Cocktail Party Physics

behind the physics

A few years ago, VH-1 ran a New Year's Eve marathon of its hugely popular "Behind the Music" TV segments. Music videos have never held much fascination for me, but somehow, this time, I got sucked in. I spent several hours sitting slackjawed in front of the idiot box, fascinated by the antics of bands with whom I had only passing familiarity. I very nearly missed the New Year's festivities with my friends; I was that enthralled with the mini-dramas unfolding on my screen. The series is addictive precisely because of the glimpses it provides into how music is really made. Sure, it capitalizes on any given band's hit single(s), but the real drawing power was that quintessential human element.

Physics isn't any different. It was the opportunity to interact with physicists as human beings when I began working for the American Physical Society that got me interested in the field, and  telling the "behind the scenes" stories is pretty much the backbone of (shameless plug alert!) my book, Black Bodies and Quantum Cats. Sure, the research is Very Important, and any major result is Big News.  But as I said a couple of posts ago, sometimes we focus too much on the big breakthroughs and not enough on the people and events that led up to them.

Physicists are far more interesting (I would argue) than, say, the lead singers of One-Hit-Wonder rock bands. And they generally don't end up bankrupt and in rehab, although some no doubt wouldn't mind Tommy Lee's dilemma of how to keep both of the two women one brings home sufficiently occupied. (His solution, as outlined in his kiss-and-tell memoir, Tommyland: bring home three! "That way everyone has something to do.") Jen-Luc Piquant would like it to be known, for the record, that she did not actually read Tommyland; she prefers more wholesome biographies of the Marquis de Sade. Yet somehow we became aware of Tommyland. It's as if this kind of information drifts aimlessly around the pop-cultural ether, seeping by osmosis into our brains no matter how we try to resist, until we all know the name "Jessica Simpson." Physicists should figure out how to tap into that ether.

Take the case of my recent post detailing JLab's fat-fighting free electron lasers, a proof of principle  that involved zapping packets of pig fat to test the technique's effective. No sex, drugs or rock-and-roll, that we know of, but there's still some fascinating details that the press overlooked. For instance, where did they get the pig fat for the experiments? I never thought to ask, and I should have, because it's a highly amusing story. Bad science writer! No biscuit!

It turns out that the shipping company wouldn't transport the originally ordered pig fat -- especially prepared for scientific experiments -- because it was "improperly packaged." Time on the FEL is precious, and nobody wanted to cancel the experiment, so they took advantage of JLab's proximity to Virginia agriculture and paid a visit to a local pig farmer. Ssshh! Don't tell PETA, but in Virginia, pigs are slaughtered on a daily basis, for reasons that have nothing to do with science. The JLab folks paid full price for a single pig, and asked the farmer not to wash it with the usual vinegar solution prior to the slaughter (it reacts badly with the laser). The farmer shrugged, did as he was told, and the pig met its predetermined fate. The JLabbers picked out their pieces of pig fat, and when the farmer pointed out that there was still an awful lot of useful pig parts left, they told him he could use them as he saw fit. I'm guessing it made the farmer's day, and he's still telling his friends about those crazy scientists who paid full-pig price for a few pieces of lard.

C'mon -- if you were a reporter, wouldn't you be all over that story like, well, a pig wallowing gloriously in a mud pit? I'm thinking science stories would receive more coverage if they bothered to release these sorts of telling details. Unfortunately many scientists seem to find this approach "undignified." And that's too bad, because if they're honest, even scientists would admit that they find this kind of stuff fascinating. One should never underestimate the power of the colorful detail or amusing anecdote to liven up an otherwise dry technical topic.

Early on in my science writing career -- before it had occurred to me that this was a career, and one for which I might prove surprisingly well-suited -- I sat through a session on some obscure specialist topic in condensed matter physics. It should come as no great shock to anyone that the finer technical points eluded me, but I managed to get the gist of three of the four invited talks. The last one, though, fried my brain. I couldn't make head or tail of it, and emerged in a somewhat shellshocked state, convinced I was far too mentally challenged to ever succeed at this gig. Serendipitously, I bumped into Barbara Levy, a long-time science writer for Physics Today, coming out of the session, confessed my befuddlement, and begged her to give me a brief synopsis. She holds a PhD in condensed matter physics, after all. I figured she was the right person to ask. She snorted disdainfully and declared, "I didn't understand it either. That man was a terrible speaker!"

Barbara doesn't even remember this incident, but she unwittingly altered my entire outlook. It was a revelation to discover that if I didn't understand something, it wasn't because I was stupid. (Barbara is a very smart woman.) It was just as likely -- more probable, in fact -- that the concepts were poorly communicated. And it's not just me. Everyone enjoys a clear, well-ordered lecture, regardless of educational status or profession. Perhaps that's why so many established PhD physicists made their way to a session filled with talks targeting undergraduate physics majors at the APS April Meeting in Dallas.

One of the featured speakers was Princeton University's Paul Chaiken, who made headlines in 2004 when he and his collaborators published their results on packing efficiencies of ellipsoid objects. What got the media's attention was the fact that they used a 55-gallon drum of M&M candies to perform the study. Apparently a few of Chaiken's physics students played a prank on their professor by leaving the huge drum in his office, and he chose to put it to good use. (He's known for his fondness for the candies.) You can read more about it here and here, including the history of the packing problem (which dates back at least to Johannes Kepler in the 1600s) and potential applications of the research. But essentially, Chaiken and company found that the ellipsoidal shape of M&Ms led to much more efficient packing. Other tidbits revealed during the Dallas talk: when Chaiken approached the Mars Corporation about how they got the candies to be so uniform in shape, he was sharply rebuffed. Trade secrets and all. And apparently they conducted a similar experiment using Smarties; those candies didn't measure up nearly as well. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up! Truth is invariably stranger, and more wonderful, than fiction... especially when it comes to science.

Jen-Luc Piquant likes to flatter herself that she is unique in the blogosphere, but some truths are so patently universal that it's difficult for any one person to lay claim to them. This is one of those cases. I'd been mulling over this post since my last day in Dallas, randomly jotting down notes and thoughts for when I finally had time to pull it altogether into a (semi)coherent post. In the interim, we were scooped. Thursday morning, two of my science-phile sistahs at Skepchick.org separately pointed me towards the April 25 piece in the New York Times by James Gorman, praising Florida State University biologist Walter R. Tschinkel for an inventive approach to his new academic tome, The Fire Ants. ("Book" does not do it justice: it is 750-odd pages and costs $95 on Amazon. I was going to purchase it, but am now having second thoughts. Jen-Luc thinks it might be cheaper at Overstock.com.)

Sure, it's technically a textbook, and contains a great deal of scholarly information, but apparently it's rendered in clear, accessible prose with welcome flashes of wry humor. More importantly, Tschinkel has scattered random sidebar essays he calls "Interludes" throughout the text, focusing on some of anecdotes arising from the practical difficulties associated with studying tiny, wriggling insects. For instance, it's apparently very difficult to measure the heads of ants. It must be done with tiny forceps to hold the ant's head still under a stereomicroscope outfitted with a special "insect size scale" in the eye piece. It's the most common measurement in myrmecology, and it's maddening. Tschinkel attributes more than one "burn-out" case among his grad students to frustration with trying to execute this technique. That's what I'm talking about, right there. It's "Behind the Music" for the science set. I can't wait for this to hit VH-1. The venomous insect angle alone should be sufficient to pique viewers' interest.

Far from being displeased at coming (fashionably) late to the "Story Behind the Science" party, we choose to take this as a positive sign that the traditional paradigms might be changing for the better, not just for science writers and reporters, but also for the authors of scientific papers: yes, the scientists themselves. We're quite happy to let Mr. Gorman have the last word: "Scientific language is necessary. But so is speaking plainly. And if you have something funny, or human, to tell, that won't undermine your work. (Pipes in Jen-Luc: "Or at least it shouldn't!") But it may bring it to a wider audience." Amen.

warped thinking

Public outreach is a tricky thing, particularly when it comes to physics. For several years now, the APS has sponsored the odd "public lecture" at the April meeting, with only spotty success. Even when the speakers are excellent, it's rare for actual members of the public to show up, with very few notable exceptions. It kind of defeats the whole purpose of "public outreach" when the only people in the audience are one's fellow physicists. Talk about preaching to the converted.

So it was a pleasant surprise to find an auditorium at the Dallas Hyatt Regency filled not just with April meeting physicists, but with an equal number of high school students, teachers, local university types, and interested members of the public -- all on hand for "An Evening of String Theory and Cosmology" with Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall, author of Warped Passages. Authors don't always make the best public speakers -- and scientific authors can be more challenged in this area than most -- but Randall delivered a polished, enjoyable presentation covering the basics of particle physics, string theory, extra dimensions, and the mysteriously elusive hypothetical "gravitons" -- force-carrying particles (part of the family of bosons) believed to transmit the gravitational force.

Those are deep, deep waters, Watson, and it is to Randall's credit that she held her audience's attention for well over an hour, even though there were sections where the technical detail admittedly got a bit too heavy. It's extremely difficult to condense such a complex topic into language a lay audience can understand, and I doubt many people could do better. I won't go into a summation of Randall's talk here, partly because I'm feeling lazy. This gives me something in common with gravitons, apparently. Consider Randall's analogy for why gravitons don't travel far off their respective "brane": it's not because someone locked the metaphorical door to prevent them from leaving the "house," but because they're simply lazy couch potatoes that lack the energy to venture much further than the front porch. (Yes, I realize the analogy lacks context, but perhaps it will spur you to buy her book, thereby supporting the popular science genre.)

As well-received as the talk was, the real highlights were the pre-lecture reception, where Randall mingled with local high school students and their teachers over tasty hors d'oevres and non-alcoholic beverages, and the Q&A afterwards. Randall skillfully avoided engaging the borderline crackpot who brought up Moses of Maimonides's notion of extra dimensions and asked, "Would you care to comment on that?" She flatly said, "No," and moved on. That's really the only way to deal with people who only ask questions to push a private agenda. (Whenever someone at one of my own readings begins a question with "Don't you think..." my answer is inevitably "No.")

More impressive was the caliber of questions posed by the students who were present. One pretty blonde student in bohemian-chic garb asked for clarification on gravitons and their relation to W and Z bosons. Where was her physics teacher when I was in high school? I didn't learn about W and Z bosons until I became a science writer. The girl received a well-deserved free copy of Warped Passages for her precociousness. And there were flashes of shared humor, such as one student who followed up his question with a second tongue-in-cheek observation: "I notice you keep dropping your microphone. Is it possible gravity is taking your comments personally?" He also received a free book for his trouble, which the otherwise-serious Randall playfully dropped on the floor with a thud, rather than handing it to him directly.

I suppose it depends in part on your criteria, but as public lectures go, I would consider "An Evening with Lisa Randall" a solid success precisely because there were so many non-scientists present. The APS Powers That Be probably don't care much what we think here at Cocktail Party Physics, but we shall offer our opinion anyway as to why this event "worked" so much better than in past years, in hopes that the Society can build on what it did right to ensure future successful public lectures.

(1) It goes without saying that the choice of speaker is paramount. One should consider the intended audience. If it's physicists you're after, by all means choose a speaker with a certain degree of eminence. Nobel laureates are always a safe bet, although a Nobel Prize is no guarantee that they are good speakers. That's why an ability to speak well, present complex topics simply and clearly, connect with the public and hold a lay audience's attention should be the primary factors when selecting a speaker for a public lecture; eminence is a secondary (even tertiary) concern. Frankly, even physicists enjoy elegant, well-organized general talks; the level needn't extend into the technical stratosphere.

(2) It helps to have some kind of media tie-in, such as a recent book. This gives local radio and newspapers a handy news hook, making them more likely to cover the event, or at least announce the listing prominently.

(3) One of the chief factors contributing to the Randall event's success was the involvement of local education enthusiasts, who rallied high school teachers, arranged for the reception and book signing, and bused in loads of students -- in short, they made it so easy and accessible that people had little excuse not to attend. Alternatively, you can bring the physics out of the meeting itself and into local venues. That's the model physicist Brian Schwartz employs as part of his "Science and the Arts" program at the City University of New York Graduate Center. In 2000, Schwartz arranged a special scientific/historical symposium tied to the Broadway premiere of Michael Frayn's Tony-award-winning play, Copenhagen, and the resounding success convinced CUNY that this was a very effective method of outreach. The program has expanded to include staged readings, public lectures and panel discussions, a robot dance competition, and a "concert theater work" inspired by astrophysics. This June 17-18, CUNY will sponsor "Street Fair Science," bringing science demonstration booths to New York City's ubiquitous summer street fairs. (Unless there's an unforeseen wrench in the works, Jen-Luc Piquant and I will be on hand that weekend with various members of our former jujitsu dojo, demonstrating the physics of the fight.)

(4) Put your money where your mouth is. The APS spent far more money on this event than it has in prior years. You can't claim to be a proponent of public education and outreach and then start skimping on the funding. We all know that funds are spent according to priorities; the Society has had a tendency to give lip service to the principal of outreach, and yet be unwilling to make the financial commitment to ensure success. You can't do outreach as an afterthought. It took a lot more time, effort and money to put together the Randall event, but in the end, it served its intended purpose: to reach members of the general public.

Randall's lecture provided a tidy wrap-up to what turned out to be a particularly enjoyable meeting (despite the poor wireless service). I've got a couple more blog posts in the works about some of the other tidbits gleaned from my time in Dallas, which will appear over the next few days as I manage to get them done. (Sadly, my "real" work has a way of interfering.) All good things must come to an end, even physics conferences, and perhaps I left Dallas in the nick of time. At the Randall reception, I overheard a fellow science writer bemoaning an earlier session, in which a physicist in the audience raised his hand to ask the speaker a question, and filled the room with the unmistakable scent of B.O. "It's time for the April meeting to end," the science writer sniffed disdainfully. "The physicists are starting to smell."

the importance of being nitpicky

Jen-Luc Piquant and I are all jacked up on caffeine and frustration-derived adrenalin at the APS April meeting here in Dallas, after a fruitless hours-long effort to find a high-speed internet connection that works consistently. We would like to state uncategorically that the Dallas Hyatt Regency has the worst high-speed wireless internet connection we have yet encountered in our many jaunts to physics conferences.

The signal is weak, and sometimes disappears altogether. Sometimes one gets a signal, but no connection. And when one does get a connection, it is unbearably slow, so much so that we briefly considered resorting to dial-up. (Oh, the horror!) There are rumors of one good "hot spot" in the hotel bar, right by the piano, that seems to work well, so whenever sessions let out, there is a mad rush to that area by physicists desperate to check their email before the next set of papers. It looks suspiciously like a pre-arranged flash mob, when in fact it's more like a weird kind of emergent behavioral phenomenon dictated by dire circumstances of Internet withdrawal.

And this is why we have been delayed in posting something about the ongoing conference. "Really," Jen-Luc huffs, in haughty high dudgeon, "How can we possibly blog under such barbaric conditions?" Nonetheless, we shall try, although we might lack our usual polish. Because while there has been much wailing and gashing of teeth in the press room about the lack of "real news" at this year's meeting, that doesn't mean there isn't a bunch of really cool stuff going on. It's just hidden in the nooks and crannies, rather than displaying itself brazenly in the center of the town square -- although for some reason, all the sessions on cosmology and dark matter/energy have been standing room only. (People were actually standing on chairs in the hall to hear Cosmic Variance's own Sean Carroll talk about "the future of theoretical cosmology," which was delivered with characteristic panache.)

It occurred to me today that perhaps we focus a bit too much, as science writers, on major results or breakthroughs -- so much so that we miss a lot of the tiny, incremental breakthroughs that are constantly taking place all the time, year after year, which eventually add up to the major "news worthy" results that everyone makes such a fuss about. But what about all the other forgotten, unsung experiments (or planned experiments that sadly never saw the light of day), the fascinating conjectures, colorful minute details, and amusing anecdotes? These, too, are a seminal part of physics, and a big part of what makes the field so fascinating.

Okay, I know I sometimes whinge about certain scientists being excessively nitpicky about minute technical details. That's relevant to a discussion of public communication of science. But in the actual practice of science itself, those nitpicky elements are indeed absolutely crucial. And while it's hard to "sell" those kinds of stories to the press, it's not impossible.

I was reminded of the importance of being nitpicky in physics at a press conference yesterday on experimental attempts by Eric Adelberger's group at the University of Washington to find violations in one of the most fundamental aspects of special relativity: Lorentz invariance. (For more specific detail about this experiment, and several others, go here.) That's the bit about the laws of physics being the same for all observers, regardless of frame of reference. It's something we all kind of take as a given these days, but before 1905, it was by no means accepted. Or even obvious. Physicists of prior eras firmly believed that light would show the effects of motion, but experiment after experiment failed to produce this result, with the final nail being driven in the coffin when Michelson and Morley (once again) failed to observe this prediction. But experiment after experiment has validated this particular aspect of special relativity.

So, if special relativity, as a theory, has already been confirmed, repeatedly, one might ask, why even bother to keep testing? The same question came up earlier this year with the announcement of the most precise experimental confirmation to date of another Einstein workhorse, E=mc<2>. To someone unversed in the scientific method -- and they are legion, as evidenced by all those folks who think saying evolution is "just a theory" means it's incorrect -- it seems like a waste of time to keep testing something we already know is right.

This is why: one of the best things about physics, is that it never assumes it has all the answers of the universe -- just the best answer we can verify for now. The longer a theory is in play, and the more experimental evidence is compiled to support it, the more likely it is that this theory is correct... and the more emphatically physicists will defend it. But there is always the tiniest possible chance that some experiment, somewhere down the line, will find a violation of a basic principle at, say, the eighth decimal point. And that point, as Feynman would say, is when things become "very IN-teresting." Even a slight departure from the expected behavior could signal the start of a new line of inquiry that might one day revolutionize our understanding of the universe. Adelberger's group designs all kinds of experiments to test a wide range of established physics theories. And it just seemed natural to ask: what would it take to dislodge special relativity, or at least shake up its foundations? (The answer appears to be, quite a lot. And we haven't found it yet.)

Granted, this is not the kind of thing that tends to make non-scientists sit up and take notice. Back in 2000, at the APS April Meeting in Long Beach, California, I attended a press conference reporting on recent conflicting measurements of the gravitational constant, affectionately known as "Big G."  Adelberger's people made one of those measurements. The scientists on hand were excited about the discrepancy -- to them this was fascinating physics, for good reason -- but to the assembled reporters, and to any lone members of the public who might have wandered by, it all seemed irrelevant. Finally, one reporter from a local newspaper asked (and I paraphrase), "So, why even bother doing this experiment, if you already have a reasonably good measurement that works just fine for all practical applications, and won't be affected at all by this bit of improvement in our knowledge?"

There were many ways the researchers could have answered this question -- most obviously, it could become relevant as theoreticians come closer to devising a theory of everything that incorporates both gravity and quantum mechanics --  but they froze, like deer in headlights, until one of them said, "Um, because it's FUN!" I found the comment charming, actually, because he clearly had enjoyed working on this problem, and it showed. But I was in the minority. Spending precious research dollars re-doing centuries-old experiments so you can more precisely measure a fundamental constant to yet another decimal point sounds a bit dodgy to the average taxpayer.

Fortunately, the press did find an angle: "Earth loses weight!" a BBC News headline screamed, and media outlet after media outlet followed their lead. One of the "applications" of knowing the gravitational constant is that it enables scientists to determine exactly how much the earth "weighs."  Doing so is no mean feat, since gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces. Any measurement experiments must be completely isolated and performed in a vacuum, although almost nothing can completely shield it from minute outside gravitational influences. (In fact, during one such experiment at the University of California, Irvine, the experiment showed tiny "wriggles" in the data which turned out to be caused by the sprinkler system just outside the physics lab building.)

Context is everything, of course, and there's an excellent account from 1998 about the history behind all of this by David Kestenbaum in Science magazine. A physicist named Henry Cavendish was the first to make this measurement -- by candlelight, no less, how romantic --using a small suspended lead barbell hanging from a twisting fiber. The tiny motions of twisting that he observed revealed the strength of gravity between the two masses in his experiment: two weights the size of bowling balls. Some version of Cavendish's torsion balance (see image) is usually employed to measure G ever since. In fact, if you're patient enough, and reasonably well-versed in physics, you can undertake your own basement experiment to make this exact same measurement. If nothing else, it should serve to demonstrate just how impressive Cavendish's achievement was.

The new measurements, while not completely in agreement with each other, nonetheless had a major impact on the overall weight of the earth. Our pretty blue planet "lost" something on the order of 10 billion billion tons overnight -- just by tweaking the parameters of one tiny constant by a few increments here and there. "Weight," apparently, is somewhat "relative" as well. And that gave reporters the hook they needed. In fairness, it should be noted that even many physicists are a bit blase about things like making more accurate measurements of G. In Kestenbaum's 1998 article, Clive Speaks of the University of Birmingham in England is memorably quoted as saying, "Nobody gives a damn about Big G." (Tell that to the Earth, which lost several dress sizes in 24 hours and gained a big boost in self-esteem.) Kestenbaum himself likened these kinds of experiments to a sort of extreme sport in physics: "the Mount Everest of precision measurement." Why keep making these measurements of G? Because it's there. Who cares if thousands of others have climbed that mountain before?

Of course, sometimes what you get out of a meeting isn't so much from the sessions themselves, or even the organized press conferences, but from the random casual encounters and conversations with scientists that invariably take place. For instance, while hanging out in the hotel lobby coffee bar last night, I started chatting with a few random cosmologists, who graciously answered my sophomoric "why is the sky blue" questions about why entropy equations keep turning up in everything from economic theories to parabolic arches -- and I thank them for their patience and clarity in doing so. Sure, the laws of physics are universal and all, and should therefore apply regardless of the system. But they said that there does seem to be something special about the laws of thermodynamics; they are deemed least likely to be proven wrong by future experiments. (I'm afraid I was just the slightest bit tipsy and am thus a bit fuzzy today as to why that is. So perhaps this isn't the best example of a positive educational encounter.) Which doesn't mean those won't continually be tested, at least by would-be inventors of free-energy machines.

I hope if nothing else this post will give any non-scientists who are reading this a small sense of why scientists are so obsessed with fine details. Sure, it can be annoying in a casual social setting, or when you're trying to make a much broader point that gets sidetracked by an argument over one tiny choice of wording. But there's a positive, flip side to that particular coin. That same precision and attention to detail has given rise not just to grand theories about the universe, but the inner workings of most modern technology. Except, of course, the wireless network at the Dallas Hyatt Regency. Whoever set that up was clearly not nitpicky enough, and we are paying the price for their slackerdom. A pox upon them, I say. Where are the nitpicking physicists when you need them?

nothing like the sun

It was a stunning afternoon here in DC, weather-wise, and since my DSL wasn't working, Jen-Luc Piquant and I played hooky and went on a 30-mile bike ride along the Mount Vernon trail. That's one of the perks of being self-employed: the ability to take advantage of the first 82-degree day of the year by strapping on my iPod Shuffle, donning my spiffy new biking togs, and pedaling off towards the Potomac. If only I'd remembered to slather sunblock on my sadly melanin-deprived skin before setting out. I am now sporting odd patches of sunburned epidermis, which will no doubt fade into an equally unattractive patchwork tan in a day or two. (Jen-Luc never goes out without her trademark beret and black turtleneck sweater -- she's a hipster, through and through, and guards her natural pallor vigilantly. She wouldn't be caught dead in a fuscia, orange and lime green paisley biking skort.)

The exposure to all that ultraviolet radiation not only perked up my mood (DSL detox ain't pretty), it prepared me for tomorrow's journey south to Dallas for the APS April Meeting. Dallas has been experiencing a record-breaking heat wave, although temperatures should settle down to the comfy mid-80s by the time I arrive. At least I've gotten the first sunburn of the season out of the way, and can look forward to basking in the sun's warm, welcoming rays when I'm not trapped in a darkened conference room looking at grainy overheads of random physics data.

There's not a lot to see in Dallas, frankly, which might explain the proliferation of drive-through liquor stores. But five hundred miles southwest is the tiny town of Marfa, with an estimated population of 2500. The town has two claims to fame. It's the site where Giant, James Dean's last movie, was filmed, making it a popular tourist attraction for film buffs. The famed El Paisano Hotel featured in the movie is still open for business, and you can still see the roadside ruins of Reata, some 40+ years later. Marfa is also home to the mysterious "Marfa Lights." Those lights are nothing like the sun. They only appear at night, some nine miles east of town, flitting about the night sky, splitting apart, melting together, disappearing and then reappearing with no observable patterns. It sounds suspiciously like an X-Files episode, but it's a genuine, well-documented natural phenomenon. In fact, similar optical effects have been seen elsewhere, like the Hessdalen lights of Norway, or northeastern Australia's Min Min lights.

Such sightings make for colorful tales. In Marfa, town legend holds that in 1883, a cowhand named Robert Reed Ellison noticed a flickering light while driving cattle though the Paisano Pass. He assumed they marked the campfires of Apache Indians, but other settlers reported no evidence of ashes of those supposed fires. Periodic sightings were reported from then on, and the "Marfa Lights" gradually developed their own sort of notoriety; they were even featured in a 1991 episode of NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries." Everyone has their own ideas of what the mysterious lights might be, including the usual UFO contingent. My personal favorite is that the lights are the ghosts of accursed Spanishh conquistadors looking for gold -- a much cooler notion than alien spaceships.

Naturally, wherever one finds an entertaining legend about a supposedly unexplained phenomenon, those curmudgeonly skeptics are lurking not far behind with their own scientific theories. Some of those are pretty wacky in their own right: really, phosphorescent jackrabbits? Fans of the piezoelectric effect discovered by Pierre Curie in 1883 contend that the quartz rocks that are typical of that mountainous region expand during the day and contract at night from thermal expansion. The stress this creates on the crystals converts into voltages that accumulate over time before discharging into the atmosphere.

Most, however, think the lights are a mirage created by the sharp temperature differentials -- often as much as a 50-60 degree difference -- between cold and warm layers of air, which serve to bend light, whether it be from cars or stars. If nothing else, this would explain why the lights can only be viewed from a distance, not up close. Those who have viewed the Marfa Lights through high-powered binoculars (skeptics always have nifty science toys on hand) claim it's little more than an optical illusion created by the reflections of the headlights and taillights of cars on US-67.

The binocular-wielding killjoys, it turns out, are probably right. Last year a few enterprising members of the University of Texas, Dallas, chapter of the Society of Physics Students published the results of their official study of the Marfa Lights phenomenon. Their conclusion, based on a series of experiments between May 10-14, 2004: "All the lights reliably observed during the experiment were car headlights."

Okay, so the Marfa Lights aren't so mysterious after all. I doubt any number of scientific studies will convince the true believers. If people want to believe, they believe, and nothing we can say will change that, so no doubt the legend will continue to thrive. And sometimes even the skeptics can be momentarily fooled. I recall a terrific anecdote that University of Maryland physicist (and staunch debunker of pseudoscience) Bob Park relates in his 2000 book, Voodoo Science. During his earliest years in science, he was driving down a desert road late one night in -- yes! -- Texas, when he saw a mysterious light hovering in the sky, looking for all the world like a flying saucer. His heart skipped a beat, and it took a couple of seconds for him to realize it was just an optical illusion created by the reflection of his headlights off the power lines. But he tries to remember that experience whenever he becomes exasperated with people's superstitions, when, for a split second, "I believed in flying saucers."

Just in case interest in weird lights and James Dean start to wane, the town has one more tourist fallback: according to a recent item in the Los Angeles Times, Marfa is becoming "a center of Minimalist art and earth sculpture." Earthworks are "sculptures that erode or degrade over time." Physicists call this entropy, but to some people, I guess it's art. Among the "installations" is a 15-by-25 foot mock store, "Prada Marfa," filled with genuine Prada shoes and handbags, sealed shut and supposedly left to rot.

I predict a crime wave will soon hit the tiny town of Marfa. A few locks, chains and industrial-grade sealant would never stop true fashionistas from breaking in and making off with designer inventory that would otherwise just go to waste. Jen-Luc Piquant is so there already... and she's already dressed for stealth.

out of sequence

"April is the cruelest month," T.S. Eliot declared in the opening lines to "The Wasteland" -- unless you're a poet or mathematician. Or both. In which case, you've got double the reason to celebrate. April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month. So it seems especially appropriate that there is currently an explosion of original amateur poetry on the Internet based on the famed "Fibonacci sequence." They're called "Fibs," six-line poems whose syllables follow the Fibonacci progression. After the first two terms (1 and 1), each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the two previous numbers, so 1+1 = 2; 1+2=3; 2+3 = 5; 3+5 = 8; and so on into infinity. (Jen-Luc Piquant is relieved that the fibs mostly stop at 8 syllables instead of stretching into infinity, otherwise we'd never finish reading them -- although it might be amusing to attempt an infinitely epic version of, say, The Odyssey, in this "Fibonacci meter."  Odysseus would never find his way back to Penelope.)

Apparently, more than 1000 Fibs have been written so far this month, thanks in large part to a whimsical blog posting by LA screenwriter Gregory Pincus inviting readers to submit their own six-line poems using the sequence. His original post was then linked on slashdot.org and the notion spread like a virus from there. That's the power of the Blogosphere.

Equally amazing is the fact that so many people have heard of the Fibonacci sequence, no doubt due in large part to the staggering success of Dan Brown's bestselling The Da Vinci Code, which introduced us "non-math-y" types to what was once a relatively obscure mathematical oddity -- at least to those outside rarefied academic circles. Perhaps you recall the scene in which the hero, Langdon, and the love interest, Sophie, discover a seemingly random string of numbers at a murder scene: 13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5. Because this is fiction, and therefore not even remotely realistic, Sophie quickly realizes it is the first eight numbers, in jumbled order, of the Fibonacci sequence. Divide each number in the sequence into the one that follows, and the answer will be something close to 1.618, an irrational number known as phi -- a.k.a. "the Golden ratio," which also figures prominently in Brown's book.

It's nice to see mathematics get some attention, even if it's by way of a controversial potboiler. And while we should be skeptical of some of Brown's more questionable assertions about the prevalence of the Golden Ratio in the arts, for example, Fibonacci was a real historical personage: a 13th century mathematician also known as Leonardo Pisano, or Leonardo of Pisa. He was the son of a diplomat, and therefore studied under Arabic mathematicians in North Africa and traveled widely throughout what is now modern-day Algeria, as well as Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and Provence.

Upon his return to Pisa, the now-grown Leonardo wrote the Book of Calculation (Liber Abaci) in 1200, which, among other useful elements, introduced the use of Arabic numerals to Europe, along with the base-10 system for commercial bookkeeping. (The Fibonacci moniker apparently derives from the fact that his father was nicknamed "Bonacci," so young Leonardo was dubbed "filius Bonacci" -- "son of Bonacci" -- or Fibonacci.) The Fibonacci sequence appears in the third section as the solution to a hypothetical problem on how fast a (highly idealized) population of rabbits will grow. It proved to be one of his most lasting contributions. There is still a modern journal, The Fibonacci Quarterly, devoted entirely to studying the mathematics related to this sequence.

Fibonacci deserves every bit of the attention and respect he's received of late. But it would be incorrect to assume that he "discovered" this quirky little numerical sequence that bears his name. Like Sir Isaac Newton some 400 years later, he stood on the shoulders of giants. A century before he wrote the Book of Calculation, an ancient Indian scholar named Gopala had calculated the series of meters used in some 12th century Sanskrit poetry -- a specific meter called the matra-vrttas -- in which each subsequent meter is the sum of the two preceding meters. The pattern follows the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21....

There's precious little information available about Gopala; he's the shortest of stubs on Wikipedia, and even the exhaustive collection of historical biographies of mathematicians throughout the ages compiled by the good folks at St. Andrews College in England contains very little information. (Ironically, that same database reports that Fibonacci's work in number theory was in turn largely unknown during the Middle Ages; it was "rediscovered" 300 years later by the mathematician Maurolico.) There's only a wee bit more information about Gopala's fellow Indian scholar, Hemchandra, who studied the same sequence 20 years later while looking at the various possible ways of exactly bin-packing certain items of two given lengths. Hemchandra authored a proliferation of textbooks on science and Indian philosophy, as well as an epic poem and several Sanskrit grammars.

The latter is a fascinating field of study on its own, and doesn't lack for significance in both the arts and science. "Sanskrit" means "perfected," "refined," or "polished," and it may very well be the oldest language in the world, dating back to 2000 BC, although its formal rules weren't recorded until about 400 BC. But it's hardly a dead language: it's still spoken by hundreds of millions of people. Goethe borrowed from the Sanskrit tradition when writing portions of Faust. I opened this post by quoting "The Wasteland." Eliot was a student of Indian philosophy and ended his masterpiece with the Sanskrit lines, "Shantih Shantih Shantih." (A college pal of Jen-Luc Piquant's, known affectionately as "Red," once wrote a parody of this famous poem, declaring, "Eliot is the cruelest poet/Breeding art out of dead legend...." Even more fun can be had with Sanskrit via an online interactive game, "The Trials of Vajra.")

Henry David Thoreau read the Bhagavad Gita. So did physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former head of the Manhattan Project, who famously quoted that timeless work after the successful Trinity Test ushered in the nuclear age in 1945: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." In the early days of the periodic table, scientists used Sanskrit prefixes to refer to as-yet-undiscovered elements. NASA researchers are considering the possibility of adapting Sanskrit as a possible computer language because its structure leaves little room for error -- there are some 3959 rules to define the basic elements of sentence structure, consonants, nouns and verbs, all laid out like a mathematical function -- and bears some similarity to modern programming languages.

I bring up Gopala, Hemchandra, and the grand Sanskrit tradition mostly because (a) I find it historically fascinating, and (b) we tend to be far too Western-centric in American culture, and ignorant of the rich diversity and flourishing culture of other ethnic traditions. I'm no exception: I would never have heard of Gopala had I not read Mario Livio's The Golden Ratio. nor is that an isolated instance. The Independent recently ran a fascinating article detailing the many ways in which forgotten Islamic inventors changed the world, inspired by a new exhibit featured at the Science Museum in Manchester in March and still making the rounds of Merry Olde England. It seems we honor certain historical breakthroughs and inventions out of sequence, like the jumbled Fibonacci numbers in the opening pages of The Da Vinci Code.

Leaving aside the more obvious contributions to algebra, architecture, and cryptology, Muslim scholars assumed the Earth was round some 500 years before Galileo realized it. One of the earliest pinhole cameras was invented by a 10th-century Muslim scientist named Al-Hazen (or Ibn al-Haitham). Around 800, Muslim scientist Jabir ibn Hayyan invented the process of distillation (separating liquids through differences in their boiling points), technically making him one of the founders of modern chemistry. An ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari invented a rudimentary crank shaft to raise water for irrigation, and also invented a prototype of the combination lock. And while I'm a big fan of Eilmer of Malmesbury, an 11th century English Benedictine monk who fashioned a pair of makeshift wings and jumped off the roof of Malmesbury Abbey, he wasn't the first to attempt such a stunt. In 852, a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba with nothing more than a loose cloak fitted with wooden struts. It fortunately served as a parachute, so he escaped with minimal injuries. But really, what is it about early aviation attempts and jumping off the roofs of religious structures? It lends a whole new meaning to the term "leap of faith."

Jen-Luc Piquant largely eschews poetics in favor of the highly diverting -- for those with a mathematical bent -- Fibonacci Puzzles Page. But she was nonetheless inspired by Mr. Pincus, his poetical followers, and the forgotten fathers of Fibonacci to pen the following lines:

        We

        should

        honor

        Gopala

        and friend Hemchandra,

        not just Fibonacci's sequence.

 

the power of the pickle

One of the more memorable experiments I conducted in the science classes of my misspent youth was the Amazing Glowing Pickle, part of a multi-faceted exploration into the wonders of electricity. Pickles contain salt water, which is rich in charged particles (ions). Triggering a chemical reaction will turn this classic sandwich garnish into a makeshift battery, causing it to glow as it heats up, and probably smoke a bit as it gets hot enough. There's lots of variations on the basic experiment, including this one, courtesy of San Francisco's Exploratorium science museum, which uses a pickle, a pencil and a piece of aluminum foil (along with a couple of alligator-clip leads) to set off a simple buzzer. The aluminum and the graphite in the pencil chemically react with the ions in the pickle, triggering a flow of electrons between the two materials.

You can also build a makeshift battery from a lemon, or construct your own potato clock. But regardless of your choice of foodstuff, the fundamental physics at work is the same. Just like any other battery, the pickle (or lemon, or potato) uses two metals suspended in an ion-rich liquid to separate electrical charge, and converts chemical energy into electrical energy by a spontaneous transfer of electrons between them, which can be harnessed to perform some useful task, like, for example, setting off that annoying buzzer, or illuminating a standard household light bulb -- or perhaps to run an interactive art exhibit.

I was delighted to discover during a jaunt to the Big Apple this weekend that a group of enterprising New York City artists have integrated this most basic of science experiments into an elaborate sound/art installation. It's called FluxBox, housed at the Flux Factory artistic collective in Long Island City, Queens. FluxBox is a giant interactive music box, the collaborative creation of a group of seven artists. Each produced their own "kinetic sculptures," all of which were ultimately put together into one big, coordinated "performance" of a simple melody, composed specifically for the installation by Flux Factory's executive director (and one of the resident artists) Stefany Golberg.

The group's Website describes it as "a harmonious cacophony of individual sound installations." I would liken the experience to walking into a rakishly demented, found-object musical fun house that plays with sounds instead of light and mirrors. PeeWee's Playhouse pales in comparison. An accordion hangs suspended from the ceiling by cables, which occasionally move up and down to make the instrument play. The chain of an old bicycle is connected to a little metal whirligig (note the precision of my technical description) hung with dangling keys; turn the pedal, and the whirligig spins, causing the keys to jingle to provide a tinny acoustical ornamentation to the main melody. There are small toy drums, hanging plastic pipes, even an array of lids from coffee cans and plastic spice containers, hooked up to small hammers to produce subtle snippets of percussion. I was especially entranced by an elaborately conceived set-up involving a toy piano. A plaster hand with one pointed finger is raised and lowered at certain intervals to strike a single key.

It must have been a logistical nightmare to coordinate this fascinating array of disparate elements into such a charming whole, even with the help of a computer. Equally impressive is the fact that the installation runs off a single Kosher dill. That's right: before entering the FluxBox, you turn a crank connected to a large pickle to generate sufficient energy to "wind up" the exhibit. It's also designed to "wind down" just like a music box, so repeated crankings might be necessary, depending on how long one lingers in the FluxBox. Needless to say, I lingered for quite some time.

That's not the only example of applied science to be found on the premises of Flux Factory. Many of the resident artists have at least some technical background, or at least an interest in exploring the boundaries where science and art intersect, which explains why the building's doorbell is triggered by a crude mercury switch. The FluxBox installation exploits the same kind of intricate mechanical gear works to operate its found-object instruments that people have used over the ages to construct all manner of "automata" -- in fact, Golberg says the concept was partially inspired by her longstanding interest in automata, modern robotics, and artificial intelligence.

It's a long and glorious history, dating back at least to ancient Greece. A Greek inventor named Ctesibius is usually credited with building the first organ and water clocks featuring moving figures, and per the writings of Hero of Alexandria, automata were often used in theatrical performances of that era.  There are references to automata in the writings of Roman architect/engineer Vitruvius, who also developed the so-called "canon of proportions." Leonardo da Vinci's famous sketch, "Vitruvian Man," is an homage to those proportions. Always the visionary, Leonardo also built what some historians believe to be the first human-shaped robot in western civilization: an armored knight that could sit up, wave its arms, and even move its head. He never actually built the thing, more's the pity -- Leonardo was a great visionary, but his follow-through left a little to be desired.

By the 18th century, scientific understanding of basic mechanics -- exemplified by the precise art of watchmaking -- was sufficiently advanced to inspire inventors to build all kinds of artificial mechanical animals: peacocks, insects, dogs, swans, frogs, crayfish, ducks, even elephants. One German inventor, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, built a "speaking machine" in which a bellows forced air through an artificial voice box to simulate human speech. Von Kempelen's biggest claim to fame was his chess-playing automaton, The Turk, a carved wooden human figure in elaborate Turkish dress that played tournament-level chess, defeating nearly all challengers, and wowing the court of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in the 1770s. It was all a clever illusion, of course: the base was cunningly designed to conceal a human player who moved the Turk's arms from inside via an elaborate system of wheels and pulleys. Some 15 different chess experts occupied The Turk during the 85 years it toured Europe and Russia. Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allen Poe and Napoleon Bonaparte all reportedly took on The Turk... and lost.

So automata were all the rage among the aristocracy throughout 18th century western Europe, although their usefulness went beyond amusing the privileged classes. Building automata gave scientists a better understanding of the inner workings of human anatomy. Even today, lifelike mannequins are routinely used to train paramedics in emergency response, and one company manufactures a full-sized pregnant robot, named Noelle, to train medical personnel. The high-end computerized version of Noelle has a pulse rate, breathing, and urinary functions (ick -- one hopes the users are spared having to deal with a placenta), and can be programmed for all kinds of birthing complications, ultimately delivering a small plastic doll that can change color from a healthy pink to blue as a sign of oxygen deficiency. (Always biased towards the Cyber-sphere, Jen-Luc Piquant points out that one can also learn from a virtual rendering of anatomy, and indeed, advances in haptic and other sensory interfaces for Virtual Reality are used to train future surgeons, for example.)

The enthusiasm for automata had waned by 1834, when the British scientist and inventor Charles Babbage attended a going-out-of-business auction for Weeks' Mechanical Museum, the last London museum to cater to the public fascination for automata. Babbage was after the Silver Lady. He first saw the mechanical figure of a woman during a childhood visit to the Weeks museum. While others marveled at the steel tarantula that crawled about its display case, the young Babbage was enchanted by a silver dancer with a bird poised on her finger. A grown-up Babbage acquired the Silver Lady at the auction, pieced her back together, and displayed the mechanical marionette in his drawing room, evoking gasps of admiration from his visitors.

All good fads come to an end, but automata -- in some form or another, even those little wind-up plastic toys you can buy on Canal Street -- seem to have a lasting appeal. And it seems oddly a propos that today, Babbage is widely recognized for designing mechanical "thinking machines," one of which -- the Analytical Engine -- prefigured the modern computer. That's because FluxBox combines its Old-World mechanics with the latest in computerized digital music processing technology to produce the installation's primary melody.

For some reason -- my brain works in mysterious ways -- Golberg's description of how the music was processed called to mind the Cornell University researchers who built a playable "nanoguitar" in the shape of a Gibson Flying V model in 2003. The "strings" were tiny bars of silicon that vibrated in response to laser light; pitches were determined by the length of the bars rather than the tension on the strings of a real guitar. The tones were far above the frequency range of human hearing -- 17 octaves higher than those of a real guitar -- but when the nano-strings vibrated they created interference patterns in the light reflected back, and these patterns could be detected and electronically converted into audible notes. The Cornell researchers even devised some rudimentary "compositions" for their playable nanoguitar, including a short improvisational bit (entitled "Cagey") inspired by the composer John Cage. I can see some future sound installation at Flux Factory playing with this kind of concept.

By the time we finished our tour of the exhibit, the pickle was smoking like crazy, and lots of condensation had formed on the inside of its transparent casing. Flux Factory co-founder Morgan Meis (who hangs his blogging hat over at 3 Quarks Daily) says they have to replace the pickle at least once a day, depending on the volume of traffic. If nothing else, the local Kosher delis will be moving a lot of pickles between now and April 29th, when the exhibit closes. If you're anywhere near Long Island City before then, be sure to check out FluxBox and witness the power of the pickle firsthand. The experience is well worth the trip.

bleep bleep

Jen-Luc Piquant is feeling very Spiritually Enlightened today, reveling in her newly discovered mystical connection to the billions upon billions of molecules of consciousness scattered about the cosmos. Blame it on an ill-advised viewing late last night of what critics have been calling a "surprise sleeper New Age hit."  I'm talking, of course, about What the (Bleep) Do We Know? -- a half documentary, half drama that also spawned a recently released sequel, Down the Rabbit Hole.

It's a bit late to be hopping on the Bleep-bashing bandwagon, so I won't waste your time with a lengthy analysis and/or debunking of its more questionable assertions, other than to say we clearly need more public outreach and education on the notion of quantum decoherence (not to be confused with the quantum incoherence in the film), among other concepts, and a better public understanding of the ongoing scientific debate on any possible links between quantum effects and macroscale systems. Others have already weighed in on the issue, who are far more better-informed and eloquent than I, including the Guardian's Ben Goldacre (Mr. "Bad Science" himself) and Dennis Overbye of The New York Times.

Suffice to say, I was less than impressed by the film. Maybe it was the simplistic story line of a snarky yet self-hating photographer (played by Marlee Matlin) who learns the secret of cosmic happiness by taking a long, luxurious bath while covering herself in hearts. (Don't get me wrong, a nice long soak can be quite refreshing, but spiritually enlightening on a cosmic, I-am-one-with-the-universe scale? Give me a break.) Perhaps it was the fact that the film is blatant kooky-cult propaganda, having been funded by an organization run by a mystic who claims to be able to channel a 35,000-year-old warrior from Atlantis.

But mostly it was the hijacking of respectable quantum mechanics by flaky New Age mystics that offended me most. I ranted at length in a recent post about the effectiveness of exploiting pop culture and the mass media to communicate physics concepts to the public at large. Let me clarify that with a caveat: I wasn't talking about this film. Like everything in life, my pedagogy-for-the-masses approach has its benefits, and its potential pitfalls. The same tool can be used to spread misinformation about physics, particularly in a society that, to be blunt, doesn't seem to practice, or place much value on, critical thinking.

But even critical thinkers have been taken in. That's because (a) quantum mechanics is tricky stuff, and (b) What the Bleep  blurs the line between fiction and reality in a way that goes beyond irresponsible; it's downright dishonest. Quantum physics is mysterious and confusing enough without muddying the waters with a bunch of New Age claptrap. As Goldacre put it, "Why retreat into nonsense? ... There are much stranger and more important things going on out there, and it is a lot more interesting than making stuff up."

For instance, water might not be affected by my PMS-induced negativity -- although I might be adversely affected by the trace amounts of pharmacological compounds that apparently lace US waterways -- but it really is kinda weird stuff on the quantum level. Just take a gander at the April 8 cover story in New Scientist on the mysterious quantum properties of water and their possible impact on water's vital role in living processes. And many esteemed scientists, including Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff -- who is also featured in the film -- have speculated that human consciousness involves a specific form of quantum computation. The difference between the Bleep film and, say, Penrose's work on quantum consciousness, according to Goldacre, is that Penrose clearly identifies what is conjecture and what is supported by solid scientific evidence. I have to agree with Goldacre on this point; that's an important distinction.

Clearly, my molecules of consciousness are not that highly evolved, unlike those of Jen-Luc Piquant, who has been trying to communicate telepathically with the individual electronic pixels of other avatars ever since watching the DVD (to no avail, I might add). Why did I even bother watching it at all, you may well ask? Mostly in the interest of fairness. I keep running into people at readings, during interviews, or online who have been deeply affected by the film, and I didn't feel I could fairly criticize something I hadn't seen.

Sure, there was one very sweet bohemian woman who approached me after a reading to share her belief that the higher elements in the periodic table exhibited consciousness, and that she, being psychic, was able to communicate with them directly. But most of the people who ask me about the film are quite scientifically literate. There was the nice couple who struck up a conversation with me in a local Starbucks, one of whom had a degree in engineering. They'd seen the film and were particularly struck by the whole bit about the water molecules being affected by bad vibes. The same was true of a well-educated computer programmer and physics enthusiast, who acknowledged that a good deal of the material was nonsense, but still felt the film might be onto something.

There must be something about this film that resonates with these good people. And this in turn leads me to reflect on how we might exploit this resonance to educate them about real quantum physics. In many respects, What the Bleep is an easy pseudoscientific target, and it's tempting to just dismiss it out of hand, while hurling snarky sarcasm-darts its way. This may be entertaining when preaching to the converted, but such an approach might not be in our best interest when it comes to winning others over to our point of view. After all, you could conduct a thousand scientific studies, each concluding that praying for people to recover from an illness is ineffective, but it won't keep believers from praying just the same -- and believing their prayers make a difference.

There might even be a scientific explanation for the stubbornness of belief. Consider a January 29 article in the Washington Post reporting on a social psychology study by an Emory University psychologist that found that someone's emotions and implicit assumptions and beliefs not only influence their political affiliations, but that these strong partisan leanings (left or right) will cause people to stubbornly discount any information that challenges those pre-existing beliefs. The same is true when it comes to people's religious or spiritual beliefs. Not only that, but brain scans taken during the study found that whenever subjects rejected negative information about their favorite partisan candidates, the "reward centers" of their brains were activated. That's right: it makes us feel good when we reinforce our beliefs, which goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of FOX News, doesn't it? It's hard to argue with the pleasure principle.

Several years ago, while attending a physics conference in Minneapolis, I visited the Science Museum of Minnesota, arriving just as one of the demonstration lectures was about to begin. A pretty young woman got up and proceeded to talk about this wonderful new energy-generating machine her family had designed on their small-town farm, that essentially could run indefinitely with no need to be plugged into an outlet. It was all very Norman Rockwell in tone, and you could feel the audience warming to her homespun tale. She was just so darned likeable and fresh-faced. Who cares if she was, um, wrong?

Well, me, for one. I was horrified to find a highly respected science museum perpetrating this kind of nonsense. I wasn't alone. A self-proclaimed physicist in the audience let the young woman know, in no uncertain terms, that her family's invention was nonsense, that she was a scientifically illiterate fool with no grasp of the basics of thermodynamics, and that she had no business lecturing to the people in the science museum about anything, least of all energy sources. By the time he was finished "making his case," the young woman was near tears.

The physicist was 100% correct in his technical assessment of the device she was presenting. But here's the thing: the rest of the audience hated him... even me. We agreed with his assessment, we knew he was right, but he was just so arrogant and smug, so infuriatingly condescending to this sweet young woman who simply hadn't been taught any differently. Even worse, he was ill-mannered: he chose to publicly humiliate her in the middle of her lecture, rather than dealing with the issue privately and diplomatically. His "you're wrong so you must be an idiot" attitude made me cringe in embarrassment for the field of physics, just like a teenager forced to appear in public with his/her way-uncool parental units.

The joke was on us. Just when I was beginning to fear the self-righteous physicist would be lynched by an angry mob for making the poor farm girl cry, they revealed that the whole thing was a set-up to elicit just those emotions. The man was an audience "plant," a professional actor (who gave an Oscar-worthy performance, nailing the stereotypically obnoxious know-it-all scientist to a "T"), and the young woman was a graduate student in physics at a nearby university. She used the episode to launch into a detailed explanation of thermodynamics, even revealing the secret behind her free-energy device (which had been operating continuously during the entire scene): a power source hidden behind the stage. It was a very memorable approach; I guarantee anyone in the audience remembered the basics of thermodynamics and why they rule out free-energy schemes for a good long while. But the need for public education and outreach never ends. Just like entropy forces us to constant add energy to a closed system in order to keep it running, we need to keep pouring energy into reaching out to non-scientists.

There's also a lesson there about effective modes of discourse. Far too often, physicists do come off as arrogant know-it-alls laying down the law to all the rest of us mentally challenged sorts who couldn't hack graduate studies in physics. And that really hurts the whole outreach cause, especially since the truth is that physicists don't have all the answers -- that's what makes it such a vital, fascinating field. I'm reminded of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's famed "three laws":

(1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

(2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

(3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

We don't need to indulge nonsense like that contained in What the Bleep? However, it's possible to adhere to scientific principles while still retaining enough of an open mind to allow for as-yet-undiscovered advances that could one day make us all seem like superstitious primitives.  Just look at Roger Penrose, asking all those deep, penetrating questions about quantum consciousness. And remember that astrology and alchemy, to name just two examples, were once considered valid scientific fields of study. (Isaac Newton, among others, studied alchemy extensively, and it ultimately did give rise to modern chemistry, even if alchemy itself was discredited.)

So the next time you're tempted to jump all over the latest example of bleepin' bad science, thereby unleashing all your pent-up frustration at once again having to repeat yourself to clear up what you feel is a Very Basic Point -- I hope you remember the young woman in Minnesota and pause, just for a moment. Take a deep breath and ask yourself this: Is it more important for you to be right, or to be heard? And frame your response accordingly.

zap that fat!

In a perfect world, bad things wouldn't happen to good people. There would be no pain, no suffering, no sickness -- and no calories. Those obnoxious little units, first introduced in the nutritional, food-related sense in the 1890s, have caused more grief for the human waistline over the ages than, say, girdles or whalebone corsets (although the latter were known to sometimes damage internal organs). Most women and -- let's be honest, now -- many men waste a fairly considerable amount of time worrying about unwanted stores of fat globules. It's no coincidence that one of the most popular features of Judgment City -- a sort of waiting room for the afterlife in the 1991 Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life -- is the fact that during your stay there, you can eat whatever you like without gaining an ounce. (That's where Jen-Luc Piquant is going for her next vacation: hello, Judgment City!)

I'm happy to report that there may be new hope for expanding waistlines and flabby thighs. Scientists at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (known affectionately as "JLab") have demonstrated that a laser can heat (read, "burn away") fat in the body without scorching the over-lying skin. This in turn could lead to revolutionary new laser therapies to treat such chronic bugbears as severe acne, artery plaque, and -- you guessed it -- unwanted cellulite. These very exciting results were presented this morning in Boston at the 26th annual meeting of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery (ASLMS). I was not actually there, alas, to witness this historic announcement in person, but I was among the many proud recipients of the JLab press release last Thursday, and have only been prevented from sharing the news with you all until now because of a compulsory media embargo. (We try to always respect the embargo here at Cocktail Party Physics. It'd just be rude to do otherwise.)

First, a few words about lasers. The question of who actually invented this useful little device is a thorny one, and the subject of many nasty lawsuits over several decades, but most would agree that the underlying fundamental physics comes to us courtesy of good ol' Albert Einstein. It was just a little idea he was developing on the side for a lark to take a break from the rigors of general relativity -- a side project that ended up spawning a multi-billion-dollar industry. In 1917 he published a paper that broached the possibility of something called "stimulated emission." (Yes, I know: it's an unfortunate choice of words. But that's what it's called, so try to keep the snickering to a minimum, 'kay?)

At the heart of a laser is a "lasing medium" -- usually a crystal of some sort, like ruby -- and if you pump the atoms in that material (oh, stop it!) with intense flashes of light or electricity, it will eventually emit the excess energy as photons. I won't go into all the complicated details here; you can find more details here and here. But the end result is a tightly focused beam of light in which all the photons are traveling in the same direction, rather than diffusing outward all willy-nilly, in every direction at once. So "laser" is short for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." (We're offering a brand new physics cocktail, called the Laser Beam, in its honor. See sidebar.)

The problem with conventional lasers is that by their very nature, they only emit light at one given frequency, which is determined by whatever material one is using as the lasing medium. JLab  pioneered  free electron lasers (FELs), which emit intense, powerful beams of laser light that can be tuned to whatever wavelength (color) of the electromagnetic spectrum one needs for the purpose at hand.  This makes an FEL incredibly flexible and therefore useful for a broad range of applications, including processing plastics, synthetic fibers, electronics components, and all kinds of cutting-edge materials with unique properties. And it can do so far more cheaply than more traditional manufacturing tools. That tunability also means the instrument can be tailored to three infrared wavelengths where -- the researchers found -- fat heats up more efficiently than water, making it possible to selectively heat fat tissue with infrared laser light. They tested this capability first on actual human fat (obtained from "surgically discarded normal tissue"), and then on skin-and-fat tissue samples taken from pigs.

Jen-Luc Piquant, for one, is delighted that the good folks at JLab finally got around to addressing the dire need for new ways to get thinner thighs in 30 days -- preferably ones that don't involve any actual effort. It's about time we brought out the big guns. Just look at the size of that thing! And that's only one of the system's many components... This country may or may not be facing an "obesity epidemic," depending on which conflicting study one chooses to believe, but a quick look around  the average suburban mall would offer quite a bit of anecdotal evidence in favor of the "pro"-epidemic view. Of course, excess flab isn't a new problem for the human race. Far from it. Among other notable historical figures, the English poet Lord Byron struggled mightily with his weight, despite being the quintessential ladies' man (club foot and all), and routinely went on "slimming" regimens like liquid diets.

So fad diets predate Dr. Atkins. In the early 20th century, Horace Fletcher -- a.k.a. "the chew-chew man" -- advocated controlling food consumption by chewing one's food until it was liquid. Shortly before he died in 1919, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters published the first bestselling diet book, Diet and Health, which was also the first to promote the idea of counting calories to control weight -- then quite a new concept. It had only been 20 years or so since the chemists Wilbur Atwater and Russell Chittenden came up with the notion of measuring food as units of heat that could be produced by burning it. That's all a "calorie" really is: the amount of heat energy produced when the food is burned to ashes, under controlled laboratory conditions. It's not something that's actually "in" food.

The success of Peters' book spawned an entire industry. Think the Atkins and South Beach Diets were innovative and original? Think again. The emphasis on "food combinations" dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. William H. Hay, for example, believed proteins, starches and fruits should be eaten separately to avoid "acidosis." It's unclear to me what this is, but apparently it "drained vitality and led to fat." (Jen-Luc reminds me -- somewhat unkindly, I think -- that I have had boyfriends who could be considered the human embodiment of acidosis.) He also recommended a daily enema to "flush out the poisons" -- an approach that can still be seen today in the popularity (in certain elite circles) of "colonics."

With his book, Look Younger, Live Longer, Gaylord Hauser drew the admiration of the likes of Greta Garbo and Paulette Goddard with his emphasis on Vitamin-B rich foods like brewers yeast, yogurt, wheat germ and blackstrap molasses. He was also one of the first to develop his own line of special foods and supplements in accordance with that diet plan. Then there was the so-called "magic pairs" diet, extolling the supposedly increased fat-burning properties of certain food combinations, like (we kid you not) lamb chops and pineapple. Plus ca change.... We're still looking for that "magic bullet."  When it comes to fad diets, there is truly nothing new under the sun. And they aren't any more or less effective than they were back then.

We bandy about the word quite promiscuously, but a "calorie" is not as tangible as one might think. In the realm of science (specifically, thermodynamics), calories apply to anything that contains energy, such as a gallon of gasoline. The calories in food are technically "kilocalories," according to how the units are strictly defined in science. For scientists, a calorie is simply the amount of energy (heat) required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), and 1000 calories is equivalent to 1 kilocalorie. So that Power Bar I just consumed for breakfast contained 270 food calories, which translates into 270,000 regular calories. And that four miles I'll be running this afternoon should burn 400 "food calories"; it sounds like a much more impressive amount when transposed into 400,000 regular calories.

For weight management purposes, it's sufficient just to burn up the calories. But all that energy released when calories are burned can also be harnessed to do some kind of useful task. For instance, prisoners in 19th century New York prisons were forced to walk on treadmills as punishment, and that energy was used to grind grain for the inmates' daily bread. I found an interesting comparison chart at How Stuff Works. It turns out that the calories contained in five pounds of spaghetti would yield enough energy to brew a pot of coffee, while those in a single slice of cherry cheesecake would operate a light bulb for an hour and a half. And if you need to drive 88 miles to visit friends or relatives, you'd need to burn the calories contained in 217 Big Macs. (Talk about carb-loading. Better start chowing down the night before.)

Back in February, I stumbled upon a fascinating short article in Wired about creative ways to harness the energy from gym exercise to perform useful functions. An artist named Laurie Palmer began musing about all the wasted energy being produced in gyms all across the country, by Americans on stationary bikes, elliptical machines, or treadmills. So she set up the online "Notions of Expenditure" project a year ago, in which people can contribute their ideas for turning exercisers into generators of energy. Unfortunately, unless you're Lance Armstrong, it's not a lot of energy: most people on a stationary bike only produce between 75 and 150 watts.

It all seems like a great deal of work, for very little payoff, doesn't it? Hence the appeal of the JLab approach: no muss, no fuss, no obsessively writing down every morsel that passes one's lips in a little "food diary." No special meals or supplements, elaborately orchestrated food combinations, or those telltale minute surgical scars from conventional liposuction -- just one really big free electron laser facility that hunts down fat and zaps it away without damaging one's outer layer of skin. Needless to say, Jen-Luc Piquant is ecstatic at the prospect, and is preparing to indulge in large bowls of her favorite virtual penang curry over coconut sticky rice, among other rich and calorie-laden delicacies. It's almost as it JLab's FEL has turned our world into one giant Judgment City where we can eat whatever we want with no dietary consequences. "Go ahead," she exhorts, a bit irresponsibly. "Indulge in that over sized blueberry scone. Why bother watching what you eat when you can just zap that fat away whenever you feel like it?"

As usual, Jen-Luc is letting her enthusiasm over-ride her common sense. Operating an FEL isn't cheap, nor is scheduling time at the facility as easy as scheduling a doctor's appointment -- or a visit to one's local Liposuctor. And let's not forget that for now, at least, it's just proof of principle. Commercial development of any application takes a lot more time. And money. So tempting though it may be to throw dietary caution to the wind, I think I'll stick with my tried and true Thermodynamics Diet: you know, that one where you have to burn more calories than you consume to lose weight. Sure, it lacks the guilt-free ease and panache of those flashier fad diets, and requires far more actual effort. On the other hand, it has withstood the test of time.

pop culture pedagogy

Jen-Luc Piquant peruses Physics Today regularly, often firing off snidely condescending letters taking issue with the finer technical points of lengthy articles on everything from terahertz radiation and "left-handed" materials, to the latest research news on the superfluidity of hydrogen and/or helium. (The editors wisely have yet to publish one of her missives, since she definitely falls into the "crackpot" category when it comes to her independent forays into physics research.) I know several of the staff writers -- all terrific people -- and it's without question a publication revered by its loyal readers, but I confess I rarely do more than skim through it, checking out "Search and Discovery," the science policy news, and the odd interesting tidbit.

Atypically, considering my bookworm nature, I skip the book reviews altogether, mostly because (a) by the time an issue comes out, the books in question tend to be out of print already; and (b) they usually have titles like Sculptured Thin Films: Nanoengineered Morphology and Optics, and are filled with complicated equations guaranteed to make my innumerate eyes glaze over within microseconds. Yea, verily, I exaggerate... at least with regard to (a). But let's face it, I'm hardly the magazine's target audience. I struggled mightily with the latter half of The Elegant Universe ('fess up, how many of you actually read it cover to cover?), and have never cracked open an issue of that multi-headed Hydra, the Physical Review. Unlike Jen-Luc Piquant, I know my limitations.

However, I am the target audience for books like The Physics of Superheroes, by University of Minnesota physicist James Kakalios. So I awaited my April issue of Physics Today with great anticipation, having received a distressed email from a physicist/educator pal spewing indignation over an eviscerating review of the book -- along with Barry Parker's homage to all things scientific in the James Bond franchise, Death Rays, Jet Packs, Stunts and Supercars: The Fantastic Physics of Film's Most Celebrated Secret Agent. -- by one Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mind you, I know next to nothing about Muller, Kakalios or Parker, and I haven't read these books (yet). They no doubt have their flaws (both the books, and the men). One could make a perfectly valid, thoughtful critique and fairly find the books wanting on any number of things. But Muller's analysis is wrong-headed from the get-go. It all comes down to knowing one's audience, and Muller misses the mark on that score entirely, claiming, "I doubt that any reader of Physics Today would enjoy either book."  Hmm. For starters, these kinds of books aren't intended for physicists -- although I contend that many physicists might nonetheless enjoy them as a lark -- but to help non-scientists better appreciate an often intimidating esoteric subject.

I smacked my forehead in dismay at Muller's objections to the way equations are presented in both books. It annoys him that Parker fails to fully derive the equations he cites, and Kakalios -- that miscreant -- doesn't use any equations at all, except for one buried among the superhero images. Imagine that! A physics book for a general audience that doesn't contain any equations! Here's a news flash for Dr. Muller: equations are not an effective way to convey the beauty of physics to non-scientists. They're a good way to lose your reader altogether. In fact, I am now a bit leery of Parker's book, having learned it contains equations. This has been one of the most fundamental truths of popular science writing since at least the 1970s . (Please note that I specified "popular" science writing; there are several different levels, and different criteria apply to each.) Apparently Muller is still stuck in the Dark Ages.

Kakalios teaches a popular freshman seminar called "Everything I Needed to Know About Physics I Learned from Comic Books." Muller completely misses the irony of this course title -- not to mention the entire point of the book based on it -- soberly observing that "most of what superheroes do in comic books cannot be made compatible with physics." Well, yes. So what? That's why it's called fiction, and relies on the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Any fictional world need only be compatible with its own physical laws -- and even then there's wriggle room, thanks to artistic license -- which may or may not be in harmony with those of the real world. Does Muller seriously think all non-scientists are morons who can't tell the difference between fiction and reality, just because we happen to enjoy losing ourselves in make-believe worlds on occasion? Trust me, we'll get over the earth-shattering news that -- gasp! -- Superman wouldn't be able to fly in the universe as we currently understand it. (For the curious, the cartoon at right is provided courtesy of the brilliantly inventive Paul Dlugokencky; you can see more of his work here.)

Muller continues in this misguided vein: "Instead, [Kakalios] describes the powers of... superheroes and uses those traits as an opportunity to launch into interesting physics." Yes. Exactly. This is supposed to be a criticism? Kitty Pryde's ability to walk through walls is an excellent segue into a discussion of quantum tunneling for someone who is not scientifically minded. Whether or not Kitty's ability is "totally incompatible with quantum mechanics" is irrelevant to the pedagogical purpose. Discuss her unique ability, use it to segue into real-world quantum mechanics, and guide the reader/student to the inescapable conclusion that the two are incompatible. That is apparently just what Kakalios does. Good for him. This process is called "learning." Among other things, the approach fosters critical thinking: the reader must understand the basics of real-world physics before he or she can apply those basics to a fictional world, and come to a fuller appreciation of why we don't have similar abilities.

Educators have known for eons that real learning only occurs when students are sufficiently engaged to think about the lesson, rather than learning facts by rote, or dutifully absorbing the salient points of a college lecture, stored just long enough for successful regurgitation on the final exam. The latest studies by neuroscientists at the University College London have affirmed it. How successfully we form lasting memories depends on how well our brain was "primed" to receive that information. ("We will teach no mind before it's primed," cracks Evil Punster Jen-Luc.)

There's a lot of potential "priming" power to be gained from pop culture, if only because it's so pervasive in the national consciousness. A recent poll found that Americans know more about TV shows like "The Simpsons" and "American Idol" than they do about their own Constitution. Apparently only one out of 1000 respondents could name all five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment, whereas more than one in five could name all the major "Simpsons" characters.  And while four in ten could name two out of three "Idol" judges, only eight out of 100 could name at least three First Amendment rights. (Isn't it kinda comforting to know America's educational shortcomings aren't limited to math and the hard science?) Much as some might like to pretend otherwise, physicists are hardly immune to the attractions of popular culture. I've met more than one physicist whose love for the subject was inspired by reading Jules Verne's classic 19th century sci-fi novel From the Earth to the Moon as a boy, in which men are essentially catapulted to their lunar target using a rudimentary cannon.

So if a scene in a Hollywood blockbuster isn't compatible with the laws of physics, don't sputter self-righteously about the scientific illiteracy of filmmakers; use that example to demonstrate how physics really works. Most of us don't expect movies to mirror reality perfectly, unless they happen to be documentaries, and even then, the director's perspective will "color" that "reality." It should. This is art, or if you're uncomfortable with that designation, creative multimedia entertainment. It's not a science experiment.

Pop culture can transform a tired analogy into something fresh -- say, for instance, Albert Einstein's excellent man-in-an-elevator thought experiment to demonstrate the notion of the equivalence of gravity and acceleration. Science book after science book has described it in exactly the same way for decades. Why not adapt it to the opening sequence of the movie Speed, instead? Megastar Keanu ("Whoa!") Reeves and his bomb squad partner must rescue a bunch of high-rise office workers from an elevator car stuck between floors, before that psycho, Dennis Hopper, triggers a bomb that will send it plunging down the shaft. This is a terrific way to introduce students to Einstein's historical analogy, not to mention some basic Newtonian mechanics. Based on the floor number where the car is stuck, we can estimate how far it must fall down the shaft before impact, and therefore -- with guidance from our friendly local physics teacher -- can calculate how much it will accelerate, how much momentum it will gain, its final velocity, and how hard it will hit.

Muller is not entirely insensitive to this approach, since lurking in the review's background like the Shadow himself is the specter of the book that launched the whole genre: Lawrence Krauss' The Physics of Star Trek. Krauss's tome is undeniably the gold standard for such efforts (along with Roger Highsmith's The Science of Harry Potter). It turns out that Muller is a big fan of Krauss's book (even though it eschews equations). A really big fan. So big that he can't stop talking about it. This is a man who worships at the Shrine of Krauss, which makes his attitude all the more inexplicable.

(For the record, we here at Cocktail Party Physics are also great admirers of Krauss, the Patron Saint of Pop Culture Pedagogy. He does more for public outreach in any given week than many physicists accomplish in their entire careers. He's that rare breed, a physicist who can connect with a general audience. He writes pretty damn well, too. But we stop short of lighting votive candles and bowing to his image on a makeshift altar. Really, burning a little incense now and then, or leaving milk and cookies, seems to be sufficient to keep the Wrath of Krauss at bay.)

Clearly it galls uber-fanboy Muller that his hero wrote the foreword for Kakalios' despised book, so much so that he digresses into musing on Krauss' inner thoughts while doing so. Apparently they have some kind of Vulcan Mind Meld going. How else would Muller know that Krauss deliberately wrote the forward in such a way to avoid openly endorsing Kakalios's book?

Perhaps most disturbing of all, Muller claims that he "frequently uses popular culture images" in his own introductory physics class. That means he's out there, right now, actively poisoning young minds, albeit with good intentions. Even more important than knowing one's audience is recognizing one's limitations. Please, Herr Muller, leave the pop culture physics pedagogy to those who actually get it -- you know, like Krauss. And Kakalios. And the curators of the newly opened Marvel Superheroes Science Exhibition at the California Science Center in downtown Los Angeles. In fact, if you're a student at UC-Berkeley, I'd urge you to boycott Muller's introductory physics class and head south to that exhibit instead. Would you rather listen to a boring old lecture, or (as Erin Torneo put it in SEED), "channel [your] inner Spidey on a climbing wall"?

Maybe you think I'm being unreasonable, calling for a boycott of the man's class. Consider this: Muller closes his review not just with an emphatic two-thumbs down, but with an exhortation to Physics Today readers to avoid purchasing either book even for non-scientists who might be interested in reading about the science of science fiction. (As my physicist/educator friend acidly observed, "We wouldn't want them getting used to understanding things without derivations.") It's at this point that Muller crosses that all-important line from merely misguided to petty and mean-spirited. (He was skirting pretty close with his comments on Krauss' foreword.) He can't be content with simply ripping the books to shreds for arguably specious reasons; that's a time-honored tradition among reviewers. He must endeavor to make sure that no one ever buys these books he so despises, for anyone, even those who might actually enjoy them.

Look, I can understand if some physicists find my own populist approach appalling: I'm an upstart, an interloper who sneakily infiltrated the bastion of physics with none of the traditional academic credentials for science writing, before anyone thought to stop me. And I sometimes make boneheaded mistakes. But both Kakalios and Parker are Esteemed Members of the Tribe; you'd think they, at least, would merit more respectful treatment. Muller's idol, Krauss, would never be so uncivil; he wields his pen like a scalpel, not a bludgeon. He also knows what it's like to risk putting yourself out there as an author of popular science books, and appreciates how difficult it is straddle those two worlds successfully. Kakalios, Parker, and the readers of Physics Today deserve better.

I close with a Weekend Warrior call to arms. Right after posting this, Jen-Luc and I are heading over to Amazon to order The Physics of Superheroes in a show of solidarity for Kakalios (who, for the record, I have never met). And Parker's book on the physics in Bond movies. And any other book we can find -- equation-heavy warts and all, because hey, at least they're trying, and we want them to keep on trying -- that uses pop culture to introduce the reluctant and unwilling to the wonders of physics in creative, imaginative ways. We encourage you all to do likewise. Call it our own Pop Culture Physics Revolution.

fear of flying

I was a voracious reader as a child (I still am, whenever my frenetic schedule permits). I'd read anything you put in front of me, including cereal boxes, appliance manuals, and Monopoly instructions. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my father's lap, all of four years old, trying to read his latest issue of Time, although it must be said that my comprehension of the weighty matters contained therein left a lot to be desired. I also plowed through a children's encyclopedia collection that my parents kept in the house for our edification. My favorite was the volume on mythology; I had a particular affinity for the tragic figure of Icarus.

You remember the tale: he and his father, Daedalus, were exiled onto a deserted island. Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings, affixed to the shoulders with wax, so they could escape their island prison by flying into the air like birds. But Icarus became so exhilarated mid-flight about defying gravity that he ignored his father's warnings about flying too high. He flew too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax, the wings came loose, and poor Icarus plunged to his death in the waters below.

To my shy and rather timid young self, the lesson was obvious: it's far preferable to keep one's head down and lie low, rather than try to fly and risk crashing ignominiously to earth. It was a very long time before I overcame my innate "fear of flying" and realized that life is all about taking risks. What's that catchphrase from the film, Strictly Ballroom? "A life lived in fear is a life half lived." At some point in my adult life, I decided that half lives are for radioactive materials, not for me. That's one reason I was able to assume the risk of becoming a science writer and rising above a long-standing irrational fear of physics.

I was reminded of Icarus over the past few days. On Sunday, NPR's Weekend Edition aired a short five-minute interview with me about my book, Black Bodies and Quantum Cats. As a result, I spent the day fielding calls and emails from friends -- and a few long-lost acquaintances, one of whom expressed surprise that I'd ever amounted to anything -- and watching my book skyrocket up Amazon's mysterious ranking system, a phenomenon that is actually known at NPR headquarters as "the NPR Effect." (Physicists should get right on that bit of research.) By the end of the day, the story was the top emailed article on NPR's Web site, so clearly it struck a responsive chord with the listeners. But even awash in the glow of such modest success, I couldn't help feeling anxious and apprehensive about flying too close to the sun; Icarus lurked at the back of mind.

The inevitable crash was not long in coming. The linked page also includes a short excerpt from the book, on roller coasters and the infamous 1999 incident where male model Fabio was hit in the face by a wayward goose mid-ride. It includes an abridged explanation of the various forces at work on a roller coaster ride, including the so-called "g forces." Unfortunately, as one alert reader/listener (whom I shall call "Z") pointed out via email that evening, my summation is not quite right.

Here's the gist of his -- and it's always a "he," for some reason -- points: First, mass is not related to the number of atoms (although I've seen it described as such in more than one place, so clearly a broader correction is needed beyond my book): it's a measure of the inertia of a given object, that is, its tendency to stay at rest or move uniformly in a straight line, which also determines how much force is required to get said object moving. And g is not the "force of gravity," but rather, the acceleration due to gravity. A roller coaster rider at 4 g's does indeed experience a force equal to four times his weight, but it's his "apparent weight" that increases during acceleration, not his "actual" weight.

Oops. That sound you hear is the unmistakable "thud" of me crash-landing to earth. Seriously, color me embarrassed by the gaffe. One of the hardest things about writing on physics for the general public is deciding how much to simplify the intricate details. Physicists always seem to want to include too much information, and thereby lose the interest of their intended audience far too soon. I'm good at holding a reader's attention, but sometimes -- as in the present case -- I play a little too fast and loose with the details, particularly when it comes to how physicists vs. the public use specific terminology. Who ya gonna please, when you can't please both? That's the eternal question

Now, Jen-Luc Piquant is a bit proud and hates to have her shortcomings so baldly exposed; she believes there is a special place in hell for nitpickers like this -- perhaps even Dante's dreaded Ninth Circle. But I've said before that I have no problem being corrected, so long as the people are nice about it, and Z. was as polite as they come; he even emailed back with a correction to his correction. I think folks like Z. should all volunteer as fact checkers at publishing houses, newspapers and magazines, where they can fully indulge their need to make corrections in the work of others, and thereby serve a useful purpose to society by ensuring such mistakes don't see print. Because I happen to agree with Z's statement: "Though physics terms like force, work, power, etc. may have loose meanings in everyday language, they have very precise definitions in physics." I actually take these distinctions quite seriously, and worked very hard to verify accuracy before the book was published. Despite my best efforts, tiny errors crept in, as they inevitably do; it's an inescapable reality of publishing.

Alas, there's not much I can do about it for the moment. Online stories can be corrected almost immediately. Newspapers and magazines can print corrections and retractions. Books are much more permanent. Unless there's a second edition (which is distinct from second or even third print runs), the errors must stay in place, for now. But I do have a blog, and in the interests of accuracy, let the record show that I hereby make the correction.

It's rather fitting that gravity proved to be my downfall, considering my affinity for the legend of Icarus. It might be weak compared to the other fundamental forces, but gravity is an inescapable reality of our human existence. Scientists have to come up with all kinds of ingenious ways to work around the limitations it imposes. Take the "Prometheus Project," a research team made up entirely of undergraduate students who will be exploring how sound waves might be used to extinguish fires in low-gravity environments like the space station. They've already managed to repeatedly extinguish small flames in a controlled laboratory environment using sound, but it's not clearly exactly why it works. The working hypothesis is that sound causes pressure to drop at the site of the flame, which might also involve a drop in temperature at said site, (chilling the flame) or a decrease in the concentration of oxygen (starving the flame).

In what will no doubt be the highlight of their young lives so far, the students get to test their hypothesis this summer aboard NASA's "Weightless Wonder" C-9 aircraft, a.k.a. the "Vomit Comet" -- a moniker that really bugs NASA officials, so I feel compelled to repeat it here, just to yank their chain. (Jen-Luc Piquant is seething with jealousy, since NASA rejected her proposal to study the effects of microgravity on the cellulite of aging celebrities as a possible alternative to liposuction. The anonymous peer reviewer opined that celebrities already defy gravity.) An earlier KC-135 aircraft, retired in 2000, was used to film many of the zero gravity scenes in the blockbuster film, Apollo 13.  The current Weightless Wonder produces 25 seconds or so of weightlessness by flying in a roller-coaster-like path of steep climbs and free falls. (Roller coasters again -- behold the tenuous connection!) Except in this case, the coaster is about 10,000 feet high. The aircraft's dramatic, parabolic flight patterns temporarily counteract earth's gravity, creating "weightlessness," and sometimes leading to motion sickness -- hence the "vomit comet" nickname.

Cool factor aside, the students do have a scientifically valid reason for performing their experiment in such an anti-gravity environment. Conventional fire extinguishers, it turns out, don't work properly aboard spacecraft; the foam tends to spread out in a low-g environment rather than smother the flames. It might be a good idea to figure out how best to extinguish fires in space. Although there are more terrestrial potential applications, too: the knowledge might be useful for fighting fires in computer rooms, where expensive hardware can be damaged by normal chemical extinguishers.

This past February, NASA's microgravity school program also benefited teachers from two southern California schools. One project was called the Rotational Artificial Gravity Experiment, designed to help students determine how fast a space station would have to rotate to create artificial gravity on board. The other was the Bubble Project, aimed at achieving a better understanding of how soap bubbles behave in a microgravity environment: specifically, how long it lasts, its size and its direction of travel in reduced gravity.

It just so happens that the study of bubbles and foam is pretty cutting-edge science, and the Bubble Project isn't the only research venture that seeks to study foam's properties in the absence of gravity. In that infamous, riddled-with-nitpicky-errors book of mine, there's a chapter on foam and bubbles, in which I discuss the work of Boston University researcher Glynn Holt. (It's based in part on an article on the physics of foam I wrote for Discover back in 2002.) It's actually rather difficult for sudsy scientists to create predictive models of foam's rheology -- that is, how it deforms and flows over time -- because anything you use as a container inevitably changes its shape and behavior. Holt got around this problem by using sound waves to float individual drops of foam in mid air using a technique called acoustic levitation. He can even manipulate the suspended drop by altering the acoustic field, changing its position, or squeezing it to cause the bubbles that make up the drop to vibrate.

Sometimes it can seem as if gravity "disappears," even on earth, as with the notorious "Gravity Hill, part of a remote local road located in south central Pennsylvania. For no cost whatsoever, the low-budget tourist can marvel as water seems to flow the wrong way, and cars seem to roll uphill. It's just an optical illusion but it's fun, nonetheless. The news that University of Oregon researchers have made water "climb stairs" in the laboratory isn't an illusion -- but it's a damned clever trick, basically exploiting the same phenomenon that causes water droplets to bead up and dart around a really hot frying pan. The Oregon researchers just turned the frying pan into a very hot ratcheted staircase. (You can see a helpful diagram of the experiment here.)

For most of us, though, there are no clever tricks or illusions to offset gravity. Still, I take comfort in the fact that all the sturm und drang is by its very nature transitory. The NPR link is no longer the top emailed story on the site; it's disappeared into the archives altogether. And after peaking at #14 on Amazon Sunday evening, my book has begun a slow, prolonged descent back into the online reader's abyss from whence it sprang. See? No matter how high you soar, gravity always wins out in the end and brings you crashing down to earth. Icarus learned this the hard way and paid for his error with his life. I escaped with a few scratches to my ego, having learned some very useful things about the finer points of gravity and acceleration in the process. I think that's a fair trade.

After all, one shouldn't let one's fear of flying keep one from strapping on a metaphorical pair of wings and testing the limits -- just to see if it can be done. Far worse than having the odd error in my book, would have been not writing it at all because I was too afraid of making mistakes. So I applaud those students and teachers who brave the Vomit Comet for their daring. It's only by pushing the limits that any kind of growth or progress can be made. Why bother with a life half lived?