Just do what the scientists say

 

Uncle Joe wants to “Just do what the scientists say.”  (concerning COVID) Are those the economic scientists who just want to open the economy?  Or the oncologists who worry that USA had only about half the cancer screenings this year? Or are we talking about psychiatrists who are concerned about the skyrocketing number of addictions, suicides, and marital crimes during the shutdowns?  Or the federal medical bureaucrats who only want to solve a pandemic with quarantines? 

The trouble with the thinking of most people is that they think “Science” is a monolithic body of knowledge that has been decided.  It’s not.  Sometimes a ‘principle’ is equally agreed upon, but more often there is a minority who see the data set differently. Sometimes everybody agrees but most feel there is scant proof, so support for a ‘theory’ is a mile wide but an inch deep.  Or everyone agrees but then an upstart theory upends the comfortable ideas.  Most grievously, the general population things that there is only one pat way to solve a problem or to see the results.  This is due to the fact that they struggled in science class and having simply solved the problem once, threw up hands over any further notions.  Let me illustrate. 

A friend of mine was given a take-home test and the lone question was “How can one, using a barometer, find the height of a tall building?” Well, my buddy knew what the instructor wanted as an answer, but being a scientist, he tried to think of a few alternatives. The professor read his first answer and decided to give him a second chance.

Prof: You say you could attach a string onto the barometer, go to the top on the building and let out the string until it just touches the ground. Pull it back up and measure the length of string.  That will be the height of the building. Well, that would work, but I was wanting an answer that was remote to the building. 

Friend:  Then tie the string to the building’s corner and walk down the street letting it out as you go.  Keep sighting the top of the building with a 45-degree square.  When the top aligns with the sighting, you have just made a 45 degree right triangle and the height of the building is equal to the amount of string you have let out at that point.

Prof: Well, of course, but I want to know how you would do this by something other than triangulation.

Friend: Sure.  Measure out a length of string and attach the barometer at the end like a pendulum.  Swing the pendulum and measure it’s period at the bottom of the building.  Then go to the top of the building and do it again.  The difference of the periods is proportional to 2 X pi X length of string divided by g, the gravitational acceleration.  And g decreases by the gravitational formula depending on the distance from the center of the earth. Difference in distance from earth’s center for each case is the height of the building.

Prof: Yes, but I wanted an easier way.

Friend: Easy peasy.  Just go the janitor’s room in the basement and say, “Janitor, here I have one fine barometer.  It can be yours if you can just tell me the height of this building.”

Prof, no exasperated: I want to know the way to do it using atmospheric pressure!

Friend:Yes, measure pressure at the bottom of the building using the barometer and at the top.  Use pressure proportionate relationship to radial distance from earth center to find two distances and the difference between them is the height of the building.

Prof: Finally!  Why didn’t you say that the first time?

Friend: You method is too damn pat.  Pays to think about different ways to solve a problem.  That’s called Good Analysis.

 

Kepler, perhaps the first true scientist

Johannes Kepler was walking in a Prague snowfall feeling badly about not having a New Year’s gift for his friend Mattias Wacker in 1610.  It got him to thinking about snowflakes, how each was unique and six-sided.  He began thinking about the mathematics of snow, always six-sided yet each flake unique. Made of frozen water, perhaps the frozen form must be arranging itself to minimize space, like a six-sided honeycomb.  His quick study turned out to be a pamphlet-book, On The Six-Sided Snowflake, which he sent to his friend as a gift, then published it in 1611. That paper is now considered the origin of cystallography.  “For a long time,” he later wrote, I wanted to become a theologian.  Now however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated through astronomy.”  Kepler had no doubt that God was a God of reason and order, a mathematician who left clues in nature for man to comprehend. 

            He was a German Lutheran boy and the Danish master astronomer, Tycho Brahe, had lent him a set of instruments. There was no word for ‘scientist’ in 1600.  He called himself  a “grubber for facts” from an expression about how farm chickens peck around grubbing for food.  On Feb. 19, 1604, Kepler was trying to measure the position of Mars and freezing, was disgusted with his results. Other astronomers like Copernicus felt that measurements within 10 minutes of a degree where just fine.  Kepler wanted a single minute.  Copernicus had merely speculated that the sun was the center of the solar system and that planets went around in circles on crystalline spheres.  Brahe had disproven the crystal spheres theory. Now what?  Kepler knew the answer was to postulate orbits, mere paths in space and what if there were forces around an object?  If you were trying to row a boat across a raging river, you’d curve your trajectory but a circular path is hardly expected.  He tried to fit a circular orbit to Mars but it didn’t work.  He tried an ellipse with the sun at a focus, from better data on a warmer night and found a perfect fit. In 1606 he published his book, New Star, explaining his measurements in exacting detail, including his wife’s acid critique and all the false turns and observations gone wrong.  These were expanded upon in 1609’s New Astronomy including 3 laws of planetary motion. Measurements were no longer approximations, but mathematical facts. The force in space was not a raging river, but, the world would find out the meaning of gravity.

            The reader must understand this era. Salem’s Witch Trials were 80 years into the future.  Everyone believed witches existed and magic too. Mathematicians like Galileo had a day job of teaching accounting. A new tool of medicine was bleeding the patient.  But Kepler was certain in his deep Christian faith that God had patterns in nature and he worked hard to decipher them.  When he discovered his 3 planetary laws, he experienced something of a spiritual epiphany, writing a prayer at the end of his thesis, “God, graciously cause these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and the salvation of souls.”  Kepler was not only the first mathematical scientific theorist, his findings  led to the surprising recognition that religious  motivation can sometimes make discoveries and it led to change the course of scientific history.

            In 1615, a woman in a financial dispute with Kepler's brother claimed Kepler's mother Katharina had made her sick with an evil brew resulting in Katharina being accused of witchcraft. In August 1620, she was imprisoned for fourteen months. Katharina was subjected to territio verbalis, a graphic description of the torture awaiting her as a witch, in a final attempt to make her confess.  Johannes came to her trial with stories of how she had raised him to love Jesus, so how could she collude with Satan? He put together a strong legal defense the way a scientist proves truth.  The court was flabbergasted. The accusers had no stronger evidence than rumors. Katharina was released.  As the case became known, all of Germany began to debate, as Kepler had done, whether witches really were powerful or even existed. 

            Order, simplicity, beauty of nature, directed by a seemingly intelligent harmony—even secular scientists cannot get away from these assumptions today which are Christian to the hilt. The first theoretical science is often attributed to a premature-born, sickly  boy from a small town near Stuttgart who believed the gospel with all his heart.

Michael Faraday, least known but greatest scientist

Most people have never heard of Michael Faraday but among scientists he is considered premier. Born in Newington Butts, a small village across the river from London, in 1791, N.B. is now in the middle of the metro.  His family was Glassite, a spin-off religious sect from the American First Great Awakening (1740-42).  The group was pietistic and somewhat like a Calvinist church that began believing Luther’s views.  For example, they believed in Entire Grace, that Jesus saves entirely by His death on the cross and our faith is just a response—there is no work-righteousness in believing. But they were also austere and believed in not accumulating wealth.  And Faraday deeply believed that faith, discovery and science were intertwined. This attitude is probably why our secular historians don’t find his story appealing. 

            Michael Faraday was poor and had only the barest of educations—2 years.  His dad was a blacksmith.  Michael educated himself. He apprenticed to a bookseller and became the kid who couldn’t stop reading. Isaac Newton and Isaac Watts—he read everybody—but his favorite book was Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry.  He made friends with William Dance head of the Royal Philharmonic Society and Dance who got him tickets to attend lectures of the Royal Society--Europe’s most prestigious scientists. Sir Humphry Davy, a chemist hired him as assistant after an explosive accident with nitrogen tricloride left him half-blind. He and Michael had another explosion, but not before they discovered clathrate hydrate of chorine and benzene.  A strong sense of God’s unity with nature’s laws drove Faraday on quest. 

            In class-based Georgian England, he was still a peasant class kid.  Sir Davy went on a two year tour of Europe and Faraday soaked it up, visiting scientists as a valet and aide to the blinded Davy.  Back in London he did landmark experiments in electrolysis and studying electricity, discovering nanoparticles—the beginning of “nanoscience”. His anode-cathode batteries were far better than anything prior for storage of electricity, and then he listened to Davy and Wollaston discuss their inability to make an “electric motor”.  Faraday succeeded with a simple homopolar motor.  When Davy died in 1831 and left the lab to Faraday, he began a series of experiments that led to the discovery of electromagnetic induction (two coils of wire wrapped around an iron.  When electric current is passed through one coil, it induces current in the second coil.) Faraday further found that merely moving a magnet next to a coil induces current, a principle he used to build the first dynamo, forerunner of our modern generators.  His Law of Induction became one of the 4 Laws of Electrodynamics. He proposed that a “field” surrounded currents and magnets and unified virtually all studies of electric theory into an easy understanding we possess today. Diamagnetism, polarization, magnetic shielding were all his discoveries.  He succeeded where others did not because he was so rigorous in measurement and so clear in problem posing and analysis. And while all this was going on, he investigated coal mine explosions uncovering coal dust as a hazard, solved chemical explosions, and designed better lenses for lighthouses and corrosion resistant paints for the Royal Navy,  He served as one of the world’s first expert witnesses in a court case. Did I mention that his studies of pollution of the River Thames marked the beginning of environmental science?

            So why do so few moderns know of Faraday? He was a devout Christian who shunned titles and several offers of knighthood.  The Royal Society named him Superintendent of the Royal Institute and the queen gave him a house of his own.  But Faraday loved God and often broke appointments with big shots to comfort a dying person in his church.  He refused the Queen’s offer to bury him at Westminister Abbey and he is buried in the Dissenters (non-Anglican section) of a small cemetery in London.  He wanted to be plain “Mr. Faraday” to the end.  Such religious devotion and humility may seem “kooky” to some historians, his attitudes, odd to the British.  But to many Christians, his focus on a relationship with God and the fact that all our earthly accomplishments count for nothing to the Maker of All, do indeed resonate. You can still visit his lab and workshop in London.  The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion is an interdisciplinary school at Cambridge that studies the ties between science and faith. And many streets in towns of England and Scotland are named after him.  Ask what he did, however, and most people are clueless.  Just say he invented the transformer.

Colombus Part II Epilogue

In the early 16^th century, all universities and institutions of learning were run by the church. They wove their ideas about doctrine with their “picture” of the universe.  A new idea was often labeled heresy.  In 1514, a Polish monk who had taken a Latin name, Copericus, speculated about how the sun made a better center of the universe than earth, but he feared so much he didn’t publish his idea, nor was he able to do any mathematical calculations of the orbits.  The accepted model at the time was from Ptolemy, a Roman philosopher.  It held that earth was the center of the universe. The moon didn’t float in space; it was attached to crystal (like totally transparent glass) sphere and revolved around earth as did the sun.  Planets like Mars had a trajectory in the sky that backtracked often as they revolved around earth.  So the thinking was that Mars was attached to a glass sphere that rolled within its main orbital sphere—a ball rolling within a ball—hence the retrograde motion.  All this was only approximate.  Astronomers had to speed up and slow down certain planets to make measurements fit.  The stars were fixed on a faraway sphere. 

An Italian, Geordano Bruno, overheard Copernicus and began to openly talk about a solar system.  He went to England as a visiting scholar (though he was later found to be a fraud).  An Austrian court poet, Joachim Vadianus, published a pamphlet advocating a round earth composed of both earth and water in spherical shape.  It was unread except by a certain Phillip Melancthon, Europe’s leading Greek scholar, who was tasked at Wittenberg College to teach the President, Martin Luther Biblical Greek, and to revamp the curriculum.  Melancthon published a textbook on astronomy with an illustration of Round Earth saying this was the only explanation possible (a pear earth would wobble).  Meanwhile Bruno made it back to Italy, was tried by the Inquisition and burned at the stake.  And then Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation,  Catholic scholars pointed to Melancthon’s book and surely this proved that the rebels were heretics. After all, if the earth moved, there would be a headwind and birds would be blown off trees! 

But an English mathematician, Digges wrote an explanation in his father’s almanac that Bruno wasn’t so dumb.  Motion is relative.  If you hang a plumbline on a moving boat, it doesn’t stream off the end of the boat.  There was no profession of “scientist”  at this time.  All these natural philosophers were just bookkeepers (Galileo), mathematicians (Kepler, Brahe) or munitions designers (Napier).  The Protestant world of merchants and farmers, with its reliance on a personal walk with God, was much more open to new ideas than the Catholics who ran universities with philosophers. Finally in 1543, Copernicus assented to publication of his book upon his death. He was friends with Luther.  They lived just over 100 miles apart.

In 1571, Tycho Brahe, a young Danish mathematician noticed  a new star in the constellation Cassiopea.  Day by day it grew brighter until it was visible by day (a supernova).  Brahe used parallax triangulation to measure the distance.  It had zero parallax and hence it was in the far heavens.  This was stunning.  God lived out there and the highest heavens were supposed to be unchangeable!  But Brahe had done an accurate calculation of something everybody had seen. The Danish king took Brahe under his wing and bought him the best instruments available.  In 1577, a comet appeared and Brahe calculated distances as it traveled, apparently piercing the Ptolemaic spheres! The Jesuits argued vehemently against this Protestant, but then a German, Johannas Kepler, 1604, used Brahe’s highly accurate measurements of the orbit of Mars to show three laws of planetary motion that absolutely killed the old Ptolemaic theory. When the Italian, Galileo observed the phases of Venus in 1610, the new solar system was proven beyond a  shadow of doubt.  The sun was the center with planets floating like fish in the sea around it.  Once again, the Inquisition attempted to silence Galileo and forced him into an unwanted retirement.

At this point, the science revolution began to be strongly carried in England and Netherlands.  The commerce and inventions that went with scientific advances were the work of commoners, rather than monks and clergy.  Harvey studied blood circulation; Leewenhoek invented microbiology; Newton and dozens of others did mechanics; Boyle studied gases; Toricelli created vacuums and the barometer. 

Within 100 years, belief in witches and trolls, fairies and leprechauns, alchemy and spontaneous generation of mice had died out.  People’s thinking had changed.  They wanted evidence to go with belief.  They wanted to see the experiment. And so it is that we moderns now think differently than our ancestors of a few hundred years ago.  And thus the West exploded in technology and organization over the Middle East and the East. It was the invention of Science.  

Tony the microbiologist

Tony grew up a poor Dutch boy from Delft.  His dad was a basket weaver and died when Tony was 5.  His mom remarried a painter but he died when Tony was 10.  Tony barely got time for school, but became a bookkeeper’s apprentice in a drapery shop. Still, he learned English and math and was clever. He taught himself to read English.  Drapers in 1650 did menial hand work and like taylors and sail makers were poorly paid.  In 1654, the resourceful Tony opened his own shop.  The people who put drapes in their homes were big shots—barons and wealthy merchants—and their wives were very finicky about the draperies.  The best fabrics were needed and for this, drapers carried magnifying glasses to examine the threads of the cloths at 2 or 3X magnification.  That’s what Tony wanted badly.  While doing a job in London in 1668, he came across a book Micrographica by Robert Hooke.  Hooke used a compound microscope of two lenses that was terrifically expensive, to enlarge 20X.  Tony was fascinated.  Here were pictures of legs of fleas covered with hair, the chambers of cork, and wool fibers.  The book also included a diagram and plans for the compound microscope.  But the price was way out of Tony’s league.  Glass was a precious commodity.  Lenses were taxed heavily and produced by the guild, an early form of labor union which closely guarded its secrets.

Still, the persistent Tony found a way to experiment with glass.  He found that a glass rod that is heated could be drawn out into a thin whisker, broken in two and then the end of the whisker, reheated until it forms a glass bead droplet on the end.  Tony noted that these almost perfect glass spheres could magnify greatly and so he devised a holder for the sphere that had pinholes for observation and a screw-and-pin that held a sample of something near it.  It was crude but workable. To test the result, he looked at the same things that Hooke had.  Results confirmed.  Tony showed his cheapy magnifier to his friend, Dr. Reinier de Graaf. Amazingly he had achieved 200X magnification. The tiny glass spheres were far more uniform in curvature than ground lenses.  By pinholing them, he reduced aberration from the sides.   When a 1673 paper from the Royal Society of London bragged about microscopic work by another author, de Graaf wrote the Society a letter, “a most ingenious person here named Antonie Leeuwenhoek has devised microscopes which far surpass those which we have hitherto seen.” Another Dutch scientist confirmed the draper’s work.  In 1674, Tony was crossing a lake in a boat and asked the locals why the water was green in some places and almost milky in others.  They claimed it was the dew.  That made the BS buzzer in Tony’s head go off, and he took a sample of the water home and put it under his best microscope of perhaps 500X.  To his amazement he saw “little creatures” darting about with flagellated tails and cilia waves on their bodies. This was the first observation of bacteria in the world. The microbes he was seeing, he described to his friend, an artist who dutifully drew pictures. Leeuwenhoek wrote the first of 275 letters to the Royal Society.  In the next 50 years he never published a proper scientific paper. 

Better times came to Tony.  He was appointed to an accountant position in city government, then to a lucrative post as surveyer. He lived until 90, having become the Father of Microbiology.  He was visited by royalty and kings—and not for drapes. In 1686 he was knighted for his microscopic work.  But I wonder what would have happened if he’d not found a way around the regulation, guilds and taxation of glass lenses with his own glass sphere making?  What if he’d not made the most of his education to take that job in London? He was 40 years old when he made his first microscope—a typical lifespan for the era. What if government officials had put his work to a halt by noting that he competed without degree or license. 

 The Economist notes that America’s economy needs lower taxes, less regulations, and better education these days.  If even the Europeans can see this problem amid 1.4% growth and an education system that ranks 30^th out of 40 OECD countries, why don’t we?      

Anybody out there?

Conservative Christian but not fundamentalist concerning origins. For within all of creation is interlocked a story of how things came to be through change. Surely God wants us to discover this. Had Adam cut down a tree on his first day he might have found 108 rings, then through study found that each corresponds to a year.  So the tree had a hidden history it was created with.  Becoming more astute, he might have postulated how oil originates from deposition, cooks from kerogen to petroleum, migrates into porous rock trapped by geology.  Now Adam has gas for his car, just as soon as he can figure that out.  Do you get a way to find oil from stubbornly insisting on a fundamentalist picture of Genesis?  We’ll leave that argument aside for the moment.  I respect your beliefs if you respect mine. 

Those who have been hard at work to find life in space are being surprised lately.  First, we have discovered life here on earth in places of adversity and in conditions never dreamed of before.  Single celled critters have been found at 300 degrees Farenheit and below zero, at 12,000 feet of depth in formations 80 million years old.  Plants and animals are too narrow in classification to include these so 3 “domains” now supercede the kingdoms we had before.  And the extremeophiles are thus included.  Some of these don’t need oxygen, indeed get energy from decomposing rock minerals.  And it is studied and argued that quite possibly Mars rocks have fossils of single cells in them, and that these kinds of simple critters may exist and have originated spontaneously all over our solar system, from Venus to the moons of Neptune. Encouraging that there is plentiful life out there.

But big organisms and especially animals like us, may be extremely rare.  How rare?  Maybe we are the lone wolves in our galaxy or even all of creation.  Why?  Because getting large animals may be the result of several fantastic circumstances that happened to earth.  First, our earth has an iron-nickel core, i.e. heavy metals, that set up a magnetic field and is coated with lighter elements.  This thin light crust combined with a highly radioactive core gives us plate tectonics.  Thirdly we have a moon that could only have been a highly rare event astrophysically.  We have a perfect-sized star with a perfect-sized large planet, Jupiter.  Without these, you get sporadic orbits, no protection from asteroid bombardments (hence life is constantly snuffed out by catastrophe), no water or air, too hot or cold, no complex evolution of species.  Atop all these is how strange plants and animals are in having cells with mitochondria and other embedded organelles which allow cells to be larger and specialized.This too, by near catastrophe.  Bottom line, Earth and animal life is rare, rare, rare.

Let me give a flavor of the arguments.  If a star is 1/3 larger than our sun, all the planets will be heavy metals and lighter elements will be driven off entirely to interstellar space.  If 10% smaller, then light elements comprise almost everything. Neither type spawns an earth. If earth’s orbit of 93M miles was 1 M miles farther out, we’d be glacial, but 4 M miles closer, we’d be greenhoused like Venus with no oceans.  But 90% of stars are 10% smaller than ours and 7% are much larger.  If stars are found in clusters or on galactic arms, the neighbor hood is too crowded.  Neighbors mess up nice circular orbits, conflict with interstellar bombardments of junk, and climates would contain no nights.  Thus even if the mix of elements was right, the atmospheres would boil off.  So scratch all but 1 out of 100,000 stars of the 200 billion in Milky Way. Our sun, 3/4 the way from galaxtic center and out between arms in a lonely location may well be among just a handful with location.  Next, galaxies are stratified with elements.  Inner galaxies are full of heavies and outer galaxies are light element laden.  Add to this elliptic and young galaxies have crowding and element problems. Scratch almost all galaxies. This does not bode well for your Star Wars fantasies about a bar scene with creatures from all over.

Within our solar system, not only do we occupy a sweet spot, but what if our world had erratic days and climes?  This would happen if we didn’t have an adjacent partner moon that is also large enough to stabilize the axis tilt and day lengths.  Without this, the spinning earth would resemble a wobbly top, which we have come to realize characterize other planets in our system.  But such a large moon is unique, maybe almost unheard of, caused from accident.  Geologic similarity with our crust, yet no core of the moon, could only have happened if early earth was bombarded by a Mars-sized planet but orbiting also almost perfectly circularly—a smaller twin. Then it had to strike at an angled blow.  The result can be modeled as a spun-off moon of lighter crust elements, but no core. No other physical explanation works. Moon stabilizes our weather, gives us tides that work coastal beaches, most important sites for origin of earth’s multicellular life.  The magnetic field protects us from asteroid bombardments so that all life doesn’t go extinct every few million years.  Jupiter’s mega-magnetics and big gravitational pull keeps us from becoming comet fodder.  Yet a smaller population of invading objects has struck the earth--almost a perfect number that has given us continents amid oceans.  More light elements brought by comets and we’d be water world with ocean completely covering and a tendency to be like the ice world Arctic ocean.  This also results from insufficient continental drift. Without continents, there can’t be forests that replace the CO2 and methane of an early atmosphere with O2. And we know that plants and forests had this effect by the massive iron and copper band deposits all around the world where oxygen made rust and precipitated these elements out of the oceans.

Next, earth is borderline Ice Earth (where glaciation completely covers everything) and we have had numerous Ice Ages when poles get corralled by landlocked oceans or continents like today. There are two episodes when this ran away into Snowball Earth—entirely covered with 5000 ft. of ice (known from deposition). Almost all life was extinguished.  But then came Vulcanism and some massive spew of ash atop the glaciation melted the snowball.  Life flourished again.  But to survive the hot-cold-hot, there were enormous evolutionary changes like the mitochondria in cells that are key to larger multi-celled organisms.  So we only get big critters if we have these rare Snowball Earth episodes--and a recovery.  Yet astrogeologists say  that almost always snowball earths are irrecoverable.  Cover a planet with white reflective ice and it stays forever cold. Hence our rare, rare twice recovery is key to evolving large critters and plants.  And in the aftermath it created an oxygen-rich atmosphere, key to growing carbon-based life.   

Beyond this are stunning new developments in understanding of the evolution of life that require earth to evolve from faint, cooler young sun to older warmer just like ours has done.  (But I have not time to write all these)  Bottom line: we’d be lucky to find intelligent life elsewhere in our galaxy because we are the result of so many crazy coincidences and accidents.  As one scientist said, “If an Almighty wanted to create an utterly unique life within the universe, this seems to be the rare circumstances he would impose.”