history in hand

The science blogosphere was buzzing early last week as news of President Obama's address to the National Academy of Sciences hit the airwaves. And what a long-overdue affirmation of science that address turned out to be. (You can find the complete transcript, with photos, video and audio, here.) After eight long years of scientists being ignored, ridiculed, and sometimes outright harassed or pressured into changing their conclusions for political expediency, we finally have someone in office who understands and respects how critically important the scientific enterprise is to our nation's continued well-being.

And he has the oratorical gifts and personal charisma to passionately make the case for science to the public at large. A friend of mine has joked about Obama's uncanny ability to, in effect, sprinkle fairy dust all over everyone to bring them around to his way of thinking. There's a bit of truth to that cynical remark, which to my mind, serves to underscore the importance of having a strong, articulate communicator in the Oval Office who can advocate for science. (We want skilled orators working for us, not against us.)

Obama hit all the right notes for those of us who have watched with dismay as science has been pushed further and further into the shadows. He bemoaned the steady decline in federal funding in the physical sciences as a portion of US gross domestic product -- over the last 25 years, it's fallen by almost 50%, and the crucial research and experimentation tax credit, which encourages business to take risks and innovate, keeps lapsing at the whims of policymakers. He pointed out the adverse impact this has had on American global competitiveness, and on education, as US students routinely are overshadowed in math and science by their counterparts in other countries (notably Singapore, Japan, England, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Korea).

Showing once again his strong grasp of history, Obama deftly tied the foundation of the NAS by Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War to our current need to invest in our nation's future despite facing enormous fiscal challenges. Perhaps the comment that elicited the most cheers was this: "We have watched as scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas." Speak it, Mr. President!

Obama has a plan for science. Part of it involves making the aforementioned research and experimentation tax credit permanent, in hopes of encouraging businesses to strive for game-changing innovation, rather than maintaining the status quo. (Compare Apple Inc, which is doing pretty well despite the economc downturn, thanks very much, with, say, Chrysler, which is filing for bankruptcy.) Part of it involves increased funding for math and science education. Most encouraging of all, is that Obama is calling for the federal government to devote more than three percent of our GDP to research and development. We currently spend 1% or less of GDP on R&D.

Whether or not this administration can accomplish such a feat in these difficult economic times remains to be seen. The federal budget is already groaning under the countless other burdens heaped upon it by one of the longest and steepest recessions in recent history, and the national debt is so high I can't even count all the zeros. So converting pretty words into concrete action in the face of all that is no small feat, and will be the true test of the Obama administration. I appreciate the sentiment, though, and agree that investing in scientific research is a wise use of our increasingly limited financial resources -- technological innovation tends to create new markets, and has fueled much of US economic growth over the last 30 years. Renewed investment could very well lead us back to a strong economy. In time.

I was actually in DC for the annual meeting, although the NAS auditorium was far too packed to allow me to see the President in person. However, thanks to the glories of the Interwebs, I and millions of others around the world had the chance to watch the President's address online. That should have driven home his points about the game-changing impact of S&T more than his impressive oratorical skills. After all, it was advances in science -- both incremental and revolutionary breakthroughs, over hundreds of years -- that made this kind of mass communication possible, and it never ceases to amaze me how much we take these wonders for granted. The comedian Louis CK riffed on this phenomenon of spoiled entitlement in this bit from his appearance on Conan O'Brien last year:

Okay, I admit I've been one of those people grousing about unpleasant airplane flights, completely forgetting to pause a moment and marvel, "Holy crap, I'm actually flying!" But I'm still capable of being awed by the capabilities of my iPhone, for example, because like Louis CK, I too can remember those horrible rotary dial phones -- not to mention the huge cell phone prototypes that first emerged in the 1980s (they show up in films from that period, and now seem laughably dated). Of all the things that have been lost by the nation's dwindling support of science, perhaps that shared sense of wonder is the greatest. I'm stunned by folks who spew anti-science rhetoric while mindlessly reaping the benefits of centuries of research and development, all without batting an eye -- especially if they're doing it over radio or television, or on the Internet (all the result of countless scientists toiling away in their laboratories, adhering to the scientific method).

Perhaps, as Louis CK says, these people should be forced to give up their cars, cell phones, computers, TVs, radios, MP3 players, stereos, digital cameras, video camcorders, microwaves, vacuum cleaners, washer/dryers, garage door openers, refrigerators (the Carnot cycle in action!), and so forth, and go back to living in the Stone Age until they get over their sense of entitlement. We benefit from science every single day, in countless ways, and never realize it. Without science, there would be no plastics, no carbonated beverages, no Teflon coated pans, no Segways or dirt bikes, and -- for my fellow gastronomes -- no nifty molecular gastronomy techniques for creating foods with weird textures using liquid nitrogen. (Imagine: a world without Alinea and the anti-griddle! The horror!)

There would be no antibiotics, either, to help clear up infections. No aspirin/analgesics, no thermometers, no X-rays, or MRIs, or ultrasound imaging, or cutting-edge cancer treatments, or life support systems to keep your heart pumping on the off-chance you come out of that coma. Oh, and no handy over-the-counter pregnancy tests or insulin kits for diabetics to monitor their blood sugar levels, either. There's a reason average human life expectancy is longer than it's every been: science has been working tirelessly on our behalf. (Some may argue that this longer life-expectancy is a contributing factor to our dwindling resources. That may be true, but I don't see those same people offering to shuffle off this mortal coil early to benefit the greater good. I personally intend to go out kicking and screaming and begging for one last ride on the great roller coaster of life.)

I mentioned my appreciation for the iPhone. It's not just because it's a sleek, chic gadget that can keep me connected to friends, family, and the World Wide Web wherever I can get a signal (i.e., pretty much everywhere). And it's not just because it can hold 150 of my favorite tunes. It also holds at least 150 years' worth of physics history, right there in the palm of my hand. As I pointed out in a 2007 post honoring the awarding of the Nobel Prize for giant magnetoresistance (GMR):

"Of course, if you really want to be all fundamental about it, this year's Nobel Prize in Physics has roots stretching all the way back to 900 BC, when a Greek shepherd named Magnes supposedly walked across a field of black stones, which pulled the iron nails out his sandals. He dubbed the region Magnesia. That's the legend, anyway, and who are we to argue about it?"

I went on to talk about the seminal work of Hans Christian Oersted and Michael Faraday, not to mention James Clerk Maxwell, who formalized Faraday's ideas into an actual set of equations that are now a staple of college physics courses. In fact, I'd argue that you could probably build an entire course around the "Science of the iPhone," and cover a lot of that same material in a concrete, real-world context. Maybe then those students would appreciate the scientists who gave them their iPhones and other gadgets a little more. For instance, they could learn about Benjamin Franklin and countless others who experimented with electricity in the 1700s -- at least one of whom was killed by ball lightning. R.I.P., Wilhelm Reichmann. And they would come out of college knowing the name of William Gilbert, an English physicist in 1600 who noticed that friction (rubbing one object against another) could create "electricity." (The effect had been known since around 600 BC, but was limited to amber rubbed against, say, fur. Gilbert noticed this phenomenon also extended to other objects and was not a specific magical property of amber.)

What else is covered by the science of the iPhone? Let's not forget the invention of the first telephone itself, wherein numerous inventors (Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray, and Alexander Graham Bell among them) raced to be the first to construct a device that could convert the mechanical energy of sound waves into an electrical transmission, send that signal over a wire, and reconvert it back into sound on the other end. By then, there had been sufficient technological developments -- notably the battery and electromagnet -- that such a device was feasible.

Bell won the patent race, beating out Gray by submitting his application just a few hours earlier on the same day: February 14, 1876. (The diagram below is Bell's original sketch of his concept. He may have been a brilliant inventor, but a skilled draftsman he was not.) And Bell won over the history books; he's listed in countless sources as the inventor of the telephone. It's not quite true, however; technically, he achieved the "first documented transmission of human speech" over a telephone wire, and received the first patent. There's evidence, however, that he had a little help on that score.

See, an Italian immigrant named Antonio Meucci invented a telephonic device way back in 1849; he was just too poor to be able to afford the $250 patent application fee. All he managed was filing a notice of intent in December 1871, along with a prototype model of his device. When he heard about Bell's patent application, Meucci hired a lawyer to fight back, only to find that his prior documentary had been mysteriously lost. The suspicion is that there were illegal relationships between employees in the US Patent Office and at Bell's company working behind the scenes to ensure Bell's patent claim was upheld.

Life is perennially unfair in that respect. Bell was wealthier and a far more prominent personage, so he won the court case that ensued. Meucci died as destitute as he had lived. Congress officially credited him with inventing the telephone on June 15, 2002. Better late than never, I guess. That said, Bell had studied sound and vibration for much of his life -- his grandfather was an elocutionist, his mother was deaf, and his father invented the first international phonetic alphabet for the deaf -- so it's likely that he arrived at his invention independently, even if he obtained his patent in a less than ethical manner.

Lots of folks were working on similar devices based on the same underlying principles. There was quite a lot of low-hanging technological fruit in the late 19th century, and competition to be the first to file a patent and make money off one's inventions was fierce. Consider the nasty attacks Edison leveled at Nikola Tesla over DC (direct current) versus AC (alternating current) electricity. Tesla also became embroiled in a battle for supremacy in wireless radio with Guglielmo Marconi -- another critical development in the long road to achieving the iPhone. Marconi claimed to have invented a "black box" -- basically a spark transmitter with an antenna -- in Italy in December 1894, but he didn't give a public demonstration of his device until he arrived in London in 1896. Meanwhile, Tesla had already demonstrated radio communication in St. Louis, Missouri, the year before.

Tesla patented a wireless device in 1897, but Marconi is the one who turned the fledgling technology into a major industry, sharing the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics and becoming known as the "father of wireless communications." Tesla's contributions were ignored. Marconi died a wealthy man, while Tesla died penniless (and a bit crazy). Further complicating history is the fact that Bell apparently transmitted the first wireless telephone message using his prototype "photophone" a good 13 years before Tesla gave his first public demonstration of wireless technology using radio waves -- yet Bell's work is almost never mentioned in most historical accounts of the birth of wireless. (Payback for cheating Meucci out of the patent for a telephone? Sometimes Karma is a bitch.) Bell's photophone transmitted sound on a beam of light, making it the progenitor of modern fiber-optic telecommunications. Bell may have been a crass opportunist, but he was also a genuine visionary.

We can take pictures with our iPhones, play music, and watch videos, so toss in the history of photography, the phonograph, and the television, not to mention the digitization and miniaturization of all those media outlets. Microelectronics meant that receivers, microphones, digital cameras, wireless antennae, etc., could shrink to fit into a handheld device, beginning with the invention of the integrated circuit at Bell Labs. That's not counting the development of cutting-edge lithographic techniques capable of etching ever-smaller features on silicon chips, and advances in semiconductor materials research, not to mention GMR, which has made it possible to cram tons more data into ever tinier gadgets.

And let's not forget the inventor of the first cell phone: Martin Cooper. As a project manager at Motorola, he was the fist one to make a call and speak on his mobile phone back in 1973, and admits he was inspired by the handheld communication devices employed by Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew members on Star Trek. However, Bell Labs and AT&T jointly came up with the underlying technology for making cell phones feasible back in 1947: hexagonal cells for mobile phone base stations. Before then, certain privileged folks relied on radiophones, thus being forced to haul around a large backpack device to transmit the phone's signal to nearby stations. Cooper longed for a truly mobile phone, so he invented one, although it took another 25 years or so for cell phones to resemble the communicators on Star Trek.

What made the iPhone an instant sensation with consumers long accustomed to portable cell phones and PDAs was its revolutionary multi-touch-screen technology. (I personally find my Blackberry awkward and ungainly to use, and to those who can't live without their "Crackberries," I would just point out that even Blackberry has come out with a new model employing the touch screen technology. So there.) It's so simple, and that's the genius of the concept.  Touch screens on most PDAs work because there's a layer of capacitive material to hold an electrical charge; touch the screen, and you change the amount of charge at a specific point of contact. In some models, it's the pressure from your finger that causes conductive and resistive layers of circuitry to touch each other, changing the circuits' resistance.

The problem with the conventional touch screens is that they only locate a single touch; the system just couldn't deal with touching the screen in more than spot. The iPhone's touch screen is able to respond to both touch points and their movements simultaneously. It has the same layer of capacitive material, except with the iPhone, said capacitors are arranged as part of a coordinate system, or grid, and the circuitry can detect changes at each point along that grid. Every point generates its own signal when touched and relays that signal to the iPhone's processor, and that's that's why you can enlarge or shrink a photo by a small outward sweeping motion of one's fingers, or by pinching thumb and forefinger together.

The Next Big Thing could be Microsoft's Tabletop PC, similar to the fictional wall computer featured in the film Minority Report whereby images and data could be manipulated by touch. The actual Tabletop PC itself made a cameo in last December's The Day the Earth Stood Still. It's the iPhone's touch screen technology writ large.

Should you become bored downloading all those killer apps for your iPhone, I learned recently via io9 that it's now possible to turn your iPhone into something resembling the Star Trek medical tricorder. No, really. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have a technology that requires a simple USB plug-in to turn the average SmartPhone into a handheld imaging scanner to perform ultrasound poces, image the kidneys and bladder, even perform prostate and uterine screenings. Actually, come to think of it, the plug-in only works with Windows, so it won't be hitting the Apps Store anytime soon. That's just as well, because when random people in bars can start comparing their prostates and kidneys, we've officially entered the realm of Too Much Information. Stay classy, people.

Comments

[Mike]

Ummm...

Very cool article, but it needs one minor correction. Bell Labs invented the transistor, not the IC. That came later, and is credited to both Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) and Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor), who had the same idea at approximately the same time.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

You're absolutely right... my mistake...

[jongleuse]

“With the advent of the transistor and the work on semi-conductors generally, it now seems possible to envisage electronic equipment in a solid block with no connecting wires. The block may consist of layers of insulating, conducting, rectifying and amplifying materials, the electronic functions being connected directly by cutting out areas of the various layers”.

Geoffrey Dummer 1952

[starman]

All hail Dr. Schockley, R.I.P., for inventing the transistor. Thank God for VLSI too!

Terrific article!

Starman

www.authorsden.com/rockie

[YES]

YEAH! My sentiments TOTALLY! I too think that we are in a wonderful crossroad!

[Peter Lund]

iki/Julius_Edgar_Lilienfeld">Lilienfeld and Heil.

Lilienfeld also played a role in the history of the electrolytic capacitor. Electrolytic capacitors are important because they have a very high capacitance, relative to their size. They are otherwise a bit of nuisance because they don't like heat and tend to wear out (the electrolyte actually evaporates) and because they burst if you send voltage in

[Peter Lund]

Weird. I thought I had posted a corrected version of the above post? At least, that's what TypePad told me...

PS: The Preview button caused the page to hang yesterday (I tried several times). Don't know if it works now.

[Translation]

It's interesting that most of the motivation behind innovation is personal monetary gain. This broods the fierce competition over patent rights. It seems that there are few innovations for innovation's sake and even science for the sake of pure science - furthering human knowledge.