Packing for Mars

Mary Roach does it again. An endorsement from the back cover of her book Packing for Mars sums up my sentiments. Not only does she deliver the science in detail, “she’s given us the funny stuff, the weird stuff, and the human stuff. In space, no one can hear you cackle like an insane person, which is what I did while reading this book.” I heartily agree!

The book is subtitled “The Curious Science of Life in the Void”. This is what the book is all about. Mars does make an appearance but only towards the very end. This is appropriate because you, dear reader, would want to know exactly what you’d be up against for a mission to Mars. The opening lines are a fantastic preview to what the book has in store. I can do no better than quote Roach.

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don’t start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep.

To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endless intriguing…

And intriguing it is. I have learned so many and interesting new things, that if I were to list them all, I would have to plagiarize the entire book. Instead I will just highlight some choice morsels that jumped out at me or made me cackle insanely. My advice is to go read the book for yourself!

You don’t know how much you need gravity until it isn’t there. Yes, the feeling of weightlessness might be cool for more than a few moments, but then it gets really problematic. While I’d previously known about issues affecting the human body (which Roach covers in great detail), I hadn’t thought about the non-living stuff. Interviewing astronaut Chris Hadfield, Roach learns that “even something as simple as a fuse” has problems working in zero gravity. Also, a common problem is overheating equipment. Without air currents and therefore no convection, “anything that generates heat tends to overheat”. And if an astronaut doesn’t hang his or her sleeping sack where there is good ventilation, carbon dioxide headaches await.

Some astronauts feel “sick as a dog” due to motion sickness, and interestingly dogs are used in studies because they have roughly the same susceptibility as humans. I also learned that guinea pigs and rabbits are immune to motion sickness. For a very long time, folks thought that motion sickness was due to “lurching stomach contents and oscillating air pressure in the gut.” It was only in 1896 that a sick-as-a-dog physician realized that it was the deaf-mutes on a particularly rocky sea voyage who did not get seasick. We now know that a functioning inner ear is crucial to how your body interprets balance or lack thereof. But before this was discovered, and people thought this was all about your stomach… well, here’s a Roach passage that got me cackling.

A variety of girdles and belts were prescribed in Lancet articles around the time. Readers responded with their own stomach-stabilizing activities: Singing, holding one’s breath as the boat crests the swells, and eating pickled onions freely. The rationale behind the last one being that it produces gas, which inflates the stomach and steadies abdominal pressure. The singing and flatulence perhaps explain the preponderance of deaf-mutes on ocean voyages around that time.

I learned more than I ever wanted to know about sebum and how oily your skin is when you don’t bathe. Yes, before they launched people into more extended trips in space, there were “restricted-hygiene” experiments. I also learned that apparently some people cannot smell 3-methyl-2-hexanoic acid and androsterone, also known as the two body odor “heavies”. Roach asks a question many of us have wondered: “Have you ever been on an elevator with someone and wondered, ‘How can he come on here smelling like that?’ Well, he may be anosmic to odor”. I also learned that anosmic means “genetically unable to smell”.

Roach does not shy away from detailed discussions of body odor. Her curiosity, and perhaps limits of being grossed out, far exceed the rest of the humankind. She asks questions of astronauts and scientists that likely no other journalist would ask. But the questions she asks are very important. Is having sex in zero gravity problematic? How do you deal with personally excreting your liquid and solid waste when there’s no gravity. It’s much harder and messier than you think. Not only that, even the timing that signals an urge to urinate or defecate gets messed up in weightlessness. Small wonder that a number of the more outspoken astronauts willingly conceded strategies to reduce answering nature’s call. Um, okay. If you’ve pondered any of these questions, and secretly want to know the answers, Roach is your go-to.

How do you prevent bone loss? Maybe studying hibernating bears will provide scientists with a clue. Apparently, there are some hormones, bear parathyroid hormone being the leading candidate, that could help the growth of new bone. Why not the human version? Apparently in tests on rats, injecting high doses leads to bone cancer, but the bear version “doesn’t appear to have any adverse side effects, so keep your claws crossed that it pans out.” The other problem has to do with where that bone loss occurs, and why even exercise still leaves the astronaut highly vulnerable to fractures upon returning to Earth after a long sojourn in outer space.

I end with a stitching together of several paragraphs where Roach writes about astronaut food (a common complaint!), and flatulence (clearly a problem in close quarters).

[The scientist] reported on research he had done using an “experimental bean meal” fed to volunteers who had been rigged, via a rectal catheter, to outgas into a measurement device. He was interested in individual differences – not just in the overall volume of flatus but in the differing percentages of constituent gases. Owing to differences in intestinal bacteria, half the population produces no methane. This makes them attractive as astronauts, not because methane stinks (its odorless), but because it’s highly flammable… [His] unique suggestion for the NASA astronaut selection committee: “The astronaut may be selected from that part of our population producing little or no methane or hydrogen” – hydrogen is also explosive – “and a very low level of hydrogen sulfide and other malodorous trace flatus constituents not yet identified…”

And, no, the zero-gravity fart does not provide sufficient “propellant” to launch an astronaut forward. And, yes, Roach doesn’t just do orbital flights to experience weightlessness, she also drinks reprocessed urine in the name of science. I can’t think of another science journalist so dedicated to her craft.

Previous blog posts reviewing Roach books:

·      Gulp

·      Spook, Part 1 and Part 2

·      Stiff

Ant-Man and the Quantum Realm

Having written about Ant-Man and the implications of resizing in chemistry (here and here), re-watching the first Ant-Man and Captain America: Civil War movies in preparation for Avengers: Infinity War, I was very much looking forward to Ant-Man and the Wasp. I particularly like this version of the poster advertising the movie shown below.

The movie mentions the word quantum a lot. One character in the movie even comments that the nerdy folks just seem to stick the word quantum in front of everything. Being an active quantum mechanic who has just watched the movie, here are my biased opinions.

WARNING – SPOILERS AHEAD

First, it’s a fun and lighthearted movie. The storyline isn’t the most compelling, but the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, and there are plenty of humorous bits – Michael Peña and Randall Park are superb! I thought the special effects were a strength of the movie, and the smooth weaving of objects resizing in the action sequences was excellent. While I was hoping to learn more about the Pym particle and the mechanics of resizing, I was not expecting it in the movie. The Marvel Cinematic Universe tends to have the best science-y bits in their opening movies (the first Iron Man is a quintessential example), and sequels tend to focus more on wowing the audience with action and visuals.

I was excited that there would be more travel into the quantum realm, but I was unimpressed with what that revealed. Nebulous shapes with some ethereal quality seemed to be the backdrop. There was some attempt to convey ‘fluctuations’ in the quantum realm, but overall it was more like being in a psychedelic amorphous dream world. Maybe that’s what the quantum realm should be like, but this felt much more doped-up artistic expression than making use of what we know from science. The pre-quantum world with good old hardy tardigrades was more impressive than the actual quantum realm. (This tardigrade picture comes from a UCSB outer space research group!)

The movie centers around the building of a quantum tunnel. In the movie, this means a tunnel connecting the macroscopic world with the quantum realm. To a quantum mechanic, the phrase quantum tunneling means something very different – it’s how quantum particles can seemingly pass through ‘classical’ energy barriers without having the energy to go over them. (Picture below from an OER ChemLibre text.) The tunnel in the movie was more like a contraption you might imagine in high energy physics where instability can cause the ‘reactor’ to explode and splatting everyone with high energy particles (radiation). In the movie these are quantum particles, but that’s yet another example of tacking on the word quantum to everything.

What I thought was more interesting, and possibly relevant to the quantum realm, was the phasing abilities of the character Ava Starr, nicknamed Ghost. Walking through walls and passing your hands through matter are illustrations of quantum tunneling. It’s unclear why Ghost always has her feet on the ground and she never tunnels through the ‘floor’, but I suppose that might make the running and fighting sequences more complicated and possibly less exciting. It’s too bad that the qualities of the suit, allowing Ghost to control the phasing, are not described. Now that would be interesting to a quantum mechanic. Maybe a future spin-off will delve into it? One can only hope.

Quantum entanglement is the other interesting premise of the movie. How this is weaved into the story: when Scott Lang visits the quantum realm in the first Ant-Man movie, he is somehow able to get quantum entangled with Janet van Dyne. This allows Janet, in the present movie, first to communicate with Scott in a dream – and then later, in a weird sequence, she actually takes over his consciousness. Presumably the ‘quantum energy’ she has accumulated, and her study of it while being stuck in the quantum realm for decades, allows her to manipulate what I will facetiously call quantum power. It can even be used to heal Ghost, as we see towards the end of the movie.

While quantum gets used and misused a lot in the movie, I might be able to take advantage of this by referencing the movie in my Quantum Chemistry class this coming Fall. Come to think of it, maybe I should e-mail the students ahead of time and recommend they watch the movie while it is still playing in cinemas.

Crowdsourcing and its limits

Books and articles about crowdsourcing often begin with Francis Galton and his visit to the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. Think of it as a state county fair. There is typically a competition to guess the weight of a cow, bull or ox. Apparently 800 people competed, including butchers and farmers who might be knowledgeable about the weight of a large ox; but there were plenty of non-experts who might guess wildly at best.

This opening story is used by James Suriowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds, subtitled “Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, and Nations”. But Suriowiecki doesn’t just trumpet the benefits of crowdsourcing. He also discusses its limits, including where a crowd can turn single-mindedly pathological. The Wild Horde with the Mob Mentality.

But let’s get back to Galton’s story. The average guess of the crowd turned out to be 1,197 pounds, just one pound shy of the ox’s actual weight. Pooling its results together, the crowd does shockingly well. Galton was shocked. His hypothesis was that the “average” voter was an ignoramus and that the “average” guess would be wildly off. Suriowiecki writes: “After all, mix a few very smart people with some mediocre people and a lot of dumb people, and it seems likely you’d end up with a dumb answer.” Are experts over-rated?

Who cares about the weight of an ox? Or the number of jellybeans in a jar? Maybe you would if there was prize money involved. Although sometimes dangling the reward of prize money makes the average guess worse, not to mention the individual guesses. But what about betting on horse-racing or football games? How are those betting odds or point spreads calculated? You might be surprised to know that in today’s world wide web of electronic wagering, that the wisdom of crowds is built into the system. Bookies crowdsourced before there was an internet, and you can bet they leveraged lightning speeds and crowd access as it became available. You’ll have to read The Wisdom of Crowds to learn more. As a bonus, you’ll also learn about how crowdsourcing impacts traffic patterns, intelligence spooks, Linux, movie ticket prices, Google search results, financial bubbles, and tipping practices.

To tackle complex problems with no easy or obvious solutions, Suriowiecki argues for three essential ingredients in wise crowdsourcing: diversity, independence, decentralization. Diversity promotes the generating of a wide range of ideas and solutions, some of which might be out-of-the-box, yet applicable. Independence avoids the pitfall of groupthink. To get the best out of Diversity, there needs to be Independent generating of ideas. Suriowiecki provocatively suggests that “Diversity and Independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.” We’ll revisit this idea momentarily.

The third ingredient, Decentralization, makes its power felt when it comes to the actual process of problem-solving. It has pros and cons. According to Suriowiecki: “Decentralization’s great strength is that it encourages independence and specialization on the one hand while still allowing people to coordinate their activities and solve difficult problems on the other. Decentralization’s great weakness is that there’s no guarantee that valuable information never gets disseminated, making it less useful than it otherwise would be. What you want is individuals to specialize and to acquire local knowledge – which increases the total amount of information available in the system – while also being able to aggregate that local knowledge and information into a collective whole…”

Interestingly, or oddly, The Wisdom of Crowds does not address higher education. There is a chapter on science, that illustrates the power of the three essential ingredients in combating the SARS viral outbreak. You might think that universities provide an ideal mix of diversity, independence and decentralization, particularly in the U.S. (Higher education can be much more hierarchical in many other countries.) The university consists of a diverse group of people, at least in terms of field-of-expertise, and also includes many novices (students). Some universities are the microcosm of a small town: there are campus police, electricians, folks in food service, gardeners, athletics coaches, among many other roles.

Independence is less obviously true across the university, although faculty members are largely fiercely independent by training. As a faculty member, part of my role is to train students to think independently, critically, and hopefully with nuance and wisdom. Independence of thought, and the freedom to study whatever one chooses, is or should be the hallmark of an institute of higher education. The ethos of independence is present, although the reality may differ across the institution. Due to this ethos, coupled with the diversity in the university, decentralization was a feature. Different departments operated in their own idiosyncratic way. I use the past tense because decentralization is dying in higher education, with the rise of the all-administrative university.

Perhaps there is a dis-alignment of purposes. The primary goal of the university (from my point of view as an academic) is the dissemination of the best knowledge available, both old and new. For some universities, generation of new knowledge is an equally important goal. For other institutions, preservation of knowledge may take great importance. But the signals I receive from an ever-increasing centralized administration seem to be more about how to survive (let alone thrive) in the ever-increasingly-competitive industry of higher education. There is also an aversion to disagreement and contest as providing the best outcomes for collective decision-making. I hear much more the language of consensus and compromise. Not that these are bad per se, but it’s unclear to me that university leadership tries its best to leverage the wisdom of its crowd, when it tries to avoid argumentative faculty members. Those many surveys feel like lip service information gathering, rather than truly aggregating local expertise into a collective whole.

Departments in a university can be considered as small groups, particularly if you’re at a smaller college. So for the most part, our day-to-day life revolves around small group decision-making. Suriowiecki discusses the pros and cons of small groups, providing examples of good and bad decision-making. While group wisdom can be enormously beneficial, “many groups struggle to make even mediocre decisions, while others wreak havoc with their bad judgment”. I’m very thankful to be a very-well functioning department. I’ve read about many dysfunctional ones. “Groups benefit from members talking to and learning from each other, but too much communication, paradoxically, can actually make the group as a whole less intelligent.” There are limits, and one of the large downsides can be meandering, inefficient, and ultimately poor decision-making. There’s also the danger that “aggregating individual decisions produces a collective decision that’s utterly irrational.” The ugly single-minded mob is as scary as it sounds.

The Wisdom of Crowds covers some of the same ground as The Starfish and the Spider. The latter is a breezier, lighter read. Suriowiecki’s examples have more detail and analysis, and he includes a number of counter-examples to help the reader see the ever-lurking danger of mob mentality. While the stories might now be a bit dated given the exponential increasing in internet crowdsourcing (the book was published in 2004), the principles haven’t changed be it the advantages or the dangers. I recommend it. (And yes, we did crowdsource a porchetta recipe for Christmas a few years ago!)

Hegemony and Scientific Creativity

Is sustained excellence and creativity nurtured when a nation-state is ‘powerful’? Is there a connection between hegemony and scientific creativity?

Maybe, as illustrated by this simple sketch. But it needs to be explained.

It comes from the first chapter of Exceptional Creativity in Science and Technology: Individuals, Institutions, and Innovations, edited by Andrew Robinson and published in 2013 by Templeton Press. Chapter One, by J. Rogers Hollingsworth and David M. Gear is titled The Rise and Decline of Hegemonic Systems of Scientific Creativity.

First, we need to define some terms. The word hegemon from ancient Greek means ‘leader’. The authors define a “hegemonic power [as] one that exercises political, economic and military supremacy over all other powers during a particular historic period… [and this] gave birth to the creative scientific hegemon. A scientific hegemon dominates multiple scientific fields and establishes the standards of excellence in most scientific fields. Its language is the major one used in scientific communication, and its scientific elite is the one most prominent in the world of science. It attracts more foreign young people for training than any other country. Its scientific culture tends to reflect society’s culture.”

However, developing scientific hegemony is not a given even if a nation-state possesses political, economic and military hegemony. The authors argue that totalitarian governments and overly-centralized and bureaucratic systems stifle the possibility of achieving scientific dominance. Smaller institutions, interdisciplinarity, and some degree of nimbleness or adaptability seem to be important. Examples include the Salk Institute (San Diego), MRC (Cambridge), Max Planck Institutes (Germany), and more. There are also exceptional pockets of creativity without being a powerful nation-state; the standout example provide is Göttingen in the mid-1920s.

In their four examples (French, German, British, American), the authors situate the rise of scientific hegemony within the context of nation-state superpower-ness. These seem to fit well historically, and names of famous scientists are used to bolster the argument. However, it is the decline in scientific hegemony that proves more interesting. The authors argue that while the processes varied in each nation-state, the underlying reasons are the same. Particularly troubling is that “when their systems began to decline, the elites in scientific hegemons often failed to understand this fact; indeed, they tended to believe that their system were continuing to perform extraordinarily well.”

France’s heyday was roughly 1735-1850. Indeed, French scientists dominated the field and French was the language of scientific communication. Young scientists flocked to France for training. But then the double whammy of the French Revolution followed by Napoleon Bonaparte’s short-lived conquering aspirations, led to a decline in French dominance. But the authors also lay the blame on centralization of the French government. Despite losing the lead in basic science, France still managed to excel in applied science and technology, at least for a while. But by the 1850s, resources, facilities, equipment and conditions for basic research had declined significantly. The mantle of scientific creativity was shifting to Germany.

Germany’s century spanned roughly 1830-1930, peaking in the early twentieth century and experiencing a precipitous drop with the rise of the Nazi regime. Much has been written about the rise of the German research university, a model that greatly influenced the rise of research universities in the U.S. and around the world. Many young Americans went to Germany to be trained, which subsequently led to the U.S. rise with Germany’s decline as scientists flocked (back) to the U.S. Einstein, Franck, Haber, Hahn, Meitner, Polanyi, and more are among the many famous physicists who also resided at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Dahlem. However, Germany’s defeat in the first World War, a highly disrupted economy, and skyrocketing inflation led to a loss in German hegemony. A decline in scientific prominence followed quickly.

Britain’s heyday was roughly 1870-1965. The great British empire was global in scope, its navy was the envy of the world, and it dominated world trade. The authors focus on Cambridge as the example par excellence of scientific hegemony. Catalyzed by German advances, the British government began pouring resources into its universities and emphasizing scientific research. The Cavendish Laboratory was founded in 1871; its inaugural director, the great James Clerk Maxwell. The authors write: “No department has ever had so many distinguished scientists as the Cavendish Laboratory. Indeed, this single department has received more Nobel Prizes for work actually done at the Cavendish than all of France’s and Italy’s Nobel laureates combined. Yet the distinction of the Cavendish was only the top of the iceberg of the greatness of British science…”

The U.S. is currently still acknowledged as the world leader in science. It has also been the sole global superpower since the end of the Cold War, although the rise of China is challenging U.S. supremacy today – in all areas, science included. Five years ago when this book was published, the authors caution the U.S. not to be complacent. “As the French, German and British economies declined, so did their science systems. Each former scientific power, especially during the initial stages of decline, had the illusion that its system was performing better than it actually was, overestimating its strength and underestimating innovation elsewhere.”

The authors spend a moment surveying the landscape of present-day science. In particular, there is an interesting discussion of ‘large-scale’ science in ever increasing team sizes. But does moving towards ‘big science’ also encourage the building in of constraints to research? Organization has become much more complicated, be it in scientific organizations or in universities. The administrative layering coupled with the business and legal arms of the university has led to “universities becoming like holding companies, with universities glad to have the staff as long as they can bring in large research grants and pay substantial overhead costs… [but] this kind of structure has become dysfunctional…”

A list of “Characteristics of Organizational Contexts that Facilitate Major Discoveries” is provided by the authors based on their historical analysis. Here’s my summary.

·      Capable and visionary organizational leadership

·      Moderately high scientific diversity (not too much overspecialization)

·      Effective communication and social integration across the organization

·      Recruiting the right people

·      Organizational autonomy and flexibility

On the other hand, isolation/separation of different departments, hierarchical-centralized decision-making systems, bureaucracy, are among characteristics that constrain major discoveries. Interestingly, hyperdiversity is also mentioned in this list although no explanation is provided why this might be. Finding a long-term balance between science commercialization and basic discovery research will also prove challenging. The authors put in a plug for smaller, more nimble organizations with higher autonomy, as a counterweight to ‘big science’.

Should a fifth curve be added with the rise of Asia as a whole and China in particular? Maybe the U.S. curve is already dipping and we just don’t know it yet. Certainly, we live in interesting times.

World Cup

Another World Cup come and gone. This year I limited myself to watching not more than one match per day. This was not difficult to do as I no longer have the motivation to wake up extra early or stay up extra late, thereby defining which matches I actually watch. Traveling complicated matters; some days I didn’t watch any of the matches. As the years go by, my memory of significant World Cup moments fades faster and faster. I can tell you who won the 2014 World Cup and where it was played, but nothing else more significant. I know I enjoy watching, but very little sticks in the memory any more.

I’ve watched many fine games this World Cup. Maybe I just got lucky with the games that matched my sleep-wake cycle. The opening game between Russia and Saudi Arabia was a feast of goals. The second game I watched was the nail-biting Spain versus Portugal that ended in a 3-3 draw. The France-Argentina match in the knockout rounds was wild. And the actual Final had everything: the plucky underdogs attacking throughout the match, an inadvertent own goal, amazing volleys from afar, controversial penalty requiring replay consultation, a crazy goalkeeping blunder, and even a pitch invasion. Croatia played their hearts out, but France still had the victory. And since I was watching via Telemundo, I was swept up with the excitement of famous commentator Andreas Cantor, with his signature yells of GOOOOOOOLLLL! (Learning Spanish several years ago was very handy in this regard.)

The first time I watched World Cup was Espana 82. I didn’t know Spanish then, and don’t recall if I knew that Spain was the host country. I probably thought Espana was a brand name. Like FIFA. We didn’t have a TV back then so I was only able to watch a match if I went to a friend’s house over the weekend. Even though it was 36 years ago, I can still tell you the mascot without looking it up – an orange. (Actually, back then I thought it was an orange-colored apple!) I don’t recall the mascot of any other World Cup. I can also tell you from memory that Italy defeated West Germany 3-1, that Paolo Rossi scored Italy’s third goal, and that Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was the captain of the German team. But not much else.

When we finally had a TV in time for Italia 90, I watched a lot of games even though I was sitting for national exams that year. I don’t remember any of the games although I recall that Roger Milla of Cameroon was much talked about. The vivid moments I do remember are probably ones that were replayed in some venue repeatedly over the years. Baggio’s missed penalty in 1994. The bizarre headbutting incident by Zidane in 2006. You’d have thought I would remember watching Maradona’s infamous Hand of God in 1986, but I don’t. Instead the two most vivid scenes I recall come from the Brazil-Holland match in 1994. Branco blatantly pushes Marc Overmars in the face, and somehow gets away without being sent off. Then he goes on to score the winning goal from an amazing free kick. Now that was a wild match.

Four years from now I will have forgotten most of what I watched in World Cup 2018. Maybe even a year from now I won’t remember. But now thanks to the Internet, I can go back anytime and look at the World Cup highlights of yesteryears. I’ve never done so though. Perhaps watching once (live) is enough.

Airport Privileges

Until this past weekend, I had not considered applying for TSA PreCheck. SeaTac made me reconsider. Thankfully we arrived early with plenty of time to spare because I was shocked by the snaking long line that traversed what seemed like half of the north end. There must have been close to a thousand people in line. Just finding the end of the line was tricky. The airport had anticipated this because an airport employee held up a sign high up in bright green reading “End of the Line”. We walked quite a-ways before even seeing it.

We had walked past two equally large screening areas, both dedicated to TSA PreCheck, with practically no line. It seemed highly incongruous to have two thirds of the screening sections with no line while one third has a huge line blocking foot traffic across the terminal. When we got to the end of the line, we asked the signholder how long the wait would be. She politely estimated 45 minutes. I’m sure she had being asked the question numerous times. TSA must have realized that the line length was growing exponentially quickly because it started to move relatively quickly not long after we joined the end. They had sniffer dogs while we were in line, and we didn’t have to remove anything from our bags for the X-ray because they were trying to move folks through as quickly as possible.

Thankfully we got to our gate just as our group was starting to board without having to run. Not having any elite status, we weren’t going to board early anyway. But all this made me think about paying for privilege. TSA PreCheck is $85 for five years. Flying anything beyond Coach/Economy is much more than I would pay for a plane ticket. I don’t fly enough to accrue elite status on any airline. If I had, it means someone (hopefully not me) had paid for my many flights.

What are the privileges? Special airport lounges. Shorter lines at the check-in counter, sometimes with a red carpet. A potentially significantly shorter line going through security. (I’d never experienced such a stark difference until this past weekend.) Not needing to remove belts, shoes, jackets, laptops and 3-1-1 liquids. Nicer seats with more legroom on the plane. More space for your carry-on luggage. Better food? At least in business class and above. Hardly any restroom line. We’re all going to the same place, in the same metal tube flying through the sky; yet if you can pay, you get all these other perks. Too bad you can’t pay to shorten flying time.

My mind then turned to education. As an industry – and yes, it is an industry – does education have similar pay-for-privilege features? In the U.S., the diversity of schools, colleges and universities results, to some extent, with widening the disparity between the haves and have-nots. That’s not to say that there aren’t measures to increase socioeconomic diversity within educational institutions; it’s just that on average the disparity might be increasing. In my neck of the woods, the most expensive neighborhoods have the ‘best’ schools. To access them, you pay higher rent or buy a more expensive home so your kids can attend a school in your zipcode of choice. There is a burgeoning tutoring industry to give kids the edge in the competitive marketplace of education; extreme versions of this can be found across East Asia. Private schools and colleges offering small classes, elite amenities, and prestigious networks cost a lot more to attend.

Much more can be said about pay-for-privilege in education, although the stark difference is usually not noticed within a single institution but rather with a broader lens comparing institutions and viewing the system as a whole. But at the airport, you see the stark differences upfront. I haven’t signed up for TSA PreCheck yet. But I might, before my next trip that requires air travel, even though I think there’s something rotten here. Airports around the world seem to do just fine without this. There should be a better solution.

Index and Search

In Chapter 3 of Too Much To Know, Ann Blair covers in detail different reference genres. (Previous posts: Chapter 1, Chapter 2). What I found most interesting was the history and use of the index. Blair sums up the situation:

“By the eighteenth century the index was a tool so common that it was taken for granted and manipulated in new ways. In 1749 Denis Diderot used the index to name an author whom he dared not name in the text because the author was known as unorthodox and would have caught the eye of the censors. Censors were apparently less alert to paratextual elements than modern scholars or savvy contemporary readers – errata could be used similarly to plant terms that censors would otherwise have banned. ‘Index learning’ became a term of contempt (coined by Jonathan Swift), and by the eighteenth century some authors explicitly refused to index their works lest readers fail to read the text through. These new concerns about the index attest to its prominent place among the methods of reading in the eighteenth century.”

Three things jump to mind.

First, I wouldn’t have conceived using the index or endnotes to ‘hide’ information from a censor or editor. That’s clever. I suppose it’s a good thing that censorship has (in some ways) decreased significantly compared to the eighteenth century. As a modern comparison, proofreading of chemistry textbooks comes to mind – errors in the end-of-chapter questions outnumber those in the main text. Worse are errors in solutions manuals to those end-of-chapter questions. Even worse are students trying to pass off their work by copying the wrong answers.

Second, I had not heard of ‘index learning’. Sounds like a skimming technique before there were Cliff’s Notes or other written summaries. If anything, I find that my students today don’t know how to use the index in their chemistry textbook. Office hours can be frustrating (for both me and the student) if the student hasn’t cracked open their textbook, or at best has only taken a cursory glance. Many are unaware that there is an index. They’re also more likely to do a Google search rather than use the index. A Google search in some way resembles an index. It’s just not a static alphabetical index in a single book, but rather a dynamic index of the digital ‘book containing all books’.

Third, I started to ponder why the book index is alphabetical. At first glance, that makes it easy to find what you’re looking for – assuming you’ve memorized your ABCs in the conventional order. But in medieval times, indices might be alphabetical or they might be topical. There’s a logic to the topical system – things that are related are found together. On the other hand, an alphabetical list is simply a list; aardvark and aborigine might not be connected topically in said book. Our modern version of topic-linking indices are the hyperlinks found in webpages. Think Wikipedia, our modern encyclopedia. No need to turn to the back page or even search. Just click! A very early forerunner might be the branching diagrams used in reference genres. (Shown below is a page from Polyanthea, and yes I found it on WikiCommons.)

What allows quick searching (and also facile reproduction) is atomization. That’s how a chemist thinks about it – you might call it digitization. The alphabet is basically a set of digits. That’s why you can quickly search an alphabetic index. The power of internet search leverages data in digital or atomized form. In the raw-est form of data, binary code, the digits are simply 0 and 1. Nothing in between. (Actual computer chip operation forces an analog into digital modes.) Reminds me of quantized energy levels of an atom. An electron can be in this energy state or that energy state but nothing in between. Not sure how that helps search, but somehow the electrons ‘know’ what to do. Chemists have even ‘reduced’ molecular structures into digital form, for quick searching and easy indexing. I use the NIST WebBook regularly in my research. You can plug in a chemical formula and out pop a bunch of structures – isomers, actually: molecules with the same chemical formula but with different chemical structures. The discovery of isomers is a fascinating tale in itself, for a future blogpost!

Random thought: I hyperlink back to previous posts but I don’t edit an old post to hyperlink forward to a relevant post. That’s sort of a one-way index. Maybe I need to remedy this. But I’m too lazy. Anyway, blogger has a search function.

Chemical Algebra

The Case of the Poisonous Socks by William Brock is a collection of historical vignettes about chemistry. I’ve learned some interesting factoids. For example, the design of the chemistry laboratory in educational settings owes much to the work of Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), professor at the University of Giessen. More importantly, by “demanding and obtaining a subsidy from the government to cover the expenses of running a laboratory, Liebig overcame the assumption that laboratory instruction that laboratory instruction was a professor’s personal expense.”

I also learned that laboratory instruction in chemistry acted as a template for both biology and physics. Brock describes the contribution of two individuals I had not heard of: George Carey Foster (1835-1919) and Frederick Guthrie (1833-1886). Both started out as chemists. Both were appointed professors of ‘natural philosophy’, in Anderson’s College at Glasgow and the Royal College of Mauritius respectively. Foster studied with the famed Kekule who apparently dreamt up the snake eating its own tail while pondering the structure of benzene. Guthrie, on the other hand, is infamously portrayed as a terrible teacher by H.G. Wells, his one-time student, later famous in sci-fi world.

One short chapter that caught my attention was Chemical Algebra, recounting the formulation of our modern day chemical symbols and formulae. The hero of this story is Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848) although the father of modern atomic theory, John Dalton (1766-1844), was horrified by the symbols used, complaining that “a young student in chemistry might as soon learn Hebrew as to make himself acquainted with them. They appear like a chaos of atoms. They equally perplex the adepts of the science, discourage the learner, as well as cloud the beauty and simplicity of the Atomic Theory.” But it turned out that the symbols of Berzelius were much more adaptable than Dalton’s, and I can’t imagine a better system.

Brock writes: “Symbols and a symbolic language mark the chemist from all of the other scientific disciplines apart from mathematics. While most outsiders know that H₂O means water, they would be defeated by CH₃COOH, and totally mystified by the more complex arrays of symbols chemists regularly use to portray molecules in three dimensions.” Introduction to the language of chemistry is one corner of the ‘iron triangle’ (known as Johnstone’s Triangle) that makes learning chemistry challenging for the novice. The need for a symbolic shorthand arose thanks to an explosion of new chemical compounds, thanks to Liebig’s development of combustion analysis.

The symbolic system could have been much more complicated, if William Whewell (1794-1866) had his way. Whewell was rooting for a “truly algebraic” system. “The compound AⁿBⁿ should be formulated as nA + nB, with lots of brackets for more complex molecules. Other, more pragmatic chemists soon objected that this was quite unnecessary and made matter too complicated.” Thank goodness for that. Chemistry might have become even more obtuse. Although we now know much more about the atom, and that it is the valence electrons that are responsible for chemistry, we still retain the simple chemical symbols introduced by Berzelius.

Back in 1922, Neils Bjerrum wrote: “We may be convinced that even when the electron theory has reached perfection, the chemical formulae of the nineteenth century will still continue to be the ideal instrument of stating the composition of substances and of understanding their interactions.” A hundred years later, I’m inclined to agree! So does Brock, as he writes: “The twenty-first century chemist, faced by the fleeting quasi-molecular species revealed by spectroscopy, would find it impossible to work without a symbolic system.”