Science Stories

[austintorn@aol.com]

Science Stories

The “dry” formulas from science books are depended on for a large portion of our existence, and while we may stand in awe at their deeper meaning and even enjoy some lab experiments, they don’t always reveal their full and complete history; however, the stories behind many scientific discoveries are usually insightful, amazing and sometimes even hilarious.

Being that we are human, we can be doggedly eccentric in some of our earthly quests, and perhaps the genius of some scientists begets even more incredulous undertakings. (Wait until we look into the strangeness of Isaac Newton.)

[austintorn@aol.com]

Finding the Edge of the Universe!

At Princeton University, Robert Dicke and his team
Had really been building up much scientific steam
From pursuing George Gamow’s good suggestion
Of a deep space Cosmic Background Radiation.

Gamow wrote another paper suggesting some ways
To use the Bell antenna, but no one read it in those days.

Unknowing of this paper and unbeknownst to Dicke,
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, but 30 miles not far,
Were diligently trying to get rid of this very CBR!

At Bell Lab, their large communications antenna deployed
Was plagued by some persistent background noise,
A steady steamy hiss, unfocused and unrelenting,
They ever attempting to squash it away so painstakingly.

For a year they’d tried to eliminate this nuisance noise,
Through testing, rebuilding, and wiggling-dusting ploys,
Even placing duct tape over each and every seam and rivet.
They even wiped away a ton of bird shit from the dish,
Scrub brushing it and sweeping it clean. But, no fish.

Little did they know they’d found the edge of the visible universe:
The very first photons were at hand—the most ancient light,
Although time and distance had changed it into microwaves.
It was this interfering radiation they wished to swish away.

If the Empire State Building was the universe we know,
They had reached within an inch of the sidewalk below.
In desperation, they called Princeton about the noise;
“We’ve been scooped!” Dicke sadly told all of his boys.

Penzias and Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize,
Even though they’d not been looking, CBR-wise,
And didn’t even know what it was when they found it,
Nor had they ever described it in any scientific paper,
Not even knowing the significance but from the newspaper.
(Sadly, all that Dicke’s team got was a bit of sympathy.)

note: they didn’t really call it “bird shit”,
but a “white dielectric material”.


See The Birth of the Universe At Home

You, too, can detect the ancient CBR;
Just tune your TV to a blank channel;
About 1% of the dancing static is the CBR.
When there’s nothing on, it’s really everything!

[austintorn@aol.com]

What No Man Had Thought Before

Alan Guth had never done anything much before,
But soon attended Dicke’s Big Bang lecture tour,
And so had decided to study the birth of the universe.
And so just like that he developed inflation theory first.

The “Big Bang” formed 98 percent of matter spent,
But whence the rest of all the higher elements?
What flaming forge fired carbon, iron and more?
Fred Hoyle was a nut, much unloved, and a big bore.

Working with others who often avoided him,
Hoyle came up up with imploding stars, a whim
That that allowed supernovae to generate
The heavier elements at the rate of his steady state.

This process was known as nucleosynthesis,
Causing a 100 million degree heat and mist
That sprayed new elements into gaseous clouds of stardust
That could eventually coalesce into solar systems, and us.

99.9% of this mass made our sun, the rest leftover dirt,
Ever colliding, two grains being the conception of Earth,
For in every encounter there was always a winning lump
Of these endless and random bumping growing clumps.

(Fowler, not Hoyle, obtained the precious Nobel prize;
Hoyle had been overlooked, but to no one’s surprise.)

Another time: The total farce of a French expedition and some other attempts to measure the length of one degree of meridian (1/360 of the distance around the planet) so that the circumference of the Earth could be known.

[analog]

Excellent thread Austin. I think it will be a good outlet to display the combination of your creativeness and research. Many of these stories should perhaps start some interesting discussion.

later,

Tim

[austintorn@aol.com]

Alchemy Happens via Radioactivity
And
How Old can the Earth Be?

Through E=MCC we see that vast energy reserves
Are bound up in small amounts of matter, preserved.
Henri Becquerel carelessly left a packet of uranium salts
On a wrapped photographic plate in his drawer vault.

Some time later, he was surprised to discover that
The salts had burned an “light” impression into it.
The salts were emitting some rays of some sort, curiously
So he turned the matter over to Marie Curie, literally.

Madam Curie and her new husband Pierre, with glee,
Noted that the rocks poured out great amounts of energy,
But they never diminished in size or changed in any way.
(They were converting mass into energy very efficiently.)

They also found polonium and radium and a Nobel prize,
Along with Becquerel, in 1903, Einstein yet on the rise.

Radioactive elements decayed into other elements,
Noted Ernest Rutherford and colleague Fredrick Soddy;
One day you had an atom of uranium that “bled”,
And the very next day you had an atom of lead.

It always took the same amount of days
For half of the sample to decay,
And so this steady reliable rate of decay
Could be used in kind of a clocking way.

Tick-tock, how old was it? More than 700 millions years worth!
This age was way more than anyone had given the Earth.
He lectured, taking out a piece of radioactive pitchblende,
Showing it to aging Kelvin, but Kelvin rejected it to the end.

Dimitri Mendedeyev rejected it too, as with everything new,
Ever storming out of labs and lecture halls all over, too;
However, element 101 was called mendelevium in his name meant,
And quite appropriately, for it was a very unstable element.

Pierre Curie began to experience radiation sickness, getting weak,
But in 1906 he was fatally run over by a carriage on a Paris street.

Marie worked on with much distinction, but had an affair
So indiscreet that even the French were scandalized there,
And so she was never elected to the Academy of Sciences,
Despite not just one, but two (Physics, Chemistry) Nobel prizes.

Scientists yet thought that radioactivity was beneficial,
Putting thorium into toothpaste and laxatives as useful;
Eventually these products were banned, by 1938,
But for Madam, who’d died of leukemia, it was much too late.

The radiation is so pernicious and long lasting
That even now her papers from the 1890’s,
And even her cookbooks, are dangerous and toxic,
So all her lab books must be kept in lead lined boxes.
(One must wear protective clothing to look at them.)

[austintorn@aol.com]

Marie Curie was a very attractive lady very much aglow,
For my great ancestor in his old writings such told me so.
She radiated warmth unto him as a rainbow of sparks—
“Great balls of fire!” he remarked, “They now glow in the dark!”

[austintorn@aol.com]

Measuring the Size of the Earth

An English mathematician, Robert Norwood, among many,
Wished to know the circumference of the Earth, as any,
With his back against the Tower of London, he forked
Two devoted years marching 208 miles north to York,

Repeatedly stretching and measuring a piece of chain
As he went forth through all the heat, cold and rain,
He all this while made many meticulous adjustments tolled
For the rise and fall of the land and the meandering road.

Then, in York, a year since he began in London,
He measured the precise angle of the sun.
Thus, using trigonometry to size a degree of the mark,
He came up with 110.72 kilometers per degree of arc.

Not thinking that these measurements could be true,
Since the slightest errors could throw them into the blue,
Jean Picard spent two years trundling and triangulating;
Using quadrants and pendulum clocks, he got 110.46.

But, was the Earth fatter at the north and south poles?
Now new measurement were need to replace the old.

A hydrologist, Pierre Bouguer and and soldier,
Charles Marie de La Condamine, with many bolder,
Traveled to Peru to triangulate distance through the Andes,
To measure the meridian’s length from Cuenca to Yoarouqui.

They needed but to go 200 hundred miles for one degree,
But everything began to go wrong, sometimes spectactularly.
In Quito, they provoked the locals, getting stoned away,
Then their doctor was murdered and the botanist went crazy.

Fevers and falls claimed even more, and the most senior member,
Pierre Godin, ran off with a pretty thirteen year old girl.
Then they had to halt their work for eight long months,
Having to sort out a problem in Lima with their permits.

La Condamine and Bouguer stopped to each other speaking,
And all the while officials had many suspicions, unbelieving
That French scientists would travel halfway the world around
To measure the world right here in their very own towns.

Why didn’t they make the measurements in France?
Well, Edmund Halley, an exceptional figure, by chance
Got from Newton that our planet was slightly oblate;
But, Jacques Cassini had come up with the reverse fate.

Jacques was wrong, but the Academy sent the team in mind
To South America, to mountains with good sight lines;
However, the mountains of Peru were often lost in the clouds,
So they’d wait weeks to observe for an hour, complaining loud.

Plus, the terrain was near impossible, even defeating he mules,
But the men plodded on, fording wild rivers, hacking jungles
And crossing uncharted stony deserts far from supplies,
Tackling the task for nine long sun-blistered years of lies.

They then found out that another French team, cold,
Had taken measurements in Scandinavia that showed
That indeed a degree was longer near to the poles,
The Earth Forty-three kilometers wider equatorially
(Than from top to bottom around the poles.)

Still not talking, Bouguer and La Condamine just moaned,
Returning to the coast and even taking separate ships home.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Halley, Newton and Hooke

Halley was a sea captain, a cartographer, a professor
Of geometry, a deputy of the Royal Mint, an astronomer,
And the inventor of the deep-sea diving bell, and wrote some
On magnetism, tides, planet motions, and fondly on opium.

He invented the weather map and actuarial table ages,
Even proposed methods to work out the Earth’s old age
And its distance from the sun, even how to keep fresh fish,
But one thing he didn’t do was to discover Halley’ comet,
For he merely noted that it was yet another return of it.

He made a wager with Robert Hooke, the cell describer,
And with the great and stately Christopher Wren:
They bet upon why the planets’ orbit were ellipses.

Hooke, a known credit-taker, claimed he’d solved the problem,
But had to conceal it so that others could yet have satisfaction.
Well, Halley became consumed with finding the answer,
So he called upon the Lucasian Mathematics Professor.

Issac Newton was indeed brilliant beyond measure,
But was solitary, joyless, paranoid, and ever no pleasure.

Once he had inserted a needle in his eye and poked around,
Far inserting the leather bodkin between the eye and the bone.
Another time, he'd stared at the sun for so very long
That he had to spend many days in a darkened room.

Frustrated by mathematics, Isaac invented the calculus,
And then for twenty-seven years kept it hidden from us.
Likewise, he did the same with the understanding of light
And spectroscopy, keeping it for thirty years in the dark.

For Newton, science was but a partial part of his life’s routes,
For much time was given to alchemy and religious pursuits.
He was wholeheartedly devoted to the religion of Arianism,
Whose main tenet was that there could be no Holy Trinity.

Ironically, he worked as a Professor at Trinity College,
Although the only one there who was not Anglican.
He also spent an inordinate amount of time studying
The floor plan of the lost temple of Solomon the King,
Even learning Hebrew, the better to scan the original texts.

Another single minded quest of his was to turn base metals
Into precious ones, his papers revealing this preoccupation
Over optics and planetary motions and such mentations.

Well, Halley asked Newton what the curve would be
If the planets’ attraction toward the sun was supposed to be
The reciprocal to the square of their distance from it.
Newton promptly answered, of course, an “ellipse”.

Not finding his calculations of it, Newton not only rewrote it,
But retired for two years to produce his master work,
The Plilosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

To Halley’s horror, Newton refused to release the crucial third volume,
Without which the first two would make little sense.
There had been a dispute between Newton and Hooke
Over the priority of the inverse square law in the book.

That solved by Halley’s diplomacy, the Royal Society
Had pulled out from the publication, failing financially,
For, the year before, there had been a very costly flop
Called The History of Fishes; so, Halley himself popped
The funds for Netwon’s publication out of his own pocket.

Newton contributed nothing, as usual, and, to make matters worse,
Halley had just taken a position as the society’s clerk,
They failing to pay the promised 50 pounds to his purse,
Paying him only with very many copies of The History of Fishes!

[austintorn@aol.com]

The Caldron That Almost Brewed Humanity Away

At Toba, in northern Sumatra, a supervolcano
Erupted only seventy-four thousands years ago.
Six years of volcanic winter followed this eruption,
Bringing pre-humans to the very edge of extinction.

There were but a few thousand of them left around,
Since very little light could reach the dusty ground.
It took twenty thousand years for them to recompose.
From this handful of hardy souls we humans arose.

In 1960, Bob Christiansen looked around everywhere
At Yellowstone National Park for its volcanic caldera,
But found it nowhere. By some coincidence, NASA
Had photos from a recently tested high altitude camera.

Astounded, Bob learned why he’d failed to spot the caldera;
It was virtually the entire park, 2.2 million acres of area!
Yellowstone must have blown up with a violent misery
Far beyond anything known throughout our history.

The crater was forty miles across. The cataclysm was
Even beyond the scale of what the imagination does;
It had thousands of times more monstrous molten fire
Than Mount St. Helens. Krakatau was but a firecracker.

Yellowstone’s eruptions average one really massive blow
Every 600,000 years, the last one being 630,000 years ago;

It is long overdue. Better take out some no-fault insurance.

[austintorn@aol.com]

The Asteroid That May Destroy Humanity

The air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way of the rock,
Rising in temperature ten times more than the sun is hot.
Everything and everyone crinkled and crackled in the heat,
Then a thousand cubic kilometers of earth blew from beneath.

This shock wave, radiating at about the speed of light,
Would sweep just about everything else out of sight.
From further away, one would see a blinding light
And then the unimaginable grandeur of an apocalyptic sight:
A rolling wall of silent darkness as black as midnight.

It would reach to the heavens, filling the entire field of view,
Traveling far beyond the speed of sound toward me an you.
A bewildering veil of turmoil would [ful]fill our vision
During those few last minutes before we met oblivion.