Science is My Religion

Science Is My Religion

In Italy, Galileo had announced other worlds, and Giordano Bruno had speculated on other life-forms. For this, they had been made to suffer brutally. But in Holland, the astronomer Christian Huygens, who believed in both, was showered in honors. His father was Constantijn Huygens, a master diplomat of the age, a litterateur, poet, composer, musician, close friend and translator of the English poet John Donne, and the head of an archetypical great family. Constantijn admired the painter Rubens, and “discovered” a young artist named Rembrandt van Rijn, in several of whose works he subsequently appears. After their first meeting Descartes wrote of him: “I couldn’t never believe that a single mind could occupy itself with so many things and equip itself so well in all of them”.

The Huygens home was filled with goods from all over the world. Distinguished thinkers from other nations were frequent guests. Growing up in this environment, the young Christian Huygens became simultaneously adept in languages, drawing, law, science, engineering, mathematics and music. His interests and allegiances were broad. “The world is my country”, he said, “science is my religion”.

Light was a motif of the age: the symbolic enlightenment of freedom of thought and religion, of geographical discovery; the light that permeated the painting of the time, particularly the exquisite work of Vermeer; and light as an object of scientific inquiry, as in Shell’s study of refraction, Leeuwenhoek’s invention of the microscope and Huygens’ own wave theory of light. These were all connected activities, and their practitioners mingled freely. Vermeer’s interior are characteristically filled with nautical artifacts and wall maps. Microscopes were drawing-room curiosities. Leeuwenhoek was the executor of Vermeer’s estate and a frequent visitor at the Huygens home at Hofwijck.

Stars are campfires. The world is my country, science is my religion (Christian Huygens). Image: Light Colors by ©Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Isaac Newton admired Christian Huygens and thought him “the most elegant mathematician of their time”, and the truest follower of the mathematical tradition of the ancient Greeks – then, as now, a great compliment. Newton believed, in part because shadows had sharp edges, that light behaved as if it were a stream of tiny particles. He thought that red light was composed of the largest particles and violet the smallest. Huygens argued that instead light behaved as if it were a wave propagating in a vacuum, as an ocean wave does in the sea – which is why we talk about the wavelength and frequency of light.

Many properties of light, including diffraction, are naturally explained by the wave theory, and in subsequent years Huygens’ view carried the day. But in 1905, Einstein showed that the particle theory of light could explain the photoelectric effect, the ejection of electrons from a metal upon exposure to a beam of light. Modern quantum mechanics combines both ideas, and it is customary today to think of light as behaving in some circumstances as a beam of particles and in others as a wave. This wave particle dualism may not correspond readily to our common-sense notions, but it is in excellent accord with what experiments have shown light really does. There is something mysterious and stirring in the marriage of opposites, and it is fitting that Newton and Huygens, bachelors both, were the parents of our modern understanding of the nature of light.

Starship of the Planet Earth

Starship of the Planet Earth

If the Ionian spirit had won, we – a different “we”, of course – might be now be venturing to the stars. Our first survey ships to Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star, Sirius and Tau Ceti would have returned long ago. Great fleets of interstellar transports would be under construction in Earth orbit – unmanned survey ships, liners for immigrants, immense trading ships to plow the seas of space. On all these ships there would be symbols and writing. If we looked closely, we might see that the language was Greek. And perhaps the symbol on the bow of one of the first starships would be a dodecahedron, with the inscription Starship Theodours of the Planet Earth.

In the time line of our world, things have gone somewhat more slowly. We are not yet ready for the stars. But perhaps in another century or two, when the solar system is all explored, we will also have put our planet in order. We will have the will and the resources and the technical knowledge to go to the stars. We will have examined from great distances the diversity of other planetary systems, some very much like our own and some extremely different. We will know which stars to visit. Our machines and our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein.

We are not yet certain how many planetary systems there are, but here seem to be a great abundance. In our immediate vicinity, there is not just one, but in a sense four: Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus each has a satellite system that, in the relative sizes and spacings of the moons, resembles closely the planets about the Sun. Extrapolation of the statistics of double stars which are greatly disparate in mass suggests that almost all single stars like the Sun should have planetary companions.

Galaxy is cultivated. Very soon we’ll definite answers to which of the hundred nearest stars have large planetary companions. (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

We cannot yet directly see the planets of other stars, tiny points of light swamped in the brilliance of their local suns. But we are becoming able to detect the gravitational influence of an unseen planet on an observed star. Imagine such a star with a large “proper motion”, moving over decades against the backdrop of more distant constellations; and with a large planet, the mass of Jupiter, say, whose orbital plane is by chance aligned at right angles to our line of sight.

When the dark planet is, from our perspective, to the right of the star, the star will be pulled a little to the right, and conversely when the planet is to the left. Consequently, the path of the star will be altered, or perturbed, from a straight line to a wavy one. The nearest star for which this gravitational perturbation method can be applied is Barnard’s Star, the nearest single star. The complex interactions of the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system would make the search for a low-mass companion there very difficult.

Even for Barnard’s Star, the investigation must be painstaking, a search for microscopic displacements of position on photographic plates exposed at the telescope over a period of decades. Two such quests have been performed for planets around Barnard’s Star, and both have been by some criteria successful, implying the presence or two or three planets of Jovian mass moving inn an orbit, calculated by Kepler’s third law, somewhat closer to their star than Jupiter and Saturn are to the Sun. But unfortunately, the two sets of observations seem mutually incompatible. A planetary system around Barnard’s Star may well have been discovered, but an unambiguous demonstration awaits further study.

Can We Cut a Proton?

Can We Cut a Proton?

Atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Can we cut a proton? If we bombard protons at high energies with other elementary particles – other protons, say – we begin to glimpse more fundamental units hiding inside the proton.

Physicists now propose that so-called elementary particles such as protons and neutrons are in fact made of still more elementary particles called quarks, which come in a variety of « colors » and « flavors », as their properties have been termed in a poignant attempt to make the subnuclear world a little more like home.

Are quarks the ultimate constituents of matter, or are they too composed of still smaller and more elementary particles? Will we ever come to an end in our understanding of the nature of matter, or is there an infinite regression into more and more fundamental particles? This is one of the great unsolved problems in the science.

The transmutation of the elements was pursued in medieval laboratories in a quest called alchemy. Many alchemists believed that all matter was a mixture of four elementary substances: water, air, earth and fire, an ancient Ionian speculation. By altering the relative proportions of earth and fire, say, you would be able, they thought, to change copper into gold. The field swarmed with charming frauds and con men, such as Cagliostro and the Count of Saint-Germain, who pretended not only to transmute the elements but also to hold the secret of immortality.

Fire is not made of chemical elements at all. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Sometimes gold was hidden in a wand with a false bottom, to appear miraculously in a crucible at the end of some arduous experimental demonstration. With wealth and immortality the bait, the European nobility found itself transferring large sums to the practitioners of this dubious art. But there were more serious alchemists such as Paracelsus and even Isaac Newton. The money was not altogether wasted -new chemical elements, such as phosphorus, antimony and mercury, were discovered. In fact, the origin of modern chemistry can be traced directly to these experiments.

There are ninety-two chemically distinct kinds of naturally occurring atoms. They are called the chemical elements and until recently constituted everything on our planet, although they are mainly found combined into molecules. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Air is made mostly of the atoms nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), carbon (C), hydrogen (H), argon (Ar), in the molecular forms N2, 02, CO2, H2) and Ar. The Earth itself is a very rich mixture of atoms, mostly silicon, oxygen, aluminum, iron and magnesium (Silicon is an atom. Silicone is a molecule, one of billions of different varieties containing silicon. Silicon and silicone have different properties and applications).

Fire is not made of chemical elements at all. It is a radiating plasma in which the high temperature has stripped some of the electrons from their nuclei. Not one of the four ancient Ionian and alchemical “elements” is in the modern sense an element at all: one is a molecule, two arr mixtures of molecules, and the last is a plasma.

Advantage in Possessing Brain

An Advantage in Possessing Brain

No one knows what wiped out the dinosaurs. One evocative idea is that it was a cosmic catastrophe, the explosion of nearby star – a supernova like the one that produced the Crab Nebula. If there were by chance a supernova within ten or twenty light-years of the solar system some sixty-five million years ago, it would have sprayed an intense flux of cosmic rays into space, and some of these, entering the Earth’s envelope of air, would have burned the atmospheric nitrogen. The oxides of nitrogen thus generated would have removed the protective layer of ozone from the atmosphere, increasing the flux of solar ultraviolet radiation at the surface and frying and mutating the many organisms imperfectly protected against intense ultraviolet light. Some of those organisms may have been staples of the dinosaur diet.

A recent analysis suggests that 96% or all the species in the ocean may have died at that time. With such an enormous extinction rate, the organisms of today can have evolved from only a small and unrepresentative sampling of the organisms that lived in late Mesozoic times. The disaster, whatever it was, that cleared the dinosaurs from the world stage removed the pressure on the mammals.

After that our ancestors no longer had to live in the shadow of voracious reptiles. We diversified exuberantly and flourished. Twenty million years ago, our immediate ancestors probably still lived in the trees, later descending because the forest receded during a major ice age and were replaced by grassy savannah. It is not much good to be supremely adapted to life in the trees if there are very few trees. Many arboreal primates must have vanished with the forests. A few eked out a precarious existence on the ground and survived. One of those lines evolved to become us. No one knows the cause of that climatic change. It may have been a small variation of the intrinsic luminosity of the Sun or in the orbit of the Earth; or massive volcanic eruptions injecting fine dust into the stratosphere, reflecting more sunlight back into the space and cooling the sphere, reflecting more sunlight back into space and cooling the Earth.

Our existence is very tied to random astronomical and geological events. Image: Psychodelic Kikimora © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

It may have been due to changes in the general circulation of the oceans. Or perhaps the passage of the Sun trough a galactic dust cloud. Whatever the cause, we see again how tied our existence is to random astronomical and geological events.

Anyway, after we came down from the trees, we evolved an upright posture; our hands were free; we possessed excellent binocular vision – we had acquired many of the preconditions for making tools. There was now a real advantage in possessing a large brain and in communication complex thoughts. Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid. Intelligent beings can solve problems better, live longer and leave more powerfully aided survival. In our history it was some horde of furry little mammals who hid from the dinosaurs, colonized the treetops and later scampered down to domesticate fire, invent writing, construct observatories and launch space vehicles.

Information Is Written in Detail

All Information Is Written in Detail

The genetic material of the whale, like the genetic material of human beings, is made of nucleic acids, those extraordinary molecules capable of reproducing themselves from the chemical building blocks that surround them, and of turning hereditary information into action. For example, one whale enzyme, identical to one you have in every cell of your body, is called hexokinase, the first of more than two dozen enzyme-mediated steps required to convert a molecule of sugar obtained from the plankton in the whale’s diet into a little energy – perhaps a contribution to a single low-frequency note in the music of the whale. The information stored in the DNA double helix of a whale or a human or any other beast or vegetable on Earth is written in a language of four letters – the four different kinds of nucleotides, the molecular components that make up DNA.

How many bits of information are contained in the hereditary material of various life forms? How many yes/no answers to the various biological questions are written in the language of life? A virus needs about 10,000 bits – roughly equivalent to the amount of information in this text. But the viral information is simple, exceedingly compact, extraordinary efficient. Reading it requires very close attention. These are the instructions it needs to infect some other organism and to reproduce itself – the only things that viruses are any good at.

All information is written in exhaustive, careful, redundant detail – how to laugh, how to squeeze, how to walk, how to recognize patterns, how to reproduce, how to digest an apple. Image: © Meg Jorgensen (Elena)

A bacterium uses roughly a million bits of information, which is about one hundred printed pages. Bacteria have a lot more to do than viruses. Unlike the viruses, they are not thoroughgoing parasites. Bacteria have to make a living, and a free-swimming one-celled amoeba is much more sophisticated; with about four hundred million bits in its DNA, it would require some eighty 500-page volumes to make another amoeba.

A while or a human being need something like five millions bits. The 5X10(9) bits of information in our encyclopaedia of life – in the nucleus of each of our cells, if written out in, say, English, would fill a thousand volumes. Everyone of your hundred trillion cells contains a complete library of instructions on how to make every part of you. Every cell in your body arises by successive cell divisions from a single cell, a fertilized egg generated by your parents.

Every time that cell divided, in the many embryological steps that went into making you, the original set of genetic instructions was duplicated with great fidelity. So your liver cells have some unemployed knowledge about how to make your bone cells, and vice-versa. The genetic library contains everything your body knows how to do on its own.