Cocktail Party Physics

FROM THE ARCHIVES: sleepwalking through herstory

NOTE: Galleys are finally finished! And now I am off to New York City for a few days to take in Book Expo America and also see Lisa Randall at the New York Academy of Sciences, chatting with Alan Alda about pop-up particle physics. So here's another tasty blast from the past with a math-y tie-in in honor of the forthcoming The Calculus Diaries: a lightning tour of a couple of notable women of mathematics. It's also timely because it mentions x-ray analysis of the Archimedes palimpset and Floyd Landis and his steroid scandal, both of which have been in the news again recently. Enjoy! Original posting will be back very soon, we promise.

It's official: Floyd Landis is a testosterone-pumping fiend, if the results of his "B" test are to be believed. He stands to become the first winner of the Tour de France to be stripped of his title because of doping allegations -- not quite the footnote to athletic history he was hoping to achieve. Landis still denies it vociferously, though, and vows to prove his innocence. We would like to believe him, we really would. But our skepticism is mounting. Not only were there traces of synthetic testosterone in his blood, but the tests revealed a whopping 11 to 1 ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. For comparison purposes, the maximum allowed ratio by the World Anti-Doping Agency is a trifling 4 to 1. It's not looking too good for Floyd.

Second, we cannot believe we completely missed Friday's live Webcast -- courtesy of the San Francisco Exploratorium (which still has our vote for coolest science museum ever) -- of the last bit of deciphering via synchrotron radiation of that classic text by Archimedes, which we mentioned in passing in a prior post. There is little excuse for our lapse. Wired.com tried to tell us. Yet somehow, the news eluded us until it was too late. How embarrassing. But if Landis can still make excuses, so can we. I hereby blame Bloglines, which occasionally suffers unconscionable delays in posting feed updates.

Still, missing a Webcast by a few measly hours isn't nearly so bad as not hearing about a world-class female mathematician for over 100 years. Last week, in response to the question of hip scientific names to drop for aspiring geeks, someone mentioned one Sonya Kovalevsky, a Russian woman who was a protege of the Swedish mathematician Gosta Mittag-Leffler, founder of the journal Acta Mathematica. Once again, we were caught napping. I'd never heard of Kovalevsky, and since I'm a firm believer in the importance of ferreting out long-forgotten women in science and math throughout history (my own little way of disseminating "herstory," if you will), I Googled her over the weekend. She was, indeed, a fascinating, admirable woman, whose story certainly doesn't deserve to be gathering dust in the faded archives of scientific history.

It wasn't hard to uncover the bare basics of Sonya's life; we got all kinds of hits, with everyone pretty much relating the same laundry list of accomplishments: first woman member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (although still unable to attend actual meetings); first modern European woman to attain a full professorship; established the first significant result in the general theory of partial differential equations; and winner of the prestigious Prix Bordin. She was also a gifted writer (of both novels and magazine articles), and often quoted thusly: "Many who have never had occasion to learn what mathematics is confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it a dry and arid science. In reality, however, it is the science which demands the utmost imagination.... It seems to me that the poet must see what others do not see, must look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing."

(Lengthy side note: The question of how to refer to women scientists is a thorny one -- by first name? last name? married name? But after spending so much time with Ms. Kovalevsky this weekend, we feel like we know her well enough to be on a first-name basis. Besides, it's exhausting to have to keep spell-checking "Kovalevsky." Plus, she is sometimes referenced as Sofia Kovaleskaya, because no self-respecting 19th century person of Russian descent would have any fewer than three forms of their name, including nicknames. It's all very confusing. So henceforth, she shall be Sonya.)

I wasn't surprised to learn that Sonya was a product of Russia's privileged class, the daughter of a military officer and landowner; her mother was the granddaughter of a Russian astronomer. Education was such a taboo for women, even in the mid-19th century, that only those women who moved in rarefied aristocratic circles were exposed to intellectual pursuits . "All my life I have been unable to decide for which I had the greater inclination, mathematics or literature," Sonya wrote in her autobiography, recognizing that because of her educational opportunities, she'd had a choice. Not that those opportunities were especially stellar: like most early women in math and science, she was doggedly persistent about vaulting over the many obstacles "Society" sought to erect in her path.

Sonya's interest in math was sparked by an eccentric uncle, who taught her chess and discussed all kinds of abstract concepts with her: "squaring the circle, asymptotes, and other things that were unintelligible to me and yet seemed mysterious and at the same time deeply attractive." When her room was redecorated at age 11, there wasn't enough wallpaper to complete the project, so one wall was temporarily papered with her father's old calculus lecture notes from college. Initially the symbols were little more than hieroglyphics to her, but after reflecting on them night after night, she began making connections between the symbols and the concepts she discussed with her uncle. Another 19th century mathematician, Mary Somerville, had a similar breakthrough around the same age: she stumbled upon algebraic symbols while perusing a puzzle in a magazine, also igniting a lifelong thirst to know more. And like Somerville, Sonya's father eventually grew dismayed at his daughter's "unfeminine" interests and tried to put a stop to them. ("We shall have young Mary in a straitjacket one of these days," Somerville's father supposedly lamented.)

Somerville continued to study by candlelight, and when her father confiscated her candles, she memorized texts during the day and worked out problems in her head at night.  The family of French mathematician Sophie Germain -- inventor of "Germain primes," i.e., double a Germain prime and add 1 to get another prime number -- used a similar tactic to dissuade their equally precocious daughter from studying geometry, algebra and calculus... to no avail. Sonya also studied under the covers at night, borrowing an algebra textbook from one of her tutors.

Then a neighbor, who taught science, gave the family a copy of a basic physics book he'd written. Sonya turned to the section on optics, and discovered trigonometry. Even though she'd never encountered it before, she managed to make sense of the derivations for small angles by substituting "a chord for the mysterious sine." In short, she independently rediscovered the same method by which the whole concept of a sine had been developed historically. Impressed, the neighbor convinced Sonya's father to let her study analytic geometry and calculus privately in St. Petersburg. She mastered both subjects in a single winter. Her astonished tutor noted that it was almost as if she'd known the concepts in advance.

Someone with such a formidable innate aptitude couldn't be satisfied for long with simple calculus, but Sonya's opportunities for further study were severely limited because of her gender. She entered into a marriage of convenience with a young paleontologist named Vladimir Kovalevsky, and the couple moved to Heidelberg, Germany. She still couldn't formally enroll in a university, but she managed to get permission to "unofficially" attend lectures by some of the foremost scientists in Europe. In that respect, she fared a bit better initially than Germain, who was forced at one point to impersonate a male student who had passed away in order to study with Joseph LaGrange (via correspondence) at L'Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. But in both cases, the women performed so spectacularly that they won the admiration and mentorship of prominent men: LaGrange and later Carl Friedrich Gauss, in German's case, and Karl Weierstrass (and, later, Mittag-Leffler) in Sonya's case.

Weierstrass wasn't a familiar name to me, but at the time he was the most renowned German mathematician, a professor at the University of Berlin. Sonya came to him bearing glowing recommendations from her Heidelberg professors, yet even then, he was skeptical, and far from enthusiastic about taking her on. To discourage the young woman, he gave her a set of problems he'd prepared for his most advanced students, assuming she'd never make sense of them. Instead, she solved them in record time; not only that, her solutions were clear and original, demonstrating a grasp of the material lacking in most of his male students (Mittag-Leffler being one notable exception). So he agreed to teach her privately, and came to consider her among the most brilliant and promising of all his students.

Sonya didn't disappoint her mentor. By the age of 25, she had produced three original papers, each of which was deemed worthy of a PhD degree: one on the shape of Saturn's rings, another on elliptical integrals, and a third on partial differential equations. Not that Berlin would ever award a woman a PhD, especially one that had never been officially matriculated. Anywhere. (And how could she possibly matriculate when they wouldn't allow it? Yes. Exactly.) To his credit, Weierstrass fought for her, eventually convincing the University of Gottingen to award her a PhD in mathematics, summa cum laude.

I would like to tell you this story has a happy ending, or at least that Sonya's intellectual struggles ended with her PhD. Alas, such is not quite the case. She and Vladimir returned to Russia, where she found she could only get a job teaching basic arithmetic at a girl's elementary school. The irony wasn't lost on her: "I was, unfortunately, weak in the multiplication tables," she acidly observed in her memoirs. Instead, she began reviewing theater performances and writing articles about science and technology for a local newspaper (huzzah! a fellow science writer!), as well as starting a novel. And her platonic marriage mysteriously turned non-platonic: she gave birth to a daughter during this period, too.  That didn't make the marriage a happy one. Eventually she left Vladimir and moved first to France, and then Stockholm, when the university there offered her a probationary position, thanks to the urging of Mittag-Leffler. By then, she was a widow: Vladimir had committed suicide, distraught and depressed over his many failed business ventures, among other things.

Sonya, in contrast, proved so popular with her students that she was given a five-year professorship at Stockholm, and also became an editor of Acta Mathematica. In 1888, she reached the pinnacle of her career when she won the French Academy of Sciences' prestigious Prix Bordin for her treatise, On the Problem of the Rotation of a Solid Body About a Fixed Point. They might have excluded her from the competition on the basis of gender -- the French Academy was far from welcoming, as Sophie Germain could attest -- but the papers were all submitted anonymously and the judges weren't aware they'd selected a woman until it was, as it were, "too late." Still, so impressed were they by her work that they actually doubled the prize. It seems too cruel a twist of fate that, only three years later, she succumbed to pneumonia following an influenza epidemic.

By now we hope you're convinced that Sonya deserves wider repute. Apparently the novelist Thomas Pynchon thinks so, too. His much-heralded forthcoming new book, Against the Day, is rumored to feature cameo appearances not just by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx, but also to "trace the life and loves of Sofia Kovalevskaya," per Wikipedia (which we know is never wrong). True, Sonya (or Sofia, if you prefer) died in 1891, and the book's events purportedly take place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the aftermath of World War I, but novelists have been known to take liberties with chronology, and for Pynchon, time has always been a somewhat fluid quantity. Maybe she's featured post-humously.

Still, bare facts can only tell us so much; the nuances of Sonya's life and work, the complex layers of the living, breathing woman, eluded me in my weekend research. That's probably because the definitive biography of Sonya Kovalevsky remains to be written. Fortunately, the same cannot be said of Ada Lovelace (tempestuous daughter of the poet Lord Byron), brought into vivid focus in Benjamin Woolley's The Bride of Science, or of the incomparable Emilie du Chatelet, who is celebrated in David Bodanis' new book, Passionate Minds. We have already pre-ordered the US version of this book on Amazon, and encourage our readers to do the same, since if nothing else, it proves to be a torridly rollicking good read. It also boasts the longest subtitle I've ever seen for a science book: "The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and the Birth of the Modern World." Whew! Throw in a shipwreck on a deserted island, and you've got a potboiling bestseller on your hands. From our perspective (and no doubt for Bodanis as well), that's a very good thing.

Emilie (may we call her Emilie?) was another precocious child of aristocrats, this time in 18th century France. Her parents feared she would never make a good marriage, because no great lord would want a woman who "flaunts her mind and frightens away the suitors her other excesses have not driven off." I shall have to wait for Bodanis' book to be enlightened on what these other excesses might have been, but it's a matter of historical record that she had no shortage of admirers and lovers, including the duc de Richelieu and -- yes -- Voltaire.

Despite her parents' fears, her father's wealth and position ensured a "marriage of convenience" at the age of 19 to the older marquis du Chatelet. She dressed up like a man in 1733 and gate-crashed the Cafe Gradot, where all the happening intellectuals hung out. People  like Voltaire. Soon the two were shacking up in her husband's country estate, living and working in separate studies. She completed a translation of Isaac Newton's Principia there, duplicating his experiments by hanging pipes, rods and wooden balls from the rafters.

She and Voltaire remained friends even after they split (Bodanis claims Voltaire couldn't deal his lover's superior intellect). Alas, her unconventionality, while admirable, couldn't save her from that most conventional of fates: dying in childbirth. An ill-advised liaison with a young poet resulted in Emilie's pregnancy at age 41, which everyone -- including Emilie herself -- knew was pretty much a death sentence in that day and age.  Voltaire supported her during her last days, writing that "she wasn't angry, just sad to have to leave before she was ready." She died in August 1749, a few days after giving birth. (The child didn't survive either.)

It's a compelling story, and easy to see what drew Bodanis to write a book about this remarkable woman. So we were peeved (Jen-Luc Piquant was frankly outraged) to read snarky comments in the UK reviews criticizing the book for supposedly short-shrifting on the science, taking this as evidence that Emilie wasn't really all that important a figure in science history. What is this overweening need some people have to belittle the accomplishments of women scientists throughout history? Such critics completely miss the point: what makes Emilie du Chatelet and her sisters "great" is the very fact that they were able to pursue their love of math and science in defiance of social norms, public ridicule, bureaucratic red tape designed specifically to exclude them, and lord knows what else. (This is not, incidentally, meant to be read in any way as casting aspersions on their scientific achievements.)

That's not even counting the day-to-day, constant barrage of criticism, doubt and skepticism that would inevitably cause even the toughest spirit -- regardless of gender -- to question one's aptitude or worth, something that continues to plague aspiring women scientists today. The unspoken cultural prejudice about the "female mind" and its ability (or inability) to excel at math and science is so deeply ingrained that women themselves often unwittingly buy into it. Mary Somerville is a prime example of this, eventually coming to believe that women just weren't as gifted as men when it came to scientific creativity. She certainly doubted her own abilities: "I have perseverance and intelligence, but no genius," she once wrote.

Admittedly, Somerville is primarily known for popularizing scientific treatises by LaPlace and Newton, not for original research. Nonetheless, these achievements earned her election to the Royal Astronomical Society, among other honors, and when she died, London obituaries hailed her as the "queen of science." Most significantly, she never had any real educational opportunities, unlike her male counterparts. The same is true of most of the pioneering women in math and science, many of whom did make significant original contributions to research -- and often got short-shrifted when it came to recognition of those achievements. Sophie Germain never felt she received the recognition and respect she deserved. And would the French Academy have awarded Sonya Kovalevsky such a prestigious prize had it known from the outset that she was a woman? (For that matter, Jocelyn Bell was excluded from consideration for the Nobel Prize for her role in the discovery of quasars.) We will never know what these formidable women in history might have accomplished, had they been encouraged in their early years of study, had their innate talent been supported and fostered, rather than stymied and blocked at every turn.

In short, I must agree with Bodanis: "Emilie du Chatelet deserves to be brought back to life, in all her stumbling excitement and fears." The same could be said of Sonya Kovalevsky, Mary Somerville, Sophie Germain, the chemist Agnes Pockels, Hypatia, and any number of forgotten women who blazed their own bravely idiosyncratic path in a world of men to which they were rarely welcomed -- only  to disappear into a fog of obscurity once the all-too-brief flame of life was extinguished. Too many admirable women in science and math have been unjustly forgotten because we have been sleepwalking through our own "herstory." Let us make sure we remember -- and honor -- their names, and pass their stories on to the next generation, thereby inspiring both girls and boys to emulate their passion and courage.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: out of sequence

NOTE: Still working my way through the galleys for The Calculus Diaries, but the process made me remember this post from April 2006 about the Fibonacci sequence, an obscure mathematician named Gopala, and fun with "Fibs" -- short six-line poems based on the Fibonacci Sequence. More below, and we'll be back with original posting later this week!

"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.

oily hair is not a problem - its a solution for the gulf coast

I had my own oil spill this weekend in the kitchen and got a bit of an appreciation for just how hard it is to clean up the slippery stuff. 

What is oil?  Basically, it's the polar opposite of water.  (OK, it's actually the non-polar opposite of water, chemistry joke!).  A hydrophilic material is one capable of making transient hydrogen bonds with water.  Hydrophilic molecules are polar - one end has a net positive charge and one end a net negative charge.  Water is the prototypical hydrophilic material, with a slight positive charge on the end of molecule with the hydrogen atoms (mickey mouse's ear) and a slight negative charge on the oxygen (the head, as shown below).  The total charge of the molecule is zero, but each end is slightly polarized.

That polarity makes hydrogen bonding possible.  Like dissolves like: A hydrophilic material is soluble in water, while a hydrophobic material -- like oil -- is insoluble in water.  Hydrophobic means water hating.  Hydrophobic molecules are nonpolar - like oils.

Oils are primarily hydrocarbons.  These are nonpolar molecules, so when you mix oil with water, the oil hangs out with the oil and the water hangs out with the water.  This leaves a large glop of oil in the middle of the water, which (in addition to being really bad for the environment) is embarrassing.

When you're doing the laundry, the hardest stains to get out are the oily ones because the water in which you wash your clothes literally doesn't want anything to do with the oil.  Special surfactants -- molecules with one hydrophilic end and one hydrophobic end - surround small globules of oil with the hydrophilic end pointing out.  The surfactant is sort of a mediator molecule that allows the oil-encapsulated glob to be carried out in the rinse water.  The strategy boils down to: get the oil to let go of the fiber, break it into smaller globules, surround it with surfactant and wash it out.

In the Gulf Coast, the oil is being treated with dispersants like DISPERSIT and COREXIT.  COREXIT is the particular dispersant being used.  COREXIT's active components include "light petroleum distillate" (hydrocarbons like mineral spirits and kerosene), propylene glycol (an alcohol and emulsifier, which facilitates the mixing of oil and water and is a primary ingredient in stick deodorant) and organic sulfonic acid salt.  The dispersant is dumped on top of the oil.  It breaks the giant oil glob into smaller globules, surrounds it with surfactants and disperses it out to sea.  Dispersants don't remove the oil, they just break it up into smaller pieces so that it's not as obvious.  Natural processes biodegrade the oil over time.  Yuck.  They've dumped about 190,000 gallons of this stuff in the Gulf at this point.

Ideally, you'd like to be able to separate oil from water, just like you remove fat from gravy.  My favorite way of separating out the oil from the broth for gravy is to cool the mixture and let the fat solidify.  Hard to do in the ocean, I know.

I tried cleaning up my oil spill on the counter with a paper towel.  This works for about three milliseconds and then you're mostly just moving the oil around the counter.  The paper towels absorb the oil quickly then they are no good.  So you basically use up a lot of paper towels  because you can't rinse them out and reuse them.  So anything that absorbs oil  but doesn't let it go again is a problem because it has to be disposed.  On the other hand, that's better than just breaking it up and leaving it.

Some companies are looking to aerogels - gels with so many air pockets that they look like sponges, but are very lightweight.  Aerogels pores can be treated to be hydrophobic, which is important because you want a selective mop.  If it attracts oil and water, that's not as helpful as just picking up oil.  Those technologies aren't ready for use yet.  Even after proven effective for picking up oil, they have to be tested for effects on the environment and the animals in the sea.

Most of the sorbents currently being used to deal with oil spils are made from the polymer polypropylene.  Selectivity (oil, but not water) limits what we can use in the ocean. Common sorbents for racetracks are clays with pores that suck up and hold oil.  The problem with clays and clay substitutes is that they absorb water as well as oil. 

Polypropylene is hydrophobic, so fibers absorb oil, but let water pass through.  I understand that there is now a polypropylene fiber shortage and its price is going up because of the high demand.  Another company, MOP Environmental, uses recycled cellulose fibers that have been surface treated to minimize water absorption.  Like the polypropylene, these fibers are placed into mesh bags and formed into booms, sweeps, etc. that can be put in the water and later collected. One of the disadvantages of absorption is that the oil is absorbed so strongly onto the polypropylene, for example, that you can't get it out again.  The whole assembly has to be disposed of.

The MOP product also includes some oil-digesting bacteria.  I remember during the Valdez disaster people predicting that someday, we would just be able to release bacteria and they would clean up spills in moments.  These aren't special bateria, really.  Some soil-dwelling bacteria naturally eat oil.  Actually, it turns out you can find naturally occurring bacteria that specialize in eating just about anything, from sugar to starch to detergents.  A couple of years ago, a 16-year old found a bacteria that eats plastic lunch bags.  The problem is producing enough bacteria to make a dent in the millions of gallons of oil in a reasonable time.  Also, the specificity of the bacteria as to what oils they will eat can be a problem, as "oil" contains a huge number of different types of hydrocarbon molecules.  Most of these bacteria are as picky eaters as three year olds.

One of the more interesting solutions proposed (aside from dropping trash in the pipe to block the oil) also involves using fibers; however, the fibers in question are human hair.  Chicken feathers, straw, and wool have all been used to collect oil in the past, but human hair seems to work particularly well.  A big advantage is that the oil is adsorbed rather than absorbed.  Adsorbed oil forms a very thin layer - a molecule or two thick - at the surface of the hair.  Because the molecules are only weakly bound, the oil can be removed, meaning the hair can be reused.  

Hair is naturally rough, as shown in the scanning electron microscopy picture to the left.  The overlapping scaly things are your hair's cuticle.  (This clearly isn't my hair because I dye my hair and that roughs up the cuticle quite a bit.  This hair is in pretty good shape)  All the roughness is good, because that means more surfaces onto which oil can adsorb. Every notch and bump on the cuticle is more surface area for oil to adsorb on.  A pound of hair can pick up a quart of oil in about a minute.

Given that people of different races and ethnicities have very different hair, I am curious as to whether there are any studies out there about whether particular types of hair are more useful at adsorbing oil than others.  I couldn't find any in the scientific literature, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth it.  After all, hair is a renewable resource.

Although there have been a number of articles on using hair for the Gulf oil spill, this isn't a new idea.  It's been brought up every time there's been a spill.  In the Internet era, that means starting with the Exxon Valdez and an Alabaman hairdresser inspired by pictures of oil-drenched Alaskan otters.  The enterprising hairdresser thought, "if otters get this stuff on their fur so easily, shouldn't it stick to any hair?"  He even named his company Ottimat.com in honor of the otter.  The company's website has a video showing how the product works - it works pretty darn good.  They claim that 98% of the oil adsorbed can be recovered.

The problem is that we're talking about billions of quarts of oil.  That doesn't dissuade people who figure that every quart of oil recovered is one less that has to be dispersed.  All across the Gulf Coast, grassroots organizations are getting people together to stuff old nylons with leftover human hair.  Ironically, Matter of Trust, a nonprofit in San Francisco that specialized in making and distributing human hair mats for oil adsorption, got nailed by the recession.  The companies that had been turning the hair into mats went out of business and the organization couldn't find others that would do the job for a low enough price.  The woman running the organization has 18,000 lbs of hair just waiting for to be used. 

The brown pelicans, sea turtles and fish in the Gulf don't really care whether the oil is adsorbed or absorbed.  They just want it out of there.  And so do we.  Talk about hair power.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: in perpetuity

NOTE: I have a couple of blog posts in the works, and two others percolating in the back of my brain. But today the galleys for The Calculus Diaries arrived, so I'll be spending the next few evenings combing through those pages making sure embarrassing typos don't show up in the final published book. There's a lot of math and stuff in the appendices, too, so my brain will be pretty fried by the time I'm done. But I'm kind of enjoying the occasional visit to the cocktail party archives, so here's my 2006 take on the many-headed Hydra of perpetual motion scams. Sure, Steorn has come and gone since then -- another one will pop up in its place. This is a post that, I'm sorry to say, will likely always be relevant.

Oh dear god in heaven Great Flying Spaghetti Monster, not again. I came back from a lovely weekend in the Windy City to find yet another misguided idealist named Sean McCarthy -- less kindly folks, like Jen-Luc Piquant, might say "demented crackpot" or "opportunistic con artist" -- announcing that his little start-up company in Ireland, called Steorn, has overthrown the laws of thermodynamics and developed a technique that produces more energy than it consumes -- the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. According to this news item, the mysterious process "involves magnetic fields configured in precisely the right way. Using the magnets results in a motor that's more than 100% efficient, essentially creating energy."

Our reaction to this potentially earth-shattering news? Not bloody likely. It's an opinion we expect is shared by anyone with the least smattering of comprehension of basic thermodynamical principles and the history of perpetual motion machines. People like Bob Park, the University of Maryland physics professor (and author of Voodoo Science) who has been skewering all manner of pseudoscientific claims for two decades via his electronic newsletter, What's New. (We can't wait for his acidic take on this latest claim in this coming Friday's edition.) This "fake debate" has been running so long that the physics community has moved beyond outrage and frustration to unmitigated boredom with the continued need to debunk free energy claims. In fact, it's taking all the energy we can muster to overcome our own boredom (a.k.a., mental inertia) with the issue to write this post. What the heck -- we'll reiterate the arguments yet one more time. But this is the last time, absolutely the last, cross my heart and hope to die, because death would be preferable to wasting any more time on something that ought to have been settled long ago.

As Park would be happy to tell you, people have been chasing this particular pipe dream for centuries, at least -- possibly even millennia. Biology has its bugbear in the form of Intelligent Design; the physics equivalent is perpetual motion, also known as "free energy" schemes. One of the earliest depictions of such a device can be found in the 12th century writings of Villand Honnecourt, and mentions become more frequent in historical records from then on. For example, a 15th century Italian physicist and alchemist claimed to have invented a self-blowing windmill, while in the 1670s, the Bishop of Chester designed several devices he claimed used perpetual motion.

Free energy proponents are fond of pointing out that in the 16th century, no less a luminary than Leonardo da Vinci sketched quite a few designs for perpetual motion machines based on the waterwheel mechanism, but they neglect to mention that publicly, Leonardo denounced such schemes: "Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how  many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists." (Alchemy wasn't definitively debunked until the end of the 17th century, so as usual, Leonardo was a good century ahead of his time in denouncing alchemists.)

Among the most well-known "inventors"  is Robert Fludd, a 16th century English physician and alchemist who claimed, in 1618, to have found a means of producing sufficient energy to operate a waterwheel -- a common technology dating back to the Roman Empire in 20 BC,  and still used today in hydroelectric power stations -- to grind flour in a mill, without relying on a powering stream.

Fludd figured he could use the waterwheel to drive a pump, in addition to grinding flour. The water would turn the wheel and then be pumped back up into a standing reservoir and reused. The mill could therefore run indefinitely on this fixed supply of water. But he neglected to figure in the fact that the water would have to be lifted back up the same distance it fell -- working against gravity -- as it also turned the wheel to grind the grain into flour. Merely pumping the water back up into the reservoir would require  so much energy that there wouldn't be any left to grind the flour, even considering the supposed "extra" energy generated by the rotating waterwheel.

Despite his love of alchemy, Fludd was nonetheless quite a respectable scientist and we can excuse his misguided enthusiasm for his design, because he just didn't know any better. Okay, Leonardo was smart enough to know better, despite dabbling in perpetual motion devices for his own amusement, but he was an undisputed genius. He was also a bit of a visionary, not inclined to formulate solid theoretical "proofs", either pro or con, for such machines. And he wasn't alone in this oversight. At the time Fludd announced his waterwheel scheme, no one had codified the laws of thermodynamics in precise, physical terms. That process began in the early 19th century, with the work of a little-known French physicist named Sadi Carnot.

Carnot was the son of a French aristocrat --his father was one of the most powerful men in France prior to Napoleon's ignominious defeat. He was fascinated by steam engines, and became obsessed with making them more efficient. (For some reason, he seemed to think England's superior technology in this area had contributed to Napoleon's downfall and the loss of his family's prestige and fortune.) In 1824 he published Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which described a theoretical "heat engine" that produced an amount of work equal to the heat energy put into the system.

Technically, this would be a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. (There are actually two different types of perpetual motion machines, each violating one of the two laws of thermodynamics.) But Carnot was no fool: he knew from endless experimentation that in practice, his design would always lose a small amount of energy to things like friction, noise and vibration. His lasting contribution was to set out the physical boundaries so precisely that, after his untimely death from cholera at the age of 32, Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) would draw on his work to build the foundations of modern thermodynamics in the 1840s and 1850s. Carnot also invented the so-called "Carnot cycle," drawing energy from temperature differences -- the basis of modern-day refrigerators and air-conditioners.

Quick refresher course for our lay readers (scientists and other uber-geeks, feel free to skip this part): The first law of thermodynamics says energy is conserved, which means it can be converted from one form to another, but neither created ex nihilo, nor destroyed -- even if a machine is 100% efficient, which it could never be. That's the essence of the second law, which says that a small amount of energy will always be irretrievably lost when energy is converted -- and it must be converted (and harnessed!) to produce useful work (we use that term here in the precise physics sense).

It's hardly a Big Physics Secret that perpetual motion and free energy machines just... don't... work (in the non-precise layman's sense)! There is massive amounts of information out there, adeptly debunking claims of perpetual motion and demonstrating why such schemes never work. (For a lighter take on this topic, check out the Museum of Unworkable Devices, which has entire pages devoted to demonstrating the infeasibility of perpetual motion machines.) The truth is out there, folks, for anyone who can be bothered to spend 15 minutes looking for it. And yet, unlike alchemy, this pointless quest refuses to die, like horror movie icons Jason of the Friday the 13th series, or Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger. Perpetual motion is a weed that keeps popping up despite regular blastings of chemical agents, or a cancer that stubbornly resists all forms of treatment. Feel free to suggest your own favorite metaphor; the possibilities abound.

Some perpetual motion proponents are frauds: their machines have hidden energy sources, like cleverly concealed batteries. The 18th century clockmaker Johan Ernst Elias Bessler designed over 300 perpetual motion machines, and seemed to have succeeded in building a wheel that rotated for 40 days in a locked room. His claim was unverifiable -- Bessler refused to let anyone study his machine closely -- but unlikely; historians suspect he concealed a clockwork mechanism in the large axle of the wheel to keep it running so long. Among the most notorious of modern hucksters is Dennis Lee, who hawks his various "free electricity" schemes in churches and auditoriums across the country, undeterred by the naysayers -- or by the the various state attorney general's offices who have sought legal sanctions against him.

In most cases, however, the culprit isn't fraud, but wishful thinking, combined with just a wee bit of self-delusion and hubris. Would-be inventors simply miscalculate the amount of energy produced and consumed (these can be tricky calculations, after all). Yet they are sincerely convinced that they're onto something, that they have succeeded in achieving a feat that has eluded the best scientific minds for centuries. People like McCarthy refuse to believe that there is no free lunch, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There are enough of these kinds of people that the American Physical Society felt compelled to issue a statement in 2003 "deploring" all attempts to "mislead and defraud the public" via such claims. At the time it was released, the APS Executive Board also publicly commented on the proliferation of free energy schemes and perpetual motion devices, stating unequivocally, "Such devices directly violate the most fundamental laws of nature, laws that have guided the scientific progress that is transforming our world."

This is not to say that scientists are unwilling to question and explore possible violations of the laws of thermodynamics. The physicists are on top of it, people! Truly! Not only have they conducted countless experiments, but they've even proposed ingenious "thought experiments" just to challenge the conventional scientific thinking on the matter. The most notorious of these is  "Maxwell's demon, " discussed in an earlier post, but everyone's favorite physics prankster/pundit, Richard Feynman, also got into the act when he proposed a "Brownian ratchet" device during a physics lecture at Caltech on May 11, 1962.

The basic device is depicted in the diagram at right. Essentially, the ratchet mechanism ensures that the attached shaft can only turn in one direction.  The idea is that random motions in the gas filling the container will cause atoms to bombard the fins. There will be inevitable statistical fluctuations in this process, so at some point there will be more impacts on one side of the fins than on another, and the shaft will turn slightly -- but only in one direction. Forever. So it could theoretically be used to generate power.

Feynman's thought experiment is most instructive, since the underlying violation of thermodynamics is quite subtle at first glance. You see, every time the ratchet moves, the peg will bounce off the gear teeth, producing heat. As time passes, the gear teeth will become as warm -- if not warmer -- as the gas in the container. So what? You're probably thinking. Well, that extra heat will cause the ratchet peg to bounce upwards regularly, and statistically speaking -- since the shaft's motion is by definition random -- sometimes the shaft will slip backwards instead of turning in the desired direction. In fact, if the wheel gets warmer than the gas, the cog will move in the opposite direction than Feynman originally planned.

Okay, you say, let's just make the spring stronger to prevent this inconvenient bouncing. Nice try, but no cigar. If we do this, the molecular motion won't produce enough force to overcome the stiffer spring and allow the ratchet to turn -- in any direction. Bottom line: as often as the machine ratchets forward, it will slip back, canceling out any extra "energy" it produces, and most likely losing energy in the long run, unless we find some way to replenish that lost energy from an outside source. Ironically, while Feynman's device was purely hypothetical and designed to teach his students the inviolability of the second law, it led to the development of Brownian motors, which do produce useful work, without violating thermodynamics. (You can find technical explanations of how and why here, here and here, and probably about 8 million other places on the World Wide Web.)

As recently as 2002, the University of San Diego sponsored the First International Conference on Quantum Limits to the Second Law, and maintains a Web site devoted to new challenges and accompanying critiques. So this isn't a question of the "Scientific Establishment" simply being close-minded to the possibility. Physics is all about the ongoing quest for knowledge, after all, and if physicists sometimes seem a bit dogmatic about their stance on the second law's inviolability, that's because it's backed up by massive amounts of empirical data amassed over centuries of experimental observation. The odds are definitely in the second law's favor. There has not been a shred of convincing scientific evidence to date demonstrating any exception to it. As Sir Arthur Eddington famously observed in 1948's The Nature of the Physical World:

"The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations, then so much for the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation, well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

Eddington's statement is as true today as it was almost 60 years ago; in fact, the US patent office routinely rejects applications for free energy schemes outright, based solely on the second law of thermodynamics. McCarthy and his colleagues at Steorn know all of this. That's why they've placed an ad in The Economist asking for skeptical scientists to sit on a 12-member panel to help validate the company's new process. "If we're right, that will come out in due course. If we're wrong, that will come out. It's such a big claim that it has to be validated by experts," McCarthy told Wired News. It sounds so fair-minded and sensible, right?

Wrong. Frankly, it strikes me as more than a bit disingenuous. The ad quotes playwright George Bernard Shaw, who once observed, "All great truths begin as blasphemies." So anyone who refuses to at least consider the claim risks looking like a close-minded protector of the Scientific Status Quo. McCarthy is deliberately evoking the persecuted specters of Copernicus and Galileo to goad the scientific community into lending credence to his claims. (We offer Carl Sagan's classic retort: "They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.") It worked, too: not only have I written this post, but thus far, some 1500 scientists have offered to help test a claim that has about a 0.0000001% chance of being scientifically valid -- and we're being charitable. The odds might not even be that good. Yet the company has already filed numerous patent applications, and has announced its plans to incorporate the technology into long-lived batteries for cell phones and laptops. Can you say "overconfident"?

As a writer who frequently must work while traveling, I would love to have a laptop battery that lasts longer than a few hours between rechargings, never mind indefinitely. But I am, at heart, a pragmatic realist and will not succumb to mere wishful thinking in this matter. My money's betting that the "panel of experts" concludes, in record time, that Steorn's engineers are either committing fraud, or have erred in their energy calculations. Repeat after me, people: when it comes to energy, you can't win, and you can't break even. Energy is never "free." Please, we beg of you, make this your mantra. Because we're all getting just a wee bit tired of having to constantly remind everyone of such a fundamental point. Over. And. Over. Again.

gaga for science

It's been a busy spring. Among other highlights, the Spousal Unit and I made a whirlwind trip to New York City in March, so he could be on some obscure cable talk show or something. But we had the added treat of getting to see an excerpt from the modern opera, Hypermusic Prologue, featuring a libretto penned by none other than Harvard physicist Lisa Randall. She collaborated with Spanish composer Hèctor Parra, and artist Matthew Ritchie, on a reimagined segment of the full opera, tailored specifically to the museum's unique rotunda. Physics-inspired operas are rare enough; taking over part of the Guggenheim for the evening is even rarer. Afterward, the Spousal Unit was pondering his ideal collaborator should he undertake a similar project. He decided he'd like to do more of a "rock opera," collaborating with Lady Gaga.

So I'm just putting that thought out there into the ether, on the off-chance Lady Gaga is intrigued by the notion of a rock opera on entropy, the big bang, the arrow of time, and the multiverse, and decides to give the Spousal Unit a call. I'm sure MoMA would be interested if the Guggenheim passed on the opportunity. I mean, the outfits alone would qualify as works of art, and Gaga is as much performance artist as musician. Everything she does is calculated to make an impression -- right down to her aversion to wearing pants of any kind. "When I'm writing music, I'm thinking about the clothes I want to wear on stage. It's all about everything altogether — performance art, pop performance art, fashion," Gaga once told MTV News. "For me, it's everything coming together and being a real story that will bring back the super-fan. I want to bring that back."

Oh, yes, I am a Gaga fan, and I know Jen-Luc Piquant totally hangs around backstage at Gaga's YouTube channel in hopes of catching a brief glimpse of her idol -- or at least the pixelated version thereof. But it wasn't always the case. Gaga has had a meteoric rise, and I confess that I'd really only caught snippets of "Let's Dance" and "Poker Face" as they were racing up the dance charts, augmented by her increasingly frequent appearances in celebrity gossip columns. These days, Gaga is everywhere, and "Poker Face" is one of the most parodied tunes on YouTube, but it was the release of her video of "Bad Romance" that turned me into a fan (along with millions of others). Not only is it a killer song you can't help but dance to, but the performance is fierce, intense, sexy, visually innovative, and just a wee bit sneakily subversive. Check it out:

See? She's a free bitch, baby. And she's only 24, and getting better and better musically (unlike certain other pop icons who shall not be named, Gaga can actually sing and play the piano very well). (BTW, check out this awesome rendition of "Bad Romance" by male a capella group On the Rocks, complete with nods to "Thriller.") But there's another reason I love me some Gaga. Science could use an image makeover from a true master of performance like Lady Gaga, who literally invented her persona from scratch and then demanded the world pay attention to her. I think the Spousal Unit is onto something. Bring back the super-fans of science! And use the tools of mass media and marketing -- music, fashion, performance art, and story-telling -- to do it. Especially fashion, because science and technology are definitely influencing fashion these days, in ways that should fit neatly into Her Ladyship's artistic vision via the Haus of Gaga. She already made a splash this past February by debuting her version of a shape-shifting "living dress" inspired by the designs of fashion icon Hussein Chalayan, a self-described techno-geek who tries to bring together technology, science culture, and fashion in some really intriguing ways. 

Chalayan's work was all the rage in Paris during the fall of 2006, when he debuted his "One Hundred Eleven" collection, with nods to 111 years of fashion in just five dresses that used technology to morph from, say, an 1895 look to something more common in 1900, and finally into a Roaring 20s flapper sheath. The Hour-Glass Dress morphs from a style reminiscent of Dior in the 1950s to a 1960s metallic sheath, and the grand finale during the 2006 Paris show featured a dress that disappeared entirely into a wide-brimmed hat, leaving the model pretty much naked on the runway (see video below). Chalayan has remained at the top of the field ever since with increasingly outre designs; his style is perfect for Lady Gaga -- and for the Spousal Unit's rock opera concept -- because it's the haute couture version of wearable electronics, designed in collaboration with a company called 2D3D.

2D3D director Rob Edkins described some of the underlying technology for Technology Review back in 2006:

"Basically, the dresses were driven electronically by controlled, geared motors. We made, for want of a better term, little bum pads for the models. So on their buttocks were some hard containers, and within these containers we had all the battery packs, controlling chips--the microcontrollers and microswitches--and little geared motors. The motors we used were tiny, about a third of the size of a pencil and nine millimeters in diameter. Each of the motors had a little pulley, and the pulley was then attached to this monofilament wire which was fed through hollow tubes sewn into the corset of the dress.

"Some of the corsets were very complicated. They had 30 or 40 of these little tubes running everywhere, carrying these little cables, each doing its little job, lifting things up or releasing little linked metallic plates. There was a huge amount of stuff going on beneath the clothes."

My personal favorite of Chalayan's creations -- particularly when it comes to what we'd need for a cosmology-inspired rock opera -- is his "Big Bang" dress, which debuted during the 2008 Paris Fashion Week. Its another mechanical dress, except this one projects moving spots of light to symbolize the birth of the universe. A glimpse of the underlying machinery is below, and you can watch a video of the dress in action over at Adam Wright's website (he collaborated with Chalayan on the dress). [Click "Fashion" on the right side, then click on "Hussein Chalayan: Big Bang."] 

He's also done a series of LED dresses, in which light-emitting diodes are incorporated into the fabric. Pop singer Katy Perry recently wowed the crowds when she showed up at the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a stunning LED gown. Really, that's almost as impressive as Meejin Yoon's "Defensible Dress," which has sensors woven into the fabric that can detect a person who is getting too close, thereby triggering "quills" to pop out and keep the intruder at a safe distance. (Yoon got the idea while working in Neil Gershenfeld's "Fab Lab" at MIT, and says she was inspired by the porcupine and the blowfish.)

Oh, but Chalayan didn't stop with morphing outfits and LED dresses; he also put together an architecturally inspired collection in 2009 featuring chairs and tables that transformed into wearable (at least in theory) garments. When was the last time you saw a tiered wooden skirt that doubled as a table? Chair covers that can turn into dresses? These are all elements that would be perfect for staging the Spousal Unit's hypothetical rock opera. Heck, if Chalayan prefers to focus on Galaxy/LED dresses for the performance, perhaps Neri Oxman can step in to help. Oxman is getting her PhD in design computation at MIT, and per io9, she specializes in "reactive architecture: surfaces, furnishings, and structures that change their own properties according to different stimuli. Her resin floors grow thicker where they need to support more weight; her composite walls rearrange their windows and stress lines based on local weather conditions. One of her best-known works, a chaise lounge called Beast, can adjust its shape, flexibility and softness to fit each person who sits in it."

Oxman incorporates so-called smart materials into her pieces. So does designer Marielle Leenders, who weaves wires containing shape memory alloys (like alloys of nickel and titanium) into her clothing to create, say, fabrics that contract under heat. So if you walk outside in a long-sleeved shirt, and it's warmer that perhaps you might expect, there's no need to roll up your own sleeves: the garment will respond to the increase in temperature and roll up itself. No kidding. No need for all those intricate cables, wires, motors and microcontrollers featured in Chalayan's designs! (Cracked.com has a problem with this concept. What's their problem? "You're an incredible lazy ass, that's the problem! What, you can't roll up your own sleeves?") It's still pretty ingenious on Leenders' part, and certainly preferable to Spray-On Fabric, or "Fabrican," which (according to the good folks at Cracked.com) "uses a pressurized formula that, when sprayed from an aerosol can, creates fibers that adhere to any surface and bind to create a piece of non-woven fabric. It can be sprayed onto a ... model, for example, to instantly create an entire dress or outfit right onto her body."

Then there's the tantalizing prospect of incorporating glitter-sized solar cells into fabrics to create clothing that produces electricity -- just the thing for charging your iPhone when you're on the go. That way you can be sure to get those all-important text messages sent by your sensor-lined underwear, alerting you to any unfortunate "accidents" you may experience. Per Discovery News:

"A firm in Australia called Simavita has invented a pair of electronic underpants for people who have incontinence that works to monitor and relay information about "accidents." Alerts are sent via text message over the institution's paging system. The underpants have a disposable element similar to a regular incontinence pad and include a detachable transmitter that relays readings from the pad's sensor strip over a wireless network to a central computer."

At least those mechanical dresses would have a built-in power source... so long as it was a sunny day. Ah, but what about more traditional means of ornamenting clothing? Beading and other kinds of adornment aren't just for clothing anymore; now you can place these things right onto the skin. Tattoos are old hat by now, although Gaga sports one quoting Rilke. It's even money that Gaga has already experimented with the new fashion trend of "vajazzling": "bedazzling" a certain sensitive area on women immortalized on Grey's Anatomy as the "va-jay-jay." Or maybe that's just a bit too tame for Her Ladyship. In which case, may I suggest the "dermatological embellishments" of Lauren Kalman, featured by Jessica Palmer at Bioephemera? Kalman is a metalsmith and mixed media artist who uses gold acupuncture wires to pierce the skin with mini-baubles in patterns that mimic certain skin diseases: a "rash of glistening blood-red stones set in gold," for instance to mimic an open sore. But since Gaga specializes in the gorgeously grotesque, she might like this, from an earlier series called "Hard Wear," in which golden crusts call to mind a heavily blistered mouth:

So that's a brief survey of cutting-edge, technology (and biology) inspired fashion to tempt Lady Gaga into considering a science-themed rock opera. For my part, I'm more on the grungy end of things; I'd probably want to work with the wild geeks of ArcAttack and their singing Tesla coils. They program the coils to perform electronic covers of tunes like the theme from Dr. Who (I'm still waiting for what I'm sure will be a killer version of the theme from Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Just watching the streaks of electricity emanating from the coils in time to the music is awe-inspiring enough, but these guys also devised a Faraday suit for their performances, enabling one of them (the one wearing the suit) to actually play with the arcs of electricity and not get electrocuted.

That suit that looks so much like a beekeeper's getup in the video below is actually what's known as a Faraday cage, an enclosure specifically designed to exclude electromagnetic fields. The 19th century British scientist Michael Faraday built the first one in 1836 to demonstrate his assertion that the charge on a charged conductor travels along the exterior surface and doesn't influence anything enclosed within it. It's essentially an application of "Gauss's Law": since like charges repel each other (opposites attract), electrical charge will "migrate" to the surface of a conducting form, such as a sphere. 

Faraday's 19th century version was an entire room coated with metal foil; he built it himself. Then he blasted the walls with high-voltage discharges from an electrostatic generator, and used an instrument called an electroscope to prove that no charge was present inside the actual room. As long as there are no gaps in the conductive "path," the electrical current from the lightning will never have much of an impact. The same thing is true of cars. If you happen to be sitting in a car when lightning strikes it, you'll probably be okay, as long as you don't stick your hand out the window to check and see if it's "still raining." The current will simply travel along the metallic exterior of the vehicle.

Be honest, now: wouldn't it be awesome to have a glitzed-up version of those singing Tesla coils on-stage with dancers and backup singers in spiffy tech-outfits, performing catchy dance tunes about time's arrow, entropy, and the birth of the universe? And for the finale, why not bring in the crack Caltech team -- working with Mindshare LA, an "idea factory that brings together scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and others to engage in creative brainstorming" -- that helped OK Go design their warehouse-scale, two-story Rube Goldberg device for the video version of "This Too Shall Pass"? It starts with a toy car pushing against a column of dominoes, and ends with the band being splattered by paint guns. All those cheering folks at the video's end helped design and build the contraption, using "ideas and materials anyone can come up with at home."

[The band] wanted the machine strung together from the kind of everyday stuff you might find at a yard sale and to run on mostly mechanical energy. No computers, fancy electronics, or high-tech gimmickry. The machine had to interact with the four musicians and even perform part of their song—an honor that ultimately went to a pulley-controlled whirling guitar whose neck plinks out part of the tune on water glasses. It had to function flawlessly during a lengthy camera take, like an Olympic figure skater performing a perfect program. It went without saying that the finished product had to be an eye-catching crowd-pleaser.

The whole thing was shot in an abandoned warehouse in our neighborhood, Echo Park. Even with so many creative brilliant minds at work, the team needed over 70 takes, done over two solid days and nights of filming. The elaborate device worked perfectly on only three of those takes, one of which became the final video. To date, it's had over 12.4 million views (a dozen of which are mine -- I can't stop watching it in wonderment).

And there you have: a movable feast of science-inspired elements to provide fodder for the Spousal Unit's Gaga-esque rock opera about cosmology. For those who remain unconvinced, earlier this year, Improbable Research featured a couple of interesting equations: one a GA GA equation in a CHinese paper on PCR algorithms for parallel computing, and the other a (made-up) formula re-interpreting the lyrics, such as they are, in "Bad Romance." It goes like this: (RAH(<2> (AH)<3> + [ROMA (1+MA)] + (GA)<2> + (OOH)(LA)<2>. I'm telling you, it's a sign....

nanoparticles and microparticles making things slippery

My last post focused on G-Oil, a new motor oil that uses beef tallow as a base, thus decreasing America's dependence on foreign energy sources.  One thing I didn't address in that blog is the role of nanotechnology in oils -- which is because I had to learn some things first.  

The G-Oil website has a section on nanoparticles, mostly focusing on the fact that the surface area to volume ratio of a nanoparticle is quite large.  This is true, but it doesn't tell you why that has anything to do with making oil perform better. 

The words "NANO GEODESIC BEARINGS" attracted my interest not just because they were in all caps, but because anytime you hear 'nano' and 'geodesic' together, you have to think buckyballs, those carbon structures resembling soccer balls that spent way too much time in the dryer and shrunk to about a nanometer in diameter.

Incidentally in my search for buckyballs, I stumbled across a toy called buckyballs that is unfortunately named.  It's a collection of 216 magnetic ball bearings that technaBob describes as "fun, powerful choking hazards".  You can make 3D structures like cubes, pyramids, etc.  But as a magnetician, I'm a little miffed that the magic of magnetism has been ascribed to carbon.  Carbon has its strengths, but magnetism really isn't one of them.

Buckyballs can form a solid very similarly to the way atoms form a solid.  The crystal structure is face-centered-cubic (fcc), so imagine a repeating structure of a cube with a buckyball at each corner, plus one in the very middle of each face of the cube, like the photograph at left (which is made of they toy "buckyballs"). 

Buckyballs aren't the only molecules that can do this. There is a whole class of crystals called molecular crystals that use molecules instead of atoms as their building block.  Most atomic crystals have an atom at each lattice site and the atoms are connected by very strong bonds (usually ionic or metallic).  The bonds holding molecular crystals together are much weaker, so the molecules have a little more freedom of motion than the atoms.  In some molecular crystals, the molecules can change orientation while maintaining their location in the crystal.  When buckyballs form a solid, they can spin in place.  Imagine the individual balls in the picture rotating while always maintaining the shape of the cube. 

That suggests the idea of buckyballs as tiny ball bearings isn't such a far-fetched idea, especially since the buckyball's second cousin once removed, graphite, is an outstanding lubricant.  That idea doesn't really hold water.  Graphite lubricates because it is made of sheets of carbon atoms that separate when you apply force.  The separation releases minute quantities of gas that act like atomic ball bearings. 

Sure enough, most of the people who tried using buckyballs on surfaces like aluminum and stainless steel found that high concentrations of buckyballs resulted in a compacted mess with extremely high friction and low concentrations of buckyballs produced no difference in behavior compared with the bare surfaces.  The problem, it would seem, is that you need to have the buckyballs held in one location with the freedom to rotate.  And if you think about it, that's pretty much how ball bearings work anyway.

In 1996, Jacob N. Israelachvili and co-workers at UC-San Diego showed that adding buckyballs to organic solvents allowed the liquid to flow more freely against mica surfaces.  The UCSD researchers explained the increased lubricity by suggesting that very small numbers of buckyballs layers deposit themselves along the mica surfaces.  The bonds between the buckyballs and the surface are not very strong, which leaves them free to rotate as they do in the solid phase.  The buckyball rotation allows the liquid molecules to move past the mica surfaces much more smoothly than they could otherwise.

I thought perhaps this was the mechanism that explained the buckyballs in G-Oil, but the UCSD work was organic solvents against mica at room temperature.  That doesn't necessarily translate to motor oil against metal surfaces at high temperature, the conditions found in an engine. 

I found a fair number of number of technical articles claiming that buckyballs do not markedly enhance the lubricity of motor oil. They do, however, improve the thermal conductivity of the oil and that makes the oil better at carrying heat away from the engine.  Overheating is one of the more severe problems in racing because it's hard to go fast when your pistons are starting to melt.

More searching led me to a patent application that combines nanoparticles and microparticles in oil to improve fuel efficiency.  The nanoparticles are made from hard materials, like alumina, diamond, ceria and titania -- the type of materials you'd use to polish things.  The microparticles (which are 100-1000 times bigger than the nanoparticles) are softer materials like zinc oxide, graphite, talc, and copper oxide. 

One of the problems with friction in your engine is that you lose energy because pieces have to move through the viscous oil.  Another problem is that two surfaces that rub against each other at high heat are constantly exchanging atoms, so your parts go from a flat surface to a surface that has microscopic dips and bumps.  Even though you can't see the imperfections with your bare eyes, those little divots and bumps impede the motion of the parts against each other.

In the patent application, the nanoparticles are made from hard materials because part of their job is to polish the insides of your engine and keep them nicely smooth.  The soft microparticles are designed to embed themselves into materials that have developed microsized defects.  The combination of the two types of particles, the patent submitter claims, can decrease the coefficient of friction from 0.22 to 0.01.  (The coefficient of friction ranges from 0 to 1 for abrasive friction:  a passenger car tire on asphalt is about 0.7-0.8.)

Another role I know about for nanoparticles in oil came from a discussion with Professor Shah at the University of Delaware a couple of years ago.  He told me about putting alumina or titania nanoparticles in oil to increase the heat capacity of the oil.  This initially confused me because both alumina and titania are thermal insulators.  Copper is an excellent thermal conductor, so I would have guessed a metal of some type would be a good bet to improve heat conduction.

And I would have been wrong.  Temperature is the motion of molecules.  Solids are much better at conducting heat than liquids or gases.  In the alumina nanoparticles in oil, Professor Shah told me that the oil forms a semi-crystalline layer coating the nanoparticles, and that semi-crystalline layer is better at dispersing heat than the liquid oil. 

So I'm guessing that the primary role of buckyballs, or any carbon additives is primarily in polishing the surfaces of mating parts. Oil has to deal with very high pressure, as its whole purpose is creating a very thin film between two pieces so that they slip smoothly past each other. The current additives used for pressure are sulfur and/or phosphorous additives, which can actually encourage the parts to corrode, so using buckyballs for oil used in gearboxes, for example, would make sense.

It's sort of funny that so many manufacturers use 'nanotechnology' in their advertisements, as if just the fact that they put something in their product that is really small should be enough to sell you on their product.  I'd really rather know exactly what's in the product and why -- especially if it's something I'm going to put on my face.