Science Musings Blog

Where the Queset Brook passes under the plank bridge along my Path, it slows and purls into a broad pond. This was called "The Girl's Swimming Hole" when it was part of the estate of Oliver and Elise Ames. The pond is no longer deep enough for swimming, but on these fine May afternoons I will sit there for an hour on my way home from college, reading, thinking, doing nothing.

And watching the surface of the pond come alive with the flit and skitter of a new season.

Water striders scull and stop, scull and stop, and now and then do an energetic back flip, in their search for morsels; the indentations of their feet and antennae on the surface of the water show up on the sunlit bottom of the pond as six fat blobs of shadow. Whirligigs spin like tops, like whirling dervishes, black as night in the afternoon sun. Mayflies enjoy their ephemeral fling as adults, their aerial orgy like snowflakes whirling above the dark water. Dragonflies and damselflies patrol the weedy margins of the pond, their bodies iridescent. Now and then a tree swallow from the boxes in the meadow makes a low, lightning-fast devouring sweep just millimeters above the surface of the water.

My mind drifts back to the new phylogenomic tree of life that was published in Nature a few weeks ago, 77 species across 21 phyla. I don't have to go back too many steps on the phylogram to connect myself to all the creatures I am watching at the pond. Our common ancestral group is the bilateria, animals that are bilaterally symmetric, with a front end and a back end, an upside and downside, a mouth and an anus. The first of our tribe appears in the fossil record about 600 million years ago, and it turned out to be an effective body plan. Of course, we bilateria don't exhaust the ranks of life on Earth, but we make up a goodly part of the phylogram. Anyway, I sit at the bridge and I feel part of something a lot bigger than myself -- something with a front end and a back end, an upside and downside, a mouth and an anus. The swallow zips across the pond; I give her a wink. She and I have our own little niche in the phylogram. We have backbones.

Humans have a way of drifting through the world as if we were temporary visitors from another dimension. A few moments at the bridge remind me that we are bound to the rest of creation by a myriad of genomic threads.

Many years ago, Time magazine illustrated an article with a painting of Pablo Picasso. As I recall, it was the ground-breaking cubist work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Someone wrote to the magazine saying something to the effect, "My eight-year-old son could have painted that." Time accompanied the letter with a highly-accomplished sketch by the eight-year-old Picasso. I haven't been able to track down the letter or the sketch, but here is a painting by the artist at age fifteen.

What Picasso was up to in 1907 with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has been a matter of debate among art historians, but it clearly wasn't to provide a photographic representation of reality. Ostensibly, the subject of the painting is five prostitutes in a brothel, but what the painting documents is a mind in interaction with the world. The "reality" Picasso seeks is at a remove from what presents itself unmediated to the senses.

At almost the same time, Picasso's contemporary Albert Einstein was showing that physical space and time is relative to an observer.

The parallels between the two lives are numerous and striking, as Arthur I. Miller has shown in Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. By force of their creativity and personalities they pretty much defined modernity in art and science. Neither man, however, quite let go of classicism. Einstein never accepted the pure mathematical formalisms of Heisenberg and Bohr. Picasso never made the break into pure abstraction.

What they left us with is a simple lesson that has survived subsequent developments in art and science: We construct our own reality.

Which does not mean, of course, that every reality is equally real. We stub our toe against the real. It does mean to distrust pure objectivism and pure subjectivism -- and abjure dogma wherever we find it.

Anne sent me this pic the other day, bacteriophages attacking a bacterium. It was recently featured as an APOD (astronomy picture of the day) on the APOD site. Not quite sure what bateriophages have to do with astronomy, although they do look a bit like lunar landers setting down on a tiny moon.

They are viruses, of course. Like other viruses, they lack the resources to make their own energy or proteins. They can only reproduce and build their shells by hijacking the chemical apparatus of an invaded cell. Phage viruses are parasitical on bacteria. They sit on the surface and inject their genetic material (RNA or DNA) into the bacterium, commandeering the host's reproductive machinery to make more phages, in the process often killing the host.

Where did they come from? Some scientists believe viruses are degenerate life-forms that have lost every animating function except the minimum genes essential to their parasitic way of life. Other scientists suspect viruses evolved inside cells, as organelles, and subsequently escaped to take up their vagabond existence. Then again, maybe they evolved on a parallel track to cellular life.

This electron micrograph of bacteriophages reminded Anne of angels dancing on the head of a pin. And when you think about it, they are no less improbable than a company of angels. They may even turn out to be angelic allies in out fight against bacterial human pathogens. In the meantime, there they dance, little APOD pods on their spidery legs, and millions could gaily cavort on the head of a pin. Holy and terrible. Beautiful and scary.

I was with environmental science students in the campus woods the other day. Big pink granite boulders. The bedrock under the boulders is a green volcanic rock. Where did the boulders come from?

Pretend it is 1840. Two stories explain the granite boulders.

--During the great flood of Noah, when the Earth was covered with water, rock-bearing ice bergs drifted south from the Arctic. As they melted, they dropped their burden. The story nicely accounts for why we don't find these "erratic" boulders much further south.

--At some time in the past, the Earth's climate was colder and large parts of the northern continents were covered with ice. The glaciers moved out from their centers of accumulation, eroding the crust of the Earth, and plucking boulders from the downstream slopes of hills. As the climate warmed and the ice melted, its burden of rock was dropped in place.

Two stories. Both propose an improbable event: an all-engulfing flood, a continent-spanning sheet of ice. Which to believe?

Continent-spanning glaciers exist today, in Greenland and Antarctica. Water for glaciers of greater extent could come from the oceans.

The water for an all-engulfing flood requires a miracle.

The ice theory makes predictions, based on what we see where glaciers exist today. The bedrock should be scratched, and the scratches should all be aligned in the same direction, pointing to the centers of ice accumulation. Here on the Stonehill campus, if we follow the scratches north, we should find a source for the pink granite boulders on the south-facing slope of a hill. In fact, all of the ledges we find on the campus should be on south-facing slopes, and every rock we find should have a source somewhere to the north. And so we go, tramping through the woods, and -- lo and behold -- our predictions are confirmed in every respect.

This is the game of science. Explain the past using only natural agencies that we see at work in the world today. Find the simplest story that explains all of our observations. Be happy when we can find a story that can be as easily falsified as confirmed.

And, on a lovely bright spring day, let the students figure it out for themselves, by placing them in front of the evidence and letting them ask -- and answer -- questions.

You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.

"Hello, Harry? Robert here. I can't give you the full scoop right now. I'm on my cell at a concert. Middle of the second movement of some symphony or other. I've got something big for you. The latest thing in personal communications. It's hot, Harry. Real hot. If you check your machine, give me a call. You know my number. I'll call you again when I get to the restaurant."

Chirrup...chirrup

"Harry? Oh, it's you, Ally. Listen, I told you not to call Daddy when he is at the concert. Yeah, I know the baby-sitter won't let you watch TV after 10 o'clock. That's what Mommy and Daddy told her to do. Now hang up your phone. Some people don't like it when a phone rings at a concert. And besides, I'm waiting for an important call. Yeah, Daddy misses you too. Go to bed."

You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.

"Harry. Robert again. Where are you, guy? The concert sucked. Something dumb by Brahms. Or was it Bach? We're waiting for a table at Gina's, the new restaurant downtown. You'd like it, Harry. We'll do lunch here sometime. Listen, I'd rather not be talking to your machine but the story is this: Our R&D guys have come up with a drop-dead product. We're looking for a strategic alliance with someone with marketing clout. That's you, Harry. Give me a buzz when you get in. This is something you don't want to miss."

Chirrup...chirrup

"Harry? Mom! Why are you calling this time of the night? We're just finishing desert at Gina's. Nice place. Real classy, you know what I mean? Your boy's made good. So, what's up? No, I didn't forget that Sunday is your birthday. Yeah, I know. We'll be there for dinner. Listen, Mom, I gotta hang up, I'm expecting an important business call. Yeah, see ya Sunday. Yeah, Mom, love you too."

You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.

"Harry. Robert. I'm hittin' the sack. Don't ring now, I need the shut eye. I'll call you in the morning."

Good morning. HighTech Marketing. Mr. Hawker's office.

"Hi, Karen. Robert here. Is Harry in? On the phone? OK, have him give me a call when he's free. Use my cell number. I'm on the expressway."

Chirrup...chirrup

"Harry, at last! Hey, thanks for calling, buddy. I'm on my way to town. It'd be great to do lunch. I've found a new place. No? OK, listen. Our R&D guys have come up with a voice-activated cell phone that's smaller than a pea. Microphone and speaker fabricated right on the silicon chip with the electronics. New kind of microantenna. Also picks up and transmits ambient sound. Pop it right in the ear. It's there all the time. Think about it, Harry! You dial by voice. Hang up by voice command. No bigger than a pea.

"What's that? No one will want a pea in their ear? That's where you come in. This is cutting-edge technology, Harry. The ultimate status symbol.

"Think about it, Harry. There's three billion cell phones in use in the world. Think of the market! If we get only a piece of it, we will have the hottest product since sliced bread. A cell phone in every ear. Twenty-four/seven. Never out of touch.

"Harry, listen, I'm on the downtown off-ramp. I could be at your office in... Jeez, a guy just cut me off. Some people drive like maniacs. Harry, let's get cell phones out of the hands and put 'em in the ear where they belong. Total, ubiquitous, hands-free connectivity. It's a winner...Beep...Harry, listen, can I put you on hold for a sec? I've got a call on the other line."

This week's Musing dates back more than a few years, and is rather longer than my usual Sunday offerings.

Click to enlarge Anne's illumination.

You may remember the wonderful chapter in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind In the Willows -- The Piper at the Gates of Dawn -- when Rat and Mole go rowing on the night river in search of the young otter. As first light tints the horizon, Rat hears a delicious piping: "O, Mole! ," cries Rat. "The beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us." And Mole, greatly wondering, obeys. "I hear nothing myself," he said, "but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers."

Remember? Remember the piping? We heard it as children, until the adults closed our ears by filling our heads with useful sense. We heard the piping, which is the unfathomable mystery of the world, beautiful and distant, until our parents and teachers and pastors stopped up our ears with answers. What they did was necessary, I suppose. We can't go through the world in a dreamy reverie, not this world, with its rush and certainty and bother. Soon we were made to believe that the magical music we heard as children is only the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.

Only! The piping that Rat hears on the river is indeed the wind playing in the reeds, but it is not only. Nothing is only. When we get caught up in the only we cease to wonder. And when we cease to wonder, we might as well not be on the river at all.

"I believe that the analogy between childhood wonder and adult creativity is good biology, not metaphor," said Stephen Jay Gould. I wrote on the same theme myself many years ago, in a 1992 article for Horn Book, the children's literature journal, called "Dr. Seuss and Dr. Einstein." I suggested that the most creative scientists retain an ear for the piping that is the wind -- and more than the wind. I ended that essay with these words: "In children's books we are at the roots of science -- pure, childlike curiosity, eyes open with wonder to the fresh and new, and powers of invention still unfettered by convention and expectation."

And now I enter upon a second childhood of sorts. I have time to idle on the river. A pension check arrives in my bank account each month. The children are grown and independent. I've had a lifetime to extract the cotton of only from my ears. And I strain to hear again the piping I heard as a child, the merry bubble and joy that sets the world alight. "Clearer and nearer still," cried Rat joyously. "Now you must surely hear it! Ah -- at last -- I see you do!"

(I wasn't able to find a copy of the Horn Book essay on the internet, but I did find it using Stonehill Library's electronic data bases. I will post it tomorrow as my Sunday Musing.)

Ponder a quasar called OJ287, about 3.5 billion light-years away from us in the constellation Cancer, relatively close as quasars go, a super bright (for its distance), super small source of optical and radio energy. A quasar is thought to be powered by a massive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Energy is emitted as gas and dust are swept into the dark pit of oblivion. Astronomers have been observing OJ287 for more than a century, long before it was recognized as a quasar -- long before such things as black holes and quasars were known to exist.

OJ287 has the curious property of flaring up at 12-year intervals, with two flashes about 2 years apart. The best way to account for the flare-ups is to assume OJ287 consists of two black holes, one with a mass of 18 billion Suns, the other with a mass of 100 million Suns. The smaller black hole orbits the larger in an eccentric orbit with a 12-year period. As the smaller black hole approaches the larger, it dives through the accretion disk of hot matter surrounding the primary, causing a burst of energy, zips around the primary, then 2 years later plunges through the accretion disk on its way out again, stirring up another burst.

Now if this is what is actually going on, then Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that the orbit of the secondary black hole should precess -- that is, the axis of the orbit should slowly rotate like the axis of a top. The theory predicts by exactly how much the orbit should precess -- 39 degree per orbit -- which affects the timing of the flare ups.

And so it was that in September of last year astronomers waited expectantly on the predicted day, the first since the theory was applied in detail, for the second of the expected flares in the current cycle. And -- bingo -- OJ287 brightened on schedule, in perfect compliance with general relativity. (See Nature, April 17, 2008, p.851)

Now what thrills me about this story is not just that we live in a universe with orbiting black holes, or that galaxies (including our own) have supermassive black holes at their centers, but that the human mind can formulate mathematical laws that apply to objects 3.5 billion light-years away. Einstein said: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." His theory of general relativity has so far passed every test.

The next flare up of OJ287 is expected in early January 2016, and then again two years later. Part of the story of general relativity is the emission of gravitational waves by the orbiting bodies, which so far we have no way to detect. By 2016, or soon thereafter, a gravitational wave detector may be available, to confirm (one assumes) in yet another way the marvelous nature of OJ287, and to celebrate the incomprehensible comprehensibility of nature.

(The diagram is from the Tuorla Observatory of the University of Turku in Finland.)

In a post last week I suggested that the stories associated with the foundation of Christianity -- The Annunciation, the Visitation, the Virgin Birth, the Flight into Egypt, and so on -- might be respectfully entertained by a religious naturalist even as he rejects the literal truth of the stories. As might be expected, I was challenged by friends who contend that the world has quite enough superstition without keeping religious fairy tales alive.

Do the stories attendant upon the birth of Christianity have any value in the 21st century? Or should they be jettisoned as the supernaturalist humbug of an earlier age?

Let us not be so quick to condemn the imaginings of our ancestors. The Christian stories have resonated down through the centuries as vessels that can contain a multitude of truths, just as the Greek and Roman myths remain generously instructive in their frequent retelling. We fill the vessels with our own imagining.

Here is a work of the young Caravaggio -- The Rest on the Flight Into Egypt -- painted in Italy about 1597, as Galileo was in Padua laying the foundations of modern science. The young Mary sleeps with the infant Jesus cradled in her arms. Her older husband holds a songbook for the young angel who just happens to appear on the scene with his violin. The ass looks on with a dreamy eye. (Click to enlarge. And here is an image you can examine more closely.)

I love this painting. Why? There is nothing literal about it. Surely this resting place under an oak tree is not the desert the family would have had to cross. Nor were there violins or modern musical notations at the time of Christ. Caravaggio makes no pretense at historical realism. His purpose is otherwise.

The madonna and child sleep in a natural bower. They are the feminine still point at the heart of creation. Cut the painting in half along the angel's edge-on wing and the right side is a Raphaelesque world of neo-Platonic repose.

The real action is on the left, where a less reposeful male drama is acted out. The aged Joseph, who has accepted the responsibility of bringing his young wife and child out of danger, is here reduced to holding the score for youth. Look at the old man's feet and read there the anguish of his heart confronted with the beautiful adolescent boy. And the boy, with feigned indifference, knows full well he is playing on the old man's heartstrings as well as upon his violin.

A distinctively male tension between age and youth resonates through all of Caravaggio's work, which no doubt accounts for why the artist has become something of a gay icon. But here, in The Rest On the Flight Into Egypt, something more than homoeroticism is at play. On the left -- darkness, a stony foreground, the anxious gaze of the seeking soul. On the right -- light, verdancy, the quietude of acceptance. Most luminous of all, the angel, his wings improbably affixed at the center of his back, filling the frame with a music that excites the ache of longing and lulls the sleep of innocence. (Why are the angel's wings black? As counterpoint to the white of the flowing robe?) Caravaggio offers his own version of yin and yang, a dichotomy of the human spirit that transcends any historical tradition and permeates them all.

The love affair of Heloise and Abelard produced an illegitimate child, a boy, that Heloise named Astrolabe, after the instrument developed by Islamic astronomers. European scholars of the 12th century, such as Heloise and Abelard, must have been deeply impressed by the sophistication of these beautiful devices and by the learning they clearly represented. While students in grungy Paris were debating fine points of trinitarian theology, their counterparts in bright Cordoba possessed a knowledge of the heavens, geography and mathematics that the northern Europeans could only envy. It would be like a woman in a sci-tech backwater today naming her son iPod.

Heloise and Abelard were certainly two of the brightest minds of their time, and their son would have possessed their brainy genes. He was abandoned by Heloise to be raised by her sister, but except for a few brief allusions in letters not much else is known about him. He vanishes into history like the illegitimate child of Albert Einstein and the physicist Mileva Maric, whose little girl, Lieserl, was given up for adoption and followed Astrolabe into sad oblivion.

Legend has it that Peter Abelard's last words were "I don't know."

We know Abelard, of course, for his ill-fated love affair with the brilliant and strong-willed Heloise. Even today their purported burial place in Paris is a place of pilgrimage for lovers. But it is as a charismatic teacher and provocative thinker that Abelard was best known in his own time. He was not adverse to challenging the smug certainties of the ecclesiastical establishment, and his rambunctious young students cheered him on. Systematically applied doubt was his "master key to wisdom," clearly a challenge to those who felt they held the exclusive keys to truth. Eventually Abelard stirred the wrath of that other great charismatic of his time, Bernard of Clairvaux. Their epic confrontation in 1121 can be taken as a classic expression of a dichotomy that still resonates in our culture, and sometimes in the comments on this blog: "God did it" versus "I don't know.

Where did the primal seed of the big bang come from? How did life begin? How did monarch butterflies evolve the ability to navigate to their winter home? God did it, says the believer. I don't know, says the agnostic. The two statements have exactly the same explanatory value. Zero.

Why then opt for one rather than the other? The first provides an illusion of understanding, and reinforces the ancient belief in a personal divinity who attends to our individual lives. The second is a goad to curiosity, and leaves open the possibility of greater future understanding. Which path we pick may reflect an innate preference for security or risk.

Bernard and Abelard both understood God as mystery. Bernard believed God has revealed himself once and for all in the deposit of faith. Abelard believed the goal of life is to seek a God who is and remains hidden. The controversy, for all of its theological nitpicking, came down to a matter of temperament. Bernard liked answers. Abelard liked questions.

The phoebe has returned again to rebuild her nest at the same spot in the old cellar along the path. One by one she laid her eggs, one a day for five days. Now she sits. And I keep watch, hoping her nest stays hidden from cowbirds and boys with sticks.

Meanwhile, Bob Benson, the bluebird man, tends his boxes. Four boxes along the path have eggs. The blue birds do their best to put up with the harassments of the tree swallows. Who cannot love swallows? So sleek. So agile. And, this year, so tame. They sit on their squatted bluebird box and let me approach within a few feet. No zoom for this pic.

The bluebirds are more skittish. The naturalist John Burroughs heard the bluebird's song as "pur-i-ty, pur-i-ty." Some field guides transcribe the song as "tru-al-ly, tru-al-ly." I walk with Bob from box to box, as he counts, repairs, keeps watch. His heart is pure and true.

Before we are scientists, before we are philosophers, before we are theologians, we are biological organisms. See this week's Musing.

Click to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

"We seek through doubt," wrote the philosopher Peter Abelard nearly 900 years ago, "and by seeking we perceive the truth."

Yesterday I suggested that the long tension between science and religion boils down to naturalism vs. miracles. Science began its long progressive march when it eschewed the miraculous in favor of natural law. It has found no reason to regret that decision.

Of course, science cannot prove that miracles do not occur. Faith can believe in the absence of evidence.

But what miracles to believe? Do I accept the corporeal Assumption of Mary, but not the literal Flood of Noah? Do I accept the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, but not the Assumption of Mary? If God is all-powerful and intervenes in creation, then every miracle is equally plausible.

The believer will say: God has revealed to us which miracles are true. Well, fair enough. But parsing revelation is formidable task in itself. The parsing that led to the Nicene Creed, for example, was as much political as theological. And let's be honest enough to admit that what one considers to be divine revelation is overwhelmingly dependent upon the religion of our birth. Mormons believe that God revealed the truth to Joseph Smith on a hillside in New York for exactly the same reason and with the same reliability of evidence as the Catholic believes in the Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth.

All miracles are equally plausible. By the same token they are all equally implausible. The naturalist takes the latter view as being most compatible with commonplace experience. The religious naturalist finds more reason to celebrate the inexhaustible mystery of existence in the everyday metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly than in the problematic raising of Lazarus from the dead.

I have suggested in this series of posts that the church of my birth would lose nothing and gain much by shedding its supernaturalist baggage. I am not so naive as to believe it will happen in my lifetime, nor am I vain enough to think the Church should change to accommodate me. However, miracles have been in slow retreat at least since the preSocratic rationalists, and especially since the Scientific Revolution. Attrition will continue as science reveals more and more of the marvelous, naturalistic, and deeply mysterious underpinnings of reality.