Category Archives: Biography and personalities

Cosmic lobsters and electric bees

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Like other science editors I scan a lot of press releases. Some of the titles catch my eye, either because their writers opted for something witty or cute (“Sweeping the dust from a cosmic lobster”) or because the science in the press release, even when soberly summarized, is alluring (“New imaging device is flexible, flat, and transparent”).

A press release I encountered last Tuesday fell into the second category. “Sparks fly between flowers and bumblebees” flagged one of the papers previewed in Science magazine’s weekly press release. The notion that flowers have electrostatic fields and that bumblebees can detect the fields was so unexpected and intriguing that I promptly downloaded the paper.

As should be the case for papers in general science journals, the introduction proved to be accessible and informative. The authors, led by Daniel Robert of the University of Bristol in the UK, summarized evidence from the past 30 years that electricity plays a role in pollination.

A bumblebee caught in the act of collecting pollen from what looks like a lupin. CREDIT: Nigel Raine

A bumblebee caught in the act of collecting pollen from what looks like a lupin. CREDIT: Nigel Raine

My interest piqued, I wanted to read those early papers, especially one by Sarah Corbet, Jimmie Beament, and Dan Eisikowitch, which appeared in 1982 in volume 5 of Plant, Cell & Environment. Here is its abstract:

The measurements of Yes’kov & Sapozhnikov (1976) suggest that electrostatic potentials on foraging honeybees can reach hundreds of volts. Pollen grains of oilseed rape, Brassica napus L., subjected experimentally to potentials of this order, jumped a distance that increased approximately as the square of the voltage, between two pin electrodes on which, in some experiments, were impaled an anther or stigma of oilseed rape or a freshly-killed honeybee. Most floral surfaces were insulated, but there was a low-impedance path to earth via the stigma, and the electrostatic field due to an approaching charged bee must therefore concentrate there. Thus, if electrostatic potentials of this magnitude occur in nature they may increase the chance that pollen from bees will reach the stigma rather than other floral surfaces, as well as enabling pollen to jump from anther to bee and from bee to stigma across an air gap of the order of 0.5 mm.

As far as I can tell, the paper was the first to report that pollen is electrically charged. But I couldn’t evaluate its priority because the paper and others that Robert cited in his Science paper were behind their respective journals’ paywalls. That observation isn’t a criticism. Most of Physics Today‘s content is similarly walled off to nonsubscribers. Still, the paywalls did rather restrict my investigative efforts.

Sir James “Jimmie” William Longman Beament

But those efforts weren’t wholly in vain. My various online searches led me to John T. Green’s charming biographical memoir of his friend and former colleague, Jimmie Beament, the electric pollination pioneer.

Sir James “Jimmie” William Longman Beament (1921–2005) spent most of his productive and distinguished career at the University of Cambridge, where he had earned his bachelor’s degree. His first research project, and the one from which his career sprang, was to investigate the physical basis of insects’ ability keep their bodies from drying out.

Of course I can’t be sure, but it’s my hunch that if anyone had asked Beament why, in the 1940s, he was studying insect desiccation, he might have replied, “Because it’s interesting!” He couldn’t have known that he would go on to develop an insect-inspired wax that keeps bananas fresh on sea voyages, dispensing with the need for expensive refrigeration. Or that he’d solve the mystery of why tilapia weren’t finding enough food to eat in Ghana’s Lake Volta.

Beament was evidently so fascinated by the surfaces of insect bodies and eggs that he sought collaborations with physicists to study them. He was among the first entomologists to look at insects through an electron microscope. In 1958 he and Ken Machin, a radio astronomer, developed an electronic thermostat accurate to 0.01 K—and used it to discover, among other things, that locusts are coated with a wax that becomes permeable at 39 °C, thereby allowing evaporation to cool their muscles in very hot weather.

Soon after I read about Beament, I received a message from one of the fans of Physics Today‘s Facebook page. He sought my advice on whether he should pursue a graduate degree in materials science or physics. I told him he should choose a field in either discipline that would hold his interest through and after graduate school, just as Beament did.

China’s new president is a scientist

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Yesterday Xi Jinping officially took over as China’s president, general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, and chairman of the central military commission. In other words, he became China’s new leader.

Given China’s increasing importance—in 2010 it overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy—and the fact that the ascendance of the country’s new leader had been anticipated for some time, Xi has attracted a lot of media coverage. Still, I was surprised to discover in a recent Wall Street Journal profile of Xi that the subject he studied at Tsinghua University was organic chemistry. (Xi’s Wikipedia entry, however, says chemical engineering.)

To mark China’s Science Popularization Day of 15 September, Xi Jinping attended a science fair at China Agricultural University. The appearance marked Xi’s first return to public view after a brief and mysterious absence.

My surprise was limited to learning Xi’s major. That China’s leader should have a scientific background isn’t surprising. Xi’s predecessor as president and general secretary, Hu Jintao, studied hydraulic engineering, also at Tsinghua University. And Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, studied electrical engineering at National Central University in Nanjing and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Whether Xi’s exposure to science at university will influence his policies is a matter of speculation. But it’s certainly the case that China invested heavily in science during Hu’s and Jiang’s presidencies. Last year China devoted 1.84% of its GDP to R&D—$251.8 billion (adjusted for purchasing power). Only the US spent more.

On the physics front, that investment reached a culmination earlier this year. On 8 March scientists working at the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China’s Guangdong Province announced they had measured θ13, a neutrino parameter whose larger-than-expected value could help answer one of the biggest questions in physics: Why does the universe contains more matter than antimatter? Robert McKeown, a Daya Bay team member from the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, told Science magazine’s Adrian Cho, “This is arguably the most important physics result ever to come out of China.” I agree.

Of course, world leaders do more than determine how much their countries invest in science. Could Xi’s scientific background influence his policies in other areas? It might—if Xi has retained a scientist’s respect for data.

There’s at least one encouraging precedent. Like Xi, Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford University’s Somerville College. Her government’s response to the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s was to print and drop in every UK household’s mailbox a pamphlet about the disease and how to avoid contracting and spreading it. “AIDS: Don’t die of ignorance” became the official slogan.

Thatcher’s response to the threat of global warming was also scientifically sober: She funded the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, a world leader in climate science.

Given that some US politicians persist in denying that climate change is happening, despite the evidence, let’s hope the China’s new president takes a more scientific approach to that issue. Let’s hope, too, that he studies tables of GDP data, notices that the world’s wealthiest and healthiest countries are democracies, and institutes political reform in his country.

Five hundred small details

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Among aficionados of men’s fashion, Cary Grant is as revered for his meticulous style as for his acting. His most celebrated suit—the lightweight woolen one he wore throughout North by Northwest—was made at his request by his Savile Row tailor, Kilgour, French and Stanbury. “It takes five hundred small details to make one favorable impression,” he once said.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest Cary Grant plays an advertising executive who becomes enmeshed in an espionage plot that takes him from Manhattan to Mount Rushmore.

NASA’s Curiosity rover certainly made a favorable impression on 6 August when it landed safely on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars. The nuclear-powered, car-sized vehicle was built by three principal contractors, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and MacDonald Dettwiler, but many other organizations—universities, national labs, and companies—contributed their expertise.

Siemens, the German engineering conglomerate, supplied software that engineers used to help design the rover and to manage the more than one terabyte of data that the mission generated even before a physical prototype was built. Siemens was so proud of its role that it took out a full-color, full-page ad in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal in celebration.

Though far smaller than Siemens, Ocean Optics is just as proud of its contribution to Curiosity. The company, which is based in Dunedin, Florida, sent me a press release about its three compact, high-resolution spectrometers that form part of the rover’s ChemCam instrument. Developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and France’s Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, ChemCam will fire its pulsed laser at Martian rocks to vaporize their surfaces. By analyzing the vapor, the Ocean Optics spectrometers will help determine the rocks’ chemical composition.

I’m not sure how many individuals have contributed to Curiosity. By Nature‘s count, the number of scientists—just scientists—is 400. They and their colleagues in other professions have pulled off a remarkable coup.

Among Cary Grant’s films, my favorites are three he made under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock: Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), and North by Northwest (1959). Like most of Hitchcock’s films, all three had modestly sized casts, but Grant did star in a full-blown, cast-of-thousands historical epic. Directed by Stanley Kramer and set amid Napoleon’s struggle to conquer Spain and Portugal, the 1957 film bears a title that could be justifiably applied to a documentary about the making of the Curiosity rover: The Pride and the Passion.

Edward Condon’s reflections on the first 60 years of quantum physics

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On 2 December 1960 Edward Condon stood in the auditorium of the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC, to address the 1500th meeting of the Philosophical Society of Washington. The topic of his talk was another scientific milestone. Sixty years before, at the 19 October meeting of the German Physical Society in Berlin, Max Planck presented his radiation formula for the first time; quantum mechanics made its public debut.

Edward Condon

Condon (shown here) was well qualified to survey the history and progress of quantum physics. After earning his PhD in physics in 1926 at the University of California, Berkeley, he moved to Goettingen to work with Max Born. That same year he published what is perhaps his most famous contribution to physics: His quantum mechanical extension of James Franck’s semiclassical description of vibronic transitions in molecules. In 1929 he and Philip Morse wrote Quantum Mechanics, the first English-language textbook on the topic.

Besides witnessing and participating in the establishment of quantum mechanics, Condon had another early experience that I think prepared him for delving into the subject’s history. Between leaving high school and attending university, he spent three years as a reporter for the Oakland Inquirer and other newspapers.

A reporter’s curiosity and tenacity are evident in Condon’s Washington talk, which appeared in written form in the October 1962 issue of Physics Today. Fascinated by how Lord Rayleigh and other great old physicists of the time struggled to accommodate Planck’s formula within their classical worldviews, he dug into their papers and memoirs and quoted them extensively. Even Planck himself had difficulty, as evidenced from the excerpt that Condon quoted from Planck’s autobiography:

My futile attempts to fit the elementary quantum of action somehow into the classical theory continued for a number of years [actually until 1915] and they cost me a great deal of effort. Many of my colleagues saw in this something bordering on a tragedy. But I feel differently about it, for the thorough enlightenment I thus received was all the more valuable. I now knew for a fact that the elementary quantum of action played a far more significant part in physics than I had originally been inclined to suspect, and this recognition made me see clearly the need for the introduction of totally new methods of analysis and reasoning in the treatment of atomic problems.

In all, Condon devoted five of nine pages of his Physics Today article to his inquiries into the acceptance of quantum mechanics among physicists. That editorial choice, plus his emphasis on his own fields of study, atomic and nuclear physics, left him little room to cover the application of quantum mechanics to condensed matter and field theory. Still, I urge you to read the fascinating article.

And if you want to learn more about Condon, I recommend another Physics Today article. In “Edward Condon and the cold war politics of loyalty,” which appeared in December 2001, historian Jessica Wang discussed the groundless political persecution that Condon faced during his distinguished and productive career.

Atomic rockets, space colonies, and x-ray binaries

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There are at least three award-winning science fiction writers who do or did research in astrophysics. Gregory Benford studies space plasma at the department of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. David Brin earned a PhD in physics at the University of California, San Diego; Hannes Alfvén was his thesis adviser. Alastair Reynolds was, until 2004, an x-ray astronomer at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

It seems natural for literary physicists to write speculative fiction. The laws of nature that they study and elucidate describe not only what does happen but also what could happen. Cheap, near limitless energy from nuclear fusion is not obviously ruled out by known physics, nor are humanoid robots that could pass a Turing test or memory sticks that could plug into our brains to upload or download information. Physicists also know how physical laws might be plausibly bent, or plausibly extended, to account for uncanny phenomena and astounding technologies.

The original cover of David Brin's 1987 novel The Uplift War

Other physicists, motivated less by literature, exercise their knowledge and imaginations to write what might be called speculative fact. To illustrate what I mean, consider the late nuclear physicist Leslie Shepherd.

Born in South Wales in 1918, Shepherd led the team that developed Britain’s high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactor in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout his long career, he maintained an interest in the topic that had captured his imagination as a young boy: space travel. In two papers, “The atomic rocket” (1949, written with Rolls Royce engineer A. V. Cleaver) and “Interstellar flight” (1952), Shepherd worked out the physics of practical space travel. Achieving near light-speed travel, he proposed, would require engines powered by the annihilation of matter and antimatter.

Another writer of speculative fact was Gerard O’Neill. Nine years younger than Shepherd, O’Neill was born in Brooklyn. In 1956 he wrote a paper that outlined the storage ring, a device that traps a beam of high-energy particles from an accelerator and holds it until it can be released to smash into a second beam.

Besides particle physics, O’Neill’s other calling was the colonization of space, which was the title of an article he wrote for the September 1974 issue of Physics Today. Raw materials from the Moon and asteroids could be mined and processed to build vast cylindrical habitats whose rotation would mimic gravity. Colonists would live on the inner surfaces.

Most physicists do not devise future technologies, fictional or not. However, many of the most successful physicists have been led by their imaginations, ambitions, or both to new discoveries. In 1928 Paul Dirac incorporated special relativity into the quantum mechanics of the electron. His equations predicted negative energy states that could not be brushed under a theoretical carpet, even though the states would be manifest in two weird phenomena that had not been observed: Either electrons spontaneously switch charge from negative to positive or positively charged electrons exist.

Dirac did not ignore the problem of negative states. Three years later he published a paper in which he took the bold step of predicting the existence of antimatter. Here’s a quote from the introduction:

Following Oppenheimer, we can assume that in the world as we know it, all, and not merely nearly all, of the negative-energy states for the electrons are occupied. A hole, if there were one, would be a new kind of particle, unknown to experimental physics, having the same mass and opposite charge to an electron. We may call such a particle an anti-electron.

When I look back on my own, pre-Physics Today career as an astrophysicist, I note with regret that my most imaginative paper was the first one, written while I was still a graduate student. Its subject, Hercules X-1, is binary system that consists of an x-ray-emitting neutron star and a normal star. In “Observations of three high-state eclipse egresses of Hercules X-1,” my coauthors and I sought to explain why the atmosphere on one side of the normal star was puffed up. The combination of radiation pressure from the x rays and the Coriolis force arising from the stars’ orbit was my answer.

So whatever stage you’ve reached in your career, I urge you to emulate the likes of Brin, Shepherd, and Dirac and let your imagination wander. You might not win a Hugo Award for science fiction or a Nobel Prize for physics, but you could create something original that you’re proud of.

Prince Charles and me

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The Prince of Wales and I have some things in common besides our first names. We favor double-breasted suits, we studied Welsh, we went to Cambridge University, we enjoy grass-fed beef, and we like the 1974 Three Degrees’ song “When Will I See You Again,” which the group performed at Buckingham Palace for the prince’s 30th birthday party.

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But I do not share the prince’s sweeping disdain for modern civilization. His disdain is not wholly misplaced. A preference for the buildings of Nicholas Hawksmoor over those of Norman Foster is a harmless matter of taste. The prince’s objection to the factory farming of chicken, bullocks, and other edible animals springs from a concern for their welfare and the quality of their meat

The trouble is, the ills of modern civilization extend, as far as the prince is concerned, to science and technology. Not stopping at mere advocacy of homeopathy and other alternative therapies, the prince sells, though his company company Duchy Originals, a line of herbal tinctures, among them a “detox tincture,” which contains

extracts of artichoke and dandelion, cleansing and purifying herbs to help support the body’s natural elimination and detoxification processes, and help maintain healthy digestion. Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture can be taken as part of a regular detox program.

Does it matter that a rich Englishman peddles herbal remedies? Hardly. But it’s a pity that someone so keen on safeguarding Earth’s natural environment and cultural heritage should object to science-based approaches to achieving the same ends. Prince Charles recognizes the threat of climate change. His latest book, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World (HarperCollins, 2010), begins with the words:

This is a call to revolution. The Earth is under threat. It cannot cope with all that we demand of it. It is losing its balance and we humans are causing it to happen.

Whether humankind succeeds in forestalling climate change or not, meeting the world’s food and energy needs is sure to involve technologies that the prince deplores: genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and nuclear power.

How different the prince is from the last English king named Charles. During his reign, which ran from 1660 to 1685, Charles II commissioned a modern architect of the time, Christopher Wren, to design several buildings, including the Royal Greenwich Observatory. He appointed Isaac Newton as his Astronomer Royal and founded the Royal Society.

I don’t expect British monarchs to be as pro-science as Charles II. But it would nice if the next one weren’t so anti-science.

Charles Day

May the force be with you!

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Happy Star Wars Day! Because “May the fourth” sounds like “may the force,” fans of the movie series have picked the day to celebrate and talk about the exploits of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and other characters—humanoid, droid, or neither—in the rich Star Wars universe.

The third Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, was released on 25 May 1983. Two months earlier, President Ronald Reagan announced to the world that the US would develop a system that, in his words, “could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies.”

The Strategic Defense Initiative was the official name of Reagan’s program, but it soon became known as Star Wars. I’m not sure how SDI acquired its nickname, but it’s possible that the originator of the nickname saw a resemblance between one of the early SDI proposals—a screen of satellites armed with nuclear-powered x-ray lasers—and the movie’s Death Star, the moon-sized base that houses a planet-destroying laser weapon.

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The feasibility of SDI’s space-based x-ray lasers was doubted from the get-go. In 1987 a panel of physicists convened by the American Physical Society published a study on the lasers and other so-called directed energy weapons. The panel wrote:

We estimate that all existing candidates for directed energy weapons (DEWs) require one or more orders of magnitude (powers of 10) improvements in power output and beam quality before they may be seriously considered for application in ballistic missile defense systems. In addition, many supporting technologies such as space power, beam control and delivery, sensing, tracking, and discrimination need similar improvements over current performance levels before DEWs could be considered for use against ballistic missiles.

In conceiving of the Death Star and other Star Wars weapons, George Lucas was not obliged to follow the laws of physics or even military priorities. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber may be a better weapon than its metal-bladed namesake, but it seems less effective at killing people than James Bond’s Walther PPK. And the Galactic Empire’s four-legged AT-ATs (All Terrain Armored Transports) are of a needlessly vulnerable size and slowness.

When I wrote a news story for Physics Today‘s October 2009 issue about protoplanetary collisions, I learned that it takes 1021 joules to vaporize 1 kg of silicate rock. Earth weighs 6 × 1024 kg. To vaporize our planet or one like it, the Death Star’s laser would have to deliver as much energy as a supernova explosion.

Charles Day

Crumple zones

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The bespectacled man in the photo below is the automobile engineer Bèla Barènyi. In 1937, when he was 30, Barènyi came up with the idea of crumple zones for cars. To protect occupants in the event of head-on or rear-end collisions, Barènyi proposed that cars should consist of three cells: a strong, rigid, central cell that would house the driver and passengers, and weaker cells front and back that would absorb the energy of a crash by deforming plastically.

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The first production cars to incorporate crumple zones belonged to the W111 series made in 1958–59 by Barènyi’s employer, Mercedes-Benz.

Another car that incorporated crumple zones was my 1993 Honda Civic hatchback. I use the past tense because yesterday my wife and I were involved in a four-car pile-up on US Route 1 just outside the Capital Beltway. The car’s front end was indeed crumpled, but none of the four cars’ six occupants was seriously injured.

The accident was caused by a driver of a Ford Taurus, who apparently went into diabetic shock and failed to stop or even apply the brakes when the traffic light ahead of him turned red. The Taurus hit a Toyota Camry, which hit my car, pushing it into a Nissan Xterra.

Because the Toyota driver and I were still braking, the first two collisions, Ford–Toyota and Toyota–Honda, were mostly elastic. The Nissan ahead of us had come to a complete stop. The last collision, Honda–Nissan, was therefore inelastic, as you can see from the photo.

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When a car that doesn’t have a crumple zone smashes into something at high speed, its entire frame, including the passenger compartment, can buckle and its front end, including the engine if it’s in the front of the car, can be pushed into the passenger compartment. As Barènyi recognized 74 years ago, either consequence imperils passengers.

The collision my wife and I were involved in was at low speed. If the car didn’t have crumple zones and had instead a rigid frame, I doubt we’d have been crushed by a buckled frame or pushed-in engine.

But the crumple zone spared us from injury in another way. Thanks to its crumple zone, my car took longer to decelerate when it was slammed into the Nissan than a rigid car would have done. That extra time meant that our heads required less force from the objects that brought them to rest: our necks.

Charles Day

Atmospheric railways

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One of the joys of the internet in general and Wikipedia in particular is that your curiosity can take you along a chain of links to discover new and interesting things.

Last week, for a reason I’ve now forgotten, I wanted to know more about the River Lea, a tributary of the River Thames that meets its more illustrious parent in London’s Docklands. A chain of links that sprang from the Lea’s Wikipedia entry took me eventually to a page about the topic of this blog post: atmospheric railways.

In 1843 Joseph and Jacob d’Aguilar Samuda established the shipbuilding firm Samuda Brothers near the mouth of the Lea. Among the vessels built at Samuda Brothers’ yard was the Fuso, one of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s first armored battleships. Heihachiro Togo, who would later lead Japan’s navy to victory over Russia’s in the Battle of Tsushima, was on hand to observe the ship’s construction, having recently graduated from the Thames Nautical Training College.

But I digress. The Samuda brothers, I learned, were also proponents of atmospheric railways, whose trains are not pulled by fuel-carrying locomotives but sucked along by a vacuum.

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The section of disused track shown here gives some idea of how atmospheric railways worked. One of the carriages in the train was equipped with a piston that hung from its undercarriage. The piston fitted snugly inside a pipe that ran between the rails. Ahead of the train, a pumping station created a vacuum in the pipe; behind the train, the pipe was opened, allowing atmospheric pressure to push the piston forward—hence the name.

Thanks to their central pumping stations, atmospheric railways were cleaner than their coal- or wood-fired contemporaries, and lighter. But the technology didn’t catch on. The piston rod that connected the source of the propulsion to the train had to pass through the pipe without losing the vacuum as the train moved forward. Meeting that requirement in the 19th century proved challenging. Moving the trains on and off sidings and onto the mainline was also difficult because of the railways’ closed-loop topology.

Reading about atmospheric railways, I was reminded of a talk entitled “The Energy Problem: What Can a Physicist Do?” that Steven Chu gave at the April 2007 meeting of the American Physical Society in Jacksonville, Florida. At that time, Chu directed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He became secretary of the US Department of Energy a year later.

In his talk, Chu reviewed progress toward developing energy sources that don’t emit climate-warming gases into the atmosphere. Of all the points he made, the one that has stuck in my mind is the versatility of chemical energy. Unlike the vacuum that propelled atmospheric railways, the chemical energy that fueled steam locomotives was convenient to store and transport.

To catch on, whatever energy source powers the trains and cars of the future will also have to be convenient to store and transport.

Charles Day

The rare pleasure of physics

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The Order of Merit is one of Britain’s most exclusive clubs. Limited to 24 living members, the OM honors distinguished service in the arts, science, industry, and war. Lords Kelvin and Rayleigh were among the first group admitted to the order in 1902. On receiving the honor from King Edward VII, Rayleigh remarked,

The only merit of which I personally am conscious was that of having pleased myself by my studies, and any results that may be due to my researches were owing to the fact that it has been a pleasure for me to become a physicist.

Rayleigh enjoyed physics so much that he’d investigate topics that lay outside the mainsteam, such as tennis ball trajectories, insect color, and the soaring of albatrosses.

Most people, however, don’t share Rayleigh’s love of physics, especially high-school physics. When I tell members of the nonphysics laity that I work for a physics magazine, a typical reaction is “Man, I hated physics in high school. I just didn’t get it.”

Bad or uninspiring teachers are sometimes responsible for the unpopularity of physics. But even good and inspiring teachers have a tough time with a subject whose prime directive is to distill natural phenomena and express them in abstract mathematics. If a school’s catalog of courses were a music store, physics would be the modern jazz section, where you’d find the likes of Eric Dolphy’s 1964 album Out To Lunch!

Improving the teaching of physics should be a high priority. Biologists, chemists, and engineers need a basic understanding of physics to practice their chosen fields effectively. And everyone, nonscientists included, would benefit from knowing a little of the physics behind air conditioners, cars, cookers, and other everyday machines.

However, just as modern jazz is enjoyed by a small band of enthusiasts, physics will likely remain a minority interest. Physics is too esoteric and difficult to become as popular as country and western music.

Does that matter? Probably not. As long as everyone who wants to become a physicist can become one.

Charles Day