Instability Rules

Charles Flowers

Description

World-altering discoveries that reveal a universe of uncertainty and constant change
Whether probing the farthest reaches of the vast universe or exploring the microscopic world of genetics and the subatomic world of quantum mechanics, Instability Rules is a remarkably informative and engaging look at ten milestone discoveries and their discoverers-a wide range of very human personalities whose insights have dramatically altered our most basic assumptions about human existence during the last century. The stories include Edwin Hubble and the expanding universe, Alfred Wegener and continental drift, Neils Bohr and quantum mechanics, Alan Turing and artificial intelligence, and James Watson and Francis Crick and DNA. Also covering discoveries of the twenty-first century that are already refining these and other ideas, Instability Rules is an exhilarating, sometimes amusing encounter with the defining scientific discoveries of our age.
Preface: "It Moves . . . "

1 Hubble and the Expanding Universe.

2 Einstein and the Wonder of Light.

3 Bohr and the Puzzles of the Quantum World.

4 Wegener and the Dance of the Continents.

5 Big Bang, Big Crunch, and Big Bore.

6 Fermat, Godel, and Fuzzy Math.

7 Mendel, Watson, Crick, and the Human Genome.

8 Hominids, Humans, and the Search for Origins.

9 Turing and the Brain as Computer, and Vice Versa.

10 Freud, the Unconscious, and Other Views.

Acknowledgments.

Photo Credits.

Index.

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Ácido desoxirribonucleico
• James Watson
• Physics
• Alfred Wegener
• Francis Crick
• DNA
• James Dewey Watson
• Edwin Hubble
• Science
• Alan Turing
• Physique
• Physical attractiveness

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470312544
• Langue: English

Extrait

Instability Rules
Instability Rules
T HE T EN M OST A MAZING I DEAS OF M ODERN S CIENCE

Charles Flowers

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
Copyright 2002 by Charles Flowers. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., New York Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, [phone], fax [phone], e-mail: [e-mail].
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.
ISBN 0-471-38042-3
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For A. R. Casavant, Lucille Johnson, and Bill Alfred, teachers who tried to make us use our minds.
Contents
Preface: It Moves
1 Hubble and the Expanding Universe
2 Einstein and the Wonder of Light
3 Bohr and the Puzzles of the Quantum World
4 Wegener and the Dance of the Continents
5 Big Bang, Big Crunch, and Big Bore
6 Fermat, Godel, and Fuzzy Math
7 Mendel, Watson, Crick, and the Human Genome
8 Hominids, Humans, and the Search for Origins
9 Turing and the Brain as Computer, and Vice Versa
10 Freud, the Unconscious, and Other Views
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
Index
Preface
It Moves
Eppur si muove Did a bitter old man, disgusted with the scarlet-robed, fig-faced dolts around him but desperate to hang on to life, mumble that phrase under his yellow breath, after kneeling and recanting what he had discovered through his spyglass? That s the story, said not to be true, but it ought to be.
Pah! Earth doesn t move around the Sun, the Inquisition forced the Pisan astronomer to say in Holy Rome. No, Earth is the center of the universe, put there by God and fixed until the end of time. Orthodoxy: right thinking.
And yet, that grumbling Eppur si muove . . . something like, Dammit, it does too move!
For generations of students, Galileo s apocryphal but irresistible muttering affirms a heliocentric solar system: Earth and the five planets known in the early seventeenth century circling around the Sun. Suddenly, sensible humans grasped what had not been understood during the 100,000 years or more we have, according to current analyses of the genetic record, been here on Earth in our present form: The senses through which we apprehend existence are frail and treacherous. Bright Phaeton in his swift chariot, Quetzalcoatl careening over ancient Tenochtitl n, are still. It is we who tumble around them, unequipped to sense this truth, feeling the ground firm beneath us.
But the old man s wisecrack knocks ajar another door of perception that did not fully swing open until the startling discoveries of the twentieth century: that there is perpetual movement everywhere and in everything where we sense stability, not just in the journey of the Earth.
Rapid, continual change imprecision an infinite number of perspectives: Nothing is fixed.
For the next 300 years after Galileo, science was essentially the continuing, expanding discovery that the universe is ever larger, more complex, and more ancient than the experience of our senses would suggest. Yet the Sun stood still.
Then we learned, as this book will recall, that the solar system is moving at preposterous speed, as is our home galaxy the Milky Way, and likewise the supercluster within which it is a grain of sand, and, indeed, everything in the universe-racing away from an inconceivable explosion that began time some 12 billion to 15 billion years ago.
We learned that the continents are forever slipping and sliding around the globe, like clothing on a teenager, and the mountains are forever rising, the oceans widening, the volcanoes stoking their furnaces for the next blast.
Our bodies are a fever of change as our minds perpetually rewire themselves and our genes make uncountable decisions, renewing or growing or misfiring to produce the runaway cancers that may kill us, initiating the instability of mortal decay.
We learned that entire galaxies are being born billions of light-years away in deep space, or being ingested into the supposed oblivions of black holes, or blowing themselves to smithereens.
Within tiny atomic universes, particles pop in and out of being, impossible as that may be to conceive, while atoms collide and meld, buzzing continually in their electrically charged states.
This, then, was the truth behind many of the defining discoveries of the twentieth century: existence is constant activity.
It is a counterintuitive theme and many of us hate it. Who are we if we are not the same physically and mentally from nanosecond to nanosecond, unable even to freeze-frame our face in the mirror or solidify for a moment our feelings about a lover. It s all moving too fast. The present is instantly the past. What sermons can be found in nature, since it is in perpetual flux? What the hell, then, is truth ?
The twentieth century was perhaps predicted by the Greek thinker Heraclitus s ancient dictum, often quoted by conceptual artists in the 1970s, You can t dip your hand into the same river twice. But the idea goes much further than that now. It s also not the same hand, the same owner of the hand, the same riverbank, the same Sun in the sky, the same universe.
I write in late August in a converted barn in Westhampton, New York. Under a Giotto-blue sky, single florets of the amethyst phlox at the edge of the woods occasionally fall to the ground in a gentle breeze. The Japanese maple that blunts the north wind has begun its submission to autumn. Aside from my irregular arpeggios on the laptop, and the far-off whine of what I take to be some jerk s cigarette boat, there is only a growing wash of sound, like the muted roar of a seashell, that is the wind rising before a late afternoon rain.
All is still. I am in the center of my world. All is illusion. There is no center anywhere of anything.
1
Hubble and the Expanding Universe

There may be, as we learned in school, no straight lines in sprawling, liquid nature, but there are rigidities and mechanisms that have the force of rules. Clocks tick all over the place. Apparent movements in the sky inspire our hours and calendars. Radioactive rocks decay, clicking off billions of years of terrestrial geology. Pulsars, superdense neutron stars, spin hundreds of times a second, sending out radio beams as regularly as a downed airliner s black box. (The record so far is 860 rotations per second.) Light travels at a cosmic speed limit of 186,282.397 miles per second (a speed so phenomenal that liberal arts-trained copy editors, I ve found, routinely change it to per hour ); the distance it travels in a year becomes the space-time measurement, a light-year. If we look at an object only 1 light-year away, the light that reaches us has traveled 5.9 trillion miles and, perhaps more astonishingly, is conveying information that is twelve months back in the past. This is highly accurate distance-timekeeping.
Over time these regularities will become less so, perhaps even the unvarying speed of light, but they work more than well enough for humankind s fleeting appearance in the universe.
One of the most valuable regularities for astronomers is a star called the Cepheid variable, a yellow supergiant that is typically a thousand to a hundred thousand times brighter than our Sun. Each brightens and dims in a predictable cycle ranging from 3 to 50 days. This cycle is related to the star s brightness. In other words, the brightness of a Cepheid, linked with the brevity or length of its cycle, reveals its distance from the Earth. Once thousands of Cepheids had been cataloged, the absolute brightness of a star with a 10-day cycle, say, could be estimated. Comparing this brightness with its apparent brightness in the night sky would produce an estimate of its distance. Cepheids can be used as signposts in space-or what scientists call astronomical yardsticks or standard candles.
These extremely helpful celestial objects became the specialty early in the 1900s of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, an astronomer who pored over photographic plates counting and cataloging thousands of individual stars at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work produced signposts that were very carefully calibrated. They were like loran way points for the yachtsman navigating a dark sea, or VORs for the amateur pilot, fixed in relation to the Earth, defining points of space. (As of this writing, thanks to observations by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, Cepheids have been cataloged up to 56 million light-years away.)
One astronomer who understood Cepheids, and just about everything else in the night sky that was deepening because of advances in optical telescopy in the 1920s, was the inimitable, insufferable Edwin Hubble. An American mid-westerner who affected a British accent and claimed to have a German dueling scar-the kinds of eccentricities that are more amusing to read about than sit beside-he was an athlete, though no team player, whose ambitions aimed, well, to the stars.

Edwin Hubble

When Hubble lit up his briarwood pipe and peered into the 100-inch-