had only been around for 35,000 years when he was a lad; but today we were 160,000 years old.  How come?   There’s  just more evidence today – we have the 160k skull.   And as we’ve  only been civilised (read post-hunter/gatherer) for 10,000 years of that, it’s fair to say our brains aren’t exactly wired to watch TV, never mind cancel the irritating offer of a wi-fi connection that repeatedly popped up throughout Bob’s PC presentation.  Yet despite our brains being rigged to escape tigers and seek out elusive berry bushes, those same brains do a pretty good job of enjoying concertos, fine art, and solving complex differential equations.   So we are somehow managing to get along with less than fit-for-purpose equipment.  The secret now is to understand it (the brain) sufficiently so that we can explain and counter some of its more noisome excesses – like war for example.

Bob Park (Photo courtesy Sven Klinge)
Bob Park (Photo courtesy Sven Klinge)

But getting on to superstition now, Bob explained that as early as 585 BC, Thales of Melitus had understood how solar eclipses came about, if not how to predict them.  And yet armed with this and doubtless many other supportive evidences for causation, we failed to declare the rational age of man, but rather continued, as we still do, to be superstitious.

Religion is a superstition, Bob maintained.  And with 90% of the global population subscribing to some form of religion, doesn’t that make most of us superstitious?  In Bob’s reckoning, that  should be a concern.

There followed a variety of God-Delusionesque arguments around the illogical multiplicity of christian and other religions, what I thought was a somewhat confused description and use of the anthropic principle, and a potted history of John Templeton and the Templeton prize.  The prize is given to individuals who do research that advances ‘spiritual discovery’ – and is big bucks; the last one was £820,000 to Michael Heller – a cosmologist and catholic priest.   We learnt that Templeton’s only dictate on value of the prize was that it  should always exceed whatever Nobel is offering.   Bob shared the results of a Templeton funded study that must be seen as an own goal in some quarters: a controlled trial to assess the value of prayer on the recovery rates of coronary bypass patients. No effect was found.  Interestingly, there was a negative impact on the health of a sub-group of patients who were told up-front they would be receiving prayers.

We moved on to a debunking of the ten commandments as the basis for our moral code, and an appeal instead to the Golden Rule of  ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ , which Bob put down to sensible evolutionary development rather than any biblical dictate.  (As it happens, A.C.Grayling challenged the attractiveness of the Golden Rule earlier this week – but that’s another story….).

On the role of science, Bob believes that if there is one thing science has to offer over everything else,  it’s openness – a reference to open data sharing and peer review.

So what are we left with?  A questioner from the audience asked what we all wonder now and again – ‘does life have any meaning?’

But Bob had already answered the question in his slides.  There is no plan, and if there’s no plan,  there’s no purpose beyond that we give to life ourselves.  But, as Bob continued, “that doesn’t mean that we can’t have good lives, enjoyable lives, and part of doing that is the way we treat other people”.   There’s nothing more to say.

Also of Interest

Professor Robert Park interview at the Guardian HERE

 

Royal Institution Speaker Calls for an End To Culture Wars

Yesterday evening at the Royal Institution, I watched the respected biographer and academic Richard Holmes make an empassioned plea for an end to the ‘two cultures’ rift between science and the arts – a reference  to the term coined by CP Snow in his Rede Lecture of 1959.

Coleridge with his biographer, Richard Holmes, at the RI last night.  Photo Sven Klinge
Coleridge with his biographer, Richard Holmes, at the RI last night. (Photo Sven Klinge)

In a packed auditorium, familiar as the venue for the annual Christmas Lectures, Holmes challenged his hosts to do their bit by including humanities speakers as a fixture in the RI lecture programme.   He certainly held the historical high ground, sharing a daiz occupied in another age by Sir Humphrey Davey, Michael Faraday and significantly the poet Samuel Coleridge.

Faraday at the Royal Institution
Faraday at the Royal Institution

Dipping into his new book The Age of Wonder, Holmes used the lives and achievements of explorers like Sir Joseph Banks and the romantic polymath Erasmus Darwin (grandfather to Charles) to illustrate an age when science and art moved together to their mutual benefit.  He continued through the lives of the Herschels: from William and Catherine and the discovery of Uranus, to Catherine’s formative influence on the young John Herschel.  Then on to Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday, finishing with Charles Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century.   Readers who enjoyed hearing about Joseph Banks’s culturally sensitive integration activities in this earlier post on the Otaheite Dog, will find more revelations in the same vein in Age of Wonder.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Holmes  bemoaned the lack of general access to source texts, including Banks’s Endeavour Journal and Darwin’s Botanic Garden – another sign of the literary/science imbalance of two cultures thinking.  Both of these works are wonderful pieces of literature as well as scientific documents.   The Botanic garden is a compendium of virtually all 18th century science expressed as poetry, in a format where the footnotes are as inspiring as the main text.    The good news is that both are available online.

Richard Holmes (Photo courtesy Sven Klinge)
Richard Holmes (Photo courtesy Sven Klinge)
Age of Wonder
Age of Wonder

Holmes believes that if there there was one event more than any other that influenced Snow’s proclamation on the two cultures, it was the horrific association of science with the atomic bomb.   An audience member blamed the divide in the UK on the arts/science choices students were forced to make at A-Level.   Whatever the reason, Holmes’s comments are a timely introduction to a week in which the two cultures theme figures large, with as part of the London Consortium’s Art and Science Now Programme,  a mix of all-day conference sessions and receptions  scheduled at the Wellcome Institute on Thursday, the Science Museums’s Dana Centre on Friday, and the  Tate Modern Art Gallery on  Saturday.  More on those later.

UPDATE:  My report on the Art and Science Now ‘Two Cultures’ event is HERE

Stephen Fry, Science, and the Night I Lost My Gorilla to a Python

This Sunday 12th October, Stephen Fry will present the first of a series of programmes recounting his epic 50 State tour of the USA. Fry is well known as an actor, TV presenter, novellist, film maker, and general wit and, as this quote from the current Radio Times reminded me, he’s also a great fan and defender of science:

Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry (Picture credit: Radio Times online)

“The best definition of science I have ever heard (embarrassingly, it’s my own) is ‘humility in the face of facts” and yet science in America is always being accused of arrogance! Arrogance? Compared to those Sunday evangelists and others who claim that truth is ‘revealed’ in a book, one book, whose journey into existence is traceable in history, whose fragments and parts and apocrypha were arbitrarily decided by compromise and pragmatic need? Yet America’s insistence on equal validity between ‘revealed’ truth and evidence-based truth has meant that evolution is now pitted against so-called ‘intelligent design’, a barbarously irrational mixture of pseudoscience and fallacious argument that poses itself ‘innocently’ as a credible alternative.” (Stephen Fry – Radio Times)

No mistaking Stephen’s position on ‘Intelligent Design‘ then.

This sort of comment is consistent with the Stephen Fry I encountered at the first DNA Memorial Lecture at the Royal Institution in 2003. Fry was Master of Ceremonies for Richard Dawkins‘s lecture ‘Queerer Than We Can Suppose‘. And no, this wasn’t a homage to Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid, but rather a celebration of the memory of the irreplaceable Douglas Noel Adams, patron to the beneficiaries of the evening – The Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund and Save the Rhino International.

Fry’s comments during the various introductions, links, and humorous ramblings revealed an impressively knowledgeable and scientifically literate guy, especially in all matters evolutionary. He’d doubtless be shocked that anyone would think otherwise, but this was a world as yet unexposed to the intellectual sound-bitery of the QI show.

The real, not to say surreal, reason I remember this all so well is the charity auction at the end of the evening. With Fry as auctioneer, I found myself bidding head-to-head with Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) for a two foot high, ceramic, silver-backed gorilla (as you do). Suffice to say the wrong Jones walked off with the pottery primate – leaving me apeless (sorry).

 

Also of Interest

“Douglas Adams loved ideas but hated writing, says Terry Jones”  March 2012 BBC article HERE