A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters, Book 12 of 2022

Each semester, I read a book on evolution with the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. Until two years ago, the group met Mondays at noon in one of the college houses.  Since March of 2020, like so much of the world, we meet on Zoom. 

The group is mostly retired scientists, but there are also people like me who worked in science museums, libraries and even a few artists and business people.  The group has existed since the 90s. Stephen Jay Gould once visited the campus for a talk and sat in with the group.  Over the years we have read Gould, Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin, and many of the luminaries of evolution. Most of the books focus on biology. Some, like Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, are sweeping histories.  

The current book, A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters, is a sweeping history focused on geology. Andrew H. Knoll writes with the wit and brilliance his title promises.  His outline is by subject, rather than chronology, but flows from the earth's beginnings to our current state.

The chapters:

1. Chemical Earth
2. Physical Earth
3. Biological Earth
4. Oxygen Earth
5. Animal Earth
6. Green Earth
7. Catastrophic Earth
8. Human Earth

Each chapter presents the development of earth in a different frame, but the narrative tracks the development of earth from the beginning to the present.  Chemical earth explains some basic chemistry and how chemistry determined the history of the planet we live on.  Knoll focuses on zircons and how they help to show the age of the earth and details of earth's history.  Zircons bond with uranium which allows radiation dating. Knoll ends the chapter:

The remarkable drama of Earth's birth--accretion from ancient star stuff, global melting and differentiation that shaped our planet's interior, the formation of oceans and atmosphere--played out on a timescale of 100 million years or less. By 4.4 billion years ago, Earth had recognizably become a rocky planet bathed by water beneath a veneer of air. ... Earth was swaddled by a thick atmosphere, but it was air without oxygen; human time travelers wouldn't last long on primitive Earth. The world we know of large continents, breathable air--and life--was yet to come.

With each succeeding chapter, the story moves forward through the past four billion years in smaller increments until the final chapter, the brief period that the earth has been home to us humans.   

In the chapter "Biological Earth" Knoll tells us how life developed with an emphasis on the oldest evidence of life.  There are traces of single-cell organisms from more than three billion years ago.   As I read of these shadows of life captured in rock, I thought of the many science deniers who are part of my life through family and the Army and other acquaintances.  

Earlier this year, I spoke with a family member who believes God sprinkled dinosaur bones around to make the earth look older, but really, the earth is just six thousand years old.  He knows no science, did not go to college, but believes he is smarter than every scientist since Isaac Newton. (Creationists like Newton.)

The Greeks said philosophy begins with θαυμαζειν, with Wonder.  Until the 19th century, what we call science was called Natural Philosophy.  Wonder is at the center of innovation in science. I wish I could feel the wonder Charles Darwin felt on Galapagos; the wonder I heard Richard Smalley describe when he said he could feel the 60-carbon atom Buckminsterfullene "snap" into spherical existence; the wonder Einstein must have felt when he knew he could prove Special Relativity. 

There is no wonder in science denial, none of the speechless state in awe of the beauty and majesty and surprise of the reality of nature, from Quarks to Quasars.  

Each year, I experience a little more of that wonder, reading books written by those who made the discoveries that more deeply and beautifully describe the depth and beauty of the natural world and cosmos.  

But I am left to wonder how anyone could turn their back on the wonder of life as it is and trade it for the dull, gray certainty of untested belief.  

First eleven books of 2022:

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

The Joy of Work: Packing Supplies for Ukraine

Taking a break for a selfie 

"Neil, we need four-inch bandages."

"Hey, Neil, we need compress bandages."

"Neil, tourniquets."

During the past two weeks I have spent several days in a warehouse in New Jersey packing emergency medical kits for people in Ukraine.  If you want to donate or volunteer visit the Razom for Ukraine website.

Yesterday, I became the guy who refills the boxes for the assembly line putting together the combat medical kits. I worked unwrapping tourniquets until one of the boxes of bandages was low. Then would take a box off of a pallet, cut it open and switch the empty for a full box.

Our assembly line

Nearly sixty years ago, when I was 12 years old, I started working summers and Saturdays at Food Center Wholesale Grocers in Charlestown, Massachusetts.  I swept floors and picked up trash in the two-acre warehouse with dozen of truck and railcar loading doors and shelves more than thirty feet tall.  I earned $1.60 per hour, paid taxes and paid into the Social Security account I have been getting checks from for more than six years.

For two decades, I worked in warehouses, loading docks and was a soldier. I liked working with my hands, but at age 32 I got a job as a writer at an ad agency and left labor for white collar work.  

Coming back to lifting boxes after all these years has been delightful. When I leave, I am sore and dirty and have the good feeling of being a part of something worthwhile.  While we pack supplies, we laugh, joke, and share the joy of doing something will truly help people who are under attack by an evil regime.  

The Five People I Would Love To Have Dinner With

Marie Curie after receiving the first of two Nobel Prizes

 A friend keeps a changing list of the five people she wants to have dinner with. It would be a one-time dinner party. The guests can be contemporary or from any time past. 

I like the idea and decided to make my own version. I get to pick the dinner venue and get to say at what age my guest joins the party. Even if they are living, I want to say at what age they are at dinner. At dinner, everyone is fluent in English, or maybe everyone is fluent in French, but no translators: we understand each other.

Also, I added a sixth guest whom I know is on the top of the guest list of the majority of the current world. 

 1.  Marie Curie at age 52. By the time Marie Curie was 52 years old, World War I had ended and she had achieved things no one thought possible.  In 1903 at age 34 she received the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering research in radiation. Eight years later she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium. She was the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes in science. When World War I broke out she organized mobile x-ray labs that saved as many as a million lives of wounded soldiers. I want to talk to her when that terrible war is over.

2. Theodor Herzl at age 38. He is called the founder of Israel, yet he died more than 40 years before Israel became a country in 1948.  Herzl was the founder of modern Zionism and inspired Jews around the world to see the possibility of a Jewish homeland after 2,000 years of exile. In 1898 he went to Jerusalem at the same time as the Kaiser of Germany went to petition the Kaiser for support for a Jewish homeland. I want to talk to him after that trip.

3. John F. Kennedy at age 44. With nuclear threats by Russia in the air, I want to talk to JFK after he faced down the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world was on the brink of nuclear war, and Kennedy brought the confrontation to a peaceful conclusion.  Nikita Krushchev was out of power within two years after losing to Kennedy.  There is a lot to love in what JFK did. 

4.  Alexis de Tocqueville at age 30. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville began a nine-month journey in America. He was 26. In 1835, when he was 30, the first volume of his Democracy in America was published.  This 900-page book is the single best work ever published on politics in the United States of America, maybe the best book about America, period. Abridged versions omit the heart-rending descriptions of slavery and the treatment of the First Americans. When I read it again, I will read the translation by Harvey Mansfield. His lectures on Tocqueville are wonderful.

5.  Thomas Jefferson at age 33. In his biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jon Meacham describes a man who in  addition to all of his other qualities was a wonderful dinner guest. He would stop at a rural tavern and eat with whomever was at the table. One man wrote he only found out much later that the man who was curious about everything and everyone was also the man who wrote The Declaration of Independence.  In 1776 when he wrote the founding document of America, Jefferson was 33. In his draft, Jefferson called for the abolition of slavery in the new nation. The Continental Congress removed the passage.  I would like to have Jefferson at dinner before he became the 3rd President of the U.S.  In a famous toast at a White House dinner in honor of 49 Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy said, 

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” 

6. Volodymyr Zelenskyy this month. Courage is always admirable and the center of the universe on the subject of courage is the President and people of Ukraine.  At the beginning of 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky was the unpopular President of a poor country. Now he is Winston S. Churchill in Eastern Europe, the spokesperson for Democracy, the leader of the nation fought the Russian army to a standstill against every prediction. Zelenskyy is 44 years old. May he live to be 100.

----

Where with the dinner take place?  At Maison Fournaise. I wrote about this restaurant earlier this week. It is a victim of COVID, but it can come back for this dinner.  We will eat on the porch where Renoir painted "The Boating Party."

Maison Fournaise, My Favorite Restaurant in Paris is a Victim of COVID

 

Last month when I visited Paris, I took the suburban train to Chatou to visit a restaurant that had closed in March of 2020 and never reopened.  That restaurant is Maison Fournaise. It is located on an island in the Seine northwest of Paris on a narrow island called Ile des impressionistes. There is a small impressionist art museum on the island that is still open, but Maison Fournaise closed after being in business from 1857 to 1906 as a restaurant and boat rental business, then reopened in 1990 closing again in 2020.

In its first life, Maison Fournaise drinking spot for artists who would become some of the most famous French impressionists. Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted "The Boating Party" on the porch at Maison Fournaise.  The scene became the business card and symbol of the restaurant.  

Inside the restaurant are several sketches on the walls, carefully covered in lucite.  The sketches were caricatures done by Henri Matisse.  The owner told me that Matisse drank too much and was in love with one of the bar maids. He would come to the bar, flirt with the bar maid, and drink too much.  When he drank more than he could pay for, he paid his bar tab with sketches of prominent customers.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted "The Boating Party" 

on the porch at Maison Fournaise. 

I first learned about the restaurant in the late 1990s from a colleague, Alain Mathurin, who showed me several restaurants where I could host business meetings and even impress French guests. Twice I rented the same porch for a business meeting. At each event one of the French guests said they had lived in Paris all their lives and never heard of Maison Fournaise.

When I visited recently the porch that was the scene of "The Boating Party" was stripped of furniture. Some volunteers are preserving the building and hoping the restaurant has a third life. 

Even on a cold, gray day in February, the area is lovely.  The next island to the south, around the bend of the Seine, is the setting for one of Guy de Maupassant's sad love stories.  

On a summer evening with a late sunset, on the porch, watching barges and pleasure boats slip silently past, there could hardly be a better place in the world for dinner.  I hope the restaurant somehow returns. It is a victim of COVID and a loss mourned by many, including me. 

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

Understanding Beliefs: Book 10 of 2022

 

The thesis statement of Understanding Beliefs is in the middle of page three in the first chapter: 

One of the most important things to say about beliefs is that they are (or at least should be) tentative and changeable.

From this statement, many believers and all fundamentalist believers, would disagree with Nils J. Nilsson, Kumagai Professor of Engineering (emeritus) at Stanford University.  He was a pioneer in computer science and robotics and wrote many books including The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements. Nilsson died in 2019 at the age of 86. 

Nilsson first divides beliefs into "procedural" and "declarative."  Procedural beliefs are what we know and believe by doing--riding a bicycle for example. Declarative beliefs are those we state in sentences--religious creeds, political views, etc. He then discusses whether declarative beliefs constitute knowledge. Some who do research in the field of knowledge say that beliefs are different, Nilsson says in the introduction that beliefs cannot be separated from knowledge. Then he begins the first chapter:

Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. For example, I believe I exist on a planet that we call Earth and I share it with billions of other people.

He goes on to enumerate his beliefs in things such as computers and airplanes, beliefs about our culture such as democracy and the rule of law, and beliefs about the members of his family.  He describes procedural and declarative belief in more detail and explains scientific theories.  The Nilsson says,

Before we trust a belief sufficiently to act on it, we can analyze it and perhaps modify it--taking into account our own experiences, reasoning, and the opinions and criticisms of others.

Which had me smiling and thinking of religious believers, myself included, who are more likely to believe and then analyze later.  He ends the chapter saying we are like pilots flying through clouds trusting our instruments--our beliefs guide our lives when we cannot see our path.

The second chapter asks the question "What do beliefs do for us?"  The answer:

Our beliefs serve us in several ways. Some help us make predictions and select actions, some help us understand a subject in more detail, some inspire creativity, some generate emotional responses, some can even be self-fulfilling.

The rest of the chapter explains more about what beliefs do for us.  In the third chapter we get to the more murky subject, "Where do beliefs come from?" Part of Nilsson's answer: 

All of our beliefs are mental constructions. Some are consequences of other beliefs, and some are explanations built to explain existing beliefs and experiences. (Italics Nilsson's.). ... We do know that explanations can only be constructed from the materials at hand--that is, from whatever beliefs and concepts happen to be around.

Chapter four "Evaluating beliefs" looks at how we handle doubt in our beliefs and the strength of our beliefs.  His example throughout the chapter is belief in global warming or climate change.  How those who believe come to that belief and how to evaluate that belief given the new evidence every year.  He worries about those who will not evaluate their beliefs:  

On many things, our minds are made up. But they can only be made up if we never challenge them with new experiences, new information, and discussions with knowledgeable people who might hold opposite beliefs. ... Changing our minds is difficult, but it is necessary if we want to have ever-more-useful descriptions of reality.

Chapter five "In all probability" explains how we show confidence in our beliefs, or not. Most of our beliefs, fall between the extremes of "definitely true" and definitely false" and this chapter explains how to determine our confidence in a particular belief.  

Chapter six "Reality and truth" explains the boundary between reality--things that exist, and truth--statements about what actually exists.  That boundary, like an open border, gets crossed a lot. Nilsson says, In the time of Galileo "even some theologians agreed that there was a difference between reality itself and descriptions of reality." 

Nilsson uses coal as an example. Is coal black? Is the color of coal characteristic or part of the reality of coal? Which led me to think of titanium dioxide. In nature it is black sand covering beaches in around the world: in Brazil, in South Africa, and in Western Australia among others.  Titanium dioxide is black when it forms in nature. Almost a century ago, someone figured out a process for oxidizing titanium under controlled conditions that results in a molecule 2,500 Angstroms in length--half the wavelength of white light.  The result is the whitest possible white pigment.  

Chemically, black sand and white pigment are identical. But when the molecule is 2,500 Angstroms in length, our eyes see white, vivid white.  When the molecule is much bigger, it appears to be black.  Is the same substance both white and black? In this case appearance is physics not chemistry. Is the reality the chemical compound or the color? Are white and black appearance only, or reality?

Chapters seven and eight describe "The Scientific Method" and "Robot Beliefs." They are fun but for those committed to the scientific method, that chapter is a review summed up when Nilsson says, "People have a lot of beliefs that are not falsifiable, and therefore such beliefs are not scientific."  Nilsson explains the current state and limits of artificial intelligence and robot beliefs. He ends the chapter saying, "Robots do not have any "magical," nonphysical methods for obtaining information. I don't believe humans do either."

The final chapter is "Belief Traps"--getting trapped in beliefs that wouldn't survive critical evaluation. Nilsson begins the chapter:

I have stressed throughout this book that our beliefs should be subject to change. Scientists are used to having their theories replaced by better ones. Why shouldn't we regard our everyday beliefs as tentative also?

 In the next paragraph, it is clear he knows why.  He says, "Let's looks first at obstacles to belief change caused by one's lifestyle and attitudes." He then cites the isolation of technology as a cause of falling into belief traps. He then quotes a psychologist who says "People are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt." He ends the chapter and the book quoting John Stuart Mill: 

[the person who] has sought for objections and difficulties instead of avoiding them, has shut out no light which can be thrown upon the subject from any quarter...has a right to think his judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who have not gone through a similar process.

QED or Amen, as you prefer. 

Understanding Beliefs is part of The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, dozens of books on topics from Free Will to Nuclear Weapons and many more. I have read four and plan to read three this year.  

First nine books of 2022:

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

The Museum of the Great War, Somme, France

At the end of my trip to Europe last month, I visited the Museum of the Great War in Somme.  The museum is in a castle near the site of the one of the most horrible battles in World War One.  

The museum displays the things each soldier carried in the armies in the battle: clothes, mess gear, ammo, weapons, cleaning supplies and much more are displayed lying flat in areas recessed into the floor.  The displays have some of the feeling of graves.  

 As a soldier, I had the same kind of equipment I had to lay out for inspection. All the soldiers in the unit lay out their gear in a very specific pattern to make it easier for the their leaders to inspect the equipment. Anything missing is glaring when forty soldiers all lay out their equipment.  

Here are some of the displays from the Great War Museum:

German soldier

French officer uniforms

German uniform items

Machine guns

Machine guns

Medical equipment

Nurse uniform

American Soldier

Just a few miles away was the Red Baron Memorial on the side of a country road.

"Scalia/Ginsburg," an Opera in One Act--So Much Fun

 

Today I went to the Gardner theater at Lancaster Country Day School, the K-12 school of two of my six kids, and saw the one-act opera "Scalia/Ginsburg." 

Since my daughters are in their 30s, I have not been to the school in a while. The new theater is really beautiful.  

I thought it would be fun to see what an opera about the friendship between the opera lovers Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia would be.  The opera is a delight, both funny and reverent.  It begins with rapid borrowings from familiar songs as Scalia sings about why he is completely right in his conservative views and the liberals are wrong.

Next the Commentator (Judge of Judges) enters to the music of "Don Giovanni" suggesting a very bad end for Scalia. Ginsburg enters, declares herself Scalia's friend, and stands with Scalia in his trial. Their friendship is their defense.  We find out the entire opera is set in the moment Scalia has his fatal heart attack. Scalia is acquitted and goes to Heaven, and after a delay, Ginsburg follows.  

Derrick Wang wrote and created the opera using the words of Scalia and Ginsburg. His website has videos of past performances.  It also has links to a fully annotated libretto if you are curious about the words he used and the operas that inspired his work.