Catching Up with a Great Science Writer and Bicyclist I Haven't Seen For More Than 15 Years.

 

Katharine Sanderson and I on the 

north side of the Millennium Bridge

In 2004 Katharine Sanderson flew from the offices of "Chemistry World" magazine in Cambridge, UK, to Philadelphia to write about a collection of historic science books. The museum and library I worked for the time, Science History Institute, had just acquired a collection of 6,000 science books dating back almost to the invention of printing.  The article is here.

In February of the following year, I saw Katharine again and the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  At the meeting, which was in St. Louis that year, Katharine introduced me to Marc Abrahams, the creator and impresario of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony held the second Thursday of September in Sanders Theater on the campus of Harvard University--in the other Cambridge. I eventually became a volunteer at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

Marc Abrahams at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, assisted by a human flashlight

In 2005 Katharine was back to Science History Institute to write about the 40th Anniversary Moore's Law.  Gordon Moore is a co-founder of Intel Corporation and known the law of increasing complexity of microprocessor chips that bears his name. But he considers himself a chemist and held the ceremony to celebrate Moore's Law at the Science History Institute, not in Silicon Valley.

Katharine and I met at another meeting a couple of years later. During that visit we ran to Camden, New Jersey, and back across the Ben Franklin Bridge.  We have kept in touch. I followed her writing at "Chemistry World" and later at "Nature" magazine.

A decade ago she started a family and became a more avid bicyclist.  She also moved to one of the top places for the cycling in the world: the Pyrenees mountains in southwestern France. 

Now she lives in Cornwall on the southwest coast of England. A good place for riding, but not the Pyrenees! We finally got together for a long walk and coffee after more than a decade and a half.  We also walked along the Thames with Katharine's friend Elaine who lives in the Pyrenees. Her husband Peter Cossins wrote "A Cyclist's Guide to the Pyrenees." Now we have a tentative plan that if I make one last ride of the Tour de France climbs, I will ride the Pyrenees instead of the Alps and Katharine will visit and ride the big climbs.

Since she is about half my age, I will watch her disappear into the clouds.

Life's Edge:The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer, Book 43 of 2022

 

The book for this semester at the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College is Life's Edge: The Search for What it Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer.

Zimmer has been writing about science since the 1990s for the New York Times, Discovery, and National Geographic. He is the author of several books, Life's Edge is the latest.  

Every chapter of the book brings up another question about what it means to be alive, what is life, and what is not life.  

We are intro­duced to a mena­gerie that perches in the gray area bet­ween alive and not-alive: creatures like tardi­grades and nema­todes that can re­emerge from crypto­biosis with the touch of water. 

Zimmer describes pythons whose basal meta­bolic rates can grind almost to a halt, slime molds that display a brain­less kind of mem­ory and problem-solving abil­ity, and a girl named Jahi McMath, who was dec­lared brain-dead yet had a beat­ing heart and con­tinued to grow before dy­ing (again) five years later. 

COVID makes an ap­pear­ance. A book on the def­ini­tion of liv­ing would not be com­plete with­out a look at viruses. Zimmer intro­duces to var­ious def­ini­tions of life, coming from many sources from sci­entists to phil­osoph­ers. From them he derives five special hall­marks of life: meta­bolism, infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing, homeo­stasis, re­pro­duc­tion, and evol­ution. 

The sheer diver­sity with­in these traits is clear in his beautiful writing, as is the elu­sive­ and com­plex nature of life. As Zimmer says, biol­ogy is a "sci­ence in which the most impor­tant object [life] has no defin­ition." 

Wonders abound through the book. Zimmer's description human reproduction and when life begins shows the kind of complexity that makes absolute beliefs on where life begins look hopelessly ludicrous. 

If you are interested in biology, read the book. It's fantastic. 

First 42 Books of 2022:

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman Book 30 of 2022

 

At the beginning of his third lecture/chapter in the book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman says:

Most of the phenomena you are familiar involve the interaction of light and electrons--all of chemistry and biology for example.The only phenomena not covered by this theory (QED or Quantum ElectroDynamics) are phenomena of gravitation and nuclear phenomena; everything else is contained in this theory.

And QED is a theory because it predicts the behavior of light and electrons better than any other theory. That's how a conjecture becomes a Theory.

Everything about science is contingent. A new discovery submitted to rigorous testing can and will replace the previous understanding.

In his inimitable way, Feynman walks the reader through adding arrows of probability and showing how these probabilities are behind all of matter, everything we see and touch and all the processes that keep living beings alive.

The final chapter of the book is about nuclear physics--the particles inside atoms surrounded by clouds of electrons and photons that hold atoms together and give them their chemical character. And in one last paragraph, Feynman says gravity is something else entirely, vastly weaker the electromagnetic forces which are vastly weaker than nuclear forces.

By then end of the book, I could see the oak table next to me as swarming with energy and activity. Uncountable electrons around and between and among billions of nucleii. And these hard, heavy centers of atoms, while held in a rigid grid also vibrate with activity, exchanging baryons, muons, mesons, and other particles while held rigidly together.

Even a glimpse into the mind of Feynman is as exciting as a story of discovering a new world.

First 29 books of 2022:

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Book 2 of 2022: Marie Curie--a graphic novel biography in middle-school-level French

(In past years I have written an essay about the books I read in the previous year.  As my list of books gets longer and my memory shorter, I decided to write about the books as I read them rather than 2000+ words at the end of the year.)

 

In November I visited the Institute Curie near the Sorbonne in Paris.  This book was on the shelf in the tiny bookstore inside the small museum.  I read kids books in French to keep some level of reading comprehension.  This graphic novel gave me a chance to practice French and to remember what I learned about the life of this remarkable scientist.  

I learned a lot about Marie Sklodowska-Curie's life because more than half the book is about her childhood in Poland and struggles to get to France to study physics.  When I read about her previously, it was about her research and life-saving work in World War One.  

After I finished the book, I looked up how many people have won Nobel Prizes:  962 laureates earning a total of 603 prizes (as of 2020).  Just 59 laureates are women and Marie Curie is the first.  

Just four laureates have received two Nobel Prizes:  

Linus Pauling won a chemistry prize and a peace prize.

John Bardeen won the Nobel twice in physics.

Frederick Sanger won two chemistry prizes.

Marie Sklodowska-Curie won the Nobel Prize in physics and in chemistry: the only person to be awarded to Nobel Prizes in two different fields.  She is extraordinary, even among the short list of multiple Nobel laureates.  

If you read French at all, the book is fun to read and not difficult.  

The summary on Goodreads:

Cette biographie de Marie Curie (1867-1934) retrace les principales étapes de son existence : son enfance en Pologne, sa scolarité studieuse et ses études supérieures, son arrivée à Paris, sa rencontre avec Pierre Curie, ses recherches sur le radium et ses découvertes sur les rayons X, l'obtention de ses prix Nobel en 1903 et 1911 et son engagement pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

War Between Science and Religion? The Real Enemy was Catholic Immigrants

Hating immigrants is nothing new in America

The anti-immigrant tradition in America is old and deep in America.  People accepted now as "white" people were hated and reviled more than 100 years ago, none more than Catholics.

In the 1870s two acclaimed American academics each published blockbuster books about the "War Between Science and Religion."  They were both brilliant men in their disciplines.  John William Draper was one of the first presidents of the American Chemical Society and was a pioneer in photographic chemistry. Andrew Dickinson White was the first president of Cornell University.

It is an old truism that being brilliant in your own area of expertise makes one libel to spout off with idiocy in an area where one has no training.

But fame and publishing best-selling books in the 19th Century turned to derision in the 20th Century.  Draper and White today are known today as the chief promoters of the discredited "Conflict Thesis" describing a two millenia war between science and religion.  The thesis is simply anti-immigrant bullshit.

Larry Principe, a professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University, teaches a course in which he uses Draper's book as an example of how not do history.  If you are interested in the field, Principe's lectures on "The Great Courses" are brilliant.

But the smell lingers.  Wretched writers like Dan Brown use the lies and half-truths in Draper and White to write trash thrillers like The "DaVinci Code."

So why did Draper and White trash the history of the Church?  Their target was not all religion, but the Catholic faith. Draper and White were rabidly anti-Catholic and were writing propaganda, not history.  In the 19th Century, anti-immigrant people tried to take control of the political system through secret groups.  The Whig Party fell apart in 1856 and was replaced by the Republicans in part because of internal divisions over slavery and immigrants.

Draper and White, for example, popularized the myth that the Church taught the earth was flat and Columbus proved otherwise.  That the earth is round and has a diameter of roughly 8,000 miles was known to every educated person since about 300 B.C. Anyone reading the Divine Comedy, written in the late 1,200s is quite aware of the earth as a sphere.

But like any propagandists, Draper and White began with a message and massaged all their facts to fit the message. So in order to prove the Catholic Church is anti-science they twisted facts to fit their message.

A secondary effect of their campaign against Catholics was to make add another layer of anti-intellectualism to a country already prone to making lunacy into policy.

Although they were both men intellectuals in their own fields, their real legacy in America putting stupidity in power.  The anti-vaxx movement, the John Birch Society, the Young Earth Creationists, the climate change deniers, birthers, and every kind of anti-immigrant movement can look back to Draper and White and see inspiration.