Germ Warfare

Germ Warfare

Cooking by the Book

Use temperature to kill bacteria before they make you sick:

• 240º – Canning temperature for low-acid vegetables, meat, and poultry in pressure canner.
• 212 – Canning temperature for fruits, tomatoes, and pickles in water bath canner. Cooking temperatures destroy most bacteria. Time required to kill bacteria is decreased as temperature is increased.
• 165 – Warning temperatures prevent growth but allow survival of some bacteria.
• 140 – Some bacterial growth may occur. Many bacteria survive.

Danger zone: Temperatures in this zone allow rapid growth of bacteria and production of toxins by some bacteria.

• 60 – Some growth of food-poisoning bacteria may occur. (Do not store meats, poultry, or seafoods for more than one week in the refrigerator.)
• 40 – Cold temperatures permit slow growth of some bacteria that cause spoilage.
• 32 – Freezing temperatures stop growth of bacteria, but may allow bacteria to survive. (Do not store food above 10 degrees F for more than a few weeks).

Photo by Elena

To Cook Shellfish

Simmer in boiling water: Shrimp (5 minutes); Crab (20 minutes); Lobster (30 to 40 minutes).

Cooking shellfish thoroughly or to an internal temperature of 140 degrees F is required to help avoid the threat of food poisoning. Shrimp, scallops, clams, and oysters can be deep-fried at 370 F for about three minutes. Shrimp and scallops can also be sauteed. Other shellfish are best boiled or steamed. Boil for three to five minutes after the shells have opened. Steam shellfish four to nine minutes from the start of steaming. Use small pots for boiling or steaming. If too many shells are cooking in the same pot, it’s possible that the ones in the middle won’t be thoroughly cooked. Discard any clams, mussels, or oysters that do not open during cooking. If the shells remain closed, it may mean they have not received adequate heat.

How to Measure the Distance to the Stars

How to Measure the Distance to the Stars

The separation of the planets from one another – forty million kilometers from Earth to Venus at closes approach, six billion kilometers to Pluto – would have stunned those Greeks who were outraged by the contention that the Sun might be as large as the Peloponnesus.

It was natural to think of the solar system as much more compact and local. If I had my finger before my eyes and examine it first with my left and then with my right eye, it seems to move against the distant background. The closer my finger is, the more it seems to move. I can estimate the distances to my finger from the amount of this apparent motion, or parallax. If my eyes were farther apart, my finger would seem to move substantially more.

The longer the baseline from which we make our two observations, the greater the parallax and the better we can measure the distances to remote objects. Bu we live on a moving platform, the Earth, which every six months has progressed from one end of its orbit to the other, a distance of 300, 000, 000 kilometers.

How far would we have to travel from the Sun for it appear as small and as dim as a star? Illustration by Elena

If we look at the same unmoving celestial object six months apart, we should be able to measure very great distances. Aristarchus suspected the stars to be distant suns. He placed the Sun among the fixes stars. The absence of detectable stellar parallax as the Earth moved suggested that the stars were much farther away than the Sun. Before the invention of the telescope, the parallax of even the nearest stars was too small to detect. Not until the nineteenth century was the parallax of a star first measured. It then became clear, from straightforward Greek geometry, that the stars were light-years away.

There is another way to measure the distance to the stars which the Ionians were fully capable of discovering, although, so far as we know, they did not employ it. Everyone knows that the farther away an object is, the smaller it seems. This inverse proportionality between apparent size and distance is the basis of perspective in art and photography. So the farther away we are from the Sun, the smaller and dimmer it appears. How far would we have to be from the Sun for to appear as small and as dim as a star? Or, equivalently, how small a piece of the Sun would be as bright as a star?

An early experiment to answer this question was performed by Christian Huygens, very much in the Ionian tradition. He drilled small holes in a brass plate, held the plate up to the Sun and asked himself which hole seemed as bright as he remembered the bright star Sirius to have been the night before. The hole was effectively 1/28,000 the apparent size of the Sun (Huygens actually used a glass bead to reduce the amount of light passed by the hole). So Sirius, he reasoned, must be 28,000 times farther from us than the Sun, or about half a light-year away. It is hard to remember just how bright a star is many hours after you look at it, but Huygens remembered very well. If he had known that Sirius was intrinsically brighter than the Sun, he would have come up with almost exactly the right answer: Sirius is 8,8 light-years away. The fact that Aristarchus and Huygens used imprecise data and derived imperfect answers hardly matters. They explained their methods so clearly that, when better observations were available, more accurate answers could be derived.

Intelligent Life in the Universe

Intelligent Life In the Universe

We have launched four ships to the stars, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They are primitive and backward craft, moving, compared to the immense interstellar distances, with a slowness of a race in a dream.

In the future we will do better.. Our ships will travel faster. There will be designated interstellar objectives, and sooner or later our spacecraft will have human crews.

In the Milky Way Galaxy there must be many planets millions of years older than Earth, and some that are billions of years older. Should we not have been visited? In all the billions of years since the origin of our planet, has there not been even once a strange craft from a distant civilization surveying our world from above, and slowly settling down to the surface to be observed by iridescent dragonflies, incurious reptiles, screeching primates or wondering humans?

I wish it were otherwise. There is something irresistible about a discovery of even a token, perhaps a complex inscription, but best by far, a key to the understanding of an alien and exotic civilization. It is an appeal we humans have felt before. Image : © Elena

The idea is natural enough. It has occurred to everyone who has contemplated, even casually, the question of intelligent life in the universe. But has it happened if fact? The critical issue is the quality of purported evidence, rigorously and sceptically scrutinized – not what sounds plausible, not the unsubstantiated testimony of one or two self-professed eyewitnesses.

By this standard there are no compelling cases of extraterrestrial visitation, despite all the claims about UFOs and ancient astronauts which sometimes makes it seem that our planet is awash in uninvited guests.

Our Sisters and Brothers

On some planets, intelligent life may have evolved, reworking the planetary surface in some massive engineering enterprise. These are our sisters and brothers in the Cosmos.

Are these creatures very different from us? What is their biochemistry, their form, neurobiology, history, science, religion, politics, technology, art, music, philosophy? Do they have long haired ears? Is their sky blue and their soil red? Perhaps some day we will know them.

How do these creatures look? Photo : © Elena

There must be many worlds scattered through space, but our search for them just begins now, with the accumulated wisdom of the men and women of our species, garnered at great cost over a million years.

And finally, at the end of all our wanderings, we return to our tiny, fragile, blue-white world, lost in a cosmic ocean vat beyond our most courageous imagining. Our world is a world among an immensity of others. It may be significant only for us. Or it may be the center of the Universe.

Tycho and Kepler

Tycho and Kepler

Tycho Brahe

A provincial schoolteacher of humble origins, unknown to all but a few mathematicians, Johannes Kepler was diffident about Tycho’s offer to join him in Prague. But the decision was made for him. In 1598, one of the many premonitory tremors of the coming Thirty Years’ Was engulfed him. The local Catholic archduke, steadfast in dogmatic certainty, vowed he would rather “make a desert of the country than rule other heretics” (By no means the most extreme such remark in medieval or Reformation Europe. Upon being asked how to distinguish the faithful from the infidel in the siege of a largely Albigensian city, Domingo de Guzman, later known as Saint Dominic, allegedly replied: “Kill the all. God will know his own”.) Protestants were excluded from economic and political power. Kepler’s school was closed, and prayers, books and hymns deemed heretical were forbidden. Finally the townspeople were summoned to individual examinations on the soundness of their private religious convictions, those refusing to profess the Roman Catholic faith being fined a tenth of their income and, upon pain of death, exiled forever from Graz. Kepler chose exile: “Hypocrisy I have never learned. I am in earnest about faith. I do not play with it”.

Dynascope RV-6. “Hypocrisy I have never learned. I am in earnest about faith. I do not play with it” (Johannes Kepler). Image: In public domain.

Leaving Graz, Kepler, his wife and stepdaughter set out on the difficult journey to Prague. Theirs was not a happy marriage. Chronically ill, having recently lost two young children, his wife was described as “stupid, sulking, lonely, melancholy”. She had no understanding of her husband’s work and, having been raised among the minor rural gentry, she despised his impecunious profession. He for his part alternately admonished and ignored her, “for my studies sometimes made me thoughtless; but I learned my lesson, I learned to have patience with her. When I saw that she took my words to heart, I would rather have bitten by own finger to give her further offense”. But Kepler remained preoccupied with his work.

He aspired to become a colleague of the great Tycho Brahe, who for thirty-five years had devoted himself, before the invention of the telescope, to the measurement of a clockwork universe, ordered and precise. Kepler’s expectations were to be unfulfilled. Tycho himself was a flamboyant figure, festooned with a golden nose, the original having been lost in a student duel fought over who was the superior mathematician. Around him was a raucous entourage of assistants, sycophants, distant relatives and assorted hangers-on. Their endless revelry, their innuendoes and intrigues, their cruel mockery of the pious and scholarly country bumpkin depressed and saddened Kepler : “Tycho… is superlatively rich but knows not how to make use of it. Any single instrument of his costs more than my and my whole family’s fortunes put together”.

Johannes Kepler

Impatient to see Tycho Brahe’s astronomical data, Johannes Kepler would be thrown only a few scraps at a time: “Tycho gave me no opportunity to share in his experiences. He would only, in the course of a meal and, in between other matters, mention, as if in passing, today the figure of the apogee of one planet, tomorrow the nodes of another… Tycho possesses the best observations… He also has collaborators. He lacks only the architect who would put it all this to use. » Tycho was the greatest observational genius of the age, and Kepler the greatest theoretician.

Each knew that, alone, he would be unable to achieve the synthesis of an accurate and coherent world system, which they both felt to be imminent. But Tycho was not about to make a gift of his life’s work to a much younger potential rival. Joint authorship of the results, if any, of the collaboration was for some reason unacceptable.

The birth of modern science – the offspring of theory and observation – teetered on the precipice of their mutual mistrust. In the remaining eighteen months that Tycho was to live, the two quarreled and were reconciled repeatedly.

Let me not seem to have lived in vain. Image: A Flashing Texture by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

At a dinner given by the Baron of Rosenberg, Tycho, having robustly drunk much wine, “placed civility ahead of health”, and resisted his body’s urging to leave, even if briefly, before the baron. The consequently urinary infection worsened when Tycho resolutely rejected advice to temper his eating and drinking. On his deathbed, Tycho Brahe bequeathed his observations to Kepler, and “on the last night of his gentle delirium, he repeated over and over again these words, like someone composing a poem: “Let me not seem to have lived in vain… Let me not seem to have lived in vain…”

After Tycho Brahe’s death, Johannes Kepler, now the new Imperial mathematician, managed to extract the observations from Tycho’s recalcitrant family. His conjecture that the orbits of the planets are circumscribed by the five platonic solids were no more supported by Tycho’s data than by Copernicus’.

Tycho’s observation of the apparent motion of Mars and other planets through the constellations were made over a period of many years. These data, from the last few decades before the telescope was invented, were the most accurate that yet had been obtained. Kepler worked with passionate intensity to understand them. What real motion of the Earth and Mars about the Sun could explain, to the precision of measurement, the apparent motion of Mars in the sky, including its retrograde loops through the background constellations.

Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky

As we have discussed at some length elsewhere, the ideas of Immnuel Velikovsky are almost certainly wrong. Astronomers do not object to the idea of major collisions in space, only to major recent collisions. In any model of the solar system it is impossible to show the sizes of the planets on the same scale as their orbits, because the planets would then be almost too small to see.

If the planets were really shown to scale, as grains of dust, we would easily note that the chance of collision of a particular comet with the Earth in a few thousand years is extraordinarily low. Moreover, Venus is a rocky and metallic, hydrogen-poor planet, whereas Jupiter – where Velikovsky supposed it comes from – is made almost entirely of hydrogen. There are no energy sources for comets or planets to be ejected by Jupiter.

If one passed by the Earth, it could not “stop” the Earth’s rotation, much less start it up again at twenty-four hours a day. No geological evidence supports the idea of an unusual frequency of vulcanism or floods 3,500 years ago. There are Mesopotamian inscriptions referring to Venus that predate the time when Velikovsky says Venus changed from a comet into a planet: The Adda cylinder seal, dating from the middle of the third millennium B.C., prominently displays Inanna, the goddess of Venus, the morning star, and precursor of the Babylonian Istar.

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge. Image : Alien Illusion © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

It is very unlikely that an object in such a highly elliptical orbit could be rapidly moved into the nearly perfect circular orbit of present-day Venus… And so on.

In fact, many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by non-scientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence. The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that his hypotheses were wrong or in contradiction to firmly established facts, but that some who called themselves scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s work. Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits.

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavour of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundament new insights.