Category Archives: Books

astronomy, Biography, Book reviews, Books, Engineering, History, Physics

Book Review: Collider – the search for the world’s smallest particles, by Paul Halpern

October 22, 2010 Tim Jones 1 Comment

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (28 July 2009)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0470286202
ISBN-13: 978-0470286203
Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.3 x 3.3 cm

Good luck I say to anyone setting out to write a popular science book on particle physics. The concepts are weird, the math is hard; and on publishing timescales there’s not a whole lot of new stuff worth talking about.

Moreover, it’s a tall order that’s less about content and more about the way you tell it. Happily, in Collider: The Search for the World’s Smallest Particles– Paul Halpern tells it well.

Anchoring the core physics around a theme is helpful: whether it’s Brian Greene on string theory or Paul Davies on the search for extra terrestrial life or, as in Halpern’s case, the physics, technology and people that have advanced our understanding of the subatomic world.

Collider is a story of impressive people building big machines to smash small particles together to reveal big truths. With CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) limbering up under the Franco-Swiss countryside, the timing couldn’t be better.

At 232 pages before the notes, Collider is manageable without being superficial, and has sufficient pace and variety to engage even those for whom memories of high-school science induce a cold sweat (and for whom leptons is just another brand of tea).

Tracts of quantum weirdness interspersed with biographical vignettes and discussions on collider engineering should ensure a broad spectrum of readers stay the distance. Those led out of their depth, however gently, will find delightful pangs of (at least partial) understanding along the way. Personally, the engineer in me found particular joy in the mix of ethereal concept and enabling technology that particle physics, perhaps more than any other field, embodies. Halpern as a physicist clearly enjoys and respects all aspects of the endeavour. Indeed, Collider stylistically is quite polymathic, even poetic in a Saganish sort of way:

“Alas, summer’s heat sometimes shapes cruel mirages. After modifying its equipment and retesting its data, the HPWF team’s findings vanished amid the desert sands of statistical insignificance. Skeptics wondered if electroweak unity was simply a beautiful illusion.”

Poetry aside, the physics kicks in early with unification, theories of everything (TOE), and the limitations of an incomplete Standard Model.

The better known particles are introduced via their discoverers’ stories: Thompson’s electron, Roentgen’s X-Rays, Becquerel and the decomposition products of uranium, Rutherford’s proton, and Chadwick’s neutron.

By describing relatively simple experiments from the early era, like the measurement of alpha and beta particle size, Halpern gives his subject a tangibility, a graspable air that prepares the mental ground for later complexities.

Following the evolution of particle sources, accelerators, and detectors, Collider takes us through a chronology starting with unaccelerated decay products striking stationary targets, to linear accelerators, to the various circular synchrotron variants like Ernest Lawrence’s Bevatron and Cosmotron, ending with the contra-rotating particle streams and super-cooled magnets of the LHC.

As beam energies increased, detectors became more complex, sensitive, and selective, allowing the existence of myriad new particles to be confirmed or discovered. Cloud and bubble chambers joined hand-held scintillation detectors and Geiger counters in the particle physicists’ armory, and as the forerunners of the giant counters, traps and calorimeters stacked up today in CERN’s ATLAS and ALICE experiments.

Halpern devotes the last three chapters to a discussion of dark matter, dark energy and the possibility of higher dimensions in the context of string, brane and M-theory, where he underlines the mutuality of physics and cosmology in understanding the bang, whimper, crunch or (somewhat depressing) rip possibilities of an uncertain multiverse.

Looking to the future, Halpern suggests the fate of particle physics itself is less certain than current LHC excitement might lead us to believe. If the Higgs Boson, higher dimensions, or mini-blackholes show up, then fine; but if they don’t – where do we go next?’. Larger machines might be an answer, but with costs that were never pocket money now truly enormous, stakeholders, including the physics community, will need to look to their priorities. And as if to say ‘don’t say it will never happen’, Halpern dedicates a whole chapter to the last, some would say terminal, back-step in American particle physics: the 1992 cancellation of the Reagan era Superconducting Super Collider (SSC).

Something Collider really brought home for me is how the nature of particle physics as a discipline and a career has changed. Individual pioneers have been replaced by research groups working on projects staffed by thousands. As Halpern says, if the Higgs were discovered, they’d be no obvious single candidate for the inevitable Nobel prize (except Higgs himself of course). Data filtration and computation as disciplines have become as important as the collider itself: the LHC is served by a global network of computers. That creates the opportunity for remote distributed working and facilitates multi-national involvement, but also means young researchers need to think about the kind of experience, and resume, they’re building. At PhD level already, Halpern says the slow pace of fundamental revelations has required a force-put change in the definition of what qualifies for the degree in particle physics [we can’t all split the atom for the first time, right?].

I’ve one critical note on the history, and maybe I’ve just been reading too many Cold War biographies of late, but I felt Halpern’s analysis underplayed the military motivation and sponsorship behind the adolescent years of particle physics. Given that the topic’s already well covered in works like Gregg Herken’s Brotherhood of the Bomb, and that I walked away from Collider feeling inspired rather than cynical, it’s a choice of emphasis I’m inclined to forgive.

So quibbles aside, Collider is a bit of a page turner – which by the timbre of my opening statements isn’t a bad endorsement. By presenting the obscure realities of particle physics in the context of the machines and people that revealed them, Halpern has for sure made an unfamiliar pill easier to swallow.

biology, Book reviews, Books, evolution, Fun

Latest Reading – Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation

August 18, 2010 Tim Jones 2 Comments

O.K. – so I was the last person on the planet to see E.T., I still watch TV on a cathode ray tube, and I’m seven years late reading Olivia Judson’s hugely entertaining, accessible, not to say stimulating, guide to evolutionary biology: Dr.Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, making this an admittedly after-the-event review, but a recommendation all the same.

Throughout the guide, Judson stays in character as sex therapist Dr Tatiana, helping all manner of creatures out with their sex problems – agony aunt style.

And creatures it is. Ranging from a stick insect jaded with the tedium of ten week copulations; to a praying mantis who finds sex so much more satisfying after biting off her lover’s head; to a fruit fly dismayed that he’s run out of sperm; to a queen bee’s concern that her mates leave their genitalia inside her after sex.

Mixed in with these familiar heterosexual and homosexual practices are gang rape, cannibalism, self-sacrifice, and deception – all to a background of hopeless promiscuity.

The entertainment is delivered by a fascinating cast of cads, bints, sluts, and whores, bonking away at romantic locations – including the inside of a rat’s intestines.

Lestes sponsa (Emerald Damselfly) — Damsel flies “have evolved some of the fanciest penises around” Lestes sponsa (Photo: Tim Jones)

That’s the language and tone then: spirited rather than crude I’d say, but probably not first choice for your great gran.

The anthropomorphism is extreme, caricatured, and humorous enough to make any questions around ambiguity and appropriateness non-issues (at least for me). It’s clever too, each section introducing a discussion on an aspect of evolutionary biology with some fun, if not a giggle, then quickly morphing into serious, yet always palatable, science.

Stick Insect — Stick insects can copulate for 10 weeks continuously (Photo: Tim Jones)

The concepts are familiar: sex ratios, altruism, asexual vs sexual reproduction, dangers of recessive genes and such like; so perhaps I’ve not been under a log after all. I kept getting flashbacks to ideas I’d first read about in Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene or Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen. By comparison, Judson’s style in the guise of Dr Tatiana is deliberately and overtly entertaining; but not at the cost of scholarly rigor (there are 62 pages of Notes and Bibliography).

Praying Mantis — Male praying mantis prefer not to give head (Photo: Tim Jones)

Previous reading certainly didn’t stop me picking up a bunch of new facts and figures on the more macabre and icky side of sexual reproduction. Knowledge any schoolboy/girl would be proud to have in his/her armoury.

Insects dominate Dr Tatiana’s surgery hours, but mammals and birds do get a look in. Like the girl hyena concerned over the size of her pseudo-phallus, or the moorhen bemused that his girlfriends are always fighting with each other.

But now I’m giving too much away.

Amazon have the paperback Dr Tatiana on for about £6.50 in the UK, and there’s also a DVD of the TV series based on the book. No brainer – go get it!

Book reviews, Books, Chemistry, Experiments, History, technology, Uncategorized

Recipes, Formulas And Processes

July 8, 2010 Tim Jones 2 Comments

Readers interested in early twentieth century chemistry, processes, and tricks of the trade used by industry and in the home, might like to check out the online edition of Henley’s Twentieth Century book of Recipes, Formulas and Processes, Edited by Gardner D.Hiscox – a pdf of Cornell University’s 1909 copy at the Internet Archive.

hiscox recipes formulas and processes by G.D. Hiscox — Recipes Formulas and Processes by G.D. Hiscox (1907 edition)

I’m lucky enough to own a 1907 first edition of Hiscox’s classic work, and love the way my copy is dis-colored and bleached by chemical splashes. Not by me, I hasten to add. But this book has for sure been used for its intended purpose! Whether the former owner, a James McQueen Jr. according to the bookplate, lived long and prospered because of its secrets, or in spite of them, is a different matter.

Secrets intended for all; the preface:

In compiling this book of formulas, recipes and processes, the Editor has endeavoured to meet primarily the practical requirements of the mechanic, the manufacturer, the artisan, and the housewife.

Some of the information is innocuous enough. You can learn how your great grandmother made blackberry jam. And Celery Clam Punch or Cherry Phosphate (with real phosphoric acid, maybe the origin of cherry coke?) sound refreshing for a summer evening.

But some of the medical cures are distinctly dodgy. We worry enough today about tanning products, but Hiscox’s cure for a tan, made from bichloride of mercury, sounds lethal. Helpfully, he shares with us that:

This is not strong enough to blister and skin the face in average cases.

Phew, good job most folk are average. Responsibly, he adds:

Do not forget that this last ingredient [the mercury compound] is a powerful poison and should be kept out of the reach of children and ignorant persons.

Folk would have taken Hiscox’s Cannabis indica based cure for corns in their stride (ouch!). And concern over the pinch of cinnabar in his nail polish would be just another case of health and safety gone mad.

But surely, even by the standards of the time, Hiscox’s idea of a light-hearted party trick must have raised some eyebrows (or literally blown them off): like ‘To take boiling lead in the mouth’, ‘Biting off red hot iron’, ‘Sparks from the finger tips’. And ‘The burning banana’ doesn’t bear thinking about.

hiscox recipes formulas and processes — Recipes, Formulas and Processes (1907 edition)

Some recipes were probably safe, but just sound a little icky. Like a nice pomade for sir’s hair, made from vaseline oil and beef marrow. Blue hosiery dye called for some ingredients I’ve never heard of: like 4 pounds of Guatamala and 3 pounds of Beugal Indigo; and others I have heard of: like 1 pail of urine. Hiscox also contains lots of paint and ink recipes but, disappointingly, there’s no mention of the infamous Mummy Brown.

‘Solid Alcohol’ sounds quite useful, maybe as a firelighter. I made something similar as a schoolboy, by dissolving soap in methylated spirit.

There’s nothing in Hiscox to separate the domestic from the industrial. Content is alphabetically indexed, but otherwise all mixed up. The section on glass includes industrial formulas for making different glass types and colourings in the furnace, but also includes instructions for a home-made glass grinding device.

Interestingly, Recipes, Formulas And Processes was republished through many revisions and editions into at least the 1930s. But I’m sure today there is nothing quite like it – unless we include the internet as a whole.

On another tack, it’s worth remembering that when Hiscox was published, the welfare and commercial infrastructure we take for granted today (some of us) was much less developed or non-existent. No popping down to the mall for a ready-made solution to every task. Folk just did more of their own stuff.

And should you decide to do more of your own stuff, don’t do it from Hiscox! He’s academically interesting to browse, but clearly some of his recipes and ideas are best left well alone.

animals, Book reviews, Books

Book Review: Second Nature – The Inner Lives of Animals by Jonathan Balcolme

May 27, 2010 Tim Jones 1 Comment

Book review: (Link to Amazon.co.uk) Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals

Author: Jonathan Balcombe

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Language English
ISBN-10: 0230613624
ISBN-13: 978-0230613621

I remember as a child eating meat products with names like ‘jellied veal’, ‘liver-sausage’, ‘corned beef’, ‘hazlet’, ‘ox-tail soup’ and ‘tongue’. They were just labels at the time, for things I put in my mouth. Only much later would I associate them with animals.

Now, reading Jonathan Balcombe’s new book ‘Second Nature – The Inner Lives of Animals’ I’m asking myself why it took so long to make that rather obvious connection. In fact, it’s got me thinking about a whole host of issues related to how we as a species perceive and treat other animals – nonhuman beings as Balcombe prefers to call them. For the issues Second Nature addresses have as much to do with human morality and ethics as they do with animal behaviour.

Balcombe wants to open our eyes to the possibility of accepting animals as fellow sentient beings, with feelings and emotions as real to them as ours are to us; beings with lives that are pleasurable and worth living for their own sake; lives worthy of sensitivity and respect. As Balcombe puts it: “My chief aim in this book is to close the gap between human beings and animals – by helping us understand the animal experience, and by elevating animals from their lowly status.”

He begins by setting out the evidence for animal sentience, emotion and feeling, then discusses the implications this has for human attitudes and actions.

Part I summarises the findings of numerous field and laboratory studies that demonstrate a range of animal capabilities, experiences and sensitivities we usually associate more with people. Part II is a description of how animals use these qualities to interact and communicate between themselves and with other species, including man. Part III focuses on the relationship between humans and animals, and includes a discussion on popular perceptions and how they are changing with what Balcombe sees as an emerging new paradigm in attitudes and awareness.

Central to Balcombe’s plea is the assertion that humans and animals differ in degree rather than kind. Each type of animal, Balcombe says, including man, has evolved to operate in its own world, or ‘umwelt’, equipped with an appropriate package of sensory experience and feelings suited to that world. We shouldn’t assume life experience in one umwelt is inherently superior to that in another. Humans can never directly experience another animal’s umwelt (who can say what personal echo-location or magnetic navigation feels like? – to use Balcombe’s examples) but we accept that animals have complex sensory capabilities. Which begs the question why, when emotions and feelings are at least as real and necessary to us as senses in explaining our lives and behaviours, would we deny them in animals? Second Nature is certainly thought provoking on these questions.

Many readers will I expect, from watching natural history on TV or casual reading, recognise something of the better known case studies about Washoe the chimp, grieving elephants, and intelligent ravens. That said, the number and diversity of cited studies is impressive, and most of the content is new to me.

Take Kelly the dolphin for example, who was taught to trade paper litter found in her pool for fish, but discovered the fish flow could be maximised by trading smaller pieces of paper torn from a larger sheet she had stashed away at the bottom of the pool. And tests for empathy, where increased stress reactions were measured in animals who witnessed the suffering of another animal – not necessarily of the same species.

Consciousness is a key theme in Second Nature, with Balcombe describing how chimpanzees have demonstrated a ‘theory of mind’ by showing they are consciously aware of consciousness in other chimps.

Other studies support the proposition that animals, elephants for example, follow individual lives that are the product of their unique experience. And that animals, like us, deal with feelings over the short and long term; they remember experiences, their memories shaping what they become. There are even indications that elephants have a sense of the future and their own mortality. Further examples illustrate conditions ranging from depression in starlings, to post traumatic stress disorder in elephants, to anxiety in mice – including their remarkable ability to self-medicate.

Exploring the relevance of instinct, intelligence and language, Balcombe rejects simplistic models that associate instinct with animals and intelligence with humans. Instinct does not preclude conscious experience, and intelligence is not a good measure for moral standing. As Balcombe puts it: “Animals are as intelligent as they need to be”. The evidence shows that many animals, far from following some kind of invariant program, are capable of learned behaviour and can adapt flexibly to new challenges. And as regards language, as it’s not linked to sensory activity, animals are able to suffer with or without it.

Balcombe closes the animal-human gap from both directions, elevating our opinion of animal capabilities while questioning the superiority of our own. We are reminded that animal senses and capabilities – physical, and on occasion mental – can be superior to ours. Balcombe points to our penchant for industrial scale cruelty and destruction, questioning our right to label other species as uncivilized. Our culture, Balcombe says, particularly through the media, overplays the negative aspects of animals’ lives, pushing the ‘red in tooth in and claw’ image of a natural world where animals permanently struggle at the edge of survival, flailing at the smallest injury.

Part III sees Balcolme getting into his narrative stride, explaining where he thinks our relationship with animals might be heading. Under the heading ‘A New Humanity’ he describes a shift from a traditional attitude of ‘might makes right’ towards a more informed and caring paradigm – a transition he likens to the changes of mind-set that accompanied the end of slavery and the winning of womens’ rights. The process has already started, with impacts most tangibly captured in animal related legislation for the protection of species, improvements in the treatment of animals we eat, and tighter controls on laboratory animal experimentation.

Interestingly, with Second Nature appealing mostly to our moral sense, Part III includes some purely practical, well stated, arguments for reduced meat consumption based on health, resource conservation and sustainability. This leads to a brief politico-economic discussion on the compatibility of the capitalist/growth model with sustainable environments; inflammatory territory which Balcombe handles with a welcome non-emotive sense of balance.

The somewhat uneasy relationship science seems to have with the idea of animal feelings is one I find interesting in it’s own right. Balcolme, a scientist himself, criticises science’s tendency to favour the simplest of plausible theories. It’s one reason, he says, why we have the dogmatic starting assumption that animals don’t have thoughts and feelings, rather than the other way around. Conversely, Second Nature and other works on a connected theme (Masson’s and McCarthy’s ‘When Elephants Weep’ comes to mind) are particularly open to criticism when authors use language outside the scientific lexicon. There may be concensus on what sentience means, consciousness less so; but what to make of words like goodness, compassion, and selflessness? Personally, I don’t have a problem with Balcombe’s style because I don’t see the issues being wholly resolvable with today’s science; we’d need a workable scientific model of moral behaviour for that. A scientific proof isn’t going to pop up and tell us to treat animals better, no matter how many books we read. However, and I suspect this is where Balcombe is coming from, I do think science is the best tool for revealing true animal states that might then be judged logically incompatible with, or at least challenge, established moral and ethical standards. Of course, how established those standards ever are is a discussion for another day.

On a critical note, and it’s probably the scientist in me kicking up, there were times when I wanted more detail from the case studies, more counter-argument, and deeper discussion of skeptical views. That the early chapters are crammed with properly referenced case studies is a good thing but, in a work of this length, that means trade-offs in content. The shear volume of examples also gives the early chapters something of a ‘listy’ feel, although that corrects in the later, more analytical material. Also, I thought the singling out of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett for criticism was unnecessary and unhelpful, particularly so when Dawkins has discussed the positive implications for animal rights that discovery (or creation) of a hypothetical man-ape hybrid would have. Examples of the darker side of nature, like the apparently cruel egg-laying behaviour of parasitic wasps, are perhaps over-quoted by the atheist camp, but only as arguments against the existence of a benevolent god, not a celebration. Moreover, Balcombe might want to keep the secularists on his team.

Despite these minor niggles, I have to confess Second Nature has caused me to think more deeply than I otherwise would about a topic I’d mentally parked. Commendably, it brings all the relevant issues up to date in one concise volume, and has plenty of references for those who want to dig deeper.

Will Second Nature change readers’ attitudes towards animals? I think in some cases it will. What it won’t do is resolve any consequential moral dilemma we might have around that next burger purchase. That’s something each of us must think about quietly on our own.

Related posts on Zoonomian that may be of interest

Interview with Alan Mootnick, Director of Gibbon Conservation Center, Santa Clarita, CA

The Open Ground. Conference podcast. Conservation, biodiversity)

Also of interest on other blogs

Carl Zimmer on ‘What it’s like to be a bat’ (Discovery Blog Sept 2010)

Alternative futures, Astrobiology, Book reviews, Books, Uncategorized

Book review: The Eerie Silence – Are we Alone in the Universe

March 26, 2010 Tim Jones 4 Comments

Book review: The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe?

Author: Paul Davies

Hardcover: 260 pages
Publisher: Allen Lane (4 Mar 2010)
ISBN-10: 1846141427
ISBN-13: 978-1846141423

The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, or SETI, is in a rut. That is Paul Davies’s message in ‘The Eerie Silence – Are we alone in the Universe’ – a thorough taking stock of the programme started by Frank Drake in 1959 to search for alien radio messages from outer space.

Davies wants a rethink from scratch, where we shake off the blinkers of anthropocentric thinking and question exactly what we should be looking for. Listening out for a direct radio message is fine, but lets extend the search to include more subtle evidence of alien legacy and the very origin of life.

ET has indeed been strangely quiet, and for Davies two rather extreme explanations for that are providing signposts to a ‘New SETI’.

Under the first option, we have to accept that life on Earth was born of a series of events so incredibly flukey they will never be repeated. Under the second, we face the chilling prospect that intelligent life pops up quite frequently, only to develop a propensity for technology fueled self-destruction.

Holding out hope for a middle way, and putting speculation over self-destructing aliens aside, Davies argues there is a raft of solid science we could be getting on with to better understand the scarcity of life. Those up for the task (and skilled enough to secure funding) will enter a field of polarised opinions and a paucity of hard evidence. The prize? – possibly the final word on the question of whether life is ubiquitous in the universe – a ‘cosmic imperative’ – or that you and I here on Earth are a one-off, somewhat lonesome, rarity.

We should still listen for radio messages, says Davies, enthusing over SETI’s groundbreaking Allen Telescope Array (ATA) of radio telescopes; but the emphasis should be on searching for new types of evidence of intelligence, both in space and closer to home – on Earth in fact.

If we can show life on Earth started independently more than once – a second genesis if you like – the fluke theory is destroyed and the prospect of life existing on the billion or so Earth-like planets in our galaxy increases immensely. Once life has started, there is pretty much universal agreement among scientists that Darwinian style evolution will, environmental factors willing, take over to produce complex life forms and probably intelligence and consciousness. Second (and third and fourth..) genesis life forms could be living alongside us today, unrecognised as a microbial ‘shadow biosphere’ – the holy grail for researchers now culturing candidate samples from Mono Lake in California. Or we might find tell-tale markers of an extinct second genesis in geological records that we have seen but incorrectly interpreted. With so many work areas highlighted as candidates for inclusion in New SETI, a problem for potential researchers could be deciding where to focus their application. Presumably Davies is taking calls.

Moving from Petri dish to telescope dish, Davies believes our pre-conceptions of ET in space are causing us to define too narrow a target there also. Any intelligent biological life, he says, will quickly transition to an intellectually superior machine form having nothing in common with Homo sapiens and little to gain from interstellar chit-chat.

Or the aliens may have launched beacons that ping data packets only once a year. Or they may have sent probes – monolith fashion – to lurk around our solar system, programmed to spring to life when we learn to think up to their level. The point is we will only detect this kind of activity if we specifically look for it.

In his most futuristic speculation, Davies envisions life evolving into a quantum computer – an extended network of energy floating through space, amusing itself solving complex mathematical doodles. The implication of course, if such ‘beings’ exist, is that we are headed in the exact same direction. How do you fancy being a node in a pan-galactic thought matrix?

Among other thought-provoking revelations, we learn the Earth has for billions of years been happily swapping rocks, possibly with primitive life aboard, with other planets in the solar system – including Mars. That makes the potential discovery of life on that planet important, but not necessarily a game-changer for SETI, as Martian and Earth life could share the same unique origin.

Davies puts SETI into historical context on a quirkier note, recounting how the mathematician Karl Gauss, as early as the turn of the 19th century, planned to signal the Martians using huge shapes cut out of trees in the Siberian forest.

There is an implicit appeal in The Eerie Silence for scientists from different disciplines to work together on SETI and astrobiology – maybe a guiding principle for New SETI? Astronomers, biologists, geologists, engineers, astro-physicists and cosmologists all have a role in the search – as do non-scientists.

That also holds true for the post-detection task-group Davies leads, set up to advise an appropriate response in the event ET finally calls. In a chapter devoted to the implications of ‘first contact’, he asks how various groups: from the media, through politicians, the military, and religious believers might react. If we receive a targeted message, we should certainly think carefully about the reply. But that we already send the occasional burst of blindly targeted radio messages into space is a positive in Davies’s book; at least it makes people think about science, humanity, and what in our culture we value. Religion, and particularly Christianity, Davies believes, will struggle to reconcile dogma with the existence of intelligent aliens.

In his wind-up, Davies keeps all options open as to the chances of a positive outcome for SETI. But on balance, hardcore enthusiasts of radio SETI in particular may well find the The Eerie Silence a bit of a downer. Likewise, those looking for evidence to support more philosophical ideas around nature favouring life, or the existence of a life principle buried in the physics and chemistry of the universe – themes Davies has arguably been more sympathetic to in previous works – will be disappointed as he rejects each in turn.

To its credit, The Eerie Silence is as much about human motivations and psychology as it is about research and radio antennae. A chatty narrative with frequent episodes of self-examination strikes chords with thoughts and feelings most of us will have had: like the need for a sense of self, and a yearning for meaning. The search for ET is very much the search for what we are, what we may become, and what ‘it’ all means. A cliched theme maybe, but well supported here with relevant facts and reasoned speculation. Davies’s talent for projecting rock-solid scientific rationalism while not (entirely) closing the door on other perspectives has produced an absorbing read.

Other posts related to astrobiology and SETI on Zoonmian

How would you break the eerie silence – competition winners

Royal Society’s meeting on astrobiology and the search for extra-terrestrial life (SETI)

Rapping ET-style

Interview with an astrobiologist (Lewis Dartnell) and Life, Talk to me about Life

Art, Books, History, Philosophy of Science

Unweaving the Rainbow

February 28, 2010 Tim Jones 4 Comments

I took this short sequence in the garden this afternoon. No photo-shopping, just a nice illustration of the splitting of sunlight into it’s component colors by refraction through a water drop – shuddering in the breeze after a storm.

The simplest of things, it put me in mind of John Keats’s supposed lament that Isaac Newton had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by explaining the science behind it, the underlying sentiment of which he included in the poem Lamia. I say supposed, because I can’t find a primary reference to Keats actually ‘having a go’ at Newton over his prism or whatever. Lamia however speaks for itself (see below).

Richard Dawkins gives an alternative view in his book, Unweaving the Rainbow, where he argues scientific understanding enhances rather than diminishes beauty. I’m with Dawkins on this one. And while those going through life without a scientific education (for whatever reason) experience it in a way that is different, I believe they are also simply missing out.

Keats’s rainbow reference appears in his poem Lamia Part II:

What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
What for the sage, old Apollonius?
Upon her aching forehead be there hung
The leaves of willow and of adder’s tongue;
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Astrobiology, astronomy, biology, Books, Fun, space

How would you ‘Break the Eerie Silence’ ?

February 8, 2010 Tim Jones 1 Comment

Update 15th March – I’ve posted the top 50 winning messages HERE.

Update 13th March – Competition results. For those of you checking back for the 12th March winning messages, they don’t seem to have appeared yet. Another eerie silence if you like. Watch this space.

It’s been a spacey couple of weeks here at Zoonomian. What with the Royal Society’s meeting on astrobiology and the search for extra-terrestrial life (SETI), rapping ET-style, and a return to the Buck Rogers era. And we’re not finished yet.

You might remember one of the speakers at the Royal Society event was physicist Paul Davies, who also has a new book coming out, The Eerie Silence: Are we alone in the Universe?.

I’ll be writing a full review of Eerie Silence in due course, but meantime you might want to take part in what looks like a fun competition, launched today by publishers Penguin UK together with National Science and Engineering Week.

They’re asking the question:

Is there anybody out there? What would you say if you could send a message into space?

Would you say hello, ask the meaning of life, share an insight or just complain about the weather?

As the organisers say, this is a rare opportunity to beam up to 5000 messages into space to celebrate the 50th anniversary of SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, which is the subject of Davies’s book.

So get your thinking cap on, make your message funny, thoughtful or wise and do something extraordinary.

The best 50 messages, as chosen by a judging committee, will be posted at the Penguin website and also here on Zoonomian on 12 March, the first day of National Science and Engineering Week 2010 and in the national media. Winning entrants’ names and home location, only, may be credited at the foot of each message. In addition, the 50 winning entrants will each receive a copy of “The Eerie Silence: Are we Alone in the Universe?” by Paul Davies.

To send a message of no more than 40 words, simply go to www.penguin.co.uk/eeriesilence and enter your message.

Entries will be accepted between 8th – 28th February 2010.

Winners notified on 3 March and the 50 winning entries will go public on 12 March 2010. For full details and Terms and Conditions, see the website.

Books, Philosophy of Science, religion

Run Over From Behind By A Bus

January 28, 2009 Tim Jones 2 Comments

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.

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.

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

Art, Biography, Books, History, sciart

Royal Institution Speaker Calls for an End To Culture Wars

January 21, 2009 Tim Jones Leave a comment

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.

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.

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)

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

Books, education, Physics

Domestic Science – Not

October 19, 2008 Tim Jones Leave a comment

I’m not the first to ask why science has become less popular with school children and young people. It’s a fact, at least in the UK and the USA, that fewer students are selecting science subjects at school or making a college or professional career out of science.

While there are doubtless many complex reasons behind the decline, some of today’s thinkers put at least part of the blame on the reduction in first hand experience and active personal experimentation in science that young people engage in.

And could something as apparently innocent as the emasculation of the home chemistry set, or the retreat by schools from the more spectacular classroom science demonstrations, be a contributing cause?

While I’ve been musing over my own formative influences, which I put down to: inherent curiosity, parental support, inspiring teachers, a home culture of learning and DIY (do-it-yourself), and relatively unhindered experimentation; my latest reading is a warning of what can happen when home grown science goes too far.

David Hahn was an adolescent Boy Scout from Michigan when he built an operational model nuclear reactor in his parents’ garden shed. His improbable but true story is told by Ken Silverstein in The Radioactive Boyscout: The True Story of a Boy Who Built a Nuclear Reactor in His Shed.

Silverstein describes Hahn’s obsession with nuclear power and radioactivity, culminating in his own nuclear pile. It’s a frightening and fascinating study in single-minded ingenuity; the ultimate expression of ‘string and elastic bands’ resourcefulness. But it’s also a sad tale of misguided talent and lost opportunity, with Hahn’s informal career in science never blossoming beyond the confines of his backyard. I’ve just finished this book from 2004 – another volume from my latest ‘3 for £5’ trawl – and can heartily recommend it. It’s a good adult read, plus you won’t find a more mischievous gift for any young person with a maturing interest in home science experiments.

Hahn’s own inspiration was the doubly infamous Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, a product of 1950s/60s US techno-optimism that was subsequently banned from most US libraries. Certainly, some of the children’s experiments described within its colourful covers are way beyond anything that today we would consider safe – for the child or the publisher.

There is of course nothing new under the sun, and, despite the recent plethora of mimic Victoriana ‘thing-to-do’ books, titled ‘The Dangerous Books for Boys, Girls,…Whatever’, nothing compares with the original bane of the enlightened Victorian parent – ‘The Young Man’s Book Of Amusement‘. Packed with all sorts of nonsense, ranging from

the harmless to the downright suicidal, my favourite wheeze from this 1850’s bible of curiosity is the Artificial Volcano. The experimental procedure, which results in a runaway exothermic reaction of iron filings and sulphur, specifies minimum quantities of both reactants such that, in the spirit of all good compost heap construction, a critical and sustaining thermal mass is achieved – in this case 28lbs of each. The 56lb of damp mixture is buried two feet below the ground, and left to do its stuff. Never having got up the nerve or the resources to try this, on any scale, I can only imagine the combined impact on the senses of vigourous suphur dioxide production, rivers of molten sulphur, showers of burning iron particles, all escaping through an earth bulging under the pressure of a man-made magma chamber. Environmentally friendly – not. Politically correct – not. Fun, thought provoking, and inspiring….? For more excerpts from this cheery manual visit Lateralscience (but don’t fall for the apochryphal stories surrounding the text – which is real).

I’m not endorsing the building of volcanoes or nuclear piles, in our back gardens or anywhere else, but we should consider what has happened over the last thirty or forty years with regard to our freedoms and restrictions in the home-science department. Are we to be trusted with only baking soda and citric acid? – apparently so.

I’ll wind up with a taste of how some of the ‘today’s thinkers’ I referred to earlier feel about the subject of scientific inspiration and freedom for self-experimentation. “Hands-on experience and experiments” was one of the ten categories highlighted by respondents to a 2006 study by the Spiked team who, working with Pfizer, asked some well-known scientists/thinkers (including Simon Singh whom I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting recently) – ‘”What inspired you to take up science?’” Many respondents emphasised the importance during their formative years of being able to do their own independent testing, experimentation, and indeed – risk taking. Here is the complete summary of responses.

Communicate Science