The VP of production assures Brennan that the crew does have a science consultant on the set — and it turns out to be a Canadian forensic podiatrist named Doug Philmore who appeared in an episode last season. But Doug confesses that, despite his best efforts, the film’s director couldn’t care less about scientific accuracy, and rarely incorporates his input. On the plus side, when the stunt corpse is replaced with a real one — a murdered studio exec, natch! — and Booth and Brennan take over the case, at least they’ve got a fully functioning forensic lab to work with, because it turned out to cost just as much to buy real equipment as build prop replicas.

Man, I love it when the Bones writers get all meta! Here they’re sending up a rarely seen aspect of film and TV production: the role of the lowly science consultant, and all the tensions inherent in putting science into storytelling. I wasn’t the only Bones fan who noticed: Kristina Killgrove over at Powered by Osteons writes up every episode, analyzing the science in particular, although with this one being so deliberately tongue-in-cheek, Killgrove admits it kinda took all the fun out of nerdgassing.

Sure, there was the usual scientific handwaving, with Brennan magically determining the victim’s age and gender without ever explaining her process. And Killgrove says she doesn’t buy the premise that it was just as expensive to make a fake lab as set up a real one.

Actually, she’s wrong about that: when Marvel was shooting Iron Man 2, they ordered a very large number of high-end lasers for Tony Stark’s fake lab. Real ones. Nobody had the time or money — union labor doesn’t come cheap, my friends — to build a bunch of realistic looking prop equipment. And they needed a laser specialist to come onto the set to unpack them all, because nobody in production knew the first thing about lasers. (Ask them about the latest cutting-edge camera technology, though, and they’ll put any hardcore techno-geek to shame!)

Granted, Bones took it one step further, to a fully functioning forensic lab — because it was a cheeky send-up of their industry. I doubt very much the VP of production would ever take a direct call from George Clooney on the set either. (Nobody in Hollywood dials their own phone; they have “people” to do that for them. It’s like you get to a certain level in the hierarchy and lose your ability to work speed dial overnight.) And there’s no way Doug Philmore is getting paid a princely wage for his science consulting services. He’s lucky to be paid at all!

Speaking of not listening to one’s science consultants, Chad of Uncertain Principles also jumped onto the nerdgassing bandwagon, objecting to the laughably inane science-y dialogue in Marvel’s new box office juggernaut, The Avengers. Specifically, this bit:

BANNER: How many spectrometers do you have?

SHIELD REP: We have the cooperation of every university in the country.

BANNER: Tell them to put the spectrometers on the roof, and set them to detect gamma radiation.

As Chad correctly points out, “spectrometer” is such a general term, describing a broad class of instrument, that for anyone with a smidgen of physics background, the exchange is ludicrous. He helpfully offers some alternative dialogue that would have easily solved the problem, no muss, no fuss, no extra cost:

BANNER: How many gamma-ray spectrometers do you have?

SHIELD REP: We have the cooperation of every university in the country.

BANNER: Have them look for a peak at 1337 MeV.

How simple was that? Chad opines, wondering why the filmmakers couldn’t be bothered to incorporate better technobabble. It’s a valid question, and a sentiment I support.

The best answer is to paraphrase James Cameron’s sarcastic response when Neil de Grasse Tyson complained about the inaccurate night sky in a key scene in Titanic. This is what I imagine director Joss Whedon saying to Chad:

<snark on> “Gosh, The Avengers only grossed $1 billion worldwide in its first month of release. Just imagine how much more money it would have made, if we’d only managed to get the technobabble right.” </snark off>

Only he’d sound way cooler when he said it. Look, I get what Chad is saying and I agree. Why bother with a science consultant at all if you’re not going to take the input? But the reality is, despite best intentions, these are huge projects. Did you see those ending credits? Thousands of people worked on the film.

The script went through multiple revisions. The Time Lord consulted with Marvel early on for The Avengers, but the script changed dramatically on its journey to the silver screen, and nobody contacted him for follow-up to make sure the revisions were correct. Why would they? There were umpteen other movie-making details to worry about, things that could derail the entire production. As much as we root for better science in film and TV, the harsh truth is, it’s not going to make or break a film’s box office success.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying, though. It takes time — a lot of time, years of time — to change attitudes and values in an entrenched industry like Hollywood. The cheeky, good-humored send-up of science consulting in Bones tells me that change is happening because there’s self-awareness on the part of the writers, at least. (The first step is acknowledging there’s a problem.) So don’t give up on the dream just yet, science nerds.

Anyway, the whole thing has inspired me to dust off and revamp this earlier post from the old blog. If you’re a scientist interested in consulting for film and TV, you should read David Kirby’s most excellent book, Lab Coats in Hollywood. In the meantime, I offer my own humble tips, gleaned from two years with the National Academy of Science’s Hollywood outreach program, the Science and Entertainment Exchange. First and foremost:

(1) Manage Your Expectations. Shhh! Keep this under your hat, but Hollywood isn’t nearly as glamorous as you think. I know, you think it’s all just one long episode of Entourage (the colorfully foul-mouthed Ari Gold character is, indeed, based on a real-life agent, Ari Emmanuel). But power lunches and club-hopping are what people do in between projects, and even then, it’s mostly agents and studio execs with expense accounts — or A-List stars — who can afford that.

Once a film or TV show is in production, everyone is working much too hard to have time for an actual life. Catering services are huge in Tinsel Town because often nobody leaves the set (or production office, or editing room) for 12- to 16-hour stints. So don’t expect that you’ll be whisked off to Spago or Mr. Chow’s for a chic lunch meeting with Big Name Producer/Director. The reality is that you’re more likely to have a short afternoon meeting in a makeshift production office with some soda, coffee or cookies to nosh on.

That said, one scientist who came to a studio consult jokingly demanded champagne when asked if he’d care for refreshment — only to be mollified when the earnest young production assistant magically produced a bottle sent to the producers as a gift. I told him if he truly wanted to be shockingly outrageous, he should have demanded a few lines of cocaine. Although even that might not have been shocking. Apparently, it used to be quite common in the 1970s to show up to a pitch meeting and find bowls of coke on the (glass-topped, natch!) coffee table. I heard this from a longtime executive producer, who sighed wistfully in remembrance: “These days it’s all just bottled water.”

(2) Listen, Don’t Lecture. This is probably the single most common mistake scientists make when consulting with Hollywood for the very first time: they walk into a meeting and proceed to expound on their area of expertise, with little regard for whether it’s relevant to the developing story. This is understandable: scientists are accustomed to certain kinds of communication: giving class lectures, technical talks for colleagues, and an ever-larger fraction are also reasonably adept at speaking to the press about new research results.  But Hollywood is looking for more of a dialogue, a brainstorming session among equals — not a lecture. Remember, they’re smart, skilled professionals in their own right; they just have a different expertise than you. Don’t treat them like they’re stupid, because they’re not.

(3) “No” is Not Enough. It’s not enough to tell a writer, director or producer that their nifty plot twist is bad science. That’s just pointless nerdgassing; it might be cathartic for you, but the goal should be convincing Hollywood that paying attention to the scientific details results in a more successful film or TV series. Instead of “No, you can’t do that,” make sure you put a positive spin on your input: “Well, that’s stretching the science a bit too much, but have you considered this?”

(3A) A corollary: they’ll be more likely to listen to your input if The Science Serves the Story. Or the special effects. Or anything else about the creative vision that goes into making a fabulous piece of entertainment. Hollywood is not in the business of creating PR campaigns for science out of the goodness of their hearts. It will always be about the narrative. Make sure you honor that. The payoff, when it works, can be terrific, adding something unique to the film while still being reasonably true to science.

Case in point: Years ago, the Time Lord met with producers Brian Grazier and Ron Howard to discuss the science in the film adaptation of Angels and Demons. You remember, the one filmed partly on location at CERN that involves the detonation of an antimatter bomb. Lots of scientists weighed in on the question of just what such an explosion might look like (assuming one could ever manufacture and store sufficient antimatter to make a bomb in the first place).

Sean and his fellow physicists determined it would be an unusual kind of explosion. You’d have this tiny pellet of antimatter that would be released into the air and its outer shell, at least, would annihilate upon contact. But the force of the explosion would push the air away, creating empty space — at least for a moment, and then the air would rush back in, and you’d get a second explosion. It was all brought beautifully to cinematic life and I think it looks awesome:

(4) Honor the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Discretion is very much the better part of valor when it comes to advising on Hollywood projects. Ideas are bona fide currency in this town, and projects in development — and even in production — are treated as closely guarded state secrets. Think I’m kidding? I organized a local team of five scientists with varying expertise to consult on TRON: Legacy. They expected to be emailed the draft script. Instead, production assistants brought each scientist an individual copy of the script stamped with their name on every page — so if pages leaked, it could be traced back to the miscreant — and waited in their office while they read it, then took the manuscript back to the production office “vault.”

Even if nobody asked you to sign an NDA, it’s still a good idea to say as little as possible, even if it seems like a pretty trivial detail; not doing so could get you blacklisted from future consultation. So, even though it’s tempting to regale your friends down at the pub with tales of your mind-blowing meeting with Big Name Director at a Major Studio, resist that temptation — until the film comes out or the episode airs. Then you can reap the reward of all that reflected glory. It can also be a great educational opportunity, as Jim Kakalios (author of The Physics of Superheroes) discovered when he made this Webby-nominated YouTube video on the science of Watchmen (for which he consulted):

(5) Your Input Is Never Wasted. Don’t feel discouraged if few, if any, of your ideas make it onto the screen in the end. Maybe you consulted on a project in early development that never made it into production, or you were brought in too late to have much of an impact. (I cringed inwardly during one consultation when, towards the end of the meeting, the director commented, “Wow, this would have been really helpful, like, four weeks ago….”) Maybe the writers just didn’t take your suggestions, because the story ended up going in a new direction, or the studio demanded changes (or gave “notes”). A lot can happen to a film or series in development between the draft script and final cut. That doesn’t mean your input wasn’t valuable, or that you wasted your time. If nothing else, you’ve established a good foundation for future interaction. They may call on you again for another project, and next time, your input will make it to the final product.

(6) Expect Small Perks in Lieu of Payment. In last week’s episode of Bones, the podiatrist admits to Brennan that the producers don’t seem all that interested in really getting the science right — adding, “But then I got my first paycheck.” Woo-hoo! Except this is largely fiction.

In reality, it’s a rare occurrence when a science/technical consultant gets paid; some do, but it’s the exception rather than the norm. And even then, I’d advise you not to quit your day job. I’m asked about this constantly: why don’t get consultants get paid more often? And I explain that most of the time, when creators need input the most is during the early development stage — also the stage where a science consultant can have the most impact in shaping the story. But at that point, there’s usually no budget, either.

Trust me: everyone is working on spec. (Hollywood is a town of freelancers at heart.) Make a strong enough pitch — for which you need good science input — and you might get picked up by a network or studio. But it’s only when a project gets “greenlit” that it goes into actual production — and until then, there’s really not any money to be made. Be the person who helped them in the early, unpaid stage, and you’re far more likely to be approached about paid consulting when the budget finally materializes. Or not. Like I said, don’t quit your day job.

Not everyone likes to hear this. I’ve had more than one scientist stuffily inform me that s/he received so much per hour as a technical consultant for industry, and lawyers received similar rates for their consulting services, so why shouldn’t scientists who consult for film and TV be paid accordingly? One such person was so insistent on this point that, exasperated, I finally said, “Look — you keep telling me how you think things ought to be. I’m telling you the way things actually are.”

I’m sympathetic. I think science consultants should be paid. They worked hard to acquire that expertise. But it all comes down to what the market will bear, and currently, the market will bear…. practically nothing. This will only change when it becomes clear to the folks who hold the purse strings in Hollywood that a technical consultant is absolutely essential to the success of a given project. And I think their numbers are growing. But a blockbuster film with bad science is still a blockbuster film. So it might be awhile.

That doesn’t mean the creators don’t care about getting the details right — they do! — or that they aren’t generous. They are! They’ll find some way to express their appreciation. We have a growing collection of DVDs, baseball caps, sweatshirts, even a pen in the shape of a bone (from the writing staff of Bones, of course). The Time Lord is justly proud of his Stark Motor Racing sweatshirt, courtesy of Marvel Studios in thanks for his consultation work on Thor and The Avengers. I’ve been invited to watch shoots for Bones, Castle, and The Big Bang Theory and toured the set for Tony Stark’s lab in the Iron Man films. And I’ve met some truly wonderful people in the bargain.

Having fun, getting to be creative, and hopefully feeling like you’ve made a difference in some small way is actually pretty darned rewarding. If those are terms you think you can handle, congratulations — you could make an excellent science consultant.

Evidence of that can be found in a January 12, 1833, letter printed in Philosophical Magazine, in which John Herschel describes going for an early morning walk several winters before and noticing “a remarkable deposition of ice around the decaying stems of vegetables.” A few days later, he found a similar strange ice formation, this one seeming “to emanate in a kind of riband- or frill-shaped wavy excrescence.”

Herschel’s letter is one of the earliest recorded observations of the phenomenon of “frost flowers” (sometimes called ice flowers or ice ribbons), in which thin layers of ice curl out from long-stemmed plants in the wee morning hours of late autumn or early winter. Those ice layers often form intricate curling patterns, looking for all the world like flower petals. Herschel could only hypothesize about the cause of these formations, but he intuited that they correlated with specific atmospheric conditions and particular kinds of plants, although he couldn’t explain why that might be the case, concluding, “It is for botanists to decide.”

Well, botanists and physicists, perhaps; the demarcations between scientific disciplines weren’t nearly so rigid in Herschel’s day. Many others were inspired by Herschel’s letter to relate their own discoveries of frost flowers. In 1850, a physician name John LeConte of the University of Georgia described his observed ice flowers thusly: “At a distance they present an appearance resembling locks of cotton-wool, varying from four to five inches in diameter, placed around the roots of plants, and when numerous the effect is striking and beautiful.”

Thirty years later, the Duke of Argyll described similar ice formations in the January 22 issue of Nature, requesting a scientific explanation, prompted a lively exchange offering various possibilities.

In March 1884, Nature reported that one Professor Schwalbe, at a meeting of the Physical Society in Berlin, had succeeded in producing his own ice flowers from withered and rotten twigs he’d brought with him to the conference from the Harz Mountains. He simply moistened the twig thoroughly so that no water dropped off, then let it cool slowly in what’s described rather vaguely as “a cold preparation.”

Schwalbe was the only one on record to systematically grow ice ribbons/frost flowers until 1914, when a physicist at the National Bureau of Standards named William Coblentz observed frost flowers while strolling in Washington, DC’s Rock Creek Park. (He’s actually buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.) Coblentz was best known for his research on spectroscopy and infrared radiometry; for instance, he made measurements of the infrared radiation emitting from over 100 stars and the planets of Mars, Venus and Jupiter.

But like Herschel, Coblentz’s curiosity ranged further afield: he held a patent for an early solar cell, and also dabbled in bioluminescence. So it’s not surprising that when he observed his first frost flowers, he started experimenting to understand the physical mechanisms behind their formation.

He cut off stems, inserted them in moist soil and test tubes, recorded how quickly water moved up the dry stems, and figured out how to grow ice ribbons in the lab. Among other findings, he conclusively demonstrated that the roots of plants aren’t necessary for frost flowers to form, and that the water that makes the ice comes from within the stem, rather than being deposited from moisture in the air.

(For those sufficiently intrigued to want more comprehensive details about frost flowers — including more history and where and when you’re most likely to spot them — James Carter, a professor emeritus of geography and geology at Illinois State University, has an entire Website devoted to the history and science and his own personal sightings of frost flowers and ice ribbons. A Google search will turn up many more sites by nature enthusiasts.)

We know much more today about frost flowers thanks to the efforts of men like Coblentz, although they’re still a little mysterious. They tend to happen in early winter, when the ground is not already frozen: the “first freeze.” The ground temperature has to be warm enough so that the plants’ root systems are still active, and the air temperature has to be cold enough to freeze water.

Plants hold water in their stems, and water expands when frozen, so long thin cracks can form along the stem. Water is drawn through those cracks and freezes upon contact with the air. Water continues to flow out, past that first layer, freezing and forming a second layer, and so on, until the telltale thin “frozen petal” shape emerges.

Intriguingly, this has only been observed in a few species of plants: the white crownbeard (Verbesina virginica, a.k.a., frostweed), yellow ironweed (Verbesina alterifolia) and Helianthemum canadense. If we’re talking about woody plants and tree branches, the seeping water freezes into long strings of ice that look like strands of hair: “frost beard.”

That’s cool and all, but just what is causing the water to flow through those cracks in the stems? It’s kinda flowing upward, you see, which doesn’t seem like it should be possible. You’d think gravity would make it flow down. We can thank a little something called capillary action or capillary force for all those pretty floral ice arrangements. It’s the same thing that causes a sponge (a porous material) to soak up liquids from a surface.

You can witness capillary action for yourself with a simple vertical glass tube open at either end. Place the lower end in a glass of water, you’ll notice that the water rises up to a certain point and then stops. Surface tension basically pulls the liquid column up until the mass of the liquid is large enough so that gravity can overcome the intramolecular forces. You know when a drop of water forms on the spigot of your tap and suspends there until you touch it? Capillary forces hold it there.

Plants use this as a transport mechanism for water, nutrients, and so forth, so it’s not surprising that this same capillary action also gives rise to the frost flower phenomenon. Similarly, the reason groundwater moves from wet areas of soil to dryer areas is capillary action: the water molecules are attracted to soil particles and naturally seek them out; if a patch of soil gets too wet, the water molecules will move to dryer patches where the dry soil particles are more plentiful.

Capillary action is also behind a colorful bit of superstition known as the “Hindu Milk Miracle.” Just before dawn on September 21, 1995, a Hindu worshiper at a temple in New Delhi made the traditional offering of milk to a statue of Ganesha. He held up a spoonful of milk from the bowl, and was astonished when the liquid disappeared, seemingly consumed by the statue. Apparently, Ganesha had a milk craving, perhaps to supplement a calcium or Vitamin D deficiency. As abruptly as it started, it stopped: by noon, Ganesha was no longer “drinking” the milk.

When other devout Hindu people heard, they offered milk to their own statues in other temples, all over the world, and lo and behold, many  of those also lapped it up. The World Hindu Council declared it a miracle, and sales of milk in areas with large Hindu communities skyrocketed. (I can see the dairy ads now: a statue of Ganesha with the telltale white mustache and the caption, “Got milk?”)

Finally, scientists from India’s Ministry of Science and Technology came to New Delhi and determined that the “miracle” was actually due to capillary action: the surface tension of the milk pulled the liquid up and out of the spoon before gravity caused it to run down the front of the statue. Not that true believers cared about science: hordes of people still rushed to the temples with their offerings of milk in hopes that the statue would accept their offerings.

Just last month, an Indian skeptic named Sanal Edamaruku was arrested for blasphemy in Mumbai by the order of the local Catholic Church. His crime? Explaining that a weeping cross — touted as a modern miracle drawing hundreds of pilgrims daily to witness the water drops seeping from Jesus’ feet  — was really just another example of capillary action. (The cross was located near a leaky drain.)

There’s so much we couldn’t do without capillary forces. In chemistry, for example, there’s a common technique called thin layer chromatography, in which capillary action is exploited to move a solvent vertically up a plate, usually taking dissolved solutes with it.

Bounty paper towels — the “quicker picker upper” — also utilize capillary action to absorb liquid; it’s porous, like a sponge, and those pores act like small capillaries, much like the tube-like stems of plants, so that fluid on a surface is transferred to the paper towel. And much of my workout gear employ “wicking fabrics,” which use capillary action to “wick” sweat away from the skin, thereby avoiding undue chafing during strenuous workouts.

More importantly, our eyes wouldn’t be able to drain away tear fluid efficiently without capillary action. (Our eyes produce tears constantly via the lacrymal ducts in the inner corner of the eyes.) Capillary action is rather miraculous in that respect. It’s just not magic.

Images: (top) Frost flower in the Ozark Mountains. Credit: Marvin Smith, via Wikimedia Commons. (bottom) Detailed view of hair ice aka frost beard taken at Mount Maxwell, Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Here’s Kern striking a pose in one of the particle collider’s many tunnels:

Kern’s journey around the world is sponsored by precision scale company Kern & Sohn, which is teaming up with schools and research stations worldwide to highlight the variations of Earth’s gravity. The company got the idea from the “Traveling Gnome Prank,” whereby pranksters steal garden gnomes and then send the owners photographs of the ornaments in front of famous sightseeing spots.

But this time there’s a scientific twist. Kern’s journey is part of an educational effort to demonstrate how weight changes depending on how the strength of gravity varies. Mass, of course, remains constant. So Kern may record different weights at different locations, but he always has the same mass

Kern is mailed to each participating location, carefully packaged with a scale provided by Kern & Sohn. Once he arrives, a volunteer places him on the scale, and his weight is recorded to keep track of the (very) slight variations in the measurements that occur depending on his geographical location. His heaviest recorded weight so far: 309.82 grams, at the South Pole.

You can follow Kern’s continuing travels here. Bon voyage, our little gnomic friend! Who knows where his travels will take him next?

Casimir Effect tells the story of Dr. Alice Sharpe (Zoe Mills), a quantum physicist in the year 2101 who has been studying the potential use of wormholes for transportation — through both space and time. She becomes the first person to travel through time, except things don’t quite go as planned. Instead of traveling seven days into the future, she finds herself 100 years in the future.

Naturally a temporal paradox ensues, forcing Alice to travel next into the past and the year 2050, where her future true love, Bob Cameron (played by Lloyd), is conducting the first experiments on the Casimir effect and its potential use in stabilizing wormholes. Alice must choose to be with the man she loves — thereby risking the collapse of the space-time continuum — or sacrifice her own happiness to, well, save the entire universe. Sometimes love really sucks.

The film might be pure fiction, but its premise is founded in real physics. The 19^th-century Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla believed the vacuum held enormous reservoirs of energy, sufficient to revolutionize human society if we could only devise a means of harnessing it. Tesla was highly eccentric – he ended his days impoverished and with questionable sanity – but his intuition about there being energy in the vacuum turned out to be true.

See, empty space isn’t really empty. It roils and boils with quantum fluctuations, occasionally spitting out pairs of “virtual” elementary particles and antiparticles. These virtual particles annihilate and disappear back into the quantum vacuum so quickly that the apparent violation of energy conservation incurred by their creation can’t be observed directly.

So how do we know they exist? There is indirect evidence in a phenomenon known as the Casimir effect, named after Henrik Casimir, the Dutch physicist who discovered it in 1933.

Casimir received his PhD at the University of Leiden in 1931, under Paul Ehrenfest, with a thesis on the quantum mechanics of a rigid spinning body and molecular rotation. During that time, he also spent 18 months in Copenhagen, working with Niels Bohr. Then he worked as an assistant in Zurich to Wolfgang Pauli before accepting a professorship at Leiden University. His research centered on heat and electrical conduction.

His time at Leiden was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II; the university was shut down in 1942. So Casimir moved to the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven. It was here that he became intrigued by the possibility of measuring the van der Walls force between two parallel metallic plates. Two years later, he and a student, Dik Polder, conceived of an experiment to do just that.

Normally two uncharged parallel metal plates would remain stationary because there is no electromagnetic charge to exert a force to pull them together (or push them apart). But Casimir found that if the plates are close enough, there is still a tiny attractive force between them.

Because the parallel plates are so close together, virtual particle pairs can’t easily come between the plates, so there are more pairs popping into existence around the exterior of plates than there are between them. The imbalance creates an inward force from the outside that pushes the plates together slightly. The smaller the separation between the plates, the fewer virtual pairs can get between them, and the greater the force of the inward attraction.

If we could figure out a way to harvest just the antiparticle of a virtual pair, we would have a built-in source of negative energy in the quantum vacuum. Okay, sure, that’s a pretty big “if.” Even if we could find a way to harvest this negative energy, it isn’t remotely sufficient for wormhole purposes.

A wormhole only one meter wide would require negative energy equivalent to the total energy produced by our sun over roughly 10 billion years, yet the Casimir effect is quite small, equal to the weight of 1/30,000 of an ant, so it could only create a wormhole smaller than an atom, making travel through it impractical at best. We would need to find a means of amplifying that energy many times over before it would become strong enough to hold open a macroscopic wormhole.

Frankly, the energy contained in the quantum vacuum isn’t nearly as much as Tesla supposed, when one converts it into macroscale units of measurement. Release the energy stored in one cubic meter of the quantum vacuum — about the size of a small dumpster — and you’d only get about one ten-billionth of a joule. That’s not enough to light a 10-watt bulb. That hardly seems sufficient to open a wormhole of the sort featured in the film.

Caltech physicist Kip Thorne famously devised a wormhole model based on negative energy. He proposed creating two identical chambers, each of which contains two parallel metal plates separated by a very small gap. The electrical field created by the plates via the Casimir effect creates a tear in space-time, so that the chambers become the two “mouths” of a connecting wormhole.

Then one chamber is placed on a rocket ship and accelerated to near the speed of light. Since time is moving at different rates in each chamber due to relativistic time dilation, the two chambers become desynchronized. They are still connected by the wormhole, yet they exist in different times. Time has passed more slowly in the accelerating chamber, so a person in the earthbound chamber could step through the wormhole and be hurtled into the past.

A similar effect could be achieved by connecting a wormhole between the earth and something very heavy, like a neutron star. This also sets up a time difference between the two ends, since mass warps space and time. A clock on the surface of a very dense neutron star would run about 30% slower than it does on earth.

Naturally, there’s  catch. Quantum vacuum fluctuations would almost certainly destroy such a wormhole before it could be used as a portal, thanks to what amounts to a devastating feedback loop.

Virtual particles pass through the wormhole to the past. But then they must travel forward through space and time, eventually re-entering the wormhole and traveling back to the past again, in a never-ending cycle. Eventually the radiation becomes strong enough to destroy anything that tries to pass through to the other side. In the end, it would even destroy the wormhole.

The obstacles to building big swirly wormholes have proven insurmountable so far. The search continues for a feasible wormhole model that might one day serve as a portal to other universes, or to other points in time. In the meantime, we have intriguing flights of fancy via films like Casimir Effect.

Images: (top) Illustration of the Casimir effect. Wikimedia Commons/Emok. (bottom) Artist’s impression of a traversable wormhole which connects the place in front of the physical institutes of Tübingen University with the sand dunes near Boulogne sur Mer in the north of France. Gallery of Space Time Travel: Philippe E. Hurbain. Wikimedia Commons.

A good tragic love story is a time-tested recipe for cinematic success. Jen-Luc Piquant is not ashamed to admit that she sobbed her little pixelated eyes out when the movie debuted, despite the schmaltz — she’s a sucker for grand, epic, good old-fashioned storytelling on the big screen, and Titanic definitely delivers the spectacle.

But even people whose heartstrings remained untugged by the tearjerker tale couldn’t help but be entranced by the lavish re-enactment of its tragic sinking. There’s just something about the Titanic that resonates with us on a deep, subconscious level, and it is that element that ultimately raises Cameron’s film above mere Hollywood bathos.

It’s tough to put one’s finger precisely on just what that “something” is, but sci-fi author Connie Willis managed to do just that in her 2001 novel, Passage. I’ve been a Willis fan for years,. She has the skeptical mind of a scientist — her husband is a physicist — and the soul of poet, mixing science fact, science fiction, literary allusion, and metaphor with memorable characters and terrific story-telling. She’s won multiple awards — most recently for the double novels Blackout and All Clear — making her “one of the most honored sci-fi writers of the 1980s and 1990s.”

Willis has tackled time travel, chaos theory, and the sociology of fads (Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Bellwether), but in Passage, she immerses herself in the Ultimate Question: is there life after death, a part of our consciousness that continues even after the body dies? To explore her theme, she delineates the science of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs): the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, at least if the estimated 7 million people who claim to have experienced an NDE are to be believed. Written accounts of NDEs date back some two thousand years,and hail from all over the world.

The man responsible for coining the term “near-death experience” is Raymond Moody, an MD who has written several books on the afterlife based on patient testimonials,  who believes NDEs are evidence of  a soul (consciousness that exists separately from the brain), and evidence of the existence of an afterlife.

He’s boiled the typical NDE down to a few key features. First, there’s a strange kind of noise, alternately described as a ringing or a buzzing. There is a sense of blissful peace, and often an out-of-body experience (feeling as if one is floating above one’s body and observing it from that vantage point). There’s that light at the end of the tunnel, being met by loved ones, angels, or other religious figures, and a kind of “life review” — seeing one’s life flash before one’s eyes.

But as the Skeptic’s Dictionary helpfully points out, Moody’s books ignore the fact that as many as 15% of NDEs are outright hellish experiences.

There have been some solid scientific studies of what happens to the brain during such events, notably a 2001 Dutch study published in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet. The researchers examined 344 patients who were resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest, and interviewed them within a week afterwards about what — if anything — they remembered. The results were a bit startling: about 18% reported being able to recall some portion of what happened when they were clinically dead, and between 8 and 12 percent said they experienced some form of an NDE.

Neurochemistry offers some convincing alternative explanations. Perhaps NDEs aren’t evidence of an afterlife, but illusions created by a dying (oxygen deprived) brain. Cardiac arrest and the anesthesias used in ERs are capable of triggering NDE-like brain states. The Dutch researchers found that “similar experiences can be induced through electrical stimulation of the temporal lobe,” for instance, as can neurochemicals such as endorphins and serotonin, and hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and mescaline.

An October 2006 article in New Scientist described a theory by University of Kentucky neurophysiologist Kevin Nelson attributing NDEs to a kind of “REM intrusion”: “Elements of NDE bear uncanny similarity to the REM state,” he told the magazine.

He describes REM intrusion as “a glitch in the brain’s circuitry that, in times of extreme stress, may flip it into a mixed state of awareness where is is both in REM sleep and partially awake at the same time.” Something similar might be happening with NDEs, he reasons, although the jury is still out on that particular hypothesis.

Karl Jansen has managed to induce NDEs with ketamine, a hallucenogenic related to PCP, but far less destructive; it’s an anesthetic that works not just by dulling pain, but by creating a dissociative state. According to Jansen, the conditions that give rise to NDEs — low oxygen, low blood flow, low blood sugar, and so forth — can kill brain cells, and the brain often responds by triggering a flood of chemicals very similar to ketamine to protect those cells, which would produce “out of body” sensations and possibly even hallucinations. Jansen claims his approach can reproduce all the main elements Moody attributes to NDEs: the dark tunnel with a light at the end, out of body experiences, strange noises, communing with god, and so on.

Why do so many people see a light at the end of the tunnel? Susan Blackmore, a psychology professor at the University of the West of England in Bristol, thinks she might have an explanation: neural noise. During cardiac arrest, in the throes of death, the brain is deprived of oxygen, causing brain cells to fire rapidly and quite randomly in the visual cortex. There are lots of cells firing in the middle, and fewer towards the outer edge, producing white light in the center fading into dark at the outer edges.

That feeling of peace and well-being might be due to the fact that the brain is pumping out endorphins in response to pain, which can produce a dream-like state of euphoria. That same cerebral anoxia might also cause the strange buzzing or ringing sound people claim to hear when they enter an NDE.

Willis takes that tiny bit of factual thread and spins it into a complex scientific mystery, skewering cheap spiritualism in the bargain. She got the idea for the book when a friend insisted she read a book on NDEs, insisting she would find it inspiring. Instead, Willis loathed it. In fact, it made her angry: “I thought it was not only pseudoscience, but absolutely wicked in the way it preyed on people’s hopes and fears of death, telling them comforting fictions.”

She channeled that anger into the novel, creating the character of Dr. Maurice Mandrake, a physician who has abandoned all pretense of scientific objectivity, prompting his “witnesses” to say what he expects to hear — a strategy that has made him a best-selling author of just the sort of book that triggered Willis’ creative rage.

Mandrake’s foil in the novel is the main protagonist, Joanna Lander, also a doctor studying NDEs, but her approach is far more rational, firmly grounded in the scientific method — which puts her at odds with Mandrake and his minions. She finds an ally in neuroscientist Richard Wright, who has contrived a way to induce NDEs using a psychoactive drug called dithetamine. His theory is that the NDE is a survival mechanism, part of a series of strategies the brain employs whenever the body is seriously injured. The NDE is a side effect of neurochamical events.

While NDEs seem to have some striking similarities in the various recorded accounts, what specific form the NDE will take depends on the individual, and for Willis, this provides an opportunity for a clever twist.

Recall the now-famous final scene in Cameron’s Titanic, when the elderly Rose, having lived a long, full life, dies quietly in her sleep. The camera follows her “soul’s” journey out of her body, towards a white light, then down into the ocean depths until she reaches the present-day wreck. As the camera moves into the main dining hall, we see the shipwreck morph back into its former unsunken glory, and all those who perished are on hand to welcome Rose back to the fold. Waiting at the top of the grand staircase is Jack himself, who takes Rose’s hand, her youth restored, and the lovers are reunited in eternity. (Cue violins and a thousand sobbing fans.)

But what if Rose had, instead, popped back to her reality as an elderly woman  in the middle of the ocean? Her “vision” would have been classified as a classic NDE. Joanna would definitely have wanted to interview her. Not only would Rose have made an excellent witness, but the two share a common NDE framework. When Joanna consents to let Richard induce NDEs in herself as a subject, she also finds herself on the Titanic — the very day of its sinking.

Of course, it isn’t really the Titanic: she knows that, even though the experience feels uncannily real, nothing like a typical dream state. But Joanna is convinced there’s a reason her subconscious has picked this particular framework in which to place her NDE.

The Titanic is the perfect metaphor for what is happening as the brain strives to make sense of things even as it is dying (or pseudo-dying, in the case of induced NDEs). The body is a sinking ship, the chemical signals and electrical impulses are SOS messages trying to find some form of rescue, some way of jump-starting the body before brain death sets in, within four to six minutes after the onset of oxygen deprivation. The metaphor of the Titanic, says Joanna’s former English teacher, is “the very mirror image of death.”

Willis knows a little something about death, having lost her mother quite suddenly when she was 12, an experience she has described as “a knife that cut across my life and chopped it in two. Everything changed.” But she didn’t take refuge in the popular Hallmark sentiments that often pass for profundity in this country. ["[O]ur American culture is especially in denial about death,” she said in a 2003 interview, and while writing Passage, “I wanted to make sure some reader who had just had somebody die… would say, ‘Thank you for telling the truth and trying to help me understand this whole process.’”

And what a brutal truth it is. The novel ends by taking us right into the dying brain of one of the characters, quite conscious and very aware of what these visions represent: synapses firing randomly, memories falling away, even language being lost, before the visual cortex shuts down completely. The depiction is unflinching, and all the more powerful because it never resorts to easy platitudes.

It’s not an easy book to read, yet I return to it again and again. Maybe it’s because Willis stops short of letting everything go dark. In the end, she acknowledges that perhaps some things cannot  — and need not — be known. By leaving things open-ended, Passage reassures us that it’s okay for this to remain unknown. Our only job, as human beings, is to make the life journey as rich and meaningful as possible — in whatever way we choose to do so.

Images: (top) Courtesy of NOAA/Institute for Exploration/University of Rhode Island. Public domain. (middle) Source: How Stuff Works. (bottom) Cover art, Passage.

This post originally appeared in 2007 on 3 Quarks Daily.

One of my favorite scenes in the film My Best Friend’s Wedding is the heart-to-heart conversation between bride-to-be Kimmi (Cameron Diaz) and Julia Roberts’ would-be groom stealer, right after the groom has called off the wedding because of a misunderstanding (orchestrated, it must be noted, by a now-repentant Roberts). Attempting to explain why the groom would change his mind so suddenly, Roberts’ character — a food critic by trade — draws a culinary analogy between creme brulee and that All-American staple, Jell-O.

A diner in a fine restaurant might be enamored with the sweet, elegant perfection of creme brulee, she maintains, but could then suddenly realize that what he really wants is… Jell-O. Why? “Because he’s comfortable with Jell-O,” she says. “I can be Jell-O,” Kimmi tearfully offers, to which Roberts tartly replies, “No. You can’t. Creme brulee can never be Jell-O.”

I’ll spare you my exasperated rant over Kimmi’s insistent follow-up — “But I have to be Jell-O!” — with all its implications for the character’s sad lack of self-esteem. That’s another post altogether. Roberts’ food critic has a point: creme brulee can never be Jell-O, even though both depend on cross-linking proteins for their jiggly consistency. With creme brulee, proteins in the eggs and milk form stronger bonds in response to heat, changing its consistency from a liquid to a semi-solid. The opposite occurs with Jell-O: the proteins form stronger bonds as they cool.

I’m kind of with Roberts on the creme brulee vs Jell-O debate, to be honest, although Jen-Luc Piquant prefers the former. (We’re both suckers for a tasty Grand Marnier souffle, served to perfection at Fleur de Lys, a restaurant in San Francisco.) I mean, can creme brulee do this?

Drop a creme brulee and it would just go splat — although that, too, might look pretty good in super slo-mo. The components of Jell-O are gloriously simple: nothing but gelatin, water and sugar, plus any artificial flavors and colorings that are added to bolster the fun factor. But where does the gelatin come from? You might be sorry you asked.

Gelatin is a processed protein called collagen, derived from the bones, hooves and connective tissues of cows or pigs. Those parts are ground up and mixed with acid or other chemicals to break down the cellular structure, thereby releasing the collagen. Boiling the whole mess causes a layer of gelatin to form on the top, which can be skimmed off for further processing. Eventually it ends up in your local grocery store aisle in powder form.

Different proteins have different structures, and this gives them different properties, which in turn determines whether they solidify into gelatin or creme brulee (or a yummy flan, for that matter). Gelatin ‘s structure is similar to DNA, except where DNA has two chains twisted together into a spiral, the proteins that make up gelatin have three chains of amino acids tightly bonded together. The only thing that breaks those bonds is energy. A lot of energy.

That’s where the boiling water comes in: it adds a great deal of energy, in the form of heat, sufficient to cause the three strands of amino acids in collagen to unwind. Adding cold water, and then putting the Jell-O into the refrigerator to cool, causes the chains to start bonding again.

Because it takes so long to cool, the amino acid chains become entangled (when stirred) and water gets into gaps between the chains. That’s why Jell-O wriggles so appealingly. It’s also why the “short-cut” method of adding ice so the gelatin will set more quickly, is never quite as firm as the Jell-O produced by the slow-set method. The various molecules cool so quickly that they can’t self-organize in the most efficient and strongest bonds possible; instead, only a loose matrix forms. If the energy levels of the requisite molecules are lowered more gradually, as in the slow-setting method, they have more time to align properly, forming a much denser lattice structure, trapping the mixture of sugar, pigments and water in between the strands of amino acids.

Fans of Jell-O shots, take note: adding alcohol to the starting mixuture means it will take that much longer to gel, as one intrepid amateur scientist deduced in a fun experiment a few years ago. He set out to determine the highest possible concentration of alcohol (using 80% proof vodka) a given Jell-O shot could contain while still maintaining “structural integrity.”

See, alcohol has a lower freezing point than water. That’s why legend has it that the cook aboard the doomed Titanic managed to survive being plunged into icy ocean waters: he’d been drinking heavily, and all that extra blood in his alcohol kept him from freezing to death before he could be rescued. So it stands to reason that adding more and more alcohol to Jell-O shots would make it harder and harder for the substance to gel. (BTW, the same dude also experimented with what happens when you try to light a Jell-O shot on fire. I’ll bet he’s a blast at parties.)

Jell-O’s unique consistency — hovering somewhere between solid and liquid — and its mold-ability make it an intriguing potential medium for, say, artists. Back in 2006, the San Francisco Exploratorium marked the 100th anniversary of the great 1906 earthquake that laid waste to that great city with a special one-day art installation by local artist Liz Hickok.

She crafted a scale model of the entire city out of multi-colored Jell-O: everything from City Hall to the Golden Gate Bridge. (She’s also continued to work with Jell-O versions of San Francisco, and also recreated a model Scottsdale, Arizona, in Jell-O.)

Hickok relied on satellite images to design scaled-down molds, which she used to cast the buildings in various flavors of Jell-O. The entire jiggling array was mounted on a slab of plexiglass and then placed on a vibrating table to demonstrate to the gathered museum visitors exactly how those violent earthquake tremors can affect buildings. Specifically, it demonstrates “liquefaction,” which is what happens when the earthquake pressurizes the water in soil underneath a building. Liquefaction is responsible for much of the structural devastation wrought by earthquakes.

So Jell-O is good, jiggly fun, even if it can’t compete with creme brulee on the haute cuisine front. But it’s also good science. Scientists have found that adding stem cells — which can cure rats of spinal cord injuries, if not humans — to spinal implants made of hydrogels can help patients with old injuries regain a certain degree of function. The gels are basically polymers whose properties are very similar to those of Jell-O, resembling the soft tissue that surrounds the human spinal cord as it develops in the womb. The hydrogel fills the spaces in the injured areas, creating a kind of scaffolding that new cells can grow around, building a bridge of sorts to repair the damage.

Let’s see creme brulee do that.

Photo credit: “Alamo Square” by Liz Hickok (Source)

The twist: the design mimics elements of the flight path typical of NASA”s infamous “vomit comet” to create a simulation of microgravity lasting a full nine seconds. (Blame the folks at io9 for getting her all worked up with their post about it.) According to Popular Science:

“To create that illusion, a linear induction motor system would speed coasters up the track with unprecedented precision. As the coaster approached a top speed of more than 100 mph, it would suddenly and ever so slightly decelerate-just enough to throw the passengers up from their seats, like stones from a catapult-and then quickly adjust its speed to fly in formation with and around the passengers. (The ride’s calculations would correspond to the unique heft of any particular group.)”

“As the coaster reached the top of the track and began to drop back down, the computer system would continue to match its speed to that of the falling passengers, extending the sensation of weightlessness for several additional seconds, and finally rapidly decelerate to a stop back at the base station.“

Jen-Luc will be pinching those virtual pennies for a good long while, alas, because the exhilaration comes with a hefty price tag: it should cost around $50 million to build the zero gravity coaster, and the company will need to recoup those costs in its tickets. The Vomit Comet fares run around $3500, and those are under-written by NASA. I believe she is hoping that Ashton Kutcher — the latest celebrity to book passage on Virgin Galactic — will become enamored of her pixelated charms and treat her to the experience on their memorable first date. (Jen-Luc is a tad bit delusional at times.)

Extreme coasters are all the rage these days. Japan, for instance, boasts the world’s steepest roller coaster, which debuted last year. The Takabisha accelerates to 100 mph, has a 43-meter drop and a 121-degree freefall. It lasts 112 seconds and fares are $12.50, so that’s quite a bargain compared to the zero gravity version.

And earlier this month, TIME reported on a brand-new coaster called The Swarm at London’s Thorpe Park, a winged ride in which riders’ arms and legs dangle freely, and featuring an inverted drop of 127 feet. Most noteworthy: the ride is purportedly so gut-wrenching that even hardened former RAF fighter pilots blanched a bit.“ You really do feel as if you are going to crash into the structures,” one such former pilot admitted. Oh, and the ride tore a few crash test dummies to pieces during testing. Good times.

But nothing’s quite so extreme as a  fascinating project undertaken by the fine folks at Design Interactions Research, an organization that “focuses on exploring interactions between people, science and technology on many different levels.” This particular “interaction” is the brainchild of Julijonas Urbonas, a designer, artist, engineer and PhD student specializing in the “gravitational aesthetics” as played out in “gravitational theater.” He is also managing director of a Lithuanian amusement part, so it’s only natural that his project is called the Euthenasia Coaster. As he describes it:

“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death.”

“Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in aeronautics/space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasing, elegant and meaningful. Celebrating the limits of the human body, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen,former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once said that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.”

That’s right: A Killer Coaster! And if you’re wondering whether an amusement park ride could really be all that lethal — yes, it can, depending on the coaster’s design, and Urbanos has deliberately designed his coaster to maximize the kinds of adverse physical effects other coaster designers seek to minimize. (Discovery has a terrific Website where you can try your hand at designing your own coaster.)

It’s not just about speed; you need a smooth ride. Early roller coasters moved very slowly compared to modern scream machines, but even at slow speeds, a simple loop-the-loop can cause whiplash and other neck and back injuries. In 1885, the Flip-Flap debuted with a 25-foot diameter loop-the-loop, but it closed in 1903 because of all the injuries suffered by passengers because of the sharp, jerking motions. There’s a reason modern looping coaster designs incorporate a teardrop shape; it minimizes the forces that cause such havoc with the human body.

Speed can certainly be a factor, as in the infamous encounter in 1999 between male model Fabio and a wild goose. Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia, brought in Fabio for the opening of the park’s new roller coaster, Apollo’s Chariot — he of the flowing blond locks, chiseled jaw and impeccably sculpted torso, best known for posing in strategically ripped shirts on the covers of mass-market romance novels, and for hawking butter substitutes on TV. And Fabio was game. But halfway through the initial 210-foot drop, a wild goose flew into the coaster’s path and smashed into Fabio’s face. The impact gashed the model’s nose and killed the goose, whose broken body was later fished out of a nearby river. Fabio ended the ride with his face covered in blood.

Blame those nasty “G forces”:  a unit for measuring acceleration in terms of gravity that tells you how much force we are actually feeling. A roller coaster is constantly accelerating — forward and backward, up and down, side to side — so you get variations in the strength of gravity’s pull. For example, 1G is the force of Earth’s gravity: what the rider feels when the car is stationary or moving at a constant speed. Acceleration changes the equation. At 4 Gs, for example, a rider will experience a force equal to four times his weight.

Poor Fabio endured a lot of ridicule after his encounter with the kamikaze goose; people were amused that the 6’3”, 220-pound hunk fared so poorly against a 22-pound waterfowl. But assuming the collision lasted a hundredth of a second, and the coaster was traveling at a speed of about 70 MPH, Fabio would have absorbed the impact equivalent of a hard tackle by football hall-of-famer Mean Joe Green, delivered with a force equivalent to a solid punch from heavyweight champ Mike Tyson. Yet not one reporter ever said, “That Fabio, he can really take a punch!”

So yeah: your roller coaster has a dark side: accidents and injuries do happen, and coaster-related (human) deaths number between two and four per year. This might seem insignificant; fatalities occur for about one in 450 million riders. But the newest coasters can reach top speeds of 100 MPH with G force ratings as high as 6.5.

For comparison, astronauts typically experience 4 Gs while traveling up to 17,440 MPH on liftoff, and NASCAR drivers have reported feeling dizzy after experiencing 5 Gs. Coaster designers counter this by pointing out that astronauts and NASCAR racers experience sustained G forces; roller coaster riders are typically only exposed to high G forces for one second or less.

Of course, one can’t completely discount human stupidity, either. Some of the most spectacular accidents occur because riders ignore basic safety precautions. Removing the safety harness can chuck a rider out of the car and send him flying through the air at high speeds. In 1996, at Six Flags Great America, a man wandered into a restricted track area to retrieve his wife’s hat, which had blown off in the high winds. A rider on the Top Gun suspension coaster kicked him in the head, killing the man instantly. The rider suffered a broken leg.

But the Euthanasia Coaster seems to focus on the more insidious kinds of physical effects; some doctors believe that the sharp jerks and jostles of high-speed rides could have the same brain-battering effects as professional football. The strong G forces can cause headaches, nausea and dizziness – possibly harmless, but also symptoms of mild concussion – simply because the body doesn’t have sufficient time to adapt to the constantly changing environment.

The effect can be similar to what happens to the brain during a car accident, or when a person is violently shaken. As the head whips sharply back and forth, the brain can pull away from one side of the skull and smash into the other side with sufficient force to rupture tiny blood vessels. The trickling blood accumulates in the small space between the brain and the skull, and the resulting pressure can lead to permanent brain damage or death if left untreated. In the summer of 2001 alone, three women suffered fatal brain injuries on roller coasters in California, although two of those victims had pre-existing aneurisms – a weak spot on a blood vessel in their brains – which ruptured during the ride.

None of these dangers are likely to dissuade any diehard coaster fans; that’s just another part of the thrill. But take it from Fabio: a roller coaster can definitely hurt you. And the Euthanasia Coaster literally wants to kill you. At least first, it will give you the ride of your life.

Images:

(top) Credit: Nick Kaloterakis. Via Popular Science.

(middle) Design for “Euthanasia Coaster” by Julijonas Urbonas.

(bottom) “Inside the Ride”: Rendering of zero gravity coaster. Credit: Greg Maxson. Source: BRC Imagination Arts. Also via Popular Science.

Post partially adapted from archived blog.

Several years ago, Fisher started out with rugged handheld computers and a few GPS receivers to map the recently-discovered city Sacapu Angamuco in western Mexico, occupied from about 1,000 to 1,350 CE. The Purepechan or Tarascan people had proven more difficult to pinpoint archeologically than had their contemporaries and rivals, the Aztecs. But initial data gathering and geo-referencing allowed Fisher to identify the city at an important moment on the crux of empire, and to do so in a fraction of the time it would have taken with tape measures and grid-plotting….

Last year, LiDAR enabled Fisher to create a full-fledged picture of the important Mesoamerican capital in greater detail. This included the discovery of several pyramids, ceremonial complexes and thousands of residences and other buildings that no one knew existed in the city.

Hopkins’ piece inspired Jen-Luc Piquant to dust off an older blog post from 2007, suitably edited and updated for 2012. First things first:  LIDAR is an optical remote sensing technology that exploits the same basic principle as radar and sonar — sending out pulses that bounce off objects and analyzing the returning signals to determine an object’s distance from the source — except it uses light wave pulses instead of radio waves. (Yes, I know, radio waves are technically just another form of electromagnetic radiation; in this instance, “light” refers to the visible and near-infrared frequencies in the spectrum.) It’s not so much a replacement technology, as a complementary one — just one more tool in our growing arsenal for remote sensing and mapping.

A LIDAR instrument transmits pulses of light to a target, and the parts of the spectra that are not absorbed by the target are reflected back (known as backscatter) to the system, which then are detected, stored and analyzed. It’s the changes in the properties of the light when it scatters back that enable scientists to measure specific properties of the target.

Bats use ultrasonic pulses to hunt for their prey, emitting a series of pulses that become more frequent the closer it gets to its target, climaxing in a kind of “feeding buzz” as it locks in for the kill. Similarly, the more frequent the light pulses emitted in a LIDAR system, the more information is gathered, and the more accurately a target area can be mapped. For airborne topographical mapping, as many as 33,000 laser pulses can be transmitted every second.

LIDAR has been around for quite a long time, having been invented shortly after the first lasers appeared in 1958. But the technology was a bit ahead of its time, and languished for several decades until a whole bunch of other enabling technologies emerged. Early lasers were too expensive, frankly, and too heavy, too big, and required too much power, to make them practical for airborne applications.

When the solid-state diode pumped laser emerged, that changed: they were cheap, rugged, and compact, with comparably low power requirements. Computing technology also needed to advance to the point where it was fast enough, and cheap enough, to perform the kind of advanced data analysis required by a LIDAR system.

Most notably, early LIDAR systems could make accurate measurements in the centimeter range, but only for lasers fixed on the ground. This strictly limited its useful deployment, since once anyone placed a laser on a moving platform, all bets were off. Then came the Global Positioning System (GPS), and suddenly it became perfectly feasible to figure out exactly where a moving object might be in relation to a ground-based coordinate system. And LIDAR was finally dusted off and brought into the marketplace.

For remote sensing applications, the LIDAR system is mounted onto an aircraft equipped with a GPS receiver (de rigeur these days in just about any vehicle) to track its exact location and altitude. It also needs a high-accuracy inertial measurement unit (IMU) to track the pitch and roll of the airplane so that movement can be accounted for in the final analysis.

Basic physics tells us that objects spinning at a very high rate tend to maintain their relative position in space, so an IMU incorporates several spinning gyroscopes. By measuring the angle of tilt as each spins a spherical mass within a gimbal (or cage), and coupling that with an accelerometer to keep track of shifts in velocity, the system can tell us how far, how fast and in what direction a target is moving relative to a given starting point. Usually, all the data collected from the various instruments, when combined, can give an elevation that is accurate to within 6 inches.

Generally speaking, we can usually only image a feature or object roughly the same size as the wavelength of the EM radiation being used, or larger. Radio waves used in typical radar systems are great at detecting things like metallic objects — which is why they’re so useful for military and aviation applications — but rocks or raindrops might not produce much in the way of detectable reflections at all, making them well nigh invisible to radar.

But because the wavelengths used are much shorter than radio waves, LIDAR systems are much better at detecting very small objects, like particles in the atmosphere. In fact, they are already used to study atmospheric conditions, notably the densities of various particles, not to mention all kinds of emerging applications in geology, seismology, and even archeology. Also, lasers use a very narrow beam, so LIDAR allows for mapping of physical features with much higher resolution than conventional radar. It can have a “footprint” of less than 1 meter, making it possible to map the floor underneath a forest canopy, or the urban canyons between tall buildings.

In England, Cambridge University is collaborating with the UK Environment Agency in the use of LIDAR imaging to produce terrain maps for large swathes of the countryside. It started out as a way of assessing flood risks, but then an organization called English Heritage contracted with the EA to conduct a LIDAR survey of Stonehenge — one of the most studied landscapes in all of Europe, and a certified World Heritage Site. See the nifty video fly-through LIDAR of Stonehenge below, based on LIDAR data. How cool is that? It turns out that LIDAR is terrific for recording terrestrial features that have been leveled by many years of plowing: the WHS survey revealed several previously unrecorded banks in and around the Stonehenge site.

There’s more than one kind of LIDAR system, each suited to a specific kind of application. If you just want to measure the distance from your instrument to a solid target, range-finder LIDAR should suit your purposes just fine. If it’s a moving target, and you want to figure out how fast it’s moving, you’ll probably want to use Doppler LIDAR, which — as its name clearly implies — relies on the Doppler shift effect  to determine an object’s velocity.

If you’re a meteorologist interested in measuring the specific concentrations of chemicals and such in the atmosphere — ozone, water vapor, and pollutants — or if you want to map a shallow river bed underwater, you’re better off using differential absorption LIDAR. Underwater imaging in particular can be difficult using infrared  and near-infrared preferred for terrestrial mapping, since water absorbs those wavelengths; only the blue-green end of the visible spectrum can penetrate water, for the most part.

Small wonder so many applications have emerged in the past decade for LIDAR systems. In geology and seismology, they’re used to detect faults — most famously, to locate the fault in Seattle, Washington — and to measure the plumes of ash that  Mount St. Helen’s in Oregon occasionally burps out — an indication of whether its internal distress is reaching a critical eruption point. Airborne LIDAR is used to monitor glacial melting and other coastal changes, while in forestry, LIDAR is used to study canopy heights and measure biomass, not to mention making the surveying process that much faster.

LIDAR has been used for search and rescue, too, most notably in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For several days after the World Trade Center fell, a small plane made several passes over Ground Zero in Manhattan (and also over the damaged Pentagon in Washington, DC) taking LIDAR readings of the debris — courtesy of a company called EarthData. The company used the collected data to produce topographical images of the sites. This in turn helped rescue workers navigate the often-treacherous terrain by identifying unstable areas likely to shift or collapse.

The maps also enabled building and utility workers to locate foundation-support structures, elevator shafts, basement storage areas, and so forth. As workers moved deeper into the WTC’s basement wreckage, LIDAR mapping showed where the integrity of the underground walls might have been compromised, thus making those areas more at risk of flooding. The maps were even able to measure the volume of the debris and how much reach the cranes would need to efficiently remove it.

LIDAR isn’t just about mapping positions and elevations; it’s also about integrating other aspects of feature recognition to make map production ever more automated. Several years ago, scientists from Sweden and Italy teamed up to use LIDAR to image the various types of stone used in the construction of Lund Cathedral. Located in Sweden, the cathedral is an impressive 12-century edifice that ranks as the largest Romanesque building in northern Europe. (Whether you’re impressed probably depends on your fondness for the Romanesque period.) Not only could they “see” the differences between the stone used, but they could also tell, from a distance, which of the walls had moss and lichen growing on them.

As intensity recording is incorporated into LIDAR systems, scientists should be able to improve even further on this type of analysis. Intensity recording not only measures the distance between the LIDAR and the target, but it can determine the features of a landscape based on the strength of returning signals. That’s because every reflective surface will absorb some wavelengths and reflect others. A concrete block, for instance, reflects almost every wavelength and absorbs very little, so the returning signal is very strong. Leafy vegetation, however, absorbs quite a bit more of the light, and hence returns a weaker signal. These data can also be turned into a visual image.

So light and lasers are an increasingly important tool in archaeological mapping. And the innovations just keep coming. A 2007 article in the San Francisco Chronicle profiled a retired civil engineer named Ben Kacyra, who invented “a camera-like device that uses lasers to scan three-dimensional objects — such as archaeological ruins — to create digital blueprints accurate to within a few millimeters.”

At the heart of his device is a laser that emits light with sufficient power to bounce off a distant object and return to a sensor, capable of timing the intervals between signal and response. In this way, “the laser maps the surface of objects by taking millions of measurements at different angles.”

Kacyra’s system — which he sold to Swiss company Leica Geosystems in 2001 — has been used to study pre-Incan Peruvian ruins, the buried Roman city of Pompeii, and the cliff dwellings of the extinct Anasazi people in southwest Colorado. And once these digital blueprints are created and stored, it becomes so much easier to recreate portions of those sites and edifices in a virtual framework — perhaps, one day, in Second Life.

Kacyra has already created a small reproduction of an ancient frieze that he scanned, using his mapping tool. As the Chronicle article put it, “Think of the archaeological equivalent of a reprint of a famous painting, a chance to hold a piece of history.” Indeed. There lies the future of LIDAR.

Images:

(top) Three images illustrating three ways scientists can visualize LiDAR information. The top image is unfiltered LiDAR feedback, the second is filtered to show ground surface and prehistoric features, and the last is filtered even more to show ancient structures that remain. Credit: Chris Fisher. Source.

(middle) LIDAR images of ground zero rendered Sept. 27, 2001 from data collected by NOAA flights. Credit: NOAA/U.S. Army JPSD.

(bottom) Laser scan of a temple in the grand plaza of Tikal, an ancient Mayan city in Guatemala, courtesy of Kacyra Family Foundation. Source.

As of this school year, the physical education department is formally conferring pirate status on students, printing certificates on faux parchment with diploma-esque calligraphy. Each paper, authorized by the “swashbucklin’ ’’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology, certifies that the named “salty dog’’ is entitled to a Pirate Certificate “with all its privileges and obligations thereof.’’

Jen-Luc has a new goal in life: to be deemed an official “salty dog” by MIT (although a course at arch-rival Caltech would be closer). She might even be willing to get up at 8 AM for the requisite classes. As The Mary Sue describes it: “They use actual weapons for archery and pistol shooting, and then they go sailing on the Charles River. In the not-at-all-tropical waters of New England. Then again, it’s a small price to pay to become an actual bloody pirate at MIT.”

We have a deep and abiding love of pirates here at the cocktail party (almost as deep as our love for vampires and zombies). It just so happens that I explored the science of pirates way back in 2006/2007, mainly as an excuse to enthuse over an amusing comic novel I’d just read…. [NOTE: Spoilers to follow!]

What is it about pirates that holds such universal appeal? Jen-Luc maintains its all about “the look” — swashbuckling boots, colorful jacket and bandanna, a jaunty eye patch. I would make the case that it’s the salty pirate speech. Who can resist to urge to liven up a humdrum conversation with a bit of “Arrgh! Avast, ye mateys!”?

British comedic author Gideon DeFoe tackles this very issue in the opening chapter of his most excellent book (out for a few years now, and well worth reading), Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists. (Squee! It’s been optioned as an animated claymation feature by Aardman Animations!)

The pirates in question, those scurvy knaves, are lolling about the deck of their ship, debating the best thing about being a pirate. One says the looting, another marooning, still another sings the praises of pirate grog, and a fourth insists it’s the Spanish Main. A brawl inevitably develops, cut short by the appearance of the Pirate Captain, who settles the dispute by declaring that the best part of being a pirate is… the sea shanties.

This might be a good place to point out that the Pirate Captain is not the brightest bulb in the Yuletide tree, and that pirates are not known for their sophisticated musical tastes.

DeFoe’s book, however, is bloody brilliant. Sure, it has a silly premise: the pirates mistakenly loot the H.M.S. Beagle — on its second voyage, to the Galapagos Islands, circa 1831 — believing it to be carrying gold rather than exotic natural specimens. (Note that Jen-Luc has adopted a cute little lizard rather than the customary parrot, in keeping with the Galapagos theme.) They sink the ship, and feel kinda bad about it. So they agree to transport Charles Darwin, Captain Robert FitzRoy, and Mister Bobo (Darwin’s trained “Man-Panzee”) back to Victorian London.

Like I said, a silly premise. But DeFoe includes fascinating factual tidbits in the footnotes, so he’s no slouch when it comes to history, scientific or otherwise. According to one footnote, Darwin memorably described the Beagle voyage in a letter as being “one continual puke.” There is also a footnoted mention of John Venn (born in 1834, a few years after the book’s events supposedly took place), a British logician and philosopher best known for introducing “Venn diagrams” around 1881. It’s nice to see such a fine meshing of silliness with snippets of serious science, even if the price is an occasional anachronism. It’s all in the name of good clean fun.

Did I mention there’s a feisty damsel in distress named Jennifer, who ends up joining the pirate crew? Really, what’s not to love in such a book?

In the course of their adventure, the pirates crash London’s Royal Society, donning pens, rulers and white lab coats to disguise themselves as scientists. The pirates show an uncanny knack for engaging in scientific discourse, “nodding politely and saying ‘Really?’ a lot as they listened to [the scientists] drone on about their latest inventions and discoveries.”

Sounds like the average scientific press conference, doesn’t it? Personally, I think the technical sessions at meetings would be livened signficantly if the speakers were clad in Pirate garb. They should also be armed with cutlasses so they could — as the Pirate Captain is wont to do — use said weapons to run through any especially obstrepterous colleagues in the assembly.

A bit of the science behind nautical navigation is to be expected, of course. The Pirate Captain’s cabin is equipped not just with the usual nautical maps and charts, but also an astrolabe. Astrolabes are very ancient instruments — possibly dating as far back as the Second Century, B.C. — for determining the time and position of the stars in the sky. They were mostly used in astronomical studies, not for navigation, but there was a mariner’s astrolabe, a simple ring marked in degrees for measuring celestial altitudes.

In DeFoe’s book, the Captain likes to fiddle with his astrolabe for show, pretending he can carry out complex calculations in the midst of casual conversation, but he isn’t entirely sure of the difference between an astrolabe and a sextant. The sextant wasn’t invented until the 18th century, and quickly displaced the mariner’s astrolabe for navigational purposes because it was much more precise.

A sextant measures the angle of elevation of a celestial object above the horizon. Using this angle, combined with the time of measurement, enables the navigator to calculate a precise position line on a nautical chart. For example, a sextant could be used to sight the sun at high noon in order to determine one’s latitude. Hold the thing horizontally, and you can measure the angle between any two objects: say, a couple of lighthouses, giant Galapagos sea turtles, or mermaids lazily sunning themselves on conveniently located boulders.

There’s also mention of the famous Beaufort wind force scale, a 19th century means of empirically describing wind intensity based on observed sea conditions. It was the brainchild of Sir Francis Beaufort, a British naval officer and friend of Darwin who sought to remove the subjective measures for windy weather observations at sea by describing wind conditions according to the effect on the sails of a man of war, then the main ship of the Royal Navy.

The original Beaufort scale ranged from 0 to 12 (later extended to 16), and its descriptions ranged from “just sufficient to give steerage” to “that which no canvas can withstand.” As the albino pirate correctly points out, a Beaufort scale ranking of 6 would be a “strong breeze,” while 8 would indicate a “fresh gale” — or, per the Pirate Captain, “that which will make a pirate’s trousers billow about so it looks like he has fat legs.”

(Hurricanes, in case you’re interested, begin at 12 on the Beaufort scale, which corresponds to a Category 1 hurricane on the modern Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. Even as far back as 1712, the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico were beset by hurricanes. That year, according to DeFoe’s informative footnote, a single storm destroyed some 38 ships moored in Port Royal’s harbor.)

Beaufort isn’t the only historical personage to make a cameo appearance in DeFoe’s novel. FitzRoy really did captain the Beagle and select Darwin as the onboard naturalist, despite purportedly not liking the shape of Darwin’s nose. (Hey, that could get really irritating on a long sea voyage, particularly on a tiny ship like the Beagle, which was a mere 90 feet long.) He was an amateur meteorologist, eventually heading the British Meteorological Department and pioneering the printing of a daily weather forecast in newspapers. Alas, the unfortunate FitzRoy did indeed commit suicide in 1865 by slitting his own throat, ostensibly in a fit of depression over not being selected as Chief Naval Officer in the Marine Department.

While crashing the Royal Society, the pirates encounter James Glaisher, an English meteorologist who tells them of his passion for “lighter-than-air” ships, a.k.a. “dirigibles.” The concept dates back to 18th century France, when the Mongolfier brothers (paper makers by trade) noticed that smoke from a fire built under a paper bag would cause the bag to rise into the air.

The science behind this is simple: the hot air inside expanded, and thus weighed less, by volume, than the surrounding air. The Mongolfiers built the first hot-air balloons around 1782. Another Frenchman, Henri Giffard, built the first dirigible, inflated with hydrogen, a gas that is naturally lighter than air at normal temperatures. Alas, as the 1937 Hindenburg disaster revealed, hydrogen is also highly flammable; modern airships use helium, an “unburnable” gas.

Glaisher was indeed a pioneering balloonist, making numerous ascents between 1862 and 1866 to measure the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere at the highest possible levels. On one such flight, he and his pilot, Henry Coxwell, set a world record of 29,000 feet, nearly losing their lives in the process.

Glaisher passed out from the lack of oxygen, while Coxwell’s hands were so stiff with cold he could barely manage to free a tangled valve and thereby halt their ascent to even higher (and more deadly) altitudes. They still hold a few world records in this area.

As the fictional Glaisher explains to DeFoe’s assembled pirates, “What is science for? Pushing back frontiers! The thrill of discovery! Advancing the sum total of human knowledge and endeavour! And looking down ladies’ tops!”

Perhaps my favorite scene is when the Pirate Captain chases a villainous Bishop through London’s Natural History Museum. The latter flings armloads of trilobites culled from the display cases at him, and when the chase moves to the Mineral Room, both men resort to projectiles of various mineral elements, choosing them according to atomic weight. For example, the Bishop hurls a chunk of iron (atomic weight: 55.85), and the Pirate Captain counters with a chunk of nickel (atomic weight: 58.69).

Really, how many authors who write silly books about pirates can rattle off the atomic number (44) and atomic weight (101.07) of a rare transition metal like ruthenium? (Jen-Luc pipes in with the pointless information that trace amounts of ruthenium are often added to titanium to improve its corrosion resistance.) Or osmium — atomic weight: 190.2 — for that matter?

A few winks at Darwin’s expense are inevitable. To make room for Darwin and his crew on the pirate ship, the Pirate Captain makes a few crew members walk the plank. When Darwin objects to the brutality, the Pirate Captain assures him that only “fools and lubbers” would be sacrificed, concluding, “It’s for the good of the species.” And upon arriving in London, and visiting the Royal Society, the Pirate Captain nobly puts his gift of showmanship to work on Darwin’s behalf, assuring the young naturalist that good science isn’t enough: “You need a gimmick! A bit of controversy! It’s all about the presentation.”

To that end, the Pirate Captain stages a WWF-style showdown between science — represented in the novel by Darwin’s Man-Panzee, Mister Bobo — and religion, personified by the “Holy Ghost” (actually a pirate named Scurvy Jake in disguise). “The science you are doing is too shocking by half!” the Holy Ghost declares with righteous indignation. “I will lay the smackdown on your wicked ways!” Then Mister Bobo hits him over the head with a folding chair, knocking him out cold, and is declared the victor.

Ultimately, Darwin becomes the toast of London and quite a favorite with the ladies, while Mister Bobo gets featured on the cover of Nature. See? Science always triumphs in the end. Especially with the help of pirates.

Image credits: (top) First image from Aardman Animation’s claymation version of Pirates! An Adventure with Scientists. Source. (center) Design for the H.M.S. Beagle. Source: The Darwin Project. (bottom) Artist’s rendering of James Glaisher’s near-fatal balloon flight on Sept 5, 1862. Source.

And just this week, a Japanese scientist from the Nara Medical University announced that he has created violin strings out of spider silk. Shigeyoshi Osaki has been looking into spider silk for years, particularly in coming up with good ways to extract the stuff from spiders more efficiently. He made use of that knowledge to collect silk specimens from 300 captive female Nephia maculata spiders. Then he spun those filaments together into dense strings, carefully tailoring their lengths to create the musical notes A,D and G.

Ah, but what good are violin strings without a violin? Osaki then tested his spider silk violin strings on both a common violin frame, and one of Stradivari’s famous instruments, the 1720 “Gillot” violin. He called professional violinists to rate their sound quality. They concluded the spider silk strings had the “fittest timbre.” (You can listen to a sound sample here.) Not only that, says Osaki, but the strings have higher elastic limit strength, and thus are easier to tune. Osaki’s findings will appear in a forthcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.

All of which has inspired me to dig up an older archival post from 2006 on the many wonders of spider silk, suitably adapted and updated for 2012:

Scientists have known for ages that spider silk (especially the dragline silk spun by the golden orb-weaving spider, a.k.a., Nephila clavipes) is pretty amazing stuff. It’s incredibly strong — ounce for ounce, it’s stronger than steel or Kevlar, although not as strong as fibers spun from carbon nanotubes. And it’s waterproof, and incredibly stretchy, able to stretch 30-40% before it breaks, compared to 8% for steel fibers and around 20% for nylon fibers. But who knew — other than perhaps Spiderman — that it also had antimicrobial, blood-clotting, and other wound-healing properties?

Well, one person who suspected as much was George Emery Goodfellow, a 19th century physician in Tombstone, Arizona, who witnessed a pistol duel between a couple of cowboys in 1881. He examined the body of the unfortunate loser, whose chest had been pierced by two bullets. But there wasn’t a single drop of blood oozing from either bullet hole.

There was, however, a silk handkerchief protruding from the chest wounds, and when he pulled it out, there was a bullet embedded in it. The bullet went through the other clothes, flesh and bone, but somehow couldn’t make it through the silk fabric.

Intrigued, Goodfellow starting documenting other cases of silk garments that could stop speeding bullets, collected in an essay entitled, “Notes on the Impenetrability of Silk to Bullets.” In one memorable instance, a man wore a silk bandanna around his neck which kept a bullet from piercing the carotid artery.

Research on these more puzzling medical properties has been infrequent at best; mostly, scientists have focused on explicating the tensile strength and elasticity of spider silk. Here’s what we know so far. Thanks to special glands located in the abdomen, spiders secrete a fluid protein containing lots of fibers, similar in structure to keratin, the protein found in hair and horns. The silk hardens (“polymerizes”) as it oozes; scientists aren’t entirely sure what activates this process. They have managed to identify the seven amino acids that make up the silk proteins: it’s primarily alanine and glycine, with lesser amounts of glutamine, leucine, arginine, tyrosine, and serine.

In terms of structure, spider silk is pretty intricate. There are rigid layers to hold the silk together, soft areas to keep it flexible, and within those soft areas, places that enable the silk to stretch. Want a few more specifics? Two alanine-rich proteins embedded in a jelly-like polymer make up the fiber, per NMR analysis of the structure. One of these proteins has a highly ordered structure, while the other has a less ordered structure, but both adhere to a glycine-rich polymer that makes up most (70%) of the material. It’s this weird blend of order and disorder that gives dragline spider silk its unique combination of strength and elasticity.

In fact, several years ago, a collaboration of scientists in Rennes, France, and Oxford, England determined that spider silk exhibits behavior similar to certain smart materials (e.g., the Ni-Ti alloy Nitinol) known as shape memory alloys. This property is what makes spider silk so resistant to twisting and swinging. It stabilizes the spider as it suspends itself, and also makes the insect less perceptible to predators.

Scientists care a great deal about refining their understanding of spider silk’s complex structure. Gain a sufficiently fine understanding of, and control over, said structure, and scientists would be able to make better artificial silk in the laboratory, with no need for the traditional labor-intensive (and expensive) method of “milking” spiders (essentially pulling out the threat from the spinners by hand). Some 1.3 million spider cocoons are needed to produce a mere kilogram of silk, which is why a lot of commercial-grade silk comes not from spiders, but silkworms, because they’re easily farmed; spiders aren’t community-oriented creatures and if you put two or more of them together in close quarters, eventually one will eat the other(s).

Making artificial spider silk has not been an easy process. Scientists have made great strides in recent years in terms of determining the fiber’s molecular structure and architecture, and even in sequencing the genes. Chemist Glenn Elion of Plant Cell technologies (Chatham, MA) and his colleagues have isolated the entire dragline silk gene sequence — some 22,000 base pairs in all. As of 2001, the sequences of silk from 14 species had been decoded, and in 2005, biologists at the University of California, Riverside, managed to determine the molecular structure of the gene for the protein used by female spiders to make their silken egg cases.

However, spinning the raw synthetic proteins into a usable thread is a bit more challenging. Spiders have ingeniously designed “spinnerets”: usually three pairs of spinners (small tubes connected to specific glands), each with its own function. These spinnerets enable spiders to apply sufficient physical force to the protein fluid to rearrange its molecular structure into silk. We lack similar effective instrumentation, although again, there has been some progress. A Canadian biotech company called Nexia managed to produce spider silk in two genetically altered goats named Webster and Pete, but failed to spin it into silken fibers by pressing the protein solution through small extrusion holes designed to simulate the spinnerets.

Randolph Lewis is a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie has had a bit more success. He managed to clone parts of genes found in dragline spider silk and implant them in E. coli bacteria. The E. coli then produced silk protein in a fluid solution, which he was able to “spin” into synthetic fibers by squeezing it through a very thin tube.

Scientists at the US Army Research, Development and Engineering Center in Natick, Massachusetts, adopted a similar gene-based approach to make their own genetically cloned polymer fibers. Ditto for Elion and a few of the chemists at DuPont, most notably biophysicist Kenn Gardner. They’ve been working out how, exactly, to mimic the way spiders adjust the properties of their silk, probably by expressing different genes in different glands — apparently, different genes produce proteins that contain differing amounts of crystalline material, which alters the silk thread’s structure in subtle, yet significant ways.

Naturally, scientists would like to be able to fine-tune the properties of synthetic spider silk in a similar fashion, tailoring it to specific applications. MIT researchers have made synthetic fibers that are both soft and stretchy, like spider silk, and are now adding nanoscale particles to the mix, designed to bind to very specific regions to reinforce the soft material and increase its strength. Eventually, the hope is this material can be used to make garments that don’t tear very easily. Weaving in other materials that absorb sweat and wick away moisture would open up even more applications, especially for he military, police, and emergency care workers.

Historically, spider silk has been used as fishing line by Polynesian fishermen, while certain New Guinea tribes used webs as water-repellent hats. During World War II they were used as hairs in measuring equipment, and Americans used threads from Black Widow spiders in their telescopic gun sights. Modern uses span an even broader application range, most notably the manufacture of wear-resistant shoes and clothing; stronger ropes, nets and parachutes.

Other future uses could include strong, tough paper that can’t be torn, ideal for banknotes, as well as bullet-proof vests for soldiers and policemen. And here’s an unexpected application area: scientists at the University of California, Riverside, are exploring ways to use threads of spider silk to make hollow optical fibers for ultrafast nanoscale optical circuits, or to boost the resolution of optical microscopes.

Medical applications haven’t received nearly as much attention, but spider silk (natural or synthetic, if scientists continue to progress in their ability to replicate its properties) could be used for tougher sutures, antibiotic bandages, artificial tendons and ligaments, and scaffolding support for weakened blood vessels. In fact, wrapping implants in spider silk might keep the body from rejecting them, since the substance doesn’t appear to provoke the usual immune response to foreign objects.

In short, spider silk is truly a wonder material. Violin strings and silk garments are just the beginning.

Image: Vincent de Groot, Wikimedia Commons.

“Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or ‘trace’) tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability… When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.”

Or, to put it more bluntly: “Cells that fire together, wire together.”

Hebb’s ideas have influenced many a modern neuroscientist, notably in the area of brain mapping.  To date, most brain mapping efforts have been on more of a macroscale: identifying which parts of the brain are affiliated with specific functions, for example, or staining single neurons to track them in the mass of brain tissue, or looking at thicker “wiring” that connects different parts of the brain. Ideally, neuroscientists would like to trace the actual “wiring” of the brain: the dendrites and axons that form the synaptic connections between neurons.

All the cool kids call this the “connectome.” So does MIT’s Sebastian Seung, — in fact, he has a new book out (his first) called Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are. Jen-Luc Piquant devoured it and pronounces it a terrific read. She now has Seung’s TED talk on a never-ending loop playing in her pixelated brain. Such a fangirl.

I heard Seung speak a few years ago at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and was thoroughly riveted; I wasn’t the least surprised when he was tapped for TED. He came to neuroscience by way of condensed matter physics theory, working on artificial neural networks (ANNs).

That early interest served as a natural segue into neuroscience, and he’s drawn on that expertise in his current research. His goal is nothing less than to transform the field of neuroanatomy into a “high throughput, data-rich field of science,” via the creation of automated systems that can take a sample of brain tissue as raw input and generate a complete circuit diagram as output.

This, says Seung, is “an image processing problem of unprecedented scale, because a sample of even modest dimensions yields a huge amount of data at nanoscale resolution.”  He’s not kidding: we’re talking terabytes and petabytes of data just to produce a wiring map of a fruit fly, never mind a human brain. Achieving the complete fruit fly “connectome” would constitute success beyond most people’s wildest dreams, and make it more likely that neuroscientists could achieve, in our lifetime, circuit diagrams for certain critical locations in the human brain: the hippocampus, for example, or the olfactory bulb and retina.

If you want to see the connectome in action, there’s a nifty online mini-movie on the Technology Review site. It’s a 3D animation of the detailed wiring map of part of the rabbit retina called the inner plexiform layer. That’s the little piece of neural tissue at the back of the eye that senses light and sends visual information to the brain. A single neurite appears first, shown in green, followed by a larger subset of neurites in multiple colors. The result is a veritable “brain forest” as the animation traces the “wires” through the dense brain tissue.

Even better: Seung graciously found time to chat with Jen-Luc Piquant (“Squee!”) about his new book, and why he believes the connectome may hold the key to the basis of personality, intelligence, memory, and maybe even mental disorders.

Jen-Luc: How, exactly, does a condensed matter physicist find his way into neuroscience?

Seung: When I was finishing my PhD I started thinking maybe the most interesting emergent properties are living systems. How do molecules come together to make living organisms, and how do neurons come together to make a smart brain? I built mathematical models of neural networks at Bell Labs for a number of years and I continued doing that when I went to MIT.

But by then I was growing a little disenchanted because we had to make so many assumptions in building those models. And new technologies were coming online that would in principle allow us to map the connections of neural networks, and potentially provide a much-needed constraint for our models.

Jen-Luc: Why is it so  important to study neurons and the connections between them?

Seung: There is a tradition of dividing the brain into regions and ascribing functions to them. But the regional approach can’t answer the question of why a brain region might work really well in some people and not well in others. We can’t explain intelligence and many mental disorders.  We can’t explain how a brain region changes when we learn something.  For that we need to further subdivide the regions of the neurons. Anybody who has studied physics would be familiar with that idea.  You learn a lot by dividing a piece of matter into atoms.

I believe the connectome is crucial to what we care about most: differences between people and change in ourselves. There is the joke “I quit smoking every day.”  That is about a change in neural activity.  I have made the motion and I put down the cigarette and some activity pattern has changed, but to quit smoking for a lifetime? That probably involves a change in the connectome.

Jen-Luc: What you’re really talking about is changing the Self. But isn’t that already a constantly emerging and evolving thing?

Seung: We need to distinguish between two notions of self.  There is the conscious self, the one that is always changing and constantly shifting, and then there is the stable self, the one that changes only with difficulty – the core self. We are really in the dark about that.

We know that the connectome has all these mechanisms for change.  In the book, I talk about the four R’s:  Reweighting, Reconnection, Rewiring and Regeneration.  But we don’t know exactly how those are involved in change – in learning a new skill, remembering something, recovering from an injury.  We are not really sure how those processes serve those changes to the self.

Jen-Luc: How might we go about learning that?

Seung: It is important for us to figure out what I call code breaking.  You can’t point to any single connection that is responsible for personal change.  Presumably it is some kind of pattern of connections.  Where memory is stored, there must be a pattern that is there and we have never been able to see patterns.  That is why the technology is so important.

Another question about the four R’s is, to what extent do they continue throughout adulthood? And the last question is, what artificial means can we use to promote them if we want more of them? I don’t think you can ever take a pill that would just change your behavior, but you might be able to take a pill that will enable you to better change yourself.

Jen-Luc: What excites you most in terms of future challenges?

Seung: Right now I am very excited about the potential to see a memory.  When we store memory, there is presumably some change in the connections of neurons.  Can you see what happens?  Can we see that actually happen inside the brain?  Memory seems intangible, but according to the hypothesis of neuroscientists, it is a material structure and we should be able to see it.

The second challenge is the possibility of seeing connectopathies – the hypothetical miswirings of the brain that are associated with mental disorders.  Those are the two challenges that I want to attack.  There are plenty of other challenges to attack, but those are the two that excite me the most.

Jen-Luc: There is evidence that we don’t actually retrieve a memory; it’s not stored in a file like in a computer. We rebuild them every single time, so a “memory” might be distributed across the entire brain.  Is that going to make it doubly hard to finally “see” a memory?

Seung:  Sure.  One of the problems is that we can’t view the entire brain.  We would have to do little pieces, and that means we need to have a good idea about where to look.  The cognitive neuroscientists who study the brain on a coarse scale have given us some candidate areas.  You might worry that we can’t capture all of the memories, but if memory is distributed than any portion of it already contains a memory.  I am not worried so much about that. I think that even part of the pattern will tell us something.

Jen-Luc:  You’re currently working on mapping a mouse retina.

Seung: Yes. We have this new site: Eyewire.org.  It is a citizen science project.  Our AI is not accurate enough to map the connectome by itself. We still need human intervention. So we have now created this website that allows anybody to do it.

We want to motivate them with the same motivation that drives scientists to participate in discovery.  This website allows people to learn about the retina and discover something about the retina at the same time.

There is a rhetorical question that the philosophers always ask: “Is the brain complex enough to understand itself?”  Maybe if we unite our billions of brains and cooperate with AI, we can do the job.

Jen-Luc:  Towards the end of your book, you tackle the inevitable question of the singularity, and the possibility of uploading an entire human brain.  How big is the current gap between what we can do now with digital avatars, and the actual uploading of human consciousness?

Seung:  In my book I define the quest: to deconstruct the brain.  It is the inverse of artificial intelligence, which seeks to construct an artificial brain.  To deconstruct an entire human brain,  you can calculate how long that will take by extrapolating Moore’s Law.  If progress is fundamentally computationally limited, then it will take, say, 40 years to get there.  Everybody wants us to then simulate the brain, once we have that.  I don’t know if that will be possible.  I do believe that we can learn a lot about ourselves by having that connectome. but just because we have the genome doesn’t mean we have a simulation of a cell.

People are obsessed with simulation because it is an old dream, but simulation is much less important these days.  In many ways the brain simulation people are out of touch with science.  They are more obsessed with science fiction. And simulation is a lot harder than people think.

It is arguable that the connectome gets you closer to simulating a brain than the genome to a cell. If you look at our current theories about how things like perception and memory work, they are pretty simple actually, but maybe those theories are wrong.  I don’t know what is going to come out of this. We are going to test all these theories that have accumulated over the past half century, but we don’t know what nature is going to give us when we look.  I think it is important to go in with hypotheses. But it is also important to go in with an open mind.

Book cover art: Christopher Niemann.

Connectome image (top): Gigandet X, Hagmann P, Kurant M, Cammoun L, Meuli R, et al. (2008) Estimating the Confidence Level of White Matter Connections Obtained with MRI Tractography. PLoS ONE 3(12): e4006. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004006

Image of retina (bottom): Aleksandar Zlateski and Sebastian Seung

Good Internet humor never really dies; it just languishes for awhile in the dusty archives until a new crop of browsers stumbles upon its cheeky goodness. Such is the case with Simon Dedeo’s “Physical Theories as Women” essay on the McSweeney’s Website, which keeps making the rounds of the science every few years. Far be it for us to take umbrage at the amusing characterizations of our gender contained therein. But I do think, in the interests of fair play, the women should have their own version while we’re having fun with the battle of the sexes.

Ergo, I offer today’s frivolous blog post: “Physical Theories as Men.” And I offer it with a disclaimer: Any similarity to actual events or persons, living or dead, is sheer coincidence, and greatly exaggerated for comic effect.

0. Newtonian gravity is that guy you had a crush on in high school. You never really dated, but you spent a lot of time together, and once you even made out in the science lab after school over a partially dissected fetal pig. It didn’t go well. Things were kinda awkward after that, but you remained friendly from a distance.

Or so you thought. Years later, you find out he told everyone you were a frigid lesbian — even though he was the one who wouldn’t go past second base because he “respected” you too much. To paraphrase Whistler, the helpful demon from Buffy (Season 2): “Newtonian gravity is like dating a nun. You’re never gonna get the good stuff.” You suspect he may have been gay.

1. Electrodynamics is your first real boyfriend, and all your friends swear he’s quite the catch: well-educated, ambitious, clean-cut, amusing, great chemistry, plus you love his mom. Alas, he is Mr. Traditional Family Values, and you are still going through your experimental “finding yourself” phase — frankly, you’re just not ready to settle down.

Sure, opposites attract and make the sparks fly, but there has to be some complementary areas, too. You think he cares too much about what other people think. Your electro-shock blue Mohawk and multiple body piercings pretty much take you out of the running for Long-Term Potential, given his conservatism and career ambitions. When your differences become too great, you chalk it up to life lessons learned and move on to greener pastures.

2. Special Relativity is the wild, free-thinking rebel intent on smashing all those outmoded “rules” that say he can’t go faster than the speed of light — preferably while listening to the dulcet tones of The Sex Pistols and Rage Against the Machine. He’s colorful, exciting and just a wee bit dangerous after the rather plodding predictability of Newtonian gravity and electrodynamics.

So you fall for the flash — at first. But after awhile, his inability to sit still wears thin. It seems the more he rushes about, the more constricted you feel, and your “dates” just seem to stretch on for eternity. The sex isn’t all that great, either, frankly: you’ve never been a size queen, but a girl’s still got standards, and length contraction has clearly taken its toll.

3. Quantum Mechanics is that weird, nutty counter-culture guy who’s always got his finger on the pulse of the Latest Thing, before it hits the mainstream and “sells out.” He just can’t commit — not to you, not to anything. Sometimes you’re not sure you even know who he is, because every time you try to study him closely, he changes.

Is he a particle or a wave? Aquarius, or Pisces (he swears he was born on the cusp)? Good guy or spherical bastard (or perhaps an asymmetrical asshole)? Gay or straight, or rabidly omni-sexual? You spend months, sometimes years, fretting over this romantic superposition of states. When the wave function finally collapses, it’s never in your favor. He makes you feel hopelessly mainstream.

4. General Relativity is the solid salt-of-the-earth type of guy that you know you should probably be crazy about — especially after that jerkwad quantum mechanics shattered your heart into a million pieces. You have a good time with him: he’s smart, orderly, disciplined, and can bend and warp with the flow when life gets too heavy. But there’s just no romantic spark there, and a dire lack of physical chemistry.  Face it: you’re not in love. It seems a cruel, cruel irony.

5. Quantum Field Theory is that scruffy wannabe Irish artist spending the summer in New York City mooching off various acquaintances and far-too-trusting females. He actually brags about being on the dole back in London. That should have been your first clue. But he’s cute, and smart, with a lilting Irish brogue, and makes you look at Rauschenberg with fresh appreciative eyes, although you still think Ellsworth Kelly is a crock. You decide he’s worth a tumble, because it’s been awhile, plus he assures you he’s going back home in a couple of days and you need never see him again.

Alas, he gets so drunk telling you all this, spinning his web of deceit, that when you finally get down to business, he literally passes out on top of you — in flagrante delicto. This, after you paid for all those drinks because he didn’t have any cash and his credit cards were maxed out to the limit. You console yourself by recalling that the same thing happens to Liv Tyler’s character in Stealing Beauty.

Two weeks later, you run into him at an art-house film festival with another girl in tow. He pretends not to know you. It’s not like you were all that into the guy, but your pride takes a bit of a beating. Quantum field theory is a cheap, lying bastard. And they’re saving a chair for him in Alcoholics Anonymous.

6. Analytical Classical Mechanics is the self-absorbed, older intellectual that you date because you’ve decided you’re tired of immature physical theories who refuse to grow up and take some responsibility. He’s a bit pretentious and likes to pontificate about science as a social construct. He’s also a snob: he listens only to classical music, and despises all popular culture (excepting the films of Ingmar Bergman). You know, the type that brags about not owning a TV whenever one of your pals mentions their favorite program.

This gets awfully tedious very quickly and you start to get snippy and irritable. Sensing your boredom, he dumps you first, condescendingly assuring you that “one day you’ll understand,” and get over the heartbreak. In fact, you feel liberated and celebrate with pitchers of margaritas and a marathon viewing of MacGuyver.

7. String Theory is the sensitive, complex emo guy with an impossibly brilliant mind and lots of emotional problems. In fact, he’s been in therapy practically since birth. He constantly complains that nobody understands him, and he’s right: sometimes it’s like he’s speaking an entirely different language. You’re fascinated because he’s got so many dimensional levels and seems to vibrate with a mysterious energy. Besides, you think you can help him overcome his intractable problems.

You are deluding yourself. His interest in your simplistic three-spatial-dimensioned presence wanes in record time, and he starts passively-aggressively acting out. You suspect he wants to break up with you but just doesn’t have the balls to say so. He denies this when you confront him, insisting you can “work things out,” but then you find out he’s been having a fling with Loop Quantum Gravity, after swearing he hates her GUTs.

8. And Cosmology? Well duh. That’s the guy you marry. Because you know he sees the Big Picture, and he’ll be in it for the long haul.

“A former student [physics major] got a tattoo of a cartoon atom on the back of one of his legs. He told me that the first day after he got it, he went to rugby practice, and was showing it to someone when one of the seniors on the team (also a physics major) walked by. The senior looked at it, and said, ‘Oh, please. The Bohr model?’ And walked off.”

Oh, snap! Guess that poor underclassman got told! And he must live with the shame of his naive physics knowledge on his skin permanently (barring modification or tattoo removal treatments). Welcome to Hipster Physics!

Seriously, though, this is not the first time a physicist has complained about the much-maligned Bohr model of the atom. It’s like a rite of passage, the day you learn that the eye-catching little diagram of a small nucleus orbited by electrons you see all around — from the logo of the US Atomic Energy Commission, to the scene changes in episodes of The Big Bang Theory — simply isn’t the most accurate model for the atom anymore among “serious” scientists (or science writers). And espousing it is grounds for mockery, usually in the form of polite snickers and chuckling condescension from those “in the know.”

Clearly I am not a hipster, because I love the Bohr model, and will staunchly defend its use — at least in popular physics books for general audiences, and introductory courses for undergraduates. Sure, it’s been superseded since Niels Bohr first proposed it in 1913, as our understanding of the quantum world has advanced. I’m not advocating its return to cutting-edge physics research. But when it comes to outreach, it’s the perfect entry-level model for atomic structure.

Let’s get into the Wayback machine and go back to the dawn of the 20th century, just after J.J. Thomson had discovered the electron, and proposed his “plum pudding” model of the atom (see below). Bear in mind that for centuries, physicists had fought the very idea of an atom, despite the fact that Democritus had been an “atomist” two thousand years earlier. (The Time Lord likes to point out that, in this respect, the chemists were way ahead of the physicists; they accepted the existence of the atom much earlier.)

Thomson initially called his mysterious little particles “corpuscles,” and suggested that they were the primary components of an atom: a collection of negatively charged “plums” immersed in a positively-charged “soup,” or “pudding.” But then, in 1909, Ernest Rutherford went and discovered the atomic nucleus via a classic scattering experiment involving gold foil. Such an effect (scattering of alpha particles) occurred because there was a hard, dense center to atomic structure.

Thomson’s plum pudding model was handily discarded, and in its stead, Rutherford proposed something more akin to the planets orbiting the sun in our solar system. The nucleus serves as a “sun” at the center, and is positively charged, while the electrons are “planets” and negatively charged, moving about the nucleus in circular orbits.

It was pretty close to the popular design we’re familiar with today, but it violated classical physics in a very important way: if the Rutherford model were correct, the electrons would emit radiation as they orbited, such that over time, the electrons would spiral inward and collapse into the nucleus. All atoms would be inherently unstable. Since they weren’t, obviously something else was going on.

Furthermore, the frequency of the radiation would increase as the electron spiraled inward, because the orbit would get smaller and the electron would move ever-faster. That just didn’t happen. And this model didn’t agree with electrical discharge experiments demonstrating that atoms only emit light (electromagnetic radiation) in discrete frequencies, leading to Max Planck proposing “quanta” in 1900, thereby launching a revolution in physics.

Phew! Clearly, Rutherford’s model needed to be brought in line with the nascent field of quantum mechanics before it could be truly viable. Enter a young Danish upstart named Niels Bohr, who’d come to Rutherford’s lab via a postdoc with Thomson after earning his PhD in physics from the University of Copenhagen. Bohr set about adapting Rutherford’s model to accommodate the need for discrete units of energy (the quanta).

The model he came up with is the one we know and love today (often termed the Rutherford-Bohr model), in which electrons move about the atomic nucleus in circular orbits, just as in Rutherford’s model. But those orbits have set discrete energies, and those energies are related to an orbit’s size: the lowest energy, or “ground state,” is associated with the smallest orbit. Whenever an electron changes speed or direction (according to the Bohr model), it emits radiation in the specific frequencies associated with particular orbitals.

Diss the Bohr model all you like — that innovation snagged its creator the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics. As Sheldon Cooper would say, “Bazinga!”

Yeah, okay, it’s not perfect. The biggest issue is that it violates the Uncertainty Principle (which wasn’t even formulated until 1927).  Remember, the principle states that you can’t correctly pinpoint both a particle’s position and momentum (energy) at the same time, and in the Bohr model, you’ve got electrons with both known orbits and well-defined radii.

(There’s also other shortcomings related to predictions about the spectra of larger atoms and the relative intensities of spectral lines, yadda, yadda, yadda, but we’re focusing on the most major objections for the sake of simplicity. John and Jane Q. Public are not lying awake at night quibbling over the Zeeman effect.)

And technically, the electrons don’t really “move” around the nucleus in orbits. Erwin Schroedinger (of the famous cat paradox) was the one who proved that electrons are really waves (although they show up as particles when you perform an experiment to determine its position), and those waves are stationary.

Sure, you can check to see where an electron is, but each time you do, it will show up in a different position — not because it’s moving, but because of the superposition of states. The electron doesn’t have a fixed position until you look at it and the wave function collapses. (However, if you make a ton of measurements and plot the various positions of the electron, eventually you’ll get a ghostly orbit-like pattern such as the one depicted above.)

That’s why Schroedinger’s atomic model dispenses with orbits in favor of energy levels, which is what physicists really care about anyway. It still shares some similar concepts with the Bohr model. For instance, if an atom heats up (i.e., is energized), its electrons move to higher levels. As they cool and fall back to their normal ground state, the excess energy has to go somewhere, so it’s emitted as photons, which our eyes perceive as light. And those photons possess frequencies that match the change in energy levels, in keeping with earlier experiments.

Confused yet? No wonder! To understand why physicists discarded the Bohr model, you’ve got to delve into the mind-bending intricacies of quantum mechanics, and explain all kinds of things the average person likely has never encountered in any real depth: wave functions, uncertainty, superposition of states, spectral lines, and so on.

That’s why I prefer the Bohr model to introduce non-scientists to the basics of atomic structure. It gets across the basic concepts (discrete intervals and why light is emitted in specific units of frequency), and offers the neophyte a handy visualization via the analog of the atom as small-scale solar system. There’s plenty of opportunity to enhance someone’s understanding later as they progress in their basic physics knowledge — education happens in stages, not all at once. In fact, the Bohr model offers the perfect opening to talk about some of those more advanced ideas.

So don’t y’all be dissin’ my beloved Bohr model!

“This kind of thing is the body and bones of music. Anybody can have the harmony, if they will leave us the counterpoint.” — Peter Wimsey, Gaudy Night

Every great literary detective needs his muse, and for Dorothy L. Sayers’ creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, that muse is mystery writer Harriet Vane. They first meet in Strong Poison, when he clears her name (and saves her life) after she is tried for murdering her former lover with arsenic. It’s love at first sight — for Wimsey. Harriet, having been badly burned romantically, proves far more reluctant (and even occasionally hostile).

In Gaudy Night, Harriet has returned to her alma mater, Oxford University, to help the dons at the (fictional) women’s Shrewsbury College solve a mystery — not a murder, but a “poison pen” who has been sending hateful, harassing notes to various targets. (Poison pens were the Internet trolls of 1930s Oxford, apparently.)

Eventually she calls upon Wimsey for aid, despite some awkwardness arising from the fact that she’s spent the last four years rejecting his many marriage proposals. The novel’s subplot — fans might argue it’s the main plot, cleverly shrouded in the poison pen mystery — revolves around Harriet’s struggle to reconcile her feelings for Wimsey, and desires as a woman, with her fear of losing her hard-won individual identity and independence… a not-insubstantial concern for women of that era, especially those, like Harriet (and Sayers herself), of high intelligence.

That tension finds the perfect musical metaphor in a scene set in a small antiques shop, where Harriet has allowed Peter, for the first time, to buy her a gift (a set of antique ivory chessmen that has captured her imagination). Wimsey spots an old spinet piano in the shop, and knocks out a couple of tunes, finally getting Harriet to sing along for a rousing rendition of Morley’s Canzonets for Two Voices — “tenor and alto [twining] themselves in a last companionable cadence.” It is here that he makes his famous observation about preferring counterpoint to harmony. (Pardon Jen-Luc Piquant for a moment while she swoons. Swooooon.)

What does he mean? Well, Wimsey is the epitome of the urbane, cultured aristocrat, particularly when it comes to music. (There are references to a youthful dalliance with a Viennese opera singer, courtesy of his rather louche nephew, St. George.) Among other things, Wimsey understands the importance of “texture,” which Wikipedia defines as “the way the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition.”

“Counterpoint” derives from the Latin phrase punctus contra punctum, or “point against point,” and that’s exactly what it means. It’s used to describe an intricate inter-twining of two or more “voices” in a musical dialogue (whether human or instrumental is irrelevant), that are harmonically related, but don’t share the same contour and rhythm.

Which is really just a fancy way of saying, if you’ve got two lovely examples of melodies that sound different, and progress independently rather than in perfect sync, and yet somehow they sound harmonious when you combine them — why, then you’ve got yourself some mighty fine counterpoint. It’s quite difficult to pull off, as University of Washington music professor John Rahn explains in Music Inside Out: Going Too Far in Musical Essays:

“It is hard to write a beautiful song. It is harder to write several individually beautiful songs that, when sung simultaneously, sound as a more beautiful polyphonic whole. The internal structures that create each of the voices separately must contribute to the emergent structure of the polyphony, which in turn must reinforce and comment on the structures of the individual voices. The way that is accomplished in detail is…’counterpoint’.”

The result, when done well, can be breath-taking.  Consider Harriet’s ruminations as she watches Wimsey during a performance of Bach’s Concerto in D Minor (for two violins):

He was wrapt in the motionless austerity with which all genuine musicians listen to genuine music. Harriet was musician enough to respect this aloofness; she knew well enough that the ecstatic rapture on the face of the man opposite meant only that he was hoping to be thought musical, and that the elderly lady over the way, waving her fingers to the beat, was a musical moron. She knew enough, herself, to read the sounds a little with her brains, laboriously unwinding the twined chains of melody link by link. Peter, she felt sure, could hear the whole intricate pattern, every part separately and simultaneously, each independent and equal, separate but inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together.

Ahem. Jen-Luc is now wondering why it suddenly got so warm in here. This, for those unfamiliar with Bach’s masterpiece, is what Wimsey hears:

You can listen to the second movement and third movement as well. And as you listen, savor how the two violins each play their own melody, and yet somehow what emerges is this gorgeous interplay between the two instruments, two equal parts coming together to form a complex whole. It’s the perfect metaphor for how two strong, independent and intelligent people can maintain their individuality and yet, together, form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In romance, as in music, it is no mean feat to achieve this, but Wimsey’s preference for a strong, equal partner — because of, rather than despite, the challenge — is what makes him a thinking woman’s heartthrob. He likes his music, and his women, polyphonic.

Bach, too, was a master of counterpoint, particularly of the fugue (and not so bad with the ladies, either: he married twice and fathered 20 children, although only 10 survived to adulthood). In fact, the opening movement of Concerto in D Minor that you heard above has a fugal lead-in. His most famous work, The Well-Tempered Clavier,  is comprised of two volumes, each with 24 prelude and fugue pairs, corresponding to each major and minor musical key.

It’s worth taking a moment to explain what is meant by being musically “well-tempered.” For centuries (i.e., before the 15th century), the preferred system for tuning instruments was that developed by Pythagorus: it was based on frequency intervals in perfect fifths (or a ratio of 3:2).

Mathematically, the fifth was deemed the most “pure,” and hence the most ideal, but as is often the case, the practical applications were less than perfect. Other musical intervals, like the major third, would end up so badly out of tune, in comparison, that a major chord (normally consonant) would be unbearably dissonant. This is colorfully known as a “wolf interval.”

This preference for Pythagorean tuning limited musical expression to the most simple harmonies, and to pieces that didn’t change key (modulate) very much. Anything that didn’t fit this narrow mold just didn’t work musically. But, well, that kind of simplistic perfection can be boring for those who like a bit more complexity in their music (or their relationships).

Later composers (beginning around the 17th century) liked to play with their melodic themes, transposing and modulating keys with wild abandon to explore every possible nuance. They needed a different tuning method to do so: specifically, they needed “well-tempered” instruments, in which the 12 notes in an octave on a keyboard, for example, were tuned in such a way that one could play in most major and minor keys without the jarring dissonance of the “wolf intervals” ruining everything.

Freed from the constraints of Pythagorean tuning, new musical compositional techniques flourished, including the fugue. The defining features are two or more voices, each building on a theme (or subject) that is introduced at the beginning and keeps recurring throughout until the two voices come together at the end. Much like the three-act structure of a story, you’ve got three sections: the exposition, the development, and the recapitulation, where one returns to the original theme.

For instance, here’s Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C Minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier (the fugue kicks in about midway through):

Note that it begins with a simple declaration of the main “subject” (theme), using one “voice” in the primary (tonic) key. The second voice soon chimes in with an “answer.” Essentially, the answer is a restatement of the subject, transposed into a different (but related) key, often with slight alterations to accommodate that key change (a tonal answer versus a “real” answer that is identical to the stated subject). That initial call and response is the exposition. In the development, the musical dialogue continues by adding new variants on the original statement and answer (middle entries) as a counter exposition. Finally, in the recapitulation, we hear a restatement of the exposition and counter-exposition.

That’s the most basic structure for a fugue, although there are many, many more complex variants. Incidentally, the word fugue is derived from the Latin fuga, which is related to both fugere (“to flee,” like Harriet) and fugare (“to chase,” like Wimsey). Coincidence? Perhaps not. One suspects Sayers knew her Latin.

Bach was known for entering contests whereby he would improvise a fugue on organ or harpsichord based on a suggested musical theme. But fugues aren’t just for Baroque composers, nosiree! There’s tons of videos on YouTube featuring hit pop songs reworked into more  elaborate forms. True, the structure of your average pop song is fairly simplistic: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus is the standard form. And its texture is dominated by chords and harmony, with very little in the way of polyphony (i.e., little counterpoint); there’s usually only one main melody, not two or more weaving in and out as the song progresses.

But if there’s one thing popular music knows how to do, it’s fashion a catchy “hook.” A really good improvisor, in the spirit of Bach, can easily transform a relatively simple pop song into, say,  a fugue, taking that hook through a series of intricate twists and modulations, making it truly polyphonic.  For instance, here’s Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” reworked into fugue form by Giovanni Dettori, and performed by a full orchestra:

This seems a particularly apt choice, because the original tune opens and closes with a brief segment of synthesized harpsichord — designed to evoke that telltale Baroque counterpoint. It’s also in keeping with the song’s lyrical theme of lovers engaged in an intricate series of fugue-like maneuvers to establish the balance of power in their relationship. The imagery in Lady Gaga’s original video is one of a rich and powerful man who “buys” a strong, sexy woman, presumably for his pleasure — except she doesn’t want to be chattel (“I’m a free bitch, baby!”), and ultimately her own power consumes him.

That’s the danger of opting for complexity over simplicity: the fugue form is not for amateurs, and more than one hapless composer has wrecked him (or her) self on the rocks of this demanding compositional technique. If one melody is stronger than the other, if the timing isn’t perfect, if the modulated keys aren’t chosen carefully, ultimately, you’ll get jarring dissonance instead of the thrilling polyphonic interplay that makes for a successful fugue.

Which is why Harriet is so reluctant to give into her feelings for Wimsey. As the aseptic Oxford scholar, Miss DeVine cautions her, a marriage between equal intellects is inherently risky: “You can hurt one another so dreadfully.”

“Polyphonic music takes a lot of playing,” Harriet tells Peter during an interval in the Bach concert, approaching the thorny issue of her fears of yet another bad romance within the cloaking metaphor of counterpoint.

“You’ve got to be more than a fiddler. It needs a musician.”

“In this case, two fiddlers — both musicians.”

“I’m not much of a musician, Peter.”

Peter, to his credit, recognizes the difficulty. “I admit that Bach isn’t a matter of an autocratic virtuoso and a meek accompanist. But do you want to be either?”

That, really, is the heart of the matter. Harriet tried to be the meek accompanist in her first, failed relationship, with disastrous results. She is equally uncomfortable in the role of autocratic virtuoso, having bored very quickly of an amorous younger suitor whose intellect and abilities were too far below her own. That leaves her with the options of celibacy — losing herself in her writing and/or scholarship — or risking an even more painful romantic ruin by entering into an elaborate fugue with Wimsey. Pull off that delicate balancing act, however, and the result is a bright and shining love for the ages.  Fortunately for Sayers’ readers, Harriet finally succumbs to the allure of the counterpoint, accepting Wimsey’s final proposal in appropriate Latin:

“Placetne, Magistra?”

“Placet.”

And now Jen-Luc Piquant is a weepy pixelated puddle on the floor because it’s just so beautiful! (sniff)  We leave you with Glen Gould’s classic tongue-in-cheek composition, “So You Want to Write a Fugue,” in which he exhorts us all not to be daunted by the polyphonic challenge, but to embrace it. Like Wimsey and Harriet.

Check out these related posts!

The Science of Mysteries: An Overdose of Strychnine (Deborah Blum on Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles)

The Science of Mysteries: Shock, Trauma, and the First Real War (Ann Finkbeiner on Dorothy Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club)

The Science of Mysteries: For Whom the Bells Toll (Jennifer Ouellette on Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors)

The Science of Mysteries: Instructions for a Deadly Dinner (Deborah Blum on Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison)

The Science of Mysteries: Watch Where You Fall In (Ann Finkbeiner on Josephine Tey’s To Love and Be Wise)

The Science of Mysteries: Total Eclipse of the Heart (Jennifer Ouellette at Discovery News, on Jane Langton’s Dark Nantucket Noon)

The Science of Mysteries: Of Granular Materials and Singing Sands (Jennifer Ouellette on Josephine Tey’s The Singing Sands)

Meet halfway or we ain’t gonna make it, baby/
Meet halfway if you want to get it right

– Bonnie Raitt, “Meet Me Halfway,” Fundamental

Who among us has not found ourselves in the awkward and frustrating position of trying to connect with someone conversationally — and failing, despite our best efforts? It’s in stark contrast to the pleasure we derive from a long, lively conversation that flows freely with someone we feel is on the same wavelength. If the latest neuroscience is to be believed, that sense of connection is all in your head — literally.

I spent a couple days in San Diego last weekend attending the annual conference for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, taking in a few talks and happily hobnobbing with the social psych crowd (including on-my-wavelength PsySociety blogger Melanie Tannenbaum). On the way home, I stopped in La Jolla to chat with Princeton University cognitive neuroscientist Uri Hasson, who was in town as keynote speaker for a separate workshop.

Hasson’s specialty is exploring the dynamics of “interacting brains,” performing fMRI scans of human subjects (and the occasional monkey) as they watch movies or listen to a personal story. He made headlines in 2010 with his experiments demonstrating “speaker-listener neural coupling” — or, as various articles dubbed it, a kind of “mind meld” between speaker and listener that seems to indicate the achievement of true communication.

It’s not exactly like the classic Vulcan mind meld featured in the Star Trek franchise, whereby Spock would grope some poor schlub’s face and concentrate really hard so he could access their mind and echo their thoughts. There is no face-groping in Hasson’s work. But sometimes Spock could achieve a telepathic mini-meld without touching the subject, as in “The Devil in the Dark,” when he melds with a lumpy silicon-based alien life form called a horta.

There’s no telepathy in Hasson’s work, either, but there does appear to be a kind of synchronization, or neural coupling, taking place between speaker and listeners. First he had a graduate student, Lauren Silbert, tell an engaging story about her comically disastrous high school prom (featuring two suitors, a fist fight and a car accident — Ms. Silbert had quite the prom night!) for fifteen minutes while inside an fMRI machine. Her voice was recorded with a microphone rigged to filter out the machine’s CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK noise, and the taped story was then played back to 11 “listener” volunteers, also while in the fMRI.

The results were a bit surprising: all the listeners showed similar brain activity — i.e., they seemed to respond to the same elements in the story — but they also showed similar brain activity to Silbert (the story teller), despite the fact that speaking and listening are quite different activities.

Hasson thinks this means there might be more overlap than previously believed between the brain’s “production and comprehension” systems. It’s possible that the brain processes complicated audio input like language through a kind of dual processing mechanism: creating its own version of the signal and then comparing it against what it “heard.”

Yes, there was a bit of a time delay between speaker and listener responses — just enough time to allow for the flow of information between two brains.  That, says Hasson, indicates causality: to some extent, the speaker’s words shape the responses in the listener’s brain. And here’s the kicker: there was a subset of brain regions that lit up for some listeners before the corresponding activity in the speaker’s brain — as if those listeners were actively predicting or anticipating the next part of the story.

This might be linked to how well people understand each other. “The stronger the coupling between the speaker and the listener’s brain response, the better the understanding,” Hasson told a reporter for Princeton’s Website last year. “Sometimes when you speak with someone, you get the feeling that you cannot get through to them, and other times you know that you click. When you really understand each other your brains become more similar in responses over time.”

So why am I bringing up a research paper that is almost two years old? It dovetails nicely with some thoughts I’ve been having of late with regard to science communication. A great deal of effort has been made to promote the communication of science and to forge connections between scientists and the general public. Sometimes it works, which is heartening; that’s the connection Hasson is talking about that indicates a true link, bona fide communication.

But the vast majority of the populace still cheerfully go about their daily lives without giving science (or scientists) a second thought — when they’re not actively hostile to it. We’re simply not reaching them. To borrow a line from Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

I don’t like it, any more than you. It’s frustrating. That frustration is often expressed in a renewed cracking of the whip, insisting that scientists just need to do better in communicating via public outreach. While I agree that the scientific community should (and is) working to improve in that area — heck, I do this for a living and still am constantly striving to improve! — what Hasson’s research clearly shows is that genuine communication is a two-way street. Scientists — a.k.a., the speakers — are only half of the equation, and thus they are only half of the problem.

The other half of the equation are the listeners; any type of communication will fail if it doesn’t have a receptive audience. And I’d go one step further. We tend to think of listening as a passive act, but it actually requires some effort in order to achieve that elusive connection. Particularly when it comes to bridging a gap, as with scientists and the general public, the listeners need to be more actively engaged, more invested in having a true conversation.

My conversation with Hasson is a case in point. We had never met before, and had only exchanged the briefest of emails. He’s likeable and engaging, but wanted to meet in person rather than chat over the phone because he feared it would be too difficult to get his points across. English is his second language, he’s very fluent, but has a heavy accent, and we were discussing technical details that were somewhat new to me. Even though I’m an experienced interviewer, and pretty good at translating technical jargon, there’s a lot of potential for crossed signals and lack of comprehension without in-person visual cues. Hasson understands how important making a connection is to good communication.

Even then, things were a bit halting and stilted at first as we struggled to find that common ground. But he actively sought to engage me, and I actively sought to listen and engage with him in turn by asking clarifying questions. We met each other halfway, and our mutual efforts paid off. By the time we parted, we were conversing easily and cracking jokes, and I came away with an enhanced understanding (and appreciation) of his work.

So much of our focus when we talk about science communication is on what the scientific community can do to promote its work and appeal to a broader audience. I’m a fan of broad appeal; there’s a place for Mythbusters and Punkin’ Chunkin‘ and the science of science fiction and/or everyday life, to demonstrate that science is fascinating and fun. We desperately need scientists to be blogging and participating in public events. That’s important, but it’s not sufficient — not if we want to go beyond superficial interactions to have a substantive, meaningful dialogue. To do that, we need Hasson’s mind meld. And that requires receptive, active listeners. Heck, if Spock can connect with a horta, why can’t scientists connect with the man/woman on the street?

Which is why I’m speaking directly to the listeners out there now who rarely give science a second thought and/or assume they could never have a meaningful connection with a scientist: you need to meet scientists halfway. It’s not enough to sit back and wait for them to impress or entertain you before you’ll deign to give science a smidgen of your attention — not if you want to truly grok what science is all about.

Yes, there is a gaping chasm between the level of knowledge a scientist has, and that of John or Jane Q. Public (or even a humble science writer, for that matter). But it’s not insurmountable. It’s not that it’s too hard, but it does require some effort, an investment, before it starts to reveal its secrets. Science is nuanced; it’s got lots of levels, each one more illuminating than the last, and it rewards those who take the time to move beyond the most superficial levels.

For those of you who are leery of science, who think you can’t understand it, or assume it’s boring — the scientific community is reaching out across that chasm, waiting for you to meet them halfway. I’m asking you to reach out, in turn. Trust me, as one who spent years resisting the lure of science: You’ll be so very glad you did.

But we’re sure he’s most proud of his 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine, which he shared with Brian Witcombe, a consulting radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust in England. They were honored “for their penetrating medical report, ‘Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects,’” which was published to almost no fanfare in the British Medical Journal — maybe because it appeared right around Christmas and people were too busy swallowing Yorkshire pudding and opening prezzies to pay much attention to the findings.

“I want to thank Arianna for not impaling me,” Meyer said. “At least 29 people have died sword swallowing in the last 50 years, so at least I’m not No. 30.” Actually, for all its long history, very few published reports exist of related injuries from the practice of shoving sharp steel blades down one’s throat — perhaps because there are only a little more than 100 sword swallowers worldwide, out of a population of some 6.6 billion people. That’s why Witcombe and Meyer set out to explore the various techniques and side effects of sword swallowing.

Forty-six SSAI members participated in the study, having swallowed a combined 2000 swords over the prior three months. More than half (25) had swallowed more than one, five managed to swallow at least ten swords at a time, and one person achieved the whopping feat of swallowing 16 swords simultaneously.

A news release last December reported that Witcombe and Meyer found, “Sword swallowers are more likely to sustain an injury — such as a perforation of the esophagus — if they are distracted or are using multiple or unusual swords.”

Mostly, the respondents suffered from a sore throat (or as they call it, “sword throat,” such wags, those guys), generally from the multiple sword stunts, or swallowing odd-shaped blades such as curved sabers rather than straight ones. Lower chest pains were another common complaint — the only remedy being not swallowing any swords for a few days.

Sixteen had suffered some form of intestinal bleeding, and three had undergone surgery to repair injuries to their necks. One lacerated his pharynx, another slashed his esophagus — he claimed to have been distracted by a misbehaving macaw on his shoulder — and one unfortunate belly dancer suffered a major hemorrhage when three blades lodged in her esophagus unexpectedly “scissored,” after an appreciative bystander shoved some dollar bills in her belt. His donation didn’t come close to covering her medical expenses, which came close to $70,000. Not surprisingly, most sword swallowers have higher than average health care and medical costs. All it takes it one tiny slip-up, after all.

These injuries are quite real, and quite serious, because unlike many other sideshow novelty acts, sword swallowing is not a magician’s illusion — although there is a trick to it (more on that later). As the x-ray image above attests, sword swallowers really do maneuver that sharp metal blade down the hatch, past all kinds of vital organs.

Sword swallowing is an ancient art dating back to India before 2000 B.C., where it was used primarily as “a demonstration of divine union and power,” per Wikipedia. Modern-day Indian fakirs still perform such feats, along with eating burning coals, swallowing snakes, and stopping their own pulse or raising their body temperatures through sheer will — although not all such feats are genuine; many are illusions.

The art spread to China in the 8th century, then to Japan, where it found a home in Sangaku, that nation’s acrobatic theater. It also found its way to Greece and Rome, and finally into Europe in the early Middle Ages, where it became a fixture of street performers. It languished a bit during the Dark Ages, in part thanks to persecution from the Inquisition, resurged briefly in the early 1800s, and then died out again as people lost interest in street theater.

But a featured exhibition of sword swallowing at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago brought sword swallowing mania to America, where a whole new generation of performers emerged, making some fascinating innovations along the way: multiple swords, bayonets, hot swords, and glowing neon tubes, among other feats. Meyer is one of the best-known contemporary sword swallowers.

It takes practice, sometimes over many years, to develop sufficient skill for safe (relatively speaking) sword swallowing. The term is a bit of a misnomer, since swallowing is actually the last thing you want to do with a sharp blade, since it involves contraction of numerous muscles; instead, the idea is to completely relax the throat and turn it into one long “living scabbard.”

Essentially, sword swallowers have to figure out how to carefully align a sword with their upper esophageal sphincter — a ring of muscle at the top end of the throat– and straighten the pharynx, commonly achieved by hyper-extending the neck by tipping the head waaay back.

The practitioner must then move his tongue out of the way and consciously relax his throat as he “swallows” — not an easy thing to do because of our involuntary gag reflex, the body’s defense mechanism against swallowing foreign objects. There are nerve endings lining the back of the throat that can detect any intrusive, non-chewed-food objects, generating nerve impulses which neurons carry to the brain stem. The brain responds by using motor neurons to instruct the throat muscles to contract. The end result: you retch, sometimes vomiting, as the body attempts to force the unwanted object out of the throat and mouth.

On the way down, the sword straightens out the curve of the esophagus and nudges certain organs out of the way. Per the book Bizarre Medical Abnormalities, published in 1897:

“The instrument enters the mouth and pharynx, then the esophagus, traverses the cardiac end of the stomach, and enters the latter as far as the antrum of the pylorus, the small cul de sac of the stomach. In their normal state in the adult these organs are not in a straight line, but are so placed by the passage of the sword. In the first place they head is thrown back, so that the mouth is in the direction of the esophagus, the curves of which disappear or become less as the sword proceeds; the angle that the esophagus makes with the stomach is obliterated, and finally the stomach is distended in the vertical diameter and its internal curve disappears, thus permitting the blade to traverse the greater diameter of the stomach.”

The same book also notes that sword swallowers proved vital to studying the human digestive system in the 19th century. Specifically, a Scottish physicist named Stevens had an assistant sword swallower down small metal tubes with holes in them, filled with pieces of meat. After a set interval of time, the acrobat would “disgorge” the tubes, and Stevens could study how much the meat had been digested.

Also, in 1868, a sword swallower visited Freiburg, Germany, so impressing a local doctor named Keller that he examined the man’s throat with a laryngeal mirror. His colleague, one Dr. Muller, is credited with first suggesting that such acrobats would make terrific subjects for esophagoscopy, because of their ability to voluntarily relax all the muscles in the throat at the same time.

Another colleague, Adolph Kussmaul, actually performed the first successful esophagoscopy on the visiting sword swallower using a rudimentary endoscope (basically a straight tube), mirrors, and a gas lamp for illumination. The results were a bit disappointing because of the poor illumination, but it did lead to further improvements in the technique.

A famous sword and snake swallower of the mid-1800s, called Sallementro, claimed he learned his art at 17 from a friend; it took him three months. He tried starting with full-sized swords, but discovered “it made my swallow sore, very sore, and I used lemon and sugar to cure it.” Apparently he was unable to eat anything, and subsisted on a liquid diet for two months until he’d mastered the trick. Knives, he found, were easier than swords because of the shorter length.  “It was tight at first, and I kept pushing it down further and further.” He recommended resisting the urge to cough (duh), and also oiled the blade to reduce the abrasion as it slides down the throat.

Snakes proved less tricky, although Sallementro was careful to “cut the stingers out, ‘cos it might hurt you.” He used 18-inch serpents, cleaned by scraping them with a cloth because otherwise the things tasted nasty. Unlike swords, snakes are quite helpful to the process, naturally inclined to seek out a dark hole down which to disappear — unless the swallower coughs too much, in which case the snake seeks to escape back up the hatch. Sallementro said that  swallowing snakes “tickles a little, but it don’t make you want to retch.” Speak for yourself, buddy.

Like Sallementro, Witcombe and Meyer’s study found that many of the respondents had desensitized their gag reflex by starting with smaller objects and increasing the size over time. They started with their own fingers, then upgraded to spoons, paint brushes, knitting needles, bent wire coat hangers, and so forth, before attempting short knife blades and, finally, swords.

Per Cecil Adams of Straight Dope fame, I learned that Dan Mannix, a retired carnival sword and flame swallower, wrote a memoir of his experiences in 1951, and reported that he definitely threw up the first few times he tried to overcome the involuntary gag reflex. Then he struggled with getting a sword down his throat because he couldn’t… quite… relax. (Hmmm. Wonder why?) Eventually he succeeded, but said that he had to bend forward a bit halfway through the sword’s passage to get it past his Adam’s apple. He also occasionally struck his own breast bone with the sword, which apparently felt like a blow to the solar plexus, from the inside.

Many have emulated Sallementro and figured out that lubricating the blades with saliva or butter made it easier to slide them down their throats, although one admitted to retiring from the sport after developing a chronic “dry mouth” condition. The sides of the swords aren’t sharp, but the tips are, as those who suffered ruptured stomachs (with the resulting peritonitis) can attest.

Adams — recognizing that there’s always someone stupid enough to try this sort of thing at home, despite cautionary words — recommends wiping the blade before and after swallowing: the first, to remove any dust which could trigger the gag reflex, and afterwards to remove stomach acid, which could corrode the blade’s metal. (Neon tubes have an added risk of shattering inside the throat, with seriously disabling and sometimes fatal effects.)

Jen-Luc Piquant thinks she’ll take a pass on participating in this decidedly quirky skill. But those those with a penchant for showy, yet dangerous hobbies like this might want to join Meyer on February 25, when he’ll be performing at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! in Orlando, Florida., to mark World Sword Swallower’s Day.

This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on the archived blog in 2007.

Fans of classic film know Hedy Lamarr for her memorable silver screen performances. But this lovely actress also made a small contribution to wartime technology with her co-invention of an early form of spread spectrum communication technology, or frequency hopping, in which a noise-like signal is transmitted on a much-larger bandwidth than the frequency of the original information. In the 1930s, Europe (and much of the Western world) was on the brink of a second world war and military leaders from many different nations were scrambling to find advanced weapons technologies to gain an edge in the escalating hostilities. One place nobody thought to look was Hollywood, which might explain why an obscure patent filed in 1942 failed to garner much notice.

Born in November 1914 as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, Lamarr came from “Jewish haute bourgeoisie” stock (Wikipedia’s words, not mine). Her father was a bank director and her mother was a Hungarian pianist, who made sure Hedy studied ballet and piano as a child. As a teen, the young Hedy attended a famed acting school in Berlin headed by director Max Reinhardt.

She dropped out of school to be Reinhardt’s production assistant and had bit parts in two films before starring as a love-starved young wife married to a much older man in a Czech film called Ecstasy. (You can view clips here, but must verify that you’re over 18, due to mild nudity.)

Not only did Lamarr appeared nude on screen, frolicking through the woods and crouching behind convenient bushes, but there were numerous close-up shots of her (ahem) simulating orgasm in quite explicit sex scenes. (She later recalled that far from being sexually transported, her expressions were in response to the director poking her in the derriere with a pin to elicit them.)

Even back then, all it took was a sex tape to launch a stunning young woman into a life of celebrity. Lamarr leveraged her beauty and sudden notoriety into what seemed like an advantageous marriage just before she turned 20, to a man 30 years her senior.

Her (first) husband was Friedrich Mandl, an arms merchant based in Vienna who sold munitions and manufactured military aircraft. Mandl forbade her to continue acting — in fact, he tried to buy up all the prints of Ecstasy, feeling that the expression on his wife’s face during those love scenes was indecent.

Lamarr initially took the restrictions on her freedom in stride: she dutifully presided over her husband’s lavish parties, attended by Hitler and Mussolini among others, and was often present at his business meetings. None of the men in the room gave a second thought to the presence of Mandl’s beautiful young wife — how could she possibly follow their manly discussions about wartime strategy and weapons? As a result, despite her lack of formal education, she acquired a great deal of knowledge about military technology, most notably guided torpedoes and the vulnerability of radio-controlled weapons to jamming and interference.

Disillusioned with married life –- especially her husband’s increasingly controlling behavior and shady business dealings with Nazi industrialists –- Lamarr disguised herself as one of her maids and escaped first to Paris in 1937, where she obtained a divorce from Mandl, and then moved to London. She would marry five more times before giving up on the institution. (One colorful version of her legendary escape has her attending a party with Mandl decked out in all her expensive jewelry, then drugging him with the help of her maid before fleeing.)

After meeting Louis B. Mayer in London, he signed her to MGM as Hedy Lamarr. Her debut was in the 1938 film Algiers. She went on to play many more roles — including a cringe-inducing turn as a native femme fatale in White Cargo, announcing ominously to each victim, “I am Tondelayo. I will come and make tiffin for you.” She also co-starred with Lana Turner and Judy Garland in the musical extravaganza Ziegfield Girl, and showed an unexpected flair for comedy opposite Clark Gable in Comrade X, in which she played a Russian streetcar conductor named Theodore.

In a town filled with stunning women, Lamarr stood out. Actor George Sanders once said that she was “so beautiful that everybody would stop talking when she came into a room.” But Lamarr was more than just a pretty face: she had a natural mathematical ability and lifelong love of tinkering with inventions. One of those ideas bore fruit when she met her Hollywood neighbor, avant garde composer George Antheil, in the summer of 1940.

Born in New Jersey to Prussian emigrants, Antheil studied music in Philadelphia and toured Europe as a concert pianist, before turning his hand to composing. His signature piece was called “Ballet Meanique,” a complicated score originally written for Fernand Leger’s 1924 abstract film of the same name. It called for mechanically synchronizing sixteen player pianos, as well as xylophones and percussion. He returned to the US in 1933 to compose for film, and also became a syndicated romance advice columnist, writer for Esquire, and author of a book entitled, Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Endocrinology.

Legend has it that Lamarr approached him for endocrinological advice on increasing her breast size, but the two soon began chatting about weapons, particularly radio controlled torpedoes and how to protect them from jamming or interference. She realized that “we’re talking and changing frequencies” all the time, and that a constantly changing frequency is much harder to jam.

This became the basis for their design for a torpedo guidance system. Lamarr contributed the idea of frequency hopping, while Antheil drew on his experience with “Ballet Meanique” to devise a means of synchronizing the rapidly changing radio frequencies envisioned by Lamarr.

Their joint invention used a mechanism similar to piano player rolls to synchronize the changes between the 88 frequencies –- not coincidentally, this is also the standard number of piano keys -– and called for a high-altitude observation plane to steer a radio-controlled torpedo from above. They submitted their patent on June 10, 1941, and the patent was granted on August 11, 1942.

This was not an entirely new concept. Nikola Tesla alluded to frequency hopping in 1900 and 1903 patents, filed after he demonstrated the first radio-controlled submersible boat in 1898. Realizing he needed to shield the radio signals from interference, he devised two different techniques that relied on altering the carrier frequency to eliminate interference.

A similar patent for a “secrecy communications system” was granted in 1920, with additional patents granted in 1939 and 1940 to two German engineers, who also held German patents for their work. And evidence came to light in the 1980s that during World War II, the US Army Signal Corps worked on a communication system dubbed SIGSALY that used the spread spectrum concept as well.

Lamarr and Antheil had less success convincing others their idea was feasible. Examiners at the National Inventor’s Council questioned the robustness and accuracy of the internal clockwork mechanism responsible for moving the perforated tape through the system, while the U.S. Navy felt the clockwork mechanism was too bulky and unreliable to use with a torpedo, although Antheil argued it should be possible to miniaturize it to fit inside a watch. As Antheil later recalled:

In our patent Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that certain parts of it worked like the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubted, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-headed gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words “player piano.” “My god,” I can see them saying, “We shall put a player piano in a torpedo.”

In fairness to the US Navy, that wasn’t their only objection; frequency hopping was a bit too far ahead of its time — technology had to catch up. It wasn’t until 1957 that engineers at Sylvania Electronic Systems Division adopted the concept, using the recently invented transistor for an electronic system rather than the original clockwork mechanism. The Sylvania system was installed on ships sent to blockade Cuba in 1962, three years after Lamarr’s and Antheil’s patent had expired, and its primary use was for secure military communications rather than remote control of torpedos. The same basic concept is still used in US defense communication satellites — and in modern cell phone technology.

Antheil died in 1959, no doubt still bitter that his work hadn’t been taken seriously by the military. He fared better than Lamarr, who wanted to join the National Inventor’s Council and was told she could be most useful to the war effort by exploiting her celebrity status to raise money — which she did, once selling kisses for $50K a pop and raising a whopping $7 million at a single event. Lamarr went on to make more than 20 more films, most famously Cecil B. de Mille’s 1949 Samson and Delilah. She played the title role of the Biblical temptress, of course.

But somehow, true greatness in Hollywood eluded her — partly due to the dearth of meaty roles for women in general, but also because casting agents couldn’t see past her looks to find her substance. (Her fellow bombshell actress Jayne Mansfield had a similar fate. Mansfield purportedly had an IQ of 163 — or 149, depending on which source you believe — spoke five languages, and was a classically trained pianist and violinist, but admitted her public didn’t care about her brains. “They’re more interested in 40-21-35,” she said.)

Lamarr retired from film completely in 1957, settling in Altamonte Springs, Florida, where she painted and dabbled in the odd invention — like a pocket on the side of a Kleenex box in which one could deposit used tissues. It was a quiet existence, apart from the occasional lawsuit, marriage or divorce, or shoplifting scandal (she was arrested in 1966, and again in 1991 at the age of 78, although the charges were later dropped).

Lamarr has a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in honor of her film career, but she took particular satisfaction in being awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award in 1998, more than 50 years after she and Antheil received their patent. “It’s about time,” she reportedly said upon hearing the news. Her son accepted the award on her behalf.

Lamarr died on January 19, 2000, in her Florida home.  Despite her wartime contributions, she will likely always be remembered more for her spectacular beauty than for her technological contributions, which are usually treated as an intriguing footnote to a life that was not exactly devoid of drama. “My face has been my misfortune,” Lamarr once observed, describing it as “a mask I cannot remove. I must live with it. I curse it.”

[Adapted from the archived blog; originally posted May 2011.]

I Like Coffee, I Like Tea. All about interactive coasters, the physics of coffee rings, how to make siphon coffee (basically using pressure to create a vacuum during the brewing process), and how Fick’s laws of diffusion apply to brewing the perfect cup of tea.

Dueling Dualities. We tend to think of dualities as two different polar opposites, but in theoretical physics, it represents the notion that two seemingly different things might just be two different ways of looking at something. I was responding to Amanda Gefter’s wonderful Edge essay responding to the question, “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” As she wrote,

Embracing the physicist’s meaning of duality… can provide us with a powerful new metaphor, a one-stop shorthand for the idea that two very different things might be equally true. As our cultural discourse is becoming increasingly polarized, the notion of duality is both more foreign and more necessary than ever. If accessible in our daily cognitive toolkit, it could serve as a potent antidote to our typically Boolean, two-valued, zero-sum thinking — where statements are either true or false, answers are yes or no, and if I’m right, then you are wrong. With duality, there’s a third option. Perhaps my argument is right and yours is wrong; perhaps your argument is right and mine is wrong; or, just maybe, our opposing arguments are dual to one another.

Ticket to Ride. All about the “Euthanasia Coaster” invented by Julijonas Urbonas, a designer, artist, engineer and PhD student specializing in “gravitational aesthetics.” Yes, a coaster designed in such a way probably could kill you.

And the Oscar Goes To…. A fond look back at some of the best nods to physics in the films of 2010.

Driven to Diffraction. The physics of diffraction gratings, or why your DVDs work.

Babble-Onia. How nifty new speech recognition algorithms might one day solve “the cocktail party problem.”

Rubber Band Man. The physics of “shrinkage” in rubber, whether it be dildos or space shuttle o-rings. Special video appearances by the late Richard Feynman, and the very present Brian Cox giggling at a tabletop LHC model built entirely out of adult “toys.” [Mildly NSFW]

Bring Back Your Dead. The physics of cryogenics, and why it’s the unthawing process that’s the real killer when it comes to reviving cryogenically frozen folks.

Thrown for a Curve. Responding to a terrific post at Wired by my pal David Dobbs, I explore the physics of the curve ball, including the seminal experiments conducted at NIST by a man named Lyman Briggs.

So You Want to Be a Science Consultant. Advice for scientists with stars in their eyes about consulting on Hollywood movies and TV series. tl;dr: Don’t quit your day job.

Drunken Masters of Lingua Franca. At an acoustics conference in June, Abby Kaplan, who works in the linguistics department at the University of Utah, had some interesting things to say about drunken speech patterns — namely, whether it’s harder to pronounce certain sounds or words when intoxicated. I’m betting she had a lot of volunteers for the drunken group. Bonus: why it’s harder to understand foreign accents, and a bit of drunken boxing, courtesy of Jackie Chan.

What Woody Woodpecker Can Teach Us About Football. The high incidence of concussion and long-term brain damage in professional football has scientists lining helmets with high-tech sensors to better understand the forces at work in producing such injuries. They’re also looking into new materials to reduce the impact of those forces, and drawing inspiration from Mother Nature — specifically the humble woodpecker and why it never gets a headache.

Yodel All the Way. Why yes, there’s a science as well as art to yodeling. Features “Lonelly Goatherd” plus a video duet of “Nessun Dorma” between a human tenor and an operatic robot called Pavorobotti.

Flushed With Pride. The sound of one toilet flushing can be very loud indeed. That’s why acoustics researchers study how to reduce toilet flushing noise in adjacent offices. It’s science!

I also blog about the latest space, astrophysics and particle physics research over at Discovery News. Here’s a few of my favorite posts from the past year in that venue.

Solving the Mystery of Frankenstein’s Moon. An astrophysicist and “forensic astronomer” at Texas State University named Donald Olson has concluded that there is no good reason to doubt Mary Shelley’s account of being inspired after experiencing a “waking dream” as moonlight streamed through her bedroom window.

Physicists Bid Farewell to the Tevatron. After a spectacular 28-year run, Fermilab’s Tevatron is shut down, signaling the end of an era in particle physics.

Reality Check: What are Those Naughty Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Really Up To? “I’m sorry to report that, for all the hoopla, the general consensus that has emerged over the last couple of days is that (a) it’s a really interesting, potentially exciting result, but (b) it probably won’t hold up over time.”

Einstein’s Anti-Gravity Underwear and Other Weighty Matters. An 1879 issue of The London Punch credited Thomas Edison with the invention of antigravity undergarments. It was satire, of course, but prompted a blog post looking at some of the most infamous anti-gravity schemes in recent history.

Higgs Field Makes a Cameo on SyFy’s Eureka. One of my favorite sci-fi series on TV had a bit of fun with anti-gravity, too, thanks to a fictional “Higgs field disruptor” that causes various objects in Eureka start to lose mass and float away. I indulge in a bit of nerd-gassing and examine the underlying science.

Oh Pioneer! Mysterious Anomaly May Finally Be Solved. A flurry of recent papers could lay to rest once and for all a longstanding mystery in astrophysics: the so-called “Pioneer anomaly,” an as-yet-unexplained deceleration of NASA’s Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft in their wanderings beyond our solar system. A follow-up post offered further evidence that the culprit is more likely to be heat than something more exotic (like modified gravity).

Physicists Observe Neutrino “Quick Change” in Japan. In June, the Japanese T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) experiment announced the first evidence (PDF) of a rare form of neutrino oscillation, whereby muon neutrinos turn into electron neutrinos. And this, in turn, gives physicist a potential clue to a critical mystery in cosmology: why there is something in the universe, rather than nothing. Fermilab’s MINOS experiment confirmed the observation the next month.

The Soviet Particle Accelerator that Time Forgot. Back in the late 1980s, the USSR started building what would have been the largest particle accelerator in the world in a town called Protvino. And an enterprising group of urban spelunkers rediscovered it and took some pretty impressive photographs.

Fermilab’s Bump Hunters See Hints of New Particle. Okay, it wasn’t the Higgs boson, but in June there was a flurry of excitement over a slight bump in the data from Fermilab’s CDF experiment that offered compelling evidence for a possible new particle. Alas, the sister detector, D-Zero, weighed in shortly after and put the kibosh on all the excitement: they didn’t see the same signal.

What Happens to Snails in Space? A new paper by a team of US and Russian scientists that appeared in April on PLoS investigated the effects of microgravity on, well, snails.

On the Trail of Magnetic Monopoles. In the season 2 finale of The Big Bang Theory everyone’s favorite socially challenged physicist, Sheldon, accepts an invitation to spend three months at the North Pole searching for magnetic monopoles. He figures finding a magnetic monopole would put him on the fast track for a Nobel Prize. And he would be right. But he shouldn’t count on finding one right away; magnetic monopoles have eluded our best scientists for centuries.

Finally, a propos of nothing in particular, here’s one of my favorite physics-y songs, by The Cat Empire. Enjoy! And here’s to another year of bloggy goodness in 2012.

Unless, like Scout, we’ve never experienced a genuine snowfall, we probably take snow a bit for granted. It’s just another form of precipitation, after all, and we have a pretty solid grasp of that particular cycle. Just for the record, snow is not frozen raindrops; that would be sleet. Under certain conditions, water vapor can condense directly into tiny ice crystals, skipping the raindrop phase altogether, and usually forming the shape of a hexagonal prism (two hexagonal “basal” faces and six rectangular “prism” faces).

But that crystal also attracts more cooled water drops in the air. Branchings sprout out from the single crystals’ corners to form snowflakes of increasingly complex shapes. And yes, for all intents and purposes, no two snowflakes are shaped exactly alike, at least according to Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht, who runs this Website devoted entirely to snow crystals. But there are 35 different types of snow crystals, all of which he has carefully documented.

Libbrecht usually has to create his own ice crystals in the lab, or go to more frigid climes, like Michigan or Alaska or Ontario, to make his high-resolution microscope images of snowflakes. (You can see movies of lab-based snow crystals forming here.)

Even then it’s a tricky business. He has to use a small paintbrush to transfer the delicate structures to a glass slide, taking the picture with a digital camera mounted on a high-resolution microscope. All of this is done outside to keep the crystals from melting too quickly. The final images are quite striking — so much so that in 2007, they were featured on a new 39-cent commemorative postage stamp, courtesy of the US Postal Service.

Not surprisingly, the shapes of snowflakes and snow crystals have long fascinated scientists, like Johannes Kepler, who took some time away from his star-gazing in 1611 to publish a short paper entitled “On the Six-Cornered Snowflake.” He was intrigued by the fact that snow crystals always seem to exhibit a six-fold symmetry.

Some 20 years later, Rene Descartes waxed poetical after observing much rarer 12-sided snowflakes, “so perfectly formed in hexagons and of which the six sides were so straight, and the six angles so equal, that it is impossible for men to make anything so exact.” He pondered how such a perfectly symmetrical shape might have been created, and eventually arrived at a reasonably accurate description of the water cycle, adding that “they were obliged to arrange themselves in such a way that each was surrounded by six others in the same plane, following the ordinary order of nature.”

(The lack of a detailed explanation can be excused: it took the development of x-ray crystallography for scientists to really be able to study the shape and structure of snow crystals/flakes in any great detail.)

Libbrecht has an historical predecessor in Robert Hooke. Hooke’s Micrographia, published in 1665, contained a few sketches of snowflakes he observed under his microscope — sketched rapidly, one assumes, since the flakes no doubt melted soon after being placed under the lens, even working outdoors. If only he’d had access to Libbrecht’s equipment, he wouldn’t have had to do everything by hand — and he would have appreciated the far more intricate details observable under orders-of-magnitude increases in resolution.

But nobody performed a truly systematic study of snow crystals until the 1950s, when a Japanese nuclear physicist named Ukichiro Nakaya identified and cataloged all the major types of snow crystals. (Nakaya had the bad luck to be appointed to a professorship in Hokkaido, with no available facilities for his nuclear research, so he applied his considerable skills to what was readily available: snow crystals. Now that’s taking lemons and making lemonade.)

Nakaya also proved Descartes wrong in the Frenchman’s assertion that no man could make anything so perfect. Nakaya was the first person to grow artificial snow crystals in the laboratory. In 1954 he published a book on his findings: Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial. Here’s what Libbrecht’s Website has to say about it: “Nakaya’s book offers a superb look at a scientific investigation which begins with almost nothing, and proceeds through systematic observation toward an accurate description of a fascinating natural phenomenon.”

Thanks to Nakaya’s pioneering work, we now know that certain atmospheric conditions, like temperature and humidity, can influence a snowflake’s shape. For instance, those shapes tend to be simpler in low humidity. The higher the humidity, the more complex the shape, and if the humidity is especially high, they can even form into long needles or large thin plates.

Scientists aren’t entirely sure why, but they suspect it has to do with the complex underlying physics of how water vapor molecules are slowly incorporated into the growing ice crystal — what Descartes termed the “ordinary order of Nature.” There’s still a lot of mystery in that ordinariness.

That’s why NASA launched the Global Snowflake Network a few years ago, a massive project that aims to involve the general public to  “collect and classify” falling snowflakes. The data is being compiled into a massive database, along with satellite images, that will help climatologists and others who study climate-related phenomena gain a better understanding of wintry meteorology as they track various snowstorms around the globe. Participating students, teachers, and other interested parties now have the chance to take part in real science, and learn more about how climate, temperature and other atmospheric features combine to produce weather phenomena.

So next time snow falls in your area this winter, take a few moments from building snowmen and lobbing snowy missiles at the annoying kid down the street, and look more closely at each individual flake. You might even consider signing up with the GSN, thereby recording your observations for scientific posterity.

NOTE: This post adapted from an older post in the archives.

“There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.”
— Michael Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle

Who would you cite as your favorite physicist? The field has a long, rich history filled with colorful characters and undisputed genius, so it would be a most difficult choice. But Michael Faraday would certainly be near the top of my list of serious contenders for the title. [NOTE: See a related post on Faraday's lecture The Forces of Matter over at Skulls in the Stars.]

Faraday was a 19th century British scientist, the son of a blacksmith, who started out as a  bookbinder’s apprentice and took advantage of that position to read voraciously. His favorite subjects were the natural sciences.

Serendipitously, as his apprenticeship was ending, a friend gave him a ticket to a lecture on electrochemistry by the eminent scientist Humphrey Davey, at the Royal Institution — not a venue where the young humble-born Faraday would normally be welcomed.

Faraday was entranced, and after the lecture he asked Davy for a job. There wasn’t a position available, Davy gently told the young man, but shortly thereafter he sacked his assistant for brawling and hired Faraday in his stead.

It has famously been said that Michael Faraday was Davy’s greatest discovery; considering that Davy discovered the elements barium, strontium, sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium, that is no mean compliment. Faraday went on to make conduct a series of seminal experiments in electromagnetism, among other contributions.

He also quickly gained recognition as an excellent public speaker. People in early Victorian England were highly interested in the latest scientific discoveries of the day. (They were also just as prone to superstition, though, and Faraday was a staunch opponent to things like table-turning, seances, and mesmerism.) Fellow naturalist William Crookes described Faraday’s lectures thusly: “All is a sparking stream of eloquence and experimental illustration.”

One of his favorite demonstrations is now a simple experiment repeated by schoolchildren everywhere. You can see magnetic field lines — what Faraday called lines of force — by sprinkling iron filings onto a sheet of paper held over a bar magnet. The filings align themselves within the magnetic field, so we can “see” the patten normally invisible to us.

In particular, Faraday gave a series of famous Christmas lectures each year at the Royal Institution — a tradition that continues today. One of the earliest, on the chemistry and physics of flames, became a popular book: The Chemical History of a Candle.

These lectures were a gift that Faraday gave year after year to those who showed up to receive it: the gift of wonder at the natural world that continues to surprise us, even today, with its mysterious workings.

Faraday opened with a discussion of how candles were made, from naturally occurring candles like the paraffin and bits of candlewood found in Irish bogs — “a hard, strong, excellent wood” –to manmade dipped tallow candles, beeswax candles, and something called a  sperm candle, “which comes from the purified oil of the spermaceti whale.” He even displayed a candle salvaged from the wreck of the Royal George, which sunk at Spithead on the 29th of August, 1782; yet the candle still burned brightly when lit.

As Faraday described the process:

“The fat or tallow is first boiled with quick-lime, and made into a soap, and then the soap is decomposed by sulphuric acid, which takes away the lime, and leaves the fat rearranged as stearic acid, while a quantity of glycerin is produced at the same time. Glycerin—absolutely a sugar, or a substance similar to sugar—comes out of the tallow in this chemical change. The oil is then pressed out of it; and you see here this series of pressed cakes, showing how beautifully the impurities are carried out by the oily part as the pressure goes on increasing, and at last you have left that substance, which is melted, and cast into candles as here represented.”

But the bulk of Faraday’s lecture focused on the science relating to the actual flame of a burning candle. First, Faraday demonstrated a simple experiment, placing a candle inside a lampglass to block out any breezes and achieve “a quiet flame.” He showed how important a well-made candle could be, demonstrating that “a beautiful cup is formed” as a result of a “regular ascending current of air playing upon all sides, which keeps the exterior of the candle cool”:

As the air comes to the candle, it moves upward by the force of the current which the heat of the candle produces, and it so cools all the sides of the wax, tallow, or fuel as to keep the edge much cooler than the part within; the part within melts by the flame that runs down the wick as far as it can go before it is extinguished, but the part on the outside does not melt. If I made a current in one direction, my cup would be lop-sided, and the fluid would consequently run over; for the same force of gravity which holds worlds together holds this fluid in a horizontal position, and if the cup be not horizontal, of course the fluid will run away in guttering. You see, therefore, that the cup is formed by this beautifully.

Next, Faraday asked (rhetorically), how is it that a candle burns so steadily, when the it is impossible for a solid fuel to “flow” up to the wick to feed the flame at the top, as in an oil lamp? The oil in the lamp flows upward thanks to something called capillary action: “the ability of a substance to draw another substance into it.” (It’s also behind the so-called “wick effect” explanation for cases of suspected spontaneous human combustion.) Basically, it’s the same thing that causes a sponge (a porous material) to soak up liquids from a surface.

You can witness capillary action for yourself with a simple vertical glass tube open at either end. Place the lower end in a glass of water, you’ll notice that the water rises up to a certain point and then stops. Surface tension basically pulls the liquid column up until the mass of the liquid is large enough so that gravity can overcome the intramolecular forces. You know when a drop of water forms on the spigot of your tap and suspends there until you touch it? Capillary forces hold it there.

And the same is true of candles. To demonstrate this, Faraday showed a “vessel made of wire gauze filled with water.” It was porous, since water poured into the top would run out at the bottom, and yet the vessel remained filled with water. Faraday compared the wire gauze to a candle’s wick, and explained:

“the wire, being once wetted, remains wet; the meshes are so small that the fluid is attracted so strongly from the one side to the other, as to remain in the vessel, although it is porous. In like manner, the particles of melted tallow ascend the cotton and get to the top: other particles then follow by their mutual attraction for each other, and as they reach the flame they are gradually burned.”

Faraday went on to muse upon the connection between the burning candle and the formation of soot and smoke, as well as air currents and how they influence the shapes of flames. He illustrated this last point with an impromptu version of “snapdragon”: he took a warmed dish, poured in some brandy (the fuel), then lit it. Then he dropped in some plums (which served as a wick) and pointed out how “beautiful tongues of flame” were formed.

“You have the air creeping in over the edge of the dish forming these tongues. Why? Because, through the force of the current and the irregularity of the action of the flame, it can not flow in one uniform stream. The air flows in so irregularly that you have what would otherwise be a single image broken up into a variety of forms, and each of these little tongues has an independent existence of its own.

“Indeed, I might say, you have here a multitude of independent candles. You must not imagine, because you see these tongues all at once, that the flame is of this particular shape. A flame of that shape is never so at any one time. Never is a body of flame, like that which you just saw rising from the ball, of the shape it appears to you. It consists of a multitude of different shapes, succeeding each other so fast that the eye is only able to take cognizance of them all at once.”

It’s a wonderful lecture, and worth reading in its entirety. For all our technological advancement, I find it charming that, even today, scientists still find much to puzzle about when it comes to burning candles. “There are literally thousands of reactions that go on from the moment the fuel vapor is produced and leaves the wick to the time it actually burns and produces Co2 and water,” NASA researcher Howard Ross told Discover in 2001.

This is why I love Faraday so much. No matter how accomplished he became in the world of science, no matter how much he learned through his experiments (which gave us the dynamo, among other things), he never lost the ability to keenly observe even the simplest things around him, noting tiny details and reveling in the intricacy of Nature. He closed his candle lecture by telling his audience,

“Indeed, all I can say to you at the end of these lectures (for we must come to an end at one time or other) is to express a wish that you may, in your generation, be fit to compare to a candle; that, in all your actions, you may justify the beauty of the taper by making your deeds honourable and effectual in the discharge of your duty to your fellow-men.”

On August 25, 1867, the flame of Faraday’s life was snuffed out; his (physical and mental) health had been deteriorating for a good 20 years by then. But his gifts keep on giving, all these years later. And Christmas seems a particularly apt time to honor the man.

Gentleman-detective Lord Peter Wimsey is stranded in a small English village due to car trouble on New Year’s Eve at the start of Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. This being a holiday, and one of the change-ringers being absent, he finds himself sitting in on a record-breaking, nine-hour ringing of the changes for the parish. He made an impression, so much so that a few months later, he gets dragged back to the village to help solve the mystery of a body that has turned up in the cemetery, which may or may not be connected somehow with a robbery of a pricey emerald necklace some 15 years before.

Sayers certainly did her authorial homework: the entire novel is constructed around bells and change-ringing, right down to the chapter titles and epigrams. So it’s the perfect framework to discuss science of bells and change-ringing, which turns out to be a rich lode to mine indeed. (Caveat: there will be spoilers towards the end of this post, but I promise to give fair warning when we get there.)

Back before the days of insta-communication, English communities relied on the tolling of bells to sound alarms and mark the passing of village residents. Sayers took her title from the number of times a bell will toll to mark the passing of a man: nine strokes (“ringing the nine tailors”), followed by a pause, then the slow tolling of single strokes at half-minute intervals — however many strokes required to mark the age. The pattern was similar for a woman, except there would be six initial tolls. (If “nine tailors make a man,” then I guess six tailors make a woman.) If that sounds exhausting, remember that life expectancies were much lower as recently as the late 1800s — especially for women.

The famed “bow bells” at London’s church of St. Mary-le-Bow are among the most famous in the world, showing up frequently in London lore. Remember the tale of Dick Wittington? In 1932 he supposedly hard the Bow bells calling him back to London to fulfill his destiny as Lord Mayor. It is said that a true Cockney must be born within earshot of the bells, and a medieval nursery rhyme ends with the line, “I do not know says the Great Bell of Bow.”

The first known historical reference to the Bow bells is in 1469, when the Common Council ordered the ringing of a curfew every night at 9 PM. A fifth bell was donated to the church in 1515 by one William Copland, a church warden, although he didn’t live to see it rung. (It was rung for the first time at his funeral.)

By 1635 there were six bells, although both tower and bells were destroyed in the the Great Fire of London in 1666. The church was rebuilt with a new tower for 12 bells, although initially there were only eight; there weren’t a fully 12 until 1881. They weren’t rung very often, either: there were problems wit the tower, the bells and the bell frame, apparently, as well as a shortage of ringers. The BBC used a recording of the Bow bells during World War II as an interval signal for English language broadcasts. There are still 12 bells, cast at the famed Whitechapel bell foundry in 1956, after the church and bell tower were refurbished. So the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow still ring today.

Casting the Bells

Bells are fascinating things, right down to how they are made — or rather, cast, since the process involves pouring molten bell metal into a mold.  In The Nine Tailors, the tenor bell is named Tailor Paul, supposedly cast in a field next to the churchyard in 1614. Once the bell has been cast, it can be “tuned” by paring metal off various parts of the bells’ soundbow.

As for the creation of the mold, that is an equally painstaking process. There is an inner mold, or core, and an outer one (the “cope), both made up of a mixture of clay, cow dung (!) and horse hair. This mud pie is built up into the desired shape, supported by a metal base plate (“strickle”), layer by painstaking layer. After a certain number of layers, the mold is baked in a dry oven until it is hard, then more layers are added, then baked, and so on. Any air pockets or moisture would be bad, as the finished mold would crack when the molten lead is poured into it.

Just before the final layer has been baked hard, the mold is coated with graphite to prevent the molten metal from burning it, and any desired inscription is stamped into the mold in reverse. This is another time-honored tradition of bells, which frequently have nicknames and inscriptions, as if they were, indeed, alive.

For instance, in Sayers’ novel, the oldest bell is dubbed Batty Thomas, cast in 1380, and bears the inscription “Abbat Thomas sett mee heare + and bad mee ringe both loud and cleer.” (The oldest bell hung for change ringing that is still in use was cast in 1325; it is the fifth bell at St. Dunstan’s Church in Canterbury, Kent.)

Wimsey even alludes at one point to one of the most popular inscriptions employed by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry for its treble bells: “I mean to make it understood that tho’ I’m little yet I’m good.”

The traditional architecture of a bell tower incorporates a bell chamber with louvred windows so the sound can escape outside, instead of building up to intolerable levels within the chamber (see discussion of forced oscillation resonance in the final section, unless you want to avoid spoilers).

Below the bell chamber, there is usually at least one sound chamber, through which the ropes pass as they are dropped down into the ringing chamber. Each rope has a wooden grip, called a sally. (“Wimsey could see the eight bell-ropes, their wooden sallies looped neatly to the walls and their upper ends vanishing mysteriously into the shadows of the chamber roof.“)

For full-circle ringing, a bell is hung so that it can rotate a full 360 degrees, fitted with a wheel and a rope. Traditionally, the ball begins in the “mouth down” position and must be “rung up” in order to start the tolling.  (“Wimsey brought his bell up competently up and set her at backstroke while the tuckings were finally adjusted.”) The ringer then has to pull on the rope repeatedly so that the bell swings higher and higher, until it rotates the full 360 degrees each time the rope is pulled.The bell winds the rope onto its wheel as it completes the rotation, such that the sallie is lifted towards the ceiling (the “handstroke”). Then it swings back in the opposite direction as the ringer pulls the tail-end of the rope towards the floor (the “backstroke”).

These bells aren’t easy to ring either, according to my fellow science writer Karen Fox, who has been a modern-day bell-ringer at National Cathedral in Washington, DC. In an email exchange a couple of years ago — we were gushing over our shared love for Sayers’ novel — she said, “You have to pull it the perfect amount so it will balance upside down. Only by balancing it to give yourself a beat of time before it swings back down can you control it at all. One has to learn the feel of the weight of the bell and slow it down perfectly as it nears the top of its arc.”

Ringing the Changes

Karen also said she was drawn to the numbers of the patterns in the changes. Change-ringing in England — at least as we know it today — evolved in the 17th century; the first textbook on change-ringing appeared in 1671 and was called Tittinnalogia, or The Art of Ringing.  There are simple “rounds” that can be rung, but since this gets monotonous, over time, variations of the patterns emerged, and these are known as specific peals — many with colorful names.

Wimsey’s fictional nine-hour New Year’s peal of 15,840 “Kent Treble Bob Majors.” Other peals mentioned in Sayers’ novel include Grandsire Triples, Steadmans, and Grandsire Major. One wouldn’t confuse the sound of ringing the changes with anything resembling “music” as the term is traditionally used, however. (You can listen to some recordings here.)

“The art of change-ringing is peculiar to the English and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example,  it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully-tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations.”

This is partly a limitation of the bells: they have a lot of momentum, they’re huge, and it takes about two seconds for them to rotate fully, so it’s far too challenging to play melodies with them. But leave it to the Brits to take a shortcoming and turn it into its own peculiar art form. Maybe the bells can’t easily play a tune, but they can be rung in succession, in various changing sequences. Each bell can only be moved one time in the sequence.

Quoth Karen: “Part of the reason the patterns are limited to only changing order with your neighbor at any given time is due to that momentum thing. You can get the bell to stop just long enough to switch positions with the person before or after you, but no longer. That’s why you never hear melodies with change-ringing.” (You can find an Applet of change-ringing here.)

For instance, if you ring the bells in order — from the lightest, highest pitched bell to the heaviest — this is known as “rounds,” denoted by a row of numbers.

A “simple plain hunt,” per Karen, would be 1-2-3-4-5-6, followed by the next row (2-1-4-3-6-5), and the next, and the next (2-4-1-6-3-5, 4-2-6-1-5-3, 4-6-2-5-1-3, etc.), “because no bell could possibly ring further than one spot away from where they rang in the last round.”

(A notation of rounds of the Plain Bob Minor peal is pictured at right.)

Sayers includes a nice summation of the peculiar aesthetics of campanology in The Nine Tailors:

To the ordinary man, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association. The change-ringer does, indeed, distinguish musical differences between one method of producing his permutations and another; he avers, for instance, that where the hinder bells run 7, 5, 6 or 5, 6, 7, or 5, 7, 6, the music is always prettier, and can detect and approve, where they occur, the consecutive fifths of Tittums and the cascading thirds of the Queen’s change.

But what he really means is, that by the English method of ringing with rope and wheel, each several bell gives forth her fullest and her noblest note. His passion — and it is a passion — finds its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.

Killer Bells?

WARNING! MAJOR SPOILERS TO FOLLOW! READ NO FURTHER IF YOU CARE!

In fact, Sayers makes ingenious use of change-ringing and its notation as a plot device: a letter is discovered in the bell chamber with the body, but the text appears to make absolutely no sense. Then Wimsey, with the help of the vicar, realizes that it’s written in code — and the key to that code is a specific peal written out in change-ringing notation. The decoded letter reveals the hiding place of the stolen emeralds.

Bells can be fatal, most commonly because ringers get tangled in the ropes and accidentally hang themselves, or the bells unexpectedly swing down and squash somebody’s noggin. This still occasionally happens even today. In May 2008, the Independent reported that a bell ringer broke his collarbone after getting tangled up in a rope at the top of a church tower.

Apparently the rope got caught in a bunch of keys attached to his trousers, and the guy was hoisted a good three feet off the belfry floor, blacked out, and fell back to the floor. Firefighters had to rig up a pulley system to lower the injured bell ringer through a trap door in the floor, since the only other entry was up a narrow wooden spiral staircase.

Both those fates figure in the mythology of Sayers’ fictional bell, Batty Thomas, which the church sexton, Mr. Godfrey, deems “an unlucky bell.” Batty Thomas is blamed for the death of one of Cromwell’s soldiers who ventured into the belfry and — because the bells had been left mouth up — when his cohorts started to pull on the ropes, Batty Thomas swung down and killed him instantly.

A few centuries later a beginning ringer tried to raise Batty Thomas alone, without help, and hung himself in the ropes. But Sayers came up with an especially ingenious theory of how her murder victim died. Wimsey’s breakthrough occurs very late in the book, when he ventures into the bell tower as the bells are being rung in the midst of a major flood in the area. Sayers writes:

“He was pierced through and buffeted by the clamour. Through the brazen crash and clatter there went one high note, shrill and sustained, that was like a sword in the brain. All the blood of his body seemed to rush to his head, swelling it bursting point…. It was not noise — it was brute pain, a grinding, bludgeoning, ran-dan, crazy, intolerable torment…. His eardrums were cracking; his senses swam away. It was infinitely worse than the roar of heavy artillery.”

Wimsey manages to stagger to safety, but not before blood runs from his nose and ears. And he concludes that the bells murdered the victim; he had been tied up and forgotten during the nine-hour peal, and the noise had proven to much for his body to withstand: “I believe it is at St. Paul’s Cathedral that it is said to be death to enter the bell-chamber when a peal is being rung.”

Indeed, at the inquest the medical examiner testifies that the victim’s brain showed evidence of “an effusion of blood into the
cortex.” (Photo at left features the late actor Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey in a 1970s TV adaption of The Nine Tailors.)

This is probably the most criticized aspect of Sayers’ excellent mystery. It’s an ingenious cause of death, but is it plausible? Well, bells undeniably have a natural resonance. Lots of factors contribute to the sound a bell makes — its diameter, weight, profile, and thickness, for example — which is why there are so many different bell profiles.

Because of that complex shape, what we hear when the bell is struck is a combination of notes, arising from different parts of the bell vibrating at different frequencies (“partial tones”). The partial tones combine in the end to give a bell its distinctive tone. Indeed, Sayers’ fictional jewel thief, Nobby Cranton, stumbles upon the body in the belfry and in his haste to leave, drops his flashlight, which hits one of the bells hanging below. “I’ll never forget the sound it made,” he tells the Superintendent. “It wasn’t loud, but kind of terribly sweet and threatening, and it went humming on and on, and a whole lot of other notes seemed to come out of it, high up and clear and close.”

Every material object has a natural resonant frequency at which it vibrates — like crystal wine glasses. Pump in more energy of the same resonance and let it build up, and the crystal wine glass will vibrate so strongly that it can shatter — a phenomenon known as forced oscillation resonance. In order for this to work, the sound must be loud (at least 90 decibels) and prolonged (at least several seconds) to allow enough vibrating energy to build up to cause the crystal wine glass to shatter.

And of course, the sound in question must resonate perfectly with the natural resonant frequency of the glass. If it doesn’t, the glass won’t shatter no matter how long and loud the note in question. Furthermore, wine glasses have a unique “bell” shape that makes them especially able to propagate resonant vibrations — and thus more vulnerable to shattering. That said, those famous Memorex commercials showing Ella Fitzgerald shattering a crystal glass with her voice was a bit of a cheat: they specifically used glasses with a high lead content (which vibrates better) and amplified her voice to about 94 decibels, on a par with a jackhammer.

I haven’t been able to find any specific studies to back up or debunk Sayers’ ingenious murder weapon. The best answer I could find was in response to the question of whether sound can kill comes from Cecil Adams’ Straight Dope. I verified the salient points, to wit: the pain threshold in the ear is between 130 to 140 decibels — about the same as a jet engine at close-ish range.

The eardrum will rupture around 160 decibels, or 185 decibels for “nonperiodic blast pressure.” The latter is the kind of sharp instantaneous rise in ambient atmospheric pressure resulting from an explosion or the firing of a large weapon — or a thunderclap or sonic boom, for that matter. Sound, after all, is a pressure wave.

Sound, apparently, can kill. Sometimes. In World War I, for instance, soldiers were found dead in the vicinity of an explosion, yet they didn’t have any obvious external injuries — just major internal damage, especially to the ear, lungs and gastrointestinal tract. The prevailing theory as to cause of death is an air embolism, starting in the lungs. The immense pressure of the blast pushes on the chest and ruptures the delicate lung tissue, so air bubbles can travel into the arteries and thus to the heart, brain and other organs. The result is, obviously, death.

The military is interested in the development of acoustic weapons for that very reason. Adams cites German physicist Jurgen Altmann’s treatise on the physiological effects of high-intensity sound, who concluded that “the threshold for suffocation or embolism following lung rupture is 2.6 to 11 times atmospheric pressure, depending on pulse duration.”

Could the bells in Sayers’ novel have produced those extremes of pressure? Wimsey admits he couldn’t know what, exactly, the cause of death might be — “stroke, apoplexy, shock” — but the victim was tied up there for the full nine-hour New Year’s Eve peal on a night “when the snow choked the louvres and kept it pent up in the tower,” making the noise even worse. And of course, if the victim had a pre-existing medical condition, it would be far easier for him to have suffered some sort of seizure and died — although the evidence for this sort of thing remains hotly disputed.

Barring any better explanation, I’ll just side with Sayers’ fictional Superintendent: “Matter of periods of vibration, I suppose.” Case closed. For now.

Check out these related posts!

The Science of Mysteries: Instructions for a Deadly Dinner (Deborah Blum on Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison)

The Science of Mysteries: Watch Where You Fall In (Ann Finkbeiner on Josephine Tey’s To Love and Be Wise)

The Science of Mysteries: Total Eclipse of the Heart (Jennifer Ouellette at Discovery News, on Jane Langton’s Dark Nantucket Noon)

The Science of Mysteries: Of Granular Materials and Singing Sands (Jennifer Ouellette on Josephine Tey’s The Singing Sands)

My hypothesis is this: Children can never have too many good books to read.  In order to prove/disprove this hypothesis, I have set up the following experiment: I buy my niece and nephew stacks and stacks of books, and then ask them if it’s too many. We have yet to reach maximum bookage, and I’ve been sending several pounds of them every year for seven years. I plan to publish the results of my research once my four year-old niece turns eighteen in the Journal of Auntie Allyson, and am positive it will stand up nicely to peer review.

Once again, I scoured the shelves of my local indie bookstore, Vroman’s, in search of science books for the kids.  The secret to finding some of the best science books for kids is to walk past the science section and just start browsing titles in the kids’ fiction section.  I mean, there are some decent titles to be found sorted by subject in science/math/education, which I’ll detail here, but sometimes books that seem like a silly story about a pair of cats playing all night is actually a fantastic conversation starter about the night sky and everything in it.

Give it some thought when you’re browsing through the stacks. A book about different kinds of monsters with googly eyes and jagged teeth is actually kind of a neat way to introduce a child to adaptation. You just ask, “Why do you think the googly-eyed monster has that dark fur?” You hope the kid says, “So you can’t see him hiding in the closet!”

At this point, you’ll of course have to invest heavily in nightlights and scooch over in your bed when the inevitable nightmare hits. But you know, ADAPTATION!  Maybe that was a crap example.

The books I got for my niece and nephew this year include the story of Galileo, a dinosaur who doesn’t know she’s extinct, a giant squid who eats homework, lots of poop (oh how little kids love poop), and a universe full of star dust.

If you’re at a loss for what to buy the little ones in your life this holiday season, consider my recs, below. And then read to them. If you find a kid that has too many books, please send me your data. I’ve yet to discover one, and am sure that I have discovered a new law of physics, and will be shocked to find my hypothesis disproven. If you don’t have any little ones in your life, please consider buying a couple of these and tossing them in a toy drive bin or donating to your local school’s library.

These are all appropriate for ages 4-7 (and grown-ups will get a kick out of them, too)! I’m linking to Amazon, but consider buying from your local bookseller this year, and explore the store.

Older Than the Stars by Karen C. Fox. Illustrations by Nancy Davis. Charlesbridge Pub Inc; Reprint edition (July 1, 2011) Ages 6 and up.

This is the story of the Big Bang, told in a cumulative style, like This Is the House That Jack Built or The Twelve Days of Christmas. Author Karen Fox begins her story with a very heavy speck of dust that grows into a universe: electrons, neutrons, protons, all dancing together to make atoms.

The illustrations expand and spread out over the pages using carefully considered color that looks like the messy/fun work of pre-schooler on Red Bull.  “These are the bits that were born in the bang when the world began.” You can almost hear Sagan reading it aloud to you.

This is the dust, so old and new,
Thrown from the blast
Intense enough
To hurl the atoms so strong and tough
That formed in the star of red-hot stuff
That burst from the gas in a giant puff
That spun from the blocks
That formed the bits
That were born in the bang
When the world began

And so she continues through to the inevitable conclusion: You, me, the dinosaurs, your mom, that mean kid down the street who throws rocks at cars, the street itself, the neighbor’s dog who poops on the lawn…all came from a star, which means we’re all connected and as old as the universe itself.  This is a lovely introduction to cosmology. Hell, I understand it better. I hope her next book is on quantum mechanics.

Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct. Written and Illustrated by Mo Willems. Hyperion Book CH; First Edition edition (August 1, 2006).  Ages 4 and up.

Edwina is a dinosaur. She bakes cookies, goes to school, helps little old ladies cross the street, and everyone loves her. Everyone but Reginald von Hoobie-Doobie. Reginald spends all his days trying to convince everyone that Edwina simply cannot exist, even though everyone in his class can clearly see that she is there, baking cookies.  You can see how this would be a good time to bring up the topic of Climate Change.

Starry Messenger Written and Illustrated by Peter Sis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) (September 1, 2000). Ages 6 and up.

This is the history of Galileo Galilei, told simply and elegantly by author Peter Sis. I’m going to put out a warning that he doesn’t gloss over Galileo’s trial and imprisonment by the Church, and it might be a little upsetting for kids. Then again, if your kid didn’t need therapy after seeing Bambi’s mom get turned into venison ravioli, this shouldn’t be too difficult.  The illustrations are rich, intricate, and powerful.

Though it might be a little hard to get through the page on Galileo’s trial, the final artwork depicting the astronomer standing on his roof, secretly gazing up at the night sky while the unknowing guards stand below is inspiring and hopeful. In this way, Galileo is presented as victorious, because as the famous song goes, “You can’t take the sky from me.”

You see what I did there with the Firefly theme song? See? Also, this is a Caldecott Honor book, which means my contention that the illustrations are hauntingly gorgeous holds up under peer review.

One Moon, Two Cats by Laura Godwin and Illustrated by Yoko Tanaka. Atheneum Books for Young Readers (August 30, 2011) Ages 3 and up.

A country cat and a city cat live very far away from each other, but play under the same moon. This one’s a lovely conversation starter about how animals adapt to different environments, but I like it for more personal reasons. Though my niece is three-thousand miles away, we’re both sleeping under the same moon…or more likely, getting out of bed to get into some trouble. I like any book that encourages kids to look up at the night sky and wonder. This is one of them.

11 Experiments That Failed by Jenny Offill and Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter. Schwartz & Wade (September 27, 2011) Ages 4 and up.

I adore this. A little girl. A lab coat. Safety glasses. The scientific method. Eleven experiments and their results.

Question: Can a message be sent in a bottle to a faraway land?
Hypothesis: The hole in the bottom of the toilet leads to the sea.

What you need:

• Message
• Bottle
• Toilet

What to do:

1. Write a secret message.
2. Place inside bottle.
3. Flush.

Results:

• Toilet overflowed
• Plumber called
• Still awaiting rescue

There are ten more of these, including one with a bologna sandwich and a pair of sneakers. This is science comedy gold.  With diagrams.  I once worked in a lab where an ant fried an 80k laser. This isn’t that far off.

The Boy Who Cried Ninja by Alex Latimer. Peachtree Publishers (April 1, 2011) Ages 5 and up.

I’m cheating a little here in that is in no way a sciencey sort of book. However, the characters are: A boy named Tim, a ninja, an astronaut, a time-traveling monkey, a sunburned crocodile, and a giant squid.

I’m going to chalk up any story involving a giant squid as a win in the column of any fan of biologist and cephalopod lover, PZ Myers.

Poop: A Natural History of the Unmentionable by Nicola Davies and Illustrated by Neal Layton. Candlewick; Reprint edition (March 22, 2011). Ages 8 and up.

Scientists study it. Everybody does it. Dung beetles eat it. Archeologists dig it up by the truckload. Hippos make a lot of it. What is it? IT’S POOP! Kids love poop. This book takes its shit very seriously. Blue whales have big, pink poops because they eat a lot of shrimp. Hippos navigate by poop. Termites use their poop to farm mushrooms. Yes, termites farm. Holy shit.

I also purchased a brick containing fossilized dinosaur poop. It comes with a pick and brush so the kids can excavate the poop fossil. Yes, you can purchase fossilized dinosaur poop.

Why We Have Day and Night by Peter F. Neumeyer and Edward Gorey. Pomegranate (March 15, 2011). Ages 4 and up.

Using an orange and a flashlight, Edward Gorey explains the earth’s rotation to a group of crosshatch ink gothic children. Oh yes.

I also picked up a few picture books and a flip-book on dinosaurs, that allows my niece to make different crazy looking dinosaurs by flipping any one of three cardboard panels. As I wrote earlier, you can find some gems by wandering away from the science section and into the fiction stacks. Look for pictures that make you gaze a little longer, and think of ways you can use the story to talk about science with the kids you love. This will help teach them critical thinking skills, and sharpen their imaginations.

Happy holidays, all.  And happy reading!

Allyson Beatrice is the author of  The Amazing Adventures of Sam the Bat (for kids) and Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? True Adventures in Cult Fandom.

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

Hopefully everyone’s had a chance by now to look over the list of finalists for Open Lab 2012. The hardest part of editing an anthology turns out to be remarkably similar to the hardest part of writing: the necessity of killing one’s darlings. (Or, as Stephen King put it in On Writing: “kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”) But that doesn’t mean said darlings are forgotten! So I wanted to take a moment to highlight a few posts that I loved, but that didn’t quite make the final cut; each cut broke my heart a little. They are still well worth a read, so please do check them out.

1. Beatrice the Biologist: Your cold symptoms are your fault [AND]: Sleep Deprivation (cartoons). Beatrice seems like a kindred spirit to Allie of Hyperbole and a Half. It’s all about the cartoons, here, not the text — and those cartoons just wouldn’t translate well into print, alas. But I love the sense of play in evidence, and heck, any post with a cartoon drawing of mucus is A+ in my book.

2. The Biology Files: The Bears of Texas: Chapter 1-The Last Grizzly. Elegant and elegaic history of the last grizzly bear in Texas, from the keyboard of Emily Willingham. It’s actually the first chapter in a book she’s written, The Bears of Texas, so if you like what you read, you can order the whole thing.

3. Boundary Vision: Science and music: Seeing past the noise with Robin Woywitka and Paul Farrant. Tons of quirky charm, here, as Marie-Claire Shanahan explores how science informs the music of this duo, and vice versa.

4. Clastic Detritus: The Long Beat of Rhythmic Sedimentation. I loved the conceit in this post: that the layers of Earth’s sediment have their own rhythm, and geologists are learning more about how to keep the beat.

5. Culturing Science: Urban ecology doesn’t have enough humans in it. Hannah Waters muses on everything we don’t see as we walk the streets of NYC’s urban environment.

6. The Dog Zombie: The case of the jaundiced terrier. I was not familiar with this blog until now — one of the advantages to editing the anthology is discovering new voices. This is a nicely written vignette of an unusual case encountered by a veterinarian; not a perspective one usually finds!

7. From The Lab Bench: Life, Death, and Silver Bullets. I love that Paige Brown took a huge creative risk here, turning a scientific study into a short science fiction story. Looking forward to reading more from her.

8. Guardian Science Blog (Scicurious) The postdrome: migraine’s silent sister. The always wonderful Scicurious muses on the scientific evidence for a lesser-known stage of migraine.

9. The Inverse Square Blog: “The First Thing A Principle Does Is Kill Somebody”. Any post that opens with a quote from Lord Peter Wimsey (from Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, specifically) is guaranteed to catch my attention, and if it’s written by Tom Levenson — well, you just know it’s gonna be worth your time.

10. Neurophilosophy: The ghostly gaze and the disappearing bust of Voltaire. I’ve been a Neurophilosophy fan for years. Mo Costandi does his usual fine work exploring an unusual optical illusion — alas, it relies heavily on images we didn’t think would reproduce well enough in printed form. But that’s not a problem online, so check it out.

11. Oscillator: Allergy Recapitulates Phylogeny. Seamless melding of the personal with scientific explication in this charming post. Who hasn’t wondered at the seeming randomness of allergies?

12. Providentia: The Turing Problem (Part 1), The Turing Problem (Part 2) and The Turing Problem (Part 3) fused into a single essay. Alan Turing is one of the most fascinating figures in 20th century science history, and Romeo Vitelli weaves together a compelling tale of the consequences of Turing’s homosexuality at a time when it was still a criminal offense, exploring the topic of chemical castration in that context. Heartbreaking.

13. Quantum Diaries (US LHC): Helicity, Chirality, Mass, and the Higgs. One of the best careful explications of an incredibly complicated physics topic you’re likely to read. Impress your friends at the next dinner party with your grasp of chirality in particle physics when they mention the hunt for the Higgs boson!

14. Southern Fried Science: The importance of failure in graduate student training. One of the best lessons I ever learned as an adult was the importance of failure in life — we hate to fail, but that’s often how we grow and learn. So I loved Andrew David Thaler’s refreshingly honest tale of a graduate research project gone horribly wrong. Fortunately there’s a happy ending!

15.  This View of Life: Narrating Science and Fear. Emily Finke muses on narrative structure, and how we can use the same kinds of stories that delight us in fairy tales to augment our communication of science.

Finally, there were over 70 posts from the Scientific American Guest Blog nominated this year; only seven made the final cut, despite the fact that a huge fraction received very high marks from reviewers. (Perhaps FSG will consider a separate anthology of the best of the SciAm Guest Blog in the future.)  It features posts by some of the best and brightest blogging voices out there, so it’s a great way to find new bloggers.

First, I’d like to reiterate something Ed Yong said on Twitter. This is an anthology comprised of a selection of 51 OF SOME of the best blog posts in 2011 — not THE 51 “best” posts. It’s a critical distinction because, let’s face it, there’s likely many gems out there that didn’t even get nominated, and there were several posts we would have loved to include but had to cut to get the count down to 51. Also, some things work great in blog format but don’t translate well to print. (I have high hopes for what might be possible with e-books in the future, however.)

I am not kidding when I say winnowing down 720 entries was an incredibly painful process. I absolutely could not have done it without the help of all the volunteer reviewers (a full thank-you list will be forthcoming later). Even so, Bora and I engaged in much mutual handwringing, particularly over the last 10-12 cuts we were forced to make.

In the end, we looked at the overall balance of the anthology and picked those that fit the bill for what was missing — humor, personal reflection, short-form, long-form, diversity of topic and writerly “voice”, etc. — but any one of those cut dozen or so “contenders” would have also made fine additions to the anthology. (And as this year’s editor, I automatically removed my own nominated post from the running; I simply couldn’t justify including it when so many other worthy posts were under consideration.) I think we ended up with a good, diverse mix, and (amazingly) an almost perfect 50/50 split in male and female bloggers, although that wasn’t by design.

So without further ado, I give you the finalists for this year’s Open Lab anthology.

1. Anthropology in Practice (Krystal D’Costa): Unraveling The Fear o’ the Jolly Roger

2. The Artful Amoeba (Jennifer Frazer): Bombardier Beetles, Bee Purple, and the Sirens of the Night

3. The Atavism: The origin and extinction of species

4. Black Ink Obelisk (Aubrey J. Sanders): Somata (poem)

5. Blogus scientificus (Alex Reshanov): Shakes on a Plane: Can Turbulence Kill You?

6. Body Horrors (Rebecca Kreston): This Ain’t Yo Momma’s Muktuk: Fermented Seal Flipper, Botulism, Being Cold & Other Joys of Arctic Living

7. Boing Boing (Lee Billings): Incredible journey: Can we reach the stars without breaking the bank?

8. Boing Boing (Maggie Koerth-Baker): Nuclear energy 101: Inside the “black box” of power plants

9. Context and variation (Kate Clancy): Menstruation is just blood and tissue you ended up not using

10. Dangerous Experiments (Joe Hanson, It’s Okay To Be Smart): On Beards, Biology, and Being a Real American

11. Deep Sea News (Miriam Goldstein): DON’T PANIC: Sustainable seafood and the American outlaw

12. Empirical Zeal: (Aatish Bhatia) What it feels like for a sperm

13. En Tequila Es Verdad (Dana Hunter): Adorers of the Good Science of Rock-breaking

14. Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Kimberly Gerson): Romeo: A Lone Wolf’s Tragedy in Three Acts

15. Expression Patterns (Eva Amsen): Make history, not vitamin C

16. The Gleaming Retort (John Rennie): Volts and Vespa: Buzzing about Photoelectric Wasps

17. Guardian Science Blog (Karen James): Space shuttle launch: ‘I feel the percussive roar on the skin of my face’

18. Highly Allochthonous (Chris Rowan): Ten million feet upon the stair

19. History of Geology (David Bressan): It’s sedimentary, my dear Watson

20. Laelaps (Brian Switek): The Dodo is Dead, Long Live the Dodo!

21. The Last Word On Nothing (Ann Finkbeiner): Science Metaphors (cont): Resonance

22. The Loom (Carl Zimmer): The Human Lake

23. Neuron Culture (David Dobbs): Free Science, One Paper at a Time

24. Neurotribes (Steve Silberman): Woof! John Elder Robison, Living Boldly as a “Free-Range Aspergian”

25. Not Exactly Rocket Science (Ed Yong): The Renaissance man: how to become a scientist over and over again

26. Observations of a Nerd (Christie Wilcox): Why do women cry? Obviously, it’s so they don’t get laid.

27. The Occam’s Typewriter Irregulars (Richard F.Wintle): Genome sequencing, Shakespeare style [combined with] Genome Assembly – a primer for the Shakespeare fan

28. Oh, For the Love of Science! (Allie Wilkinson): The distance between your testicles and your anus, ‘taint unimportant

29. Pharyngula (PZ Myers): Dear Emma B

30. PLoS Blogs Guest Blog (T. Delene Beeland): Saving Ethiopia’s “Church Forests”

31. The Primate Diaries (Eric Michael Johnson): Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence

32. PsySociety (Melanie Tannenbaum): Sex and the Married Neurotic

33. Puff the Mutant Dragon (“Mutant Dragon”): Sunrise in the Garden of Dreams

34. Reciprocal Space (Stephen Curry): Joule’s Jewel

35. Sciencegeist (Matthew Hartings): I Love Gin and Tonics

36. Scientific American Guest Blog (Casey Rentz): How to stop a hurricane (good luck, by the way)

37. Scientific American Guest Blog (Cindy Doran, The Febrile Muse): Tinea Speaks Up—a Fairy Tale

38. Scientific American Guest Blog (Deborah Blum, Speakeasy Science): A View to a Kill in the Morning: Carbon Dioxide

39. Scientific American Guest Blog (Andrea Kuszewski, The Rogue Neuron): Could chess-boxing defuse aggression in Arizona and beyond?

40. Scientific American Guest Blog (David Manly, The Definitive Host/Lab Spaces): Mirror images: Twins and identity

41. Scientific American Guest Blog (Rob Dunn): Man discovers a new life-form at a South African truck stop

42. Scientific American Guest Blog (Jeremy Yoder, Denim and Tweed): The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Natural Selection and Evolution, with a Key to Many Complicating Factors

43. Scientific American Observations (George Musser): Free Will and Quantum Clones: How Your Choices Today Affect the Universe at its Origin

44. Skulls in the Stars (“Dr. Skyskull”): Mpemba’s baffling discovery: can hot water freeze before cold? (1969)

45. Superbug (Maryn McKenna): File Under WTF: Did the CIA Fake a Vaccination Campaign?

46. There and (hopefully) back again… (“Biochembelle”): In the shadows of greatness

47. This May Hurt A Bit (Shara Yurkiewicz): Fragmented Intimacies

48. The Thoughtful Animal (Jason Goldman): Rats, Bees, and Brains: The Death of the “Cognitive Map”

49. Uncertain Principles: Faster Than a Speeding Photon: “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam”

50. Universe (Claire L. Evans): Moon Arts, Part Two: Fallen Astronaut

51. The White Noise (Cassie Rodenberg): How addiction feels, the honest truth

Intrepid acousticians all over the globe are still hot on the trail of “Stradivari’s Secret“: a.k.a., just what is it about a Stradivarius violin that makes it sound so much better than your average, run-of-the-mill instrument? It’s been a topic of feverish investigation and much hot debate for over a decade, at least, and the latest offering comes from a Minnesota radiologist named Steven Sirr, who decided to run a 1704 Stradivarius violin known as “Betts” through a series of CT scans. The US Library of Congress helpfully loaned him the instrument for the experiment.

Why a CT scan? “CT is useful in measuring wood density, size and shapes, thickness graduation and volume measurements,” according to Sirr, not to mention providing “detailed analysis of damage and repair.”

A CT scan is simply a 3D version of your typical x-ray machine. Instead of just zapping an object with a single x-ray beam and recording the shadow image on special film, a CT scan features an X-ray beam that moves all around the object, taking a series of images from hundreds of different angles. A computer then compiles all those images into a single 3D image that enables an analyst to closely examine individual slices, one at a time.

That’s what Sirr did with the Betts violin, collecting over a thousand “slices” (individual images from many different angles) and then compiling them into a 3D reproduction of the instrument. This gave him a sneak peek into the violin’s inner workings. As Sirr explained:

“I assumed the instrument was merely a wooden shell surrounding air. I was totally wrong. There was a lot of anatomy inside the violin. Just like human beings, there is a wide range of normal variation among violins. When you are looking at an instrument that is hundreds of years old, you will see worm holes and cracks that have been repaired, as well as damage from being exposed to all kinds of conditions, from floods to wars.”

Ah, but Sirr didn’t stop there! He collaborated with two professional violin makers (luthiers) to recreate the perfect replica of Stradivari’s exquisite instrument. It started back in 1989, when Sirr showed his first scans to luthier John Waddle. They spent the next 20 years scanning over 100 violins — some common, others very rare and valuable — as well as other stringed instruments to gain a better understanding of how they were made.

For the Betts scan, Sirr converted the CT images into stereolithographic files and fed them into something called a CNC machine. It’s used for wood-working, among other applications, since it can use those files to carve out a real-world version of the imaged object. That’s what Waddle and his partner, Steve Rossow did: they carved the front and back plates and scroll for the replica Betts violin, then assembled and varnished the new instrument by hand.

In Search of Stradivari’s Secret

Ah, but the good Dr. Sirr is not the first to use CT scanning to study Stradivarius violins. Back in 2008, at a meeting of the Acoustics Society of America, Berend Stoel from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) described his collaboration with a renowned luthier named Terry Borman. The two men put several Strads (and some modern instruments, for control purposes) into a CT scanner to study the materials properties of the wood out of which the violins had been made.

Why focus on the wood? Well, several theories about why Strads sound so good rest upon the notion that it’s all about the wood used to make the instruments. For instance, some theorize that Stradivari used Alpine spruce that grew during a period of uncommonly cold weather, which caused the annual growth rings to be closer together, so the wood was abnormally dense.

The problem is that no two pieces of wood are exactly alike, so sculpting the wood — delicately shaving the top and the back to get the best acoustical properties — is critical during the violin-making process. A team of researchers from Mid Sweden University has been investigating computer models of violins for years, attempting to match in simulation that telltale Stradivari sound — including simulating that sculpting process.

Another prevailing theory has to do with the varnish: namely, that Stradivari used an ingenious cocktail of honey, egg whites, and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees, or perhaps salts or other chemicals. Joseph Nagyvary, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Texas A&M University, made headlines in November 2006 when he claimed it was the chemicals used to treat the wood — not necessarily the wood itself — that was responsible for the unique sound of a Stradivarius violin.

Those chemicals included salts of copper, iron and chromium, all of which are excellent wood preservers but may also have altered the acoustical properties. He based his findings on studies using infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the chemical properties of the backboards of several violins. (The backboard is the instrument’s largest resonant component.)

So Stoel decided to study the wood yet again, using the CT scan. See, it’s tough to study those woody properties without risking damage to this multimillion-dollar instruments. Stoel developed a computer program that non-invasively calculates lung densities in people suffering from emphysema, and adapted it to study wood densities from CT scans.

He found that while the average wood density of the classical and modern violins “did not differ significantly,” according to the accompanying press release, “the differences in wood density between early and late growth were were significantly lower in the ancient violins. Since differentials in wood density impact vibrational efficiency and thereby the production of sound, it is possible that this discovery may explain the superiority of these violins.”

Back in 2007, I sat down for a nice long chat with George Bissinger, a physicist at East Carolina University who also studies violin acoustics. Bissinger had the big Stradivari announcement in 2007 when he presented the results from his own investigations.

Using a 3D scanning laser, he achieved what he said were the most detailed and quantitative measurements to date of the acoustic properties of the Strad violins featured in the study as they vibrate — essentially mapping out how they vibrate to produce those heavenly tones. The measurements are so quantitative, in fact, that it’s possible to reconstruct the stiffness properties of the wood used to make the Strads, perhaps finally making it possible for modern instrument makers to replicate those unique acoustical attributes.

Bissinger is tall, slim, with cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and glasses, and while perfectly amiable, he’s not really one for casual chitchat; he’s more the quiet, deep-thinking sort. He doesn’t exactly stand out in a room full of scientists — until you get him talking about violin acoustics. Then he positively vibrates with intensity and becomes the most loquacious conversationalist on the planet.

That level of passion seems to be present in many who study Strad violins, never mind those who play them, like Joshua Bell (although a delusional Jen-Luc Piquant swears his passion for her trumps even his love for his Strad). The Cremona craftsman would no doubt find this quite gratifying.

Conducting this sort of experiment with bona fide Strads is a major logistics undertaking; Bissinger says it took him several years of careful “networking.” First, he had to borrow two of the world-class instruments from private collectors — no doubt having to pry the cases from the owners’ panicked fingers on the train platform. Yes, I said “train platform,” as in, Amtrak.  The instruments were brought to the lab by train in plain cases. Sometimes being inconspicuous is the best security in the world.

A violin organization generously footed the bill to insure the instruments for the 2-1/2 days of the experiment — you know, just in case the scientists dropped one or accidentally destroyed their tonal purity. Bissinger also brought in three other, lesser violins of varying quality for comparison purposes.

For the experiment, he hung each of the five violins by elastic bands, then struck the wood of the top plate with a little hammer, recording and measuring the vibrational modes with the 3D laser scanner. Bissinger specifically wanted to measure the in-plane and out-plane motion: the in-plane motion is the source of much of the sound energy, and this converts into out-plane motion, which produces the rich tonal sounds we associate with fine violins.

In addition, he hired a world-class violinist to play each of the violins used in the study for an hour so, to get the feel of the instruments, and then offer his subjective ratings for each one. The musician’s subjective analysis was then compared to the objective acoustical data.

The Psycho in the Acoustics

Not surprisingly, Bissinger had a lot to say on the topic of what makes a Stradivarius violin so acoustically superior. “The big secret about Stradivari is that there is no one secret,” he insisted — no elusive key or magical formula that, once discovered, will magically make it possible to reproduce the sound quality of a Stradivarius instrument over and over again on a mass scale.

Bissinger believes it can never be reduced to blind routine, because there are so many different factors that go into making a world-class instrument. It’s as much an art as it is science,” he told me. “You wouldn’t ask Leonardo da Vinci to reproduce the Mona Lisa en masse, perfectly, every time.” For Bissinger, an instrument maker is just as much of an artist as da Vinci: “He is the bridge between the artist and the scientist, both of whom speak very different languages and have different concerns. The maker has to speak to both.”

Certainly Stradivari was more than a simple craftsman: “He had some kind of conceptual understanding of the science behind what he was doing, even though physics technically wasn’t around yet,” said Bissinger. But he knew that doing one particular thing would have a desired effect, and he built on accumulated knowledge: each instrument was an improvement on the last, at least through Stradivari’s Golden Period.

But while Stradivari’s emphasis on geometry gave us the signature shape of a violin, Bissinger says there is  little evidence this has anything to do with the famous “Stradivari sound.” After all, Guarveri also produced exceptional instruments and wasn’t nearly as fascinated by geometry.

Not every Stradivarius sounds alike, and frankly, says Bissinger, even a genuine Stradivarius violin isn’t all it’s cracked up to be sometimes. The passage of time can exact a devastating toll. Many of Stradivari’s surviving instruments have deteriorated to the point where they are primarily collector’s items. Play a violin too frequently, and the parts wear down and must be replaced, altering the sound; play it too little, and the sound deteriorates, too.

Most of the Strads still played today do not have all their original parts, although Joshua Bell prides himself on the fact that his Strad still boasts the original varnish. Still, even Bell adapts his playing to his instrument to get the sound he desires. Bissinger claims there is no “perfect” instrument, and Stradivari — who devoted his life to the quest for perfection — would probably agree.

As for the claimed acoustical superiority of the instruments, yes, they do sound lovely. However, “There’s way too much psycho in the acoustics,” according to Bissinger, referring to a subfield known as psychoacoustics. Basically, the very name Stradivari instills respect and awe, and this can’t help but influence how people subjectively evaluate and/or respond to the instrument. “The truth is, there are many very fine world-class instrument makers today, producing violins that can hold their own against the Strads, but their names don’t evoke the same awed reverence, and thus the perception is that they are not as good,” Bissinger told me. In fact, more professional violinists play Guarveris than Strads, which have only become fashionable fairy recently.

Really, who wants mass-produced Stradivarius instruments, anyway? It’s always been all about the craftsmanship.

Ironically, while he was still alive, Stradivari — while hugely successful at his craft — was not considered the best violin-maker in the world, although he certainly dominated the industry along with Amati and Guerneri. They were the Holy Triumvirate of the Golden Age of Violins, and after they died, the instrument entered into something of a acoustical Dark Age. Later instrument makers didn’t share that all-consuming passion for improving the process to create ever-more-superior instruments: they just cranked out instruments the way it had always been done, with predictably pedestrian results.

Way back in 1819, physicist Felix Savard observed, “It is to be presumed that we have arrived at a time when the efforts of scientists and those of artists are going to unite to bring to perfection an art which for so long has been limited to blind routine.” Here we are, almost 200 years later, still trying to map out all the details, still chasing down an elusive secret that might not even exist. Perhaps that ability to capture our imagination 300 years later is the true magic of Stradivari.

NOTE: Portions of this post first appeared on the old archived blog in July 2008.