Science Musings Blog

Morning meditation

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 06:36:00 +0000

Crows roost in the trees of Ballybeg, down there at the bottom of the hill. Their raucous chorus reaches me at my desk, here in my burrow under the gorse. I look out over the parish, and now and then a solitary crow drifts into the frame, riding an uplifting wind, taunting me with its proprietary ownership of the landscape. And I think of Ted Hughes' poem "Littleblood", from that haunting volume Crow:

O littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains
Wounded by stars and leaking shadow
Eating the medical earth.

I'm not sure who or what Littlebood represented in Hughes' imagination, but for me crow, certainly, and his shadows in this landscape, at once thousands of years under human cultivation, still wild and wounded with some more ancient power, as thorny and primal as the gorse.

O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Ploughing with a linnet's carcase
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.

I'll spend the next several months beating back the gorse and bracken and bramble and stone and wind and rain that always threatens to engulf the cottage, the singsong of the stars at night, keening.

O littleblood, drumming in a cow's skull
Dancing with a gnat's feet
With an elephant's nose and a crocodile's tail.

That crow out there rising on the wind, the heron and the coal tit, the kestrel and the wren, the blackberries bleeding their August juices into the earth. This land doesn't belong to me. I just roost on it, temporarily, until crow's shadows rise up at night and eat me.

Grown so wise grown so terrible
Sucking death's mouldy tits

I wait. I roost. And as I write a clear blue sky has given way to an all-enveloping cold Atlantic mist that has rolled in through the Windy Pass.

Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.

Sit. Sing.

The Good Book

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:25:00 +0000

Growing up Catholic, I didn't have much contact with the Bible. I don't recall a Bible in our home, nor did I encounter one in parochial school. Strange, that the foundational document of our faith was so little in evidence, but that's what made us different from the Protestants -- they had the Bible, we had Holy Mother Church.

However, one of my earliest books was a collection of Bible stories -- illustrations on the right, stories on the facing pages. Adam and Eve and the Serpent. Noah and the Ark. David and Goliath. The Parting of the Red Sea. And so on. (Perhaps Anne can help me here, although she was several years younger.) Of course, there was no hint of the murder, rapine, incest and sexual shenanigans of which the Old Testament was so replete. Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, and all that, would be supplied later by Hollywood.

Two stories made a particular impression on my young memory: Abraham's almost sacrifice of his son Isaac, and the wisdom of Solomon. I have a memory of Solomon holding up an infant boy by the leg, a sword in his other hand, and telling the two contending women that they can each have half. At that tender age, I didn't make much of a distinction between Solomon and God, or Abraham and God. The God of the Old Testament was a mean son-of-a–gun, who would as soon slice me down the middle as look at me. There was never a doubt in my mind that Solomon would have done the deed had not one of the women surrendered her claim.

Perhaps the main lesson I got from my Bible stories was just how hard it is to get a Creation right. The first go-around was a botched job. "God saw that the wickedness of man was great," and so he sent a flood to almost erase the board and started over. Things were no better the second time round.

I finally got around to actually reading the Old Testament as an adult, although by that time my understanding of divine revelation had been muddied by the revelations of Hedy Lamarr and Susan Hayward. It made jolly good reading: enough sex and mayhem to keep Hollywood occupied forever. The lesson still seemed to be just how hard it is to make a half-way decent Creation. Even throwing in the New Testament hasn't helped.

Shrinking planet

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 06:14:00 +0000

It takes about an hour, depending on traffic, to get to Boston's Logan Airport from our house in the suburbs. For an international flight, we try to get there a couple of hours early. In Ireland, our home in Ventry is a two-and-a-half-hour taxi ride from Shannon airport. Which means we spend less time in the air crossing the ocean than we do on the ground.

Small world.

The first time I traveled to Europe, in 1968, we went by sea, aboard the U. S. S. United States, which was one of the fastest ocean liners of its time. It took five days. Five sea-sick days in rough seas. As far as I was concerned, it might have been a famine ship. Now, I get on a plane, have a few drinks, a semi-nice meal, a nap, and I'm there. The flight is so short I can almost overlook the fact that we are packed in like African blacks on an 18th-century slaver. The only time I've ever had aspirations to wealth is when I pass those first-class folks sprawled in their spacious recliners.

Small world.

From my window here in Kerry I look out across Dingle Bay to Valentia Island, where the first Atlantic cable came ashore. There is a nice little museum at the old cable station celebrating the event. I think of those dots and dashes zipping back and forth under the sea, connecting Europe and American in a matter of minutes with news of wars and alarms. Dots and dashes. Now I tap "Post" and Mark in Fiji might as well be sitting here in a chair next to me in Ireland.

Small world.

When asked how he stayed married for so long, my father would answer, "Propinquity." We are all "propinked" today, but there is no sign yet that we are destined to live in harmony, or even in mutual tolerance. Still, our little global community here on the porch has been remarkably free of strife, which may offer a slender hope for a peaceable future.

Small world.

The prayer

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 06:25:00 +0000

Click, and then again, to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

Grace -- a Saturday reprise

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 06:57:00 +0000

My daughter and granddaughter have been visiting with us on the island for Christmas week. They both have MacBook Airs.

This is one sweet machine, an iconic artifact of our time. My granddaughter takes it as a given -- after all, she grew up wireless. For me, holding the Air in my hands is breathtaking.

In graduate school, I worked on an IBM 1620 and a Univac, computers that had whole rooms to themselves, sucked up huge amounts of power, and were "down" as often as they were "up." A contemporary laptop is a vastly more powerful machine. And the Air, with its flash memory and sleek, minimalist beauty, silently humming away flawlessly day in and day out, well --

I said to my gals, "This is to the Computer Age what the Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale was to the Industrial Revolution."

Huh?

"You were there," I said to my daughter. "I took you there when you were ten years old."

The bridge was built in 1779-81 by the grandson of Abraham Darby, the man who perfected the smelting of iron with coke. Lithe and graceful, it arches the gorge of the River Severn in Shropshire, England, a stunning demonstration of the potential of iron.

The MacBook Air will surely end up in the Museum of Modern Art, if it's not there already. The Iron Bridge is an outdoor museum by itself. The Iron Bridge and the Air -- technological wonders, each a perfect marriage of form and function.

(This post originally appeared in December 2010. I now have my own Mac Air,)

The pushcart

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 06:49:00 +0000

A memory. I am 9 years old. My uncle Buddy, my mother's brother, is 11. Buddy has decided to build a pushcart.

Buddy lives on 9th Street in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a fine old house that has seen better days. I go there often. Buddy is my hero.

Why a pushcart? Buddy's house is no longer in a fashionable part of town. It backs up on an alley. On the other side of the alley, blacks have taken up residence. Up and down the alley go black men with pushcarts, collecting scrap metal, rags, whatever might make a dime.

Buddy and I are fascinated by the pushcarts. They are dilapidated things, jerry-rigged, rolling along on mismatched wheels. We can do better, we decide.

And so we do. Some boards from the garage. Two wheels off an old bike. We bang it together. We paint it bright colors. It looks swell.

But we are not finished. We collect hundreds of bottle caps. In dozens of hues. We tack them onto the front and sides of our pushcart in glorious, gaudy designs. Our pushcart is a thing of beauty. The pushcart of pushcarts.

We roll it up and down the alley, to downtown and back.

As I recall the episode now, it might seem racist. It was, of course, a racist place and a racist time. But I don't think race had much to do with it, or even class. The intent was not to show up the pushcart men, but to show off. We admired their pushcarts. It was the idea of a pushcart that was our motive. We wanted to perfect the idea. I suppose in some unconscious way we wanted to separate the idea of the pushcart from race, from poverty, from utility. If the blacks we passed took offense at our youthful insensitivity, they had the dignity and grace not to show it.

ATOD -- Astronomy thrill of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 06:29:00 +0000

This stunning image of the Orion Nebula was an Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) last week. It reminded me of my long and continuing relationship with this cosmic object.

"Object"? Is that the right word for a swirling maelstrom of gas, dust and stars, 40 light-years wide, 1500 light-years away? A stellar nursery! "Object" seems so passive, so final, so -- so, uh, blah. We need another term, something more Blakeian, more incendiary, more theological.

It was my father who first pointed out the Orion Nebula to me, as we stood on the badminton court in the back yard of our house in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was teaching me to recognize the constellation, and helped me to see that the middle "star" in Orion's sword was fuzzy, not a star at all but a bit of hazy luminosity. A nebula! A new word. A new concept. What we saw was just the brightest region of the cloud you see here.

Later, much later, when I finally gained access to a good amateur telescope, it was my turn to share the nebula with students. Through a scope the blur becomes a distinct mass of greenish gas, with four infant stars cradled in the nebula's center like eggs in a nest. "Like eggs in a nest"! How many times did I use that metaphor! How many times did I try to instill a sense of cosmic consciousness. There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who grasp, even dimly, the dimensions of cosmic space and time, and those who don't.

My first book, 365 Starry Nights, was rather prosaic. "There is enough hydrogen, helium, and other materials in the cloud to form at least 10,000 stars similar to our Sun," I wrote, hoping to impress by sheer numbers.

In The Soul of the Night I waxed more poetic, perhaps purple, evoking Moby Dick no less. The nebula was "the face of Leviathan, wrenching us into a space as deep and as terrible as the bowels of the sea. It is God's sturdy hand, the fist that grips us in its clenched infinities. This is the power that hides in the colorless night like the rocks in foaming breakers that crack a ship, or the white whale that drags all who seek him to black oblivion." Whew!

I calmed down for An Intimate Look at the Night Sky, but Orion is on the cover with its winking nebula. It won't leave me alone.

Snakes alive

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:08:00 +0000

A week or so ago, still in the U.S., I was swimming with the grandkids in the pool at son Dan's house. And swimming along with us was a snake.

Mind you, this was no anaconda. It was a tiny snake, about ten-inches long and as thin as a shoelace. Still, it was enough to make the kids jump screaming from the pool.

As far as I could recall, I had not seen this species of snake before. It was distinctive: brown with a bright yellow ring around its neck. Easy to identify. I typed "ring-necked snake" into Google and there it was, Diadophis punctatus. Slightly venomous, but non-aggressive and of little threat to humans. Secretive and nocturnal, which probably explains why I had not seen one before. Dan says they occasionally end up in his pool, unable to get out.

We gave it an assist.

The neck ring has a role to play in Diadophis sex, according to Wikipedia: "Once the male finds a female, he starts by rubbing his closed mouth along the female’s body. Then, the male bites the female around her neck ring, maneuvering to align their bodies so sperm can be inserted into the female’s vent."

Why did the kids jump screaming from the pool? No one likes snakes, no matter how small. Or almost no one. Snakes and humans have a long myth-wrapped mutual history, which Ramona and Desmond Morris cataloged nearly fifty years ago in a book called Men and Snakes. Our fear of snakes is deeply cultural; it may even be genetic.

Way back in the mid-17th century, the Italian physician and scientist Francesco Redi wrote a book on vipers. He begins: "Every day I find myself more firm in my intention of not trusting the phenomena of nature if I do not see them with my own eyes and if they are not confirmed by iterated and reiterated experience, since I realize always more what a difficult thing it is to pry into the truth often obfuscated by falsifications." A more apt description of the spirit of the Scientific Revolution could hardly be found.

Redi assembled everything that had previously been written about vipers and subjected that "knowledge" to experimental observation, shredding serpent myths in the process. Most men are sheep, he said, choosing to believe what they have been told is true.

Dear Suzi

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 13:01:00 +0000

Click to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

The sea grows old in it -- a Saturday reprise

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 11:32:00 +0000

The poet, like the electric [lightning] rod, must reach from a point nearer to the sky than all surrounding objects down to the earth, and down to the dark wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only converse with pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the senses. His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to be seen, and smelled and handled.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ah, Mr. Emerson. This seems about as good a description of poetry as one is likely to find. I love the image. Not a hand reaching up to grasp the hand of Zeus, the hurler of bolts, but merely a pointed rod that reaches higher than any surrounding objects. A pen-point, scratching the firmament. Not a conductor reaching down to the earth, but deeper, into the wet inkpot of the soul.

Not lofty thoughts, airy philosophies, gnostic arcana. Rather, ideas that come wrapped in the stuff of the senses. Ideas that must be unwrapped the way you'd peel an orange, or pry open an oyster, or stir up from the bottom of a bowl of soup.

The electric fire of the heavens captured and stored in the Leyden jar of physical self.

Take, for example, Marianne Moore's The Fish, a poem that has been endlessly analyzed without ever giving up its secrets. Anyone who stands on that rocky shore with the poet, looking into the wave-washed chasm -- the sea as fluid as breath, as hard as a chisel -- takes away a lesson as profound as any one might learn in school, perhaps without being able to articulate exactly what the lesson is. The experience is simply there, to be seen, smelled, handled, in the weave and wave of animal bodies, in the intricate rhyme and syllabication of the poem. Truth -- crow-blue, ink-bespattered, hatcheted, defiant.

I'd go further.

I'd say that Emerson's description of poetry can be equally applied to science, or to any human attempt to attract the spark of Zeus. One must lift one's rod beyond the scratch and tumble of the everyday, while keeping its foot buried in the dark wet soil of lived experience.

Briefly it enters, and briefly speaks

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:55:00 +0000

A few months ago, I shared here the so-called Song of Amergin, traditionally the first poem written in Ireland.

I am the wind on the sea,
I am the ocean wave,
I am the sound of the billows,
I am the seven-horned stag…

…and so on. The poem is pre-Christian, druidic, pantheistic. The "I", as I understand it, is the mysterious, all-pervading power afoot in the landscape called neart in Celtic tradition, to which the gods were simply a way of giving a human face. Neart is unknown and unknowable, but sensed everywhere. The "I", as I read the poem, is also the reader (or auditor!) of the poem, the human perceiver who is at one with all that exists.

Yesterday I came across a poem by Jane Kenyon, who I have written about here, that seems to be in conscious homage to The Song of Amergin.

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .

I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

…and so on. You can read the entire poem here.

Here, too, I think, is the ambiguous "I" -- the pantheistic neart, the poet, and the reader of the poem. This is what we all seek, is it not? A sense that everything is holy, and that we are inexplicably part of it, even in a world that is sometimes broken and painfully cruel.

(Reprise tomorrow, Anne on Sunday. On Monday I will be off to Ireland. Back here I hope on Wednesday.)

Belief and faith

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:55:00 +0000

Last week, T. M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University, had an op-ed in the New York Times called "Belief Is the Least Part of Faith." She is the author of a recent book on American evangelicals.

Here again is someone making a distinction I have a hard time grasping: the difference between belief and faith.

It is a version, I suppose, of Pascal's wager: I don't know whether God exists or not, but I choose to live as if he does because the risk of not believing -- eternal hell-fire -- is too great.

Luhrmann's evangelicals, she says, have faith for practical reasons. It makes them part of a group, bigger, better, more alive, p art of something greater than themselves. "You don't go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church."

She speaks of one evangelical woman who chooses "to foreground the practical issue of how to experience the world as if she was loved by a loving God and to put to one side her intellectual puzzling over whether and in what way the invisible agent was really there."

I can't speak for evangelicals, but this is not so different from the distinction I have sometimes made here between agnostic Catholics and Catholic agnostics: those who foreground faith over belief, and those who give primacy to belief (or the lack of it) over faith.

I have many friends who count themselves faithful practicing Catholics who weave and dodge when confronted with the doctrines of their faith -- the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, the immortality of the soul, and so on. They have faith; they say the Creed without batting an eye. Belief -- well, let's not go into that. Agnostic Catholics, I call them. Faith submerges doubt.

I have sometimes called myself a Catholic agnostic. Catholic, culturally, by virtue of having been brought up in that faith and having spent my life in a Catholic milieu. But I can't separate belief and faith. Perhaps it's my scientific training, but I can't have faith in what I don't believe, no matter the practical benefits. Truth is not subject to an act of the will.

A garden of earthly delights

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 10:56:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, Paul drew our attention to a rather unusual "flower garden," seen here on the cover of Science (click to enlarge). Not flowers at all, but non-living crystals, micrometers in size, grown in solution and here colored artificially by computer to more dramatically resemble flowers. This whole garden would fit on the period at the end of this sentence. These, and other crystalline forms, can be rationally grown by changing such parameters as pH level, temperature, and carbon-dioxide concentration.

Neat, but nothing compared to what nature does all on her own.

Consider the foraminifera (forams), tiny amoeboid creatures that live mostly in sea-floor sediments. They construct a bewildering variety of shells, typically sub-millimeter in size. You can see a photographic atlas of foraminifera here, on my daughter's web site.

For much of her research into past climates, Mo has relied upon sediment "cores" pulled up from the bottom of the sea. These are typically full of fossil forams whose forms, colors and composition contain multiple clues to the conditions in the sea (and by extension, the atmosphere) when the forams were alive. I previously wrote about one such exercise here.

As sea-floor sediments accumulate, they gather and bury a history of the Earth, page by page, reaching millions of years into the past.

Shank's mare

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 10:53:00 +0000

For many years, towards the end of my teaching career, I offered a course called The Naturalist. We never met in a classroom, unless it was raining. We availed ourselves of the wonderful natural environments of the Stonehill campus. We walked. We learned what we could of plants, animals, geology, sky. We read the works of celebrated nature writers. And we wrote. Small classes, limited to a dozen students, all self-motivated. I won't speak for the students, but I learned a lot. Nothing like smart young people to keep one on one's toes.

At the end of each class, we published a journal of nature writing, called Terraforma, featuring something from every student. It's been ten years now since I retired and our final offering.

Well, this past semester a new young professor named Stephen Siperstein offered a course in Nature Writing and revived Terraforma. It was lovely to see it resurrected from oblivion. And lovely too to see that the young writers are as talented as ever.

Let me comment on just one of the contributions: an essay on walking. Specifically, different tempos of walking. Swaying. Scurrying. Ambling. Skulking. Running. Tripping. Meandering. Wandering. Standing. The author gives each its due. As I read, it was hard not to think of Thoreau, who was a connoisseur of walking. He wrote about it, of course. He practiced it as a fine art. He skulked. He ambled. He sauntered. In the time it would take him as a laborer to earn the fare to Fitchburg on the railroad, he could walk the distance. And he did. Enjoying every footstep of the way.

Keep walking Casey. It's not just transportation. It's education.

On the river

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:29:00 +0000

There was wind in the willows as the Water Rat and the Mole rowed their boat along the river. They were on their way to visit Toad of Toad Hall.

"It been a long time since we've seen Toady," said the Rat.

"It's been a long time since I've seen any toad," observed the Mole.

"Whatever can be the problem?" wondered the Rat.

"Or frogs. Or newts. Or salamanders. The river bank is very quiet." The Mole shook his head.

"We must ask Toad what's happening to the amphibians," said the Rat, his brow furrowed with concern.

Just then they rounded a bend in the river and saw Toad Hall, a handsome old house of mellowed red brick. They glided up to the landing and the Mole shipped the oars.

"Toad is usually here to greet us," he said, looking about.

"He is, indeed," puzzled the Rat. "But look, here comes the Badger shuffling down the lawn. Halloo, Badger."

"Well, Ratty, my dear little man," exclaimed the Badger. "What brings you and Mole to Toad Hall?"

"To see Toady, of course," said the Rat.

"I'm afraid that will be impossible," responded the Badger. "Old Toad has gone from bad to worse. In fact, he passed away just yesterday."

"Oh dear!" said the Rat and the Mole together. Then the Rat added: "The Mole and I were just observing that all the amphibians seem to be disappearing."

The Badger gravely lowered his brow. "And not just here along the river. Disappearing amphibians is a worldwide problem. From Michigan to Australia. From Britain to Costa Rica. In the polluted environs of cities and in pristine nature reserves. Frog populations, especially, have declined over the past decade. And there seems to be more deformities among the frogs that survive -- extra legs, that sort of thing. Scientists are all a-tizzy, wondering what's up. The U. S. Geological Survey has just released a new report confirming the problem."

"Oh, you know those scientists," sniffed the Mole. "They are always making mountains out of molehills. If they blow up a crisis, it helps get funding for their research. 'The Silence of the Salamanders.' 'Croaking Frogs.' That sort of thing. It makes good press."

"We'll see, we'll see," mused the Badger. "Scientists are convinced something global and catastrophic is truly happening."

The Rat scratched his head: "Anyone who lives along the river knows that amphibians are the least resilient to stress. Whatever is happening to the frogs may be in store for the rest of us."

"Time will tell," said the Badger.

The Rat and the Mole made their good-byes and got back in their boat. "Badger's such a worry-wart," said the Mole, as they rowed away.

"Hmmm," said the Rat.

Friend in deed

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 10:01:00 +0000

Click to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

Asymptote -- a Saturday reprise

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 11:45:00 +0000

My pal Brian Doyle has another of his terrific essays in the current Notre Dame Magazine, recounting a moment back in 1974 when, as an ND undergraduate, he bumped into the famed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

"I read some of your stories the other day and they were pretty good," said the smug young Doyle, and added that he had in mind becoming a writer himself.

The unflappably courteous Borges responded with a few words of advice: "Get as close to the truth as you can."

Thanks, BD, for passing on the great man's words, although at this point in my life I suspect I'm about as close to the truth as I'm going to get.

In fact, I'd say that my career as a teacher and writer has been one of moving away from the truth -- or at least away from Truth with a capital T.

I was at Notre Dame two decades before Brian, and it was the professed mission of that institution to supply me with the Truth. I was ready. I lapped it up. I steeped in it. By the time I graduated I was so armored with Truth that you could kick me in the shins and I wouldn't fall over.

It was an exhilarating feeling, being in possession of the Truth.

Smug. Self-satisfied.

Trouble is, it didn't stick. My bride was less enamored with Truth than I was. As were my new secular friends at UCLA. And then there was science.

Science offered a new kind of truth -- tentative, evolving, but manifestly reliable. Truth with a lower-case t. One doesn't wear science like armor. One wears science like a pair of warm socks.

Truth? I'll settle for authenticity. Respect for the thing itself, the thingness of a thing. Juice dripping down the chin when one bites into an orange. A brushstroke of comet in the pre-dawn sky. A snuggle with a loved one in the middle of the night.

Not something as grandiose as capital T, but a myriad of little t's that can pop up anywhere, promising nothing more than a momentary tingle in the spine. Real. Authentic.

As a matter of fact, that's what I like about Brian Doyle's writing -- the way a collection of authentically felt particulars adds up to more than the sum of the parts, something one would almost be willing to call -- carefully, tentatively, asymptotically -- truth.

(This post originally appeared in October 2011.)

The better rodents of our nature

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Fri, 31 May 2013 11:39:00 +0000

Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine had a cover story on potential new drugs to address waning sexual desire in women in long-term relationships. Be that as it may, there was one paragraph that drew me up short. The author was talking about the technical difficulty of studying live brain reactions in women undergoing sexual stimulation:

So we rely on rats. And one of the world's masters of rat lust is Jim Pfaus, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Concordia University in Montreal, who wears hoop earrings and used to sing in a punk band called Mold. The various drug companies…regularly consult with him. A few floors below his office, hundreds of rats court and mate in stacks of Plexiglas cages. Pfaus and his grad students inject the rodents with this or that compound to block one aspect of desire's biochemistry and isolate another. Or they kill the rats right after a moment of craving or copulation. The brain is then extracted, frozen and shaved into wafers, microns thin, by a device resembling a miniature cold-cut slicer. Pfaus peers at these specimens under a microscope to figure out which clusters of neural cells went into metabolic overdrive while the rodent was in a sexual frenzy.

There is much in this paragraph that invites an emotional response -– intrigue, curiosity, revulsion, dismay. Primarily, I suppose, there is the assumed consonance between the psychological states of humans and rats. Then there is the always contentious question of using animals in biological research, especially research that is not potentially life-saving. And why, pray tell, did we need to know about the hoop earrings and punk band?

My first impulse was to concoct a reaction involving humor, a parody perhaps on The Rats of NIMH. Then I remembered a Boston Globe column of twenty years ago in which I poked fun at some published research on adder sex, which involved some curious voyeurism in the boudoirs of serpents. I had a rebuke from Stephen Jay Gould, who considered my snickering inappropriate for well-meaning research. Stephen had been a kind supporter of my writing, so his rebuke hit home.

I'll leave Professor Pfaus and his rats to you. Humans certainly have more in common with rats than with angels. And angels, presumably don't have sex, at least none that I ever heard about in school.

This view of life, with its several powers

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Thu, 30 May 2013 10:49:00 +0000

Somewhere in his "lost" notebooks Loren Eiseley writes of the pleasure of exploding a puffball in a woodland clearing, or shaking seeds out of their pods. As I recall, he takes a gleeful satisfaction in messing with evolution, in hurrying the process along.

I remember identifying with that sentiment when I read it. I like exploding puffballs too. Dropping insects into spider webs. Picking up turtles that are half-way across a road and placing them in a ditch on the other side.

Most of all I like breaking off the stalks of ripe milkweeds and shaking them gloriously in a meadow on a breezy day. Love that snowstorm of fecund parachutes blowing hither and yon. Love the idea that I am helping the monarch butterflies that feed and breed exclusively on milkweed.

Yes, I know, in the great scheme of things my random intrusions into the grinding engine of evolution won't make an iota's worth of difference. The problems besetting monarch butterflies won't be significantly alleviated by one more milkweed plant. And that turtle I put in the ditch may just turn around and head back across the road.

Still, I take a childish pleasure in mixing it up. Of helping the natural in natural selection. Of kicking up a little dust on the tangled bank.

We live in a creative universe, Eiseley said. Let's be creative.

Speak, Earth

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Wed, 29 May 2013 10:35:00 +0000

There is a passage toward the end of Vladimir Nabokov' memoir Speak, Memory where he compares the writing of a novel to "the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients—rocks, and carbon, and blind throbbings."

This is the season in New England when we watch the deity in action, when the cold, rocky foundation suddenly seeps and oozes the fluids of life, the blood and tears and intestinal juices and sticky protoplasm. The first rays of summer filter to the woodland floor and wild lilies-of-the-valley, bell flowers and star flowers spring up underfoot. Where the Queset Brook gathers and purls beneath the plank bridge the striders and whirligigs and mayflies skitter and flit. It's all a bit of a miracle, really--rocks, carbon and blind throbbings. Who could have guessed?

Of course the real miracle is not the annual resurgence of life but the original flicker of animation, the appearance of that first self-reproducing organism in a world that truly was just rock and carbon and blind throbbing. The crackle of lightning. The heat of volcanism. The tickling stimulus of radiation. We don't know how it happened. Or where. Or when. For the moment we must assume it happened here, on Earth, three or four billion years ago, but maybe the Earth was seeded from elsewhere, maybe the galaxy teems with life, maybe rock and carbon has an inevitable urge to seep and ooze, to throb.

There's so much we don't know that it behooves us to walk warily, to speak with discretion, to avoid dogmas of any kind. To remember the first sentence of Nabokov's Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Catching change

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Tue, 28 May 2013 10:48:00 +0000

Sometime about the second or third week of every university calculus course, the student is introduced to the concept of a limit. In my textbook, the definition was as follows. I quote it in full, perversely, knowing that I risk losing my readers:

DEFINITION: Let ƒ(x,∆x) be defined for some fixed value of x and for all values of ∆x (different from zero) in some interval -h < ∆x < +h, that is, for -h < ∆x < 0 and for 0 < ∆x <+h. Let there be a number L(x) (which may depend upon x), such that to any positive number ε, there corresponds a positive number δ, 0 < δ < h, having the property that ƒ(x, ∆x) differs from L(x) by less than ε when |∆x| is different from zero and is less than δ. That is, if 0 < |∆x| < δ, then |ƒ(x,∆x) - L(x)| < ε.

This passage was the most incomprehensible thing I had hitherto encountered in my life. It was appended to the statement "These preliminary remarks should now enable us to understand. . ."

Of course, I did not understand. I doubt if any first-year calculus student reaches this point in the course with understanding (although maybe these days textbooks take a more intuitive approach).

Still, I was smart enough to know that if I sidestepped this initial hurdle I would never grasp what followed. So I beat my head against it for a week until the light bulb finally went on. I figured out the definition of a limit.

The rest, as they say, was a piece of cake. The study of calculus became pure bliss. No kidding. Maybe I was weird or something, but I remember calculus as being the neatest thing I encountered in college (excluding my life partner). And looking back on it today, I'd say the idea embodied in that definition above is one of the greatest innovations of our species: A way of applying the logical rigor of mathematics to continuous change. That is to say, to the world we live in.

Flow. Flux. One cannot step in the same river twice. The hawk soars on an infinitely variable wind. The buttercups bend in the breeze. I breathe in, I breathe out. The blood ebbs and flows in my veins. The universe's clock doesn't stop for geometry; it only yields to that mysterious thing called a limit, a way of confidently treating the infinite and the infinitesimal.

The small and the great

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Mon, 27 May 2013 10:41:00 +0000

I've done some scientific tourism in my day, including my 100 mile solo walk along the prime meridian in England that took me, among other places, to Darwin's home in Kent, Newton's quarters at Cambridge, and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. I've looked at Galileo's finger in Florence and spent several happy hours at Linnaeus's charming country house at Hammarby in Sweden. Among these and many other places, I must say my favorite was the home of the naturalist Gilbert White in Selborne, England.

It would be hard to find a more charming English village than Selborne, its idyllic quiet disturbed only by nature tourists such as me. Thatched roof cottages, two pubs, peaceful walks in woods and meadows, a parish church with a wonderful stained-glass window of Saint Francis preaching to the birds, every species mentioned in White's classic The Natural History of Selborne.

White is generally considered to be the first naturalist, as we would understand that term today. He kept a keen eye on every aspect of his village: birds, beasts, insects, plants, geology, weather. There is little that escaped his attention. His book has been in print for two centuries. I know it from the pocket-sized Oxford World Classic series. I see from Amazon that there are now several new editions, including one for Kindle.

Almost better than the Natural History are White's journals, which he kept religiously from 1768 till his death in 1793. I own the 1970 reprint by MIT Press of the first published English edition. Amazon lists several editions of the journals, including MIT's, but none seems to be in print. A shame.

This post was prompted by a tour I just took around Selborne using Google Steeet View. Go to Selborne in Google Maps and move the little yellow guy around the village. Not much seems to have changed since I was there 40 years ago.

I've written here before about Gilbert White and a search of the archives will add more to his story (site:www.sciencemusings.com "gilbert white"). I would add only this, an epigraph to the MIT Journals, from a poem about White by A. C. Benson"

This was thy daily task, to learn that man
Is small, and not forget that man is great.

Instead of seeing forms

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Sun, 26 May 2013 11:28:00 +0000

Click to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

Adorned with all the riches of the Earth -- a Saturday reprise

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Sat, 25 May 2013 11:18:00 +0000

You had need of me in order to grow; and I was waiting for you in order to be made holy.

I have written often here of Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest, mystic, anthropologist, and an intellectual hero of my youth. I am no longer as taken with his Christocentric theology, but I still stand in awe of what he was trying to do -- to drag the Church kicking and screaming into the 20th century. For his trouble he was silenced and exiled, protesting in a letter, "If only Rome would start to doubt herself at last, a little!"

His greatest legacy, it seems to me, was his attempt to redeem matter from the contempt in which it was held by official theology, which -- caught up in an unnatural philosophical dualism -- placed matter over and against the divine. Matter/spirit, natural/supernatural, body/soul: Has ever a philosophical concept led to such strife and mischief?

Near the end of his life, Teilhard wrote: "How is it possible that I am so incapable of passing on to others...the vision of the marvelous unity in which I find myself immersed?"

One of the most moving of Teilhard's essays is "The Spiritual Power of Matter" in The Hymn of the Universe. Those who denigrate science for its supposed commitment to "Godless materialism" -- and they are many -- could do well to read these allegorical pages, in which Teilhard envisions the evolving universe of matter lit up from within by a redeeming power that is not be be separated from its corporeal embodiment. It is matter -- for Teilhard, divine matter -- who speaks the line with which I began this post.

When Teilhard spoke the words of consecration, "This is my body," he was not invoking a magical transubstantiation, but rather acknowledging liturgically "the beauty of spirit as it rises up adorned with all the riches of the earth." We are flesh and blood, through and through, in our most profound essence, says Teilhard; without matter we do not exist. And, he adds, it is our responsibility as religious creatures to make matter holy.

(This post originally appeared in November 2007.)

Going viral

noreply@blogger.com (Chet) — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:40:00 +0000

The cover of the May 10 issue of Science (click to enlarge). It caught my eye immediately. It would catch anyone's eye. What is it? The caption reads:

Model of a candidate HIV vaccine prime immunogen (center) engaging germline B cell receptors (bottom) to initiate an antibody immune response. The immunogen is a virus-like nanoparticle, ~30 nanometers in diameter, displaying 60 copies of an HIV gp120 outer domain protein engineered to bind germline precursors of specific broadly neutralizing antibodies. This work has promising implications for HIV vaccine research.

The caption I can grasp. The accompanying report in the journal by researchers at the Scripps Research Institute and elsewhere flies over my head. This is very much a specialist's game. But that doesn't make the computer-generated, false-colored model on the cover of Science any less impressive.

The two terms in the caption to focus on are "30 nanometers" and "engineered."

This "engineered" object is ten thousand times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.