Two Musicians

Watch this video of two musicians playing a two-violin arrangement of Mozart's sonata in C major K 296. They reach for their instruments, grab their arches. One look and they're off --the voices of the instruments mingle, each answering the other. One suggests a new direction, the other takes the challenge and ups the ante, and down the new path they go, frolicking in the cascades of sound. Together they weave a web of pure, exhilarating structure. The mathematics of Mozart!

One of these players is a professional violinist, the other a particle physicist. Can you tell which is which? How can you tell?

Venus, a "Pulquería", and an Observatory

People strolling around downtown Mexico City in 1875 might have come across countless “pulquerías” with odd names (pulque is a beverage made from the fermented sap of the maguey plant, Wikipedia dixit). But for weirdness of denomination none beat the latest addition to the long list of hangouts for the brothers in pulque: ”El tránsito de Venus.” The name was no allusion to Roman mythology, but the pulque fraternity´s way of celebrating a major scientific event that took place in 1874.

That was the year a Mexican expedition traveled to Japan to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the sun´s disk. Venus transits occur in pairs, the second transit in a pair coming eight years after the first. Consecutive pairs of transits happen at intervals of more than one hundred years. The transit of 1874 was the first in a pair, the previous one having taken place on June 3, 1769.

Venus transits are interesting because they allow scientists to measure “solar parallax” --a quantity from which the earth-sun distance can be accurately computed. The Mexican team was part of an international effort to determine solar parallax. Enthusiastic about the project, President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada chose Francisco Díaz Covarrubias, a geographer from the Colegio de Minería, as head of the expedition. There were, at the time, no secure roads between Mexico City and the Pacific, so Díaz Covarrubias and his team took a train to Veracruz, stopping in Orizaba for several days after learning that an epidemic of black vomit was ravaging the port. From Veracruz they traveled to Havana and Philadelphia, then on to New York, where they inquired about ships leaving San Francisco for Japan. (No, I don´t know why they took such a roundabout route.) They then crossed the United States, arrived in San Francisco, and on October 19, sailed aboard the steamer Vasco de Gama. The Mexican expedition made landfall in Yokohama on November 9, 1874, precisely one month before the transit.

Díaz Covarrubias intended to build two observation stations on Japanese soil, but he needed permits. Unfortunately, they had reached Japan at the time of a national holiday, and Díaz Covarrubias had to wait for several days before he got an answer from the Japanese government. During this time he hired a Chinese carpenter who understood some English to assemble the stations. When the government finally responded, it did so handsomely. They even provided a special telegraph line for the Mexicans to communicate with their American and French counterparts, in Kobe and Nagasaki. The transit was duly observed on December 8-9, 1874.

Díaz Covarrubias and his men sailed home via the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Suez canal, the Mediterranean, and Paris, where they published their results. They then crossed the Atlantic to Veracruz. On November 19, 1875, the train carrying the Mexican expedition rolled into the Buenavista station. The men were given a hero’s welcome, recounted the following day in the daily El siglo diecinueve .

I wonder if the event stirred the patrons of “El tránsito de Venus.” Did they discuss it? Did the pulquería take pride in making the news that day? Did a chorus of pulque-besotted voices toast the men who had sailed around the world to witness the event celebrated in their saloon´s strange name?

Whatever the reaction of the pulquería´s clients, the following year Porfirio Díaz, the new president (and future dictator), signed a decree whereby Mexico was officially given a National Observatory.

A Message from the Future

I'm strolling leisurely along the darkest corridors of the web in search of nuggets of information for my radio program tomorrow. Newscaster Pedro Ferriz asked me to talk about the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator in the world, which has made headlines now for 14 months, since it's opening -and subsequent failure- in September, 2008.

I come across a blog in portuguese (from Portugal? from Brazil? I'm guessing Brazil...). A post in that blog reports that a few days ago a strange young man was arrested by Swiss police after he tried to sabotage the LHC. Sabotaging the LHC is not easy. The thing lies hundreds of meters underground, and the facilities are protected by heavy security, but the blogger does not go into details. The would-be saboteur may have tried to tamper with the power grid in the region (though I don't know how he might manage even that...). When questioned, the strange-looking young man -who was decked in even stranger-looking clothes- claimed he was a visitor from the future. His mission was to stop the LHC from creating the Higgs boson, a particle expected to appear after protons and antiprotons collide at great speed, sometime between today and 2012. Apparently, if the chronotraveler is not wrong, the Higgs boson will bring forth great destruction ("and gnashing of teeth," one is tempted to add, like in the Bible).

It would be great if we could believe this young man from the future. Indeed, if he is right, that means that the Higgs boson really does exist! The LHC was built to answer that question. Now we can all relax and maybe even break out the champagne.

Or maybe not. Scientists don't plan multibillion-dollar experiments just to be proven right. They will be happy if nature presents them with the Higgs, which was predicted theoretically more than 40 years ago, but what would really give them a champagne-worthy thrill is to be proven wrong. Nothing makes for more exciting times in science than the discovery that everything we thought we knew is not so. If, after 20 years of work on the collider, not to mention the billions of dollars it cost, the thing only tells the scientists they were right, and nothing more, it will actually be a catastrophe. A confirmed prediction is a sort of dead end. No new roads to take, no different outlooks to pursue. No new scientific work to do. Scientists like surprises. And they thrive on challenge. If the Higgs turns out not to exist, the discovery will immediately suggest new paths and it will open wide vistas of possibility. That means a lot of work for a lot of people, young and old. Even Peter Higgs -who is pushing 81- might join in on the action (though he would probably miss his shot at the Nobel Prize).

So, even if the saboteur from the future is correct, we should not stash the LHC in the closet. Let's go looking for new lands. Let's risk being awfully wrong after 40 years. That's what science is about.

I'm Back!

Ok, time to revamp this blog. When I started it, I thought I'd use it as a repository for my old articles in the Mexico City newspaper The News, where I wrote a weekly column called Space-Time Chronicles, which ran from February, 1994, through May or June, 1999 . Then, as time went by --and more time went by-- I realized that that wasn't doing the trick for me --there was simply no motivation to post, especially since posting usually meant going through the 224 original articles and trying to choose one which was good enough to republish, and that, at the same time, I hadn't yet reused. I needed to get up to speed again and start writing in English again. The News tanked many years ago, and since then I've found no other outlet for my English-language writings. I love the English language as much as I love Spanish, and as much as I love the history and philosophy of science. Something in me was yearning to communicate in English again, so here's my chance. I am challenging myself to keep this up.

The time during which I published my column in The News was for me a time of learning the trade of science writer. It was also a very exciting time of experimenting. When I started, I was writing little essays on different aspects of the history of science, or commenting the scientific news if it was worth commenting (it rarely is, by the way, at least for a science writer who is not also a science journalist). Then, little by little, I started taking chances. I'd go out on a limb and write about my own experience as a science buff and a physics student. I'd use personal anecdotes to illustrate points (talking about yourself is a no-no among scientists; it is also frowned upon in Mexican society). Readers responded. Not that I got a lot of feedback in those days, before the Internet was widespread, but (to use personal anecdote as illustration again), I still have, tacked to the wall in front of the desk I'm using at this very moment, a beautiful photo of the Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl volcanoes that a reader sent me via the newspaper office when I wrote about my boyhood hiking trips . Readers were responding emotionally.

A scientist writes to convince, to rally forces to his or her side, not to stir emotions. A science writer, on the other hand, is, first of all, a writer. And a writer must use all the tools availabe to him to grab the reader's attention and keep it until the end, to touch the reader in as many ways as he, the writer, can. What I was doing was closer to storytelling than to scientific writing, and that was why anecdotes in general (and not only personal anecdotes) seemed to work so well, much better than explication and exposition of the technicalities of the science being discussed. It was a thrilling discovery.

Today I am aware that any science writer worth his salt knows this, but that doesn't make the discovery any less exciting.

Talking the Talk of Science

Common sense, as discussed here some time ago, is a tool we use in everyday life to sort out our surroundings. But it evolved to solve certain problems arising in the everyday experience of cavemen, or hunter-gatherers. Science takes us far from that realm of experience and so, common sense is not to be trusted if one wants to understand the world scientifically.

Scientists have common sense too, but they learn not to rely too much on it.

Speaking of which I am reminded of another tool for everyday life that cannot be applied unchanged to science --language. Languages, like common sense, developed in the “normal” world of everyday experience. Guided by our limited perception, we invented concepts like “light” and “sound,” and gave them special names We created words for everything we could see, hear, or otherwise perceive. We named what we could imagine. But our imagination rarely creates something new. It only puts together existing conceptual elements, however artfully. Our mental constructs are not unlike Frankenstein’s monster.

In the relatively recent past science and technology have revealed that what we call light is only a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the part that our eyes can see; and what we call sound is only the range of pressure wave frequencies that our ears can detect. We now use these words for light that cannot be seen and sound that cannot be heard. When confronted with new scientific developments, everyday language is forced to either stretch the meaning of extant words, or create new words by agglutination. The term electromagnetic is a case in point. Like the concept it labels, it is the result of putting together “electric” and “magnetic.” Now elektron is Greek for amber. When rubbed with a piece of cloth, amber has the strange property of attracting small objects placed nearby. This property we call electricity. Magnetism is the property of the lodestone, a material also known as magnetite after the ancient Greek city of Magnesia. The word electromagnetic is a Frankenstein monster assembled with parts of other Frankenstein monsters.

There is yet another typical reaction of language to new developments, and that is not to react at all. We have known that the earth spins on its axis these four hundred years. Yet we still say that the sun rises and that the sun sets.

So, not surprisingly, scientific language sometimes clashes with the rules of “good” English (or “good” Spanish). A scientist friend of mine was recently asked by a Spanish teacher to write a short text as an example of scientific language for a book she was writing. My friend complied, and soon got back a “corrected” version (corrupted is more like it) of his text from the teacher. She objected to his use of the phrase “almost constant.” She argued that being constant is not a matter of degree --either you are or you’re not. She is right, of course, but as my friend points out, the meaning of this phrase is self-explanatory, and to say the same thing in pristine Castillian Spanish would require a lengthy circumlocution. Scientists often don’t have time or space for such niceties. (Which is not to say, I hasten to add, that they should not try to write good Spanish or good English whenever possible.)

Tempted into Censorship

I remember once doing a reprehensible thing. I remember doing many reprehensible things, but this one is related to my being a scientist and priding myself, perhaps in a self-congratulatory and delusional way, in being a lover of the “truth,” whatever that may mean.

I was browsing around in the science section of a bookstore in Mexico City. The science section of Mexico City bookstores can be quite bewildering because bookstore owners have a very dim idea of what the term “science” means (witness the book department in any Sanborn’s store, where bona fide science consorts promiscuously with astrology, UFO-abductee accounts, and New Age self-help pap.) Next to some physics textbooks I found a little tome. I don´t remember the title or who the author was. I just remember that it was an enraged accusation of physicists and their strange ideas about relativity. The author, obviously a crank, was not comfortable with the notion that someone might know for a fact something he did not understand. A little training in math and physics shows relativity to be a logical necessity despite its weird predictions (which, by the way, are perfectly established by experiment), but this the author did not know and did not bother to find out. Too much trouble. Instead, he just ranted and raved and argued nonsensically against the special theory of relativity --whithout a single equation.

Now, this is what I did: I pushed the little volume all the way back in its shelf, effectively hiding it from view for the rest of time.

Later it dawned on me what I had really done. I had tried to suppress an idea --an act of censorship. Censorship, of course, is what people do who are not sure they are right. Totalitarian states do it, and the Inquisition did it. It is the weapon of the liar and the usurper, the corrupt and the power-hungry. Censorship, as opposed to argument, is contrary to the search for truth. I don´t mean to say that censorship is unheard-of in science, because it most certainly is not. Scientists are human and subject to human passions. But science has an advantage over political or religious systems of belief, where censorship is common --that its criteria for truth or falseness are clear, and shared by most scientists (the criteria include reproducibility of results and consistency of explanations, among others). The best way to challenge ideas is with ideas. My deed, although inspired by the noblest sentiments (as I’m sure the author of the little book is convinced his own deeds are), was reprehensible and childish.

And then again... The author wasn´t there for me to argue with. With the mass media gone over to the cranks, scientists are reduced to guerrilla tactics. We can´t speak out as they can, and most scientists will not upset their schedules to take part in the war effort. What could I do? I was feeling frustrated. (And please don´t go telling me that maybe so were Hitler, Stalin and Torquemada.)

The Minds of Cranks

(I wrote this piece in 1997, but much of its content still holds, so here it is)

My friend Miguel Alcubierre is a researcher at the Max Planck Institut für Gravitantionsphysik, in Germany. Several years back he wrote a brief paper showing that, contrary to widespread belief, it is possible to travel faster than light without infringing the laws of relativity. The paper brought him some notoriety among physicists and sci-fi buffs, but particularly among scientific cranks. One of the chief aims of every self-respecting crank is to debunk the theory of relativity (and, of course, evolution). Miguel gets e-mail from the crackpot fringe on a regular basis. He says he has no time for them, so I asked him to forward them to me.

Scientific cranks are not just any kind of crank. They are usually curious and hard-working, sometimes even bright, and without exception completely innocent of the methods of science. Many cranks, I believe, are the possessors of scientific minds gone stale for lack of rigorous training. They believe that all that rings true to them must actually be true, and they cling fiercely to their prejudices. They are absolutely confident that all that glitters must be gold. Cranks think hard and come up with ideas, like scientists; but unlike true scientists they have an unrelenting faith in common sense.

Unfortunately for them, common sense --that invaluable aid in everyday life-- has proven a very poor guide for scientific discovery. As early as the sixth century BC, the Greek philosopher Parmenides attacked common sense, calling it “that heart devoid of the tremor of truth.” Syrian-born historian Ikram Antaki writes: “Common sense is the locus of our prejudices, where thought is reduced to its inertia (...) it provides ready-made answers; it inhibits and conditions our reflexes; it fabricates and channels our reactions (...) (common sense) is like the minimum wage of intelligence.” The investigation of the natural world has produced countless results that challenge common sense. Who would have thought, before Einstein, that an object’s mass increased as it moved faster? Or that it is possible to slow down time by moving at great speed? Still, these strange ideas are true in the sense that every experiment to test them has yielded positive results.

Why is common sense so unreliable in science? Common sense was a faithful guide to our forebears for thousands of years. We evolved it as a response to the world as perceived by our senses. But our senses are limited. Our eyes, for example, are sensitive to only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. There are many more kinds of light than we perceive. The same applies to our hearing. We detect sound only in a limited range of frequencies. We should expect, then, that common sense is valid only in the realm of everyday experience. Scientific inquiry, however, routinely takes its partisans far from everyday experience. The physics of atoms seems very unnatural, but that is because our idea of what’s natural was forged among objects trillions of times larger than individual atoms. And the physics of objects moving at close to the speed of light is extremely weird, but then again, we don’t usually encounter such speeds on the Periferico.

Miguel’s cranks write with disarming confidence. In a way, I envy them. Their zeal and even their venom come from the certainty of being right. I wish I could be that certain of being right just once. But I guess I’m too far gone down a path where simple certainties dissolve. Don’t pity me, however. My simple certainties have dissolved into endless wonderment, and I think I know which one is best.