41 posts tagged “science”

Just a reminder - this is the International Year of Astronomy, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galileo's work. And this Saturday is Astronomy Day. If you happen to be in Houston, go to George Observatory, Brazos Bend State Park between 3:30 PM and 10:30 PM for lots of fun. Otherwise, look to your local university or science museum. And, in the words of one of my favorite people, keep looking up!

John

For those who prefer their irony neat:

Heinreich Boere is an admitted hit man for the Nazis. He joined the Waffen SS at age 18 and was charged with killing members of the Dutch resistance. He would shoot people dead with no trial, no warning, and no compunctions. And now he is fighting extradition to a trial for his war crimes:

"Boere's attorneys had appealed that decision to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, arguing that their client suffers a serious heart condition and that to put him on trial would violate his human rights by putting him in a possibly life-threatening situation."

Italics added; irony left intact.

And for those who prefer it over ice:

The Vatican has opened an exhibit in honor of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's publication of Siderius Nuncius, his treatise that relates his discovery of the Galilean moons of Jupiter [1]. During the opening, a reporter asked the Vatican's top Culture Official, Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, about the Church's 17th century condemnation of Galileo. Here's what he had to say:

"I continue to believe that it's necessary to look more to the future."

John

[1] Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

Think outside the (recyclable) box: What's an Act of Green someone might be surprised to learn about?
Sponsored by One Million Acts of Green brought to you by Cisco.

Increasing the standard of living in third world countries. You see, first world countries have much lower birthrates than third world countries do [1] and shifting the standard of living to one that is more like a first world country inevitably decreases the birthrate and so decreases demands for resources [2].

Interestingly, it does not appear that you have to raise the standard of living very much to have a strong effect on birthrate. Thus, by working with third world countries to increase their consumption of goods, we can decrease the number of new babies which will then decrease the total effect on the ecosystem.

Ain't unintended consequences great?

John

[1] Ethnologists are still divided over the cause, though there is no doubt about the effect. The most popular hypothesis is that the economic effect of multiple children shifts from a strong positive in third world subsidence level living to a strong negative in first world. The only first world country where this has not been the case has a very strong influx of immigrants who typically have very large families in the first generation and much smaller ones in the second (and assumed assimilated) generation [a].

[2] Think of it this way - you can hire 1,000 people for $10 each or 100 people for $50 each and still get the work done. Even though the amount of work is the same, the total cost is much lower to hire fewer people for more money. Believe it or not, it works just the same way for making babies as it does for making anything else!

[a] Geek points if you can name the country!

Time for another pop quiz, this time on climate change. Here are the questions; the answers are given below [1]:

Q1: When was the last time that the average temperature was as high as it is now?

A) Never; this is the hottest it has ever been, thanks to climate change
B) Never; this is the hottest it has ever been, but climate change has nothing to do with it
C) About  5,000 years ago
D) About 3,000,000 years ago

Q2: CO₂ is at 382 PPM. What is the highest level it has ever been?

A) 382 PPM; we have set a new record
B) 3,000 PPM
C) 900,000 PPM

Q3: Polar bears are in danger because the Arctic ice is melting.

A) True, they've never had to face this before
B) False, they are in trouble because their habitat is being encroached by man
C) False, they are in no trouble

Q4: CO₂ is the only greenhouse gas

A) True
B) Not true, but the other gases are insignificant compared to the effects of CO₂
C) Not true, the effects of other gases are about equal to that of CO₂
D) Not true, but we aren't sure what the relationship between the various gases and climate change is

Climate is an interesting thing. In order to understand it, you need to combine physics and chemistry with biology and geology and you need to apply copious amounts of skull-splitting mathematics [2]. You are using spatially and temporally limited measurements to make extended predictions about a famously chaotic system. As a result, there are a lot of oversimplifications that creep into the discussion and make it more difficult for the general public to understand what is known and why it matters.

Let's start off with the question of temperature. Today, the average temperature [3] of the globe is about 0.5 C above "normal". However, during the Holocene (5,000-9,000 years ago), the average global temperature was even higher than it is now. The temperature during the late Pliocene (~3,000,000 years ago) was also higher than it is today. We know this from a variety of sources, the best known of which are the oxygen isotope ratios.  The change in temperature comes from a variety of factors, including changes in the Earth's orbit (Milankovitch cycles), changes in the amount of energy the Sun emits, changes in the location of the continents [4], changes in vegetation [5], and (of course) changes in the Earth's atmospheric chemistry. Of these factors, we have had the most influence on the last two.

We have changed the vegetation in ways both large (e.g., the Colorado River) and small (e.g., Roundup). But it could be argued that we have had an even larger impact on the chemistry of the atmosphere. We have added radioactive materials [6], we have added complex chemicals [7], and most notably we have added CO₂. The Keeling curve is the best known record of the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, but it is not the only one. This is good, because Keeling didn't start his work until 1958! In addition, we have ice cores that contain records of both CO2 (from air bubbles trapped in the ice) and temperature [8] (from the oxygen isotope ratio in the water of the ice) extending back nearly 800,000 years.  Before that, we have a series of proxies for both temperature and CO₂.

What they show is that the temperature has often been much higher than it is now, and that the CO₂ level has increased when the temperature has gone up. During the Cretaceous (145.4 - 65.5 million years ago {MYA}), temperatures were about 4 C higher than now on average, and the CO₂ level was about six  times higher than it is now. More recently, during the Holocene Climatic Optimum [9] about 5,000 years ago, temperatures were about 2.5 C higher than they are now and CO₂ levels were similarly increased. Thus, the Earth has been hotter than it is right now; it has even been hotter in historical times than it is right now. Similarly, the Earth has had higher levels of CO₂ than those we see today; it has even had higher levels of CO₂ than we expect to see in the next century.

So why all the fuss? If this has happened before, then we don't need to worry about it, right? Wrong. The problem is that the last time an organism had this strong an influence on the Earth's atmosphere, it significantly changed the makeup of life on Earth [10]. We already see some evidence of this change happening now. However, not every extinction we see is caused by climate change -  not even every anthropogenic extinction.

Take, for example, the poor polar bear. Right now, it is the poster child for endangerment due to climate change. However, polar bears have been around for about 200,000 years which means that they were here during the Holocene Climatic Optimum. So they've seen temperatures even higher and ice levels even lower than what we see today. So why are they endangered? Simply because the last time this happened, there weren't many other competitors for their niche and the polar bear was able to adapt. Today, the polar bear competes for land and food with the most vicious predator on the planet - man. Thus, the polar bear cannot retreat onto the land when the ice melts because we've taken all of the good spots. And it can't hunt moose instead of seals, because we've taken all the good ones. And so on. Unfortunately, those who would rescue it hurt their cause by oversimplifying and saying that the polar bear is threatened due to climate change. As a result, folks who would deny that climate change will change life on Earth [11] can seize on the motes in our eye while ignoring the beams in theirs.

And there are plenty of motes to seize on. For example, the focus on CO₂ as a greenhouse gas [12]. Though it is the most prevalent greenhouse gas, and the one that is most intrinsically linked to mankind's efforts, there are others. And some of the others are even more effective at increasing the greenhouse effect. There is methane (CH₄, which is a natural byproduct of digestion for critters from no legs (phytoplankton) to four legs (cattle) to n legs (creepy-crawlies). It is 20 times more effective at trapping heat than CO₂; fortunately it decays rapidly in the atmosphere into CO₂. Unfortunately, there are great stores of methane locked in clathrates  (aka "gas hydrates") just offshore and locked in the tundra. If temperatures increase enough, this methane may be "burped" into the atmosphere rapidly, leading to an increase in greenhouse conditions [13].  Another greenhouse gas is water vapor, which acts both as greenhouse gas and (when it condenses into high-level clouds) as a cooling agent. The sheer volume of water in the atmosphere gives it a larger contribution toward warming than CO₂ has. And, in one of those funny practical jokes that Mother Nature likes to play on us, increased temperatures can increase the ability of the atmosphere to hold water which then leads to an even stronger greenhouse effect and even higher temperatures.

Another favorite is the instability of climate models. Even today, we still don't know what happens to about 1/3 of the atmospheric CO₂. We know it goes somewhere, because the amount isn't building up as quickly as it should. But where does it go? Favorite candidates are peat bogs, northern forests, and "missing" primary productivity. With a hole this big in the model inputs, you can imagine what skeptics have to say about the outputs [14].

Which brings us back to the point of this pop quiz. Quizzes should be a measure of the student's learning. But they are also a measure of the quality of the teaching. And thus far, the quality of education on climate change has been dreadful (in both senses of the word). By making the overly simplistic statements and by covering up the good that will come from climate change along with the bad, those who would "educate" others on climate change do themselves and their cause a disservice. And that is never a good thing.

John

[1] But try to give your answer before reading the actual ones, OK?

[2] The math starts at tensor calculus and works its way up from there.

[3] We pass over the problem of deriving an average temperature for something that varies widely in heat input and output. In truth, most climatologists use heat (a measure of the energy in a system) rather than temperature (a measure of how that energy has excited a particular part of the system) and only convert to temperature at the last step. By watching how the heat flows in a climate model, they are better able to understand the system. For analogy's sake, consider traffic on the highway. You and I measure traffic in speed; when we get stuck in a jam, we slow down and so think the two are synonymous. However, civil engineers measure traffic in the number of vehicles (and have even found that decreasing the average speed can increase the amount of traffic that flows through, thus shortening a trip!).  From their calculations, civil engineers can take the more fundamental measurement (number of vehicles) and convert it into a more mundane one (speed). Climatologists do the same with heat and temperature.

[4] High latitude continents tend to accumulate snow, which has a high albedo, which reflects more energy back into space, thus cooling the earth.

[5] Ignoring the obvious, there is also the shift from dark-leaved vegetation to light-leaved varieties famously modeled in Daisyworld and seen in the change from tropical forests to grasslands.

[6] Which have proven to be a boon to anthropologists, as they allow a more precise dating of recent artifacts.  

[7] Such as the CFCs that were widely hailed as a godsend in the 1930's (because they replaced even more dangerous chemicals in refrigeration units and made home fridges possible). After discovery of the ozone holes and banning of CFC’s, their concentration in the atmosphere has begun to drop off and is projected to return to 1980 levels by 2060. This quick turnaround unfortunately makes some people think that we can have the same effect on CO₂; nothing could be further from the truth. CFCs are naturally unstable in the atmosphere (which was the problem - they reacted with something we wanted to keep!), whereas CO₂ is naturally stable. So the CFCs go away quickly and the CO₂ is here to stay.

[8] Yes, I know I said that they use heat and not temperature [3]. But here the proxy records temperature (because the oxygen isotope ratio changes with temperature) and has to be translated into heat. This is typically done with modern analogs to provide a baseline for the relationship. Hey, nobody ever said this would be easy!

[9] Which, translated from the science-ese, means "Recent freakin' hot time". Honestly.

[10] Not that I'm complaining! I happen to enjoy breathing, thank you very much, and am grateful to those little slime-buckets that make it all possible. (It is a common mis-perception that trees provide all of the oxygen to the atmosphere. Actually, they provide only about 15%; more than half of the Earth's atmospheric oxygen comes from the ocean's phytoplankton. Were every tree to die, we would still breathe quite happily, thank you.)

[11] Believe it or not, there are those who do so. They run the gamut from denying that CO2 is even a greenhouse gas (Hello! Venus, anyone?) to denying that the temperature has changed at all to denying that there will be effects from the change in temperature.  

[12] We'll pass over the "volcanoes make more CO₂ than man" bit, as that is just silly. A quick check of the numbers shows it to be false. But then, these folks use numbers the way Humpty-Dumpty used words.  

[13] I.e., the entire Earth will begin to feel like a fraternity on the afternoon that the A/C quits working.
 
[14] "Garbage in, garbage out" is about the kindest thing they say.

Today is Name Your Poison Day. So make a decision and tell us: what's your poison?

Oxygen. It was responsible for one of the greatest mass extinction events in the history of the Earth.

John

Let’s suppose that you are the Earth. And let’s suppose that you are entering middle age. In human terms, that makes you about 40 years old. Thus, the following events would have marked your life [1]:

• 40 years ago, you were born, just six months after your (much) bigger brother (the Sun). Your brother threw a lot of temper tantrums during the first few months, but seems to be getting more stable.
• 41 days later, you underwent surgery to remove your twin (the Moon).
• When you turned 3, you were allowed to take a bath (oceans formed)
• When you were 4 ¾, you were given your first furniture (rocks) to keep. Every couple of years or so, you re-arrange the furniture and re-upholster a lot of it as you go.
• When you were 6 ½ you got a fungal infection (life appeared on your surface).
• When you were 13 ½, you made a water garden (photosynthesis started). You and your twin are at your closest, but you can feel her growing more distant by the day. About twice a month you catch a chill and then get too hot.  
• Not much happened for the next twenty years or so. But when you turned 35, you got crabs! (Arthropods appeared)
• Six months later, you were given a goldfish as a present (fish appeared). Two months after that, you got your first house plant (land plants appeared).
• When you were 36 ½, your plants got aphids (insects appeared).
• During the first part of your 37th year, you bought a lizard (reptiles appeared). During the last half of the year, you noticed that the lizard was getting rather large (dinosaurs appeared).
• Doing your spring cleaning two years ago (your 38th year), you found mouse droppings (mammals appeared). Later that summer, you noticed birds for the first time.
• Just over a year ago, your houseplant sprang into bloom (flowers appeared).
• About six months ago, your pet lizard died, but you can’t figure out why. Was it that car accident you had? Or the cold you caught? Or was it changing his Lizard Chow? Or did it happen just because you re-arranged the furniture?
• Just over a week ago, a noisy family moved into the neighborhood (humans appeared). They finally quieted down an hour ago (civilization spread), but you aren’t sure whether or not you want them in your neighborhood especially as they seem intent on throwing crap into your backyard.

There - doesn't that make you feel better about your mid-life crisis?

John
[1] This has probably been done several thousand times (and several thousand times better). But I'm doing it here anyhow...

Have you ever wondered about numbers? Or math? If not, then move on, bub - there’s nothing to see here. If you have, let me give you the ten-minute version of the best mathematics course I ever had.

Let’s start with the easy part: Counting. When you count, odds are you do it this way “1, 2, 3, 4, …”. That set of numbers you used is known as the “Natural numbers”, because it is the natural way to count [1, 2]. Natural numbers are good because they allow you to move beyond the way that politicians count (“1, 2, many”) and to enumerate items. How many people? How many goats? How many kids [3]? So, as you might guess, the natural numbers are a way of answering the question “How many?”

But what if the answer is “None”? Then we have to change the natural numbers by adding zero to the set: “0, 1, 2, 3, 4, …”. This new set of numbers is the “Whole numbers” (because they start with a hole, I guess). Interestingly, though the concept of zero was well known by the Babylonians [4] and those that followed them, it took the Arabs to give us the symbol for the number “0”.

Whole numbers allow us to add, which means that we can also multiply [5], as that is just repeated addition. It also gave us two of the most fundamental rules in math:

• Addition (and multiplication) is commutative – the numbers can switch places without changing the result [6]. So 2x3=3x2=6. And 2+3+4=2+4+3=3+2+4=4+2+3=4+3+2=9. And so on.
• Addition (and multiplication) are associative – you can break numbers apart into smaller bits, solve the bits and then put them back together and without changing your result [7]. So 2+(3+4) = (2+3)+4 = 9. And 2x(3x4) = (2x3)x4=24.
  

Combining the commutative rule and the associative rule gives us the distributive rule – you can spread the operations without changing the outcome. So 2x(3+4) = (2x3)+(2x4)=14.

Well that’s all good until you start to wonder who owes you money (which is something the Babylonians did often, as they invented bookkeeping). If I owe you $25 and I have $20, then the whole numbers don’t have enough numbers to tell you how much I have – we have to go into integers (-$5). The integers begin at minus infinity [8] and go to positive infinity, passing through zero on the way. Thanks to integers, we can now subtract as well as add. So we can say things like 2-3=-1 (try saying that when you don’t have -1 in your vocabulary! [9]).

And now we get to the first big hurdle in mathematics, something that caused the Greeks to splinter into several competing cults: division! You see, there are two types of division – the type that gives a nice, simple answer and the type that doesn’t [10].

Take for example the question: How many sheep are in the mountains if ten farmers each put out three sheep? Turned into math, it becomes 10 x 3 = 30 [11]. No biggie. Now ask the fall equivalent of that question and see what happens: “There are thirty sheep on the mountain, belonging to ten farmers. If each farmer gets an equal number of sheep, how many sheep does each farmer get?” In math, that’s 30/10=3. That worked well.

But what if the question had been “There are thirty-three sheep on the mountain, belonging to ten farmers. If each farmer gets an equal number of sheep, how many sheep does each farmer get?” In math, that’s 33/10 = 3.3 sheep per farmer. Oh, oh! Trouble!

You see, there were three groups in Greek mathematics. There was a group that maintained that you could never have .3 sheep, so the question was flawed in some way [12]. Then there was a group that maintained that having .3 sheep (or even .33 sheep) was fine – but you couldn’t get anything weirder than that. They created what we know as the “Rational numbers” and gave rise to the Rational School of thought in Greek Philosophy. The most prominent Rationalist was Pythagoras, the guy who did that thing with the triangle. He and his followers maintained that everything could be expressed as a ratio and that ratios could only give rational numbers [13]. They also maintained that one should be a vegetarian (but shouldn’t eat beans), and that you should never be buried in wool (even before Labor Day).

They also are reputed to have committed one of the first acts of scientific martyrdom, when Hippasus of Metapontum was killed for showing that some things could not be expressed as the ratio of two integers. Take that right triangle that figures so prominently in Pythagoras’ story – if you have a right triangle, you can find the length of any leg using the ratio of the other two legs. However, that ratio may not be rational; if the two short legs have equal length, then the long leg’s length [14] is equal to the square root of two times the length of the short legs. And the square root of two is not equal to the ratio of any two integers! It was this discovery that got Hippasus murdered by his fellow believers [15].

It was also this discovery that led to the ironically-named Pythagorean method for finding the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, known as π (pi, pronounced “pie”). Exactly what this ratio was occupied the best minds of Greece, Rome, and Europe until 1882 (nearly 4,000 years of speculation and arguing!), when it was proven once and for all that π was transcendental [16].

The reason the problem stayed around so long was that while it is very easy to find out how wide a circle is, it is very difficult to find out how far around it is. This problem is best typified in the Bible, where a circular bath is described:

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

So we have a circular “molten sea” that is ten units across and thirty units around, which means that the ratio of the circumference to the radius (i.e., π) would be 3.0 [17]. At about the same time, the Egyptians had a slightly better value for π = 440/140 (3.1428…). The Greeks were able to improve on it, but not much; however, they did give us the basic method that would be used for the new 4,000 years: the Pythagorean method, a.k.a. “squaring the circle”.  Start by drawing a circle. Now place a square around it, like a box, just barely large enough to fit the circle in [18]. You’ll find that the ratio of the “radius” of the square to its perimeter is 4.0. Now chop of the corners of the square, making an octagon. The ratio of its perimeter to its radius is 3.312. Now chop off the outside bits of the octagon, making a hexadecimagon (a regular polygon with sixteen sides) and measure again. Keep doing this until the error is very, very small (and the sides are very, very tiny, making the errors larger and larger). If you could do this forever and had infinitely good tape measures, you would get an exact value of π. Of course, you can’t do so – but there are folks who still try.

So why all the fuss? Simple – because every time we’ve discovered a new type of number, we’ve discovered new ways to use math. When all we had was natural numbers, all we could do was count. When we got the integers, suddenly we could keep track of who had how many iPods. When we got the rational numbers, we could find out how many apples it takes to make applesauce. With irrational numbers like π and e, and imaginary numbers like i [19], we are able to create better models of our world [20].

For that’s what these various mathematical tricks (addition, subtraction, division, square roots, etc.) are: they are ways that we model the world. Having more ways to model the world means that we can get better answers to the questions that we ask, which means that we can live better, richer, happier lives. And that’s why things like Pi day are so important – because they encourage people to get into math and to understand their world.

And that, as Sellar and Yeatman would say, is a good thing.

John

[1] Also known as “Counting numbers” for obvious reasons.

[2] This is also why the millennium began in the year 2001 and not in the year 2000. The first ten natural numbers are “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10”; the second decade doesn’t begin until “11”. Similarly, the first century ends with “100” and the next begins with “101”, and the first millennium ends with “1000”.

[3] Either baby people or baby goats – your choice.

[4] Who, like the Maya, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans, had their own way of marking numerals. The Babylonians, BTW, are also the reason that minute has 60 seconds, the hour has 60 minutes, the day has 24 hours, the year has 12 months, and the circle has 360 degrees; those wild and wacky Babylonians liked 20, 12, 5, 2, and 3 (as did the Maya) and used it to develop their calendrical system (as did the Maya [a]). It took the Arabs to give us a numerical system that could be easily manipulated, thus jump-starting real mathematics (as opposed to just counting or drawing pretty pictures).

[5] Being fruitful is optional.

[6] This is not true for all types of math. For example, the result you get after multiplying two vectors depends on which one comes first.

[7] Again, not true for all types of math. But you really, really don’t want to know where it goes tits up, so I won’t tell you.

[8] Early math speak for “too many to count” (literally).

[9] I still remember arguing with my 2nd grade teacher that there couldn’t be a negative number. Fortunately, Mrs. Black eventually got me straightened out on that. So it is all her fault that I have a ridiculously good job!

[10] And there are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary notation and those who don’t. End of first inevitable math joke.

[11] Or 3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3=30, if you prefer to do it the hard way.

[12] The descendants of these Greeks have become politicians and TV preachers.

[13] Indeed, that’s the root of the word “rational”.

[14] Try saying that ten times fast! (No, not “that”; “the long leg’s length”!)

[15] Thereby demonstrating that religious fanatics have always been irrational.

[16] Go and think on that for awhile!

[17] There are a few clever apologetics out there who weasel around this by saying that the circumference was measured on the inside of the bath while the radius was measured from the center to the outside rim. Silly, but that’s what they claim. This Biblical value has also caused politicians trouble, as in 1897 when an Indianan conned his state senator into putting forth a bill that would have given several incorrect values for π. The House Speaker was no dummy and referred the bill to the Committee on Swamps. The members of that committee were dummies and moved the bill over to the Committee on Education, which gave it a “do pass” recommendation (thereby proving that the members shouldn’t have been on that committee) and sent it to the House, where it was passed. As luck would have it, an actual scientist (Professor C. A. Waldo of Purdue) stopped by just before the Indiana Senate was to vote on it; he read the bill and pointed out to the senators that they were about to make Indiana the laughingstock of the nation – which killed the bill [b].

[18] Thereby putting a round peg into a square hole. Hey, these sayings all start somewhere!

[19] No, I’m not imaginary (at least, I think I’m not). The number i, which is equal to the square root of negative one, is imaginary.

[20] Or, as many would have it, e^{i π} + 1 = 0 (Euler’s Identity) is the world’s most beautiful formula. Five fundamental constants, two operations.

[a] While we are on the subject, the Mayan calendar does not end on December 21, 2012. What happens is that it reaches the end of a “Long Count” and starts over again. This is like hitting December 31 and moving on to January 1 (except that the Maya believe that this also marks a fundamental shift in the Universe – but not its end).

[b] Would that that had worked with Louisiana and Kansas…

There is a wonderful [1] article on Penn, Teller, and an illusion that they do using a red ball in the Las Vegas Weekly. In it, the illusion, they start out by explaining how it is done. Why? Because knowing the secret transforms the illusion from something commonplace to something extraordinary.

 
I feel the same way about science. By learning the secrets of the universe, my world has been changed from mundane to sublime. When I see NASA images such as the Eagle Nebula, it shows me new worlds being created in each of those glowing tips [2]. And I see the humor in my eye transforming a random swirl of gas into an artist holding a new star in his hand and gasping at its beauty [3]. And I see the equations that govern the forms of those swirls.

As a result, my day is filled with wonder and delight. The ripples on the water in the backyard? Both an anamorphic lens for light and a measure of the depth of the pool. The leaves in the gutter? An example of the difference between deciduous and evergreen trees [4] and a measure of pi. The clouds in the sky? A marvelous heat engine and a way of short-term recycling. And so on.

That's why I am always aghast when a non-scientist suggests that science is out to diminish the wonder of the world. Where we move through a wonderland of enchantment, non-scientists are condemned to blunder through a dark maze of confusion [5]. And yet they think I'm the handicapped one?

John

[1] In both senses of the word.

[2] OK, technically, they are new solar systems. But you get my point.

Maya/Ellie has, for reasons unknown to me, decided to revisit the question of whether or not one can infinitely recycle paper. Once more, she gets her basic facts wrong [1] and casts baseless accusations [2]. I would invite those of you who are interested in getting the facts right to read the original post that started this mess.

Here I merely want to emphasize one thing that Maya/Ellie seems determined to get wrong - and that will keep her from being able to do anything more than button sorting and bottle washing until she does understand it: Entropy always increases. That's what the second law of thermodynamics says, and we have never found an exception to it [3].

In the case of paper recycling, insisting that entropy increases does not mean (as Maya/Ellie would have it) " thus implying that my brief comment also stated that my grand idea would prevent the waste of any energy." You see, entropy refers to order in a system, not energy. Increasing entropy means that the disorder in the system has increased, not that the energy has changed [4]. That's why I wrote this in my previous post on the topic:

One other form of loss in the system deserves special mention, as it is so fundamental to biology that no good biologist should be capable of overlooking it: the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy always increases [5]. Applying this to paper, something jumps out - the paper fiber, the element that gives cardboard its strength. As the paper is recycled, the fibers get smaller and smaller as they are broken during use and recycling. As a result, the paper gets weaker and weaker. In other words, even if the loop were closed perfectly, the result wouldn't be useable.

Now the fun thing about this is that you need not take my word for it. You can actually test it. Take a piece of printer paper. Tear it into small pieces. Put them into a blender with a couple cups of water. Pulse the blender until everything is a mushy mess. Now pour the mush out onto a screen (one stolen from a window works just fine) that has been put over a large bowl. Spread the mush flat and press the water out of it. Tah-dah! you have just made paper!

Now look in the bowl. See all those little specks floating around? Those are the pieces of paper fiber that were too small to stay in the new paper. They were lost in the system. It doesn't matter how fine the mesh is, you'll always lose something. If you had a really, really sensitive scale, you could actually measure the difference in weight between the original piece of paper and the new one.

OK, now contrast what I asked you to do (test my statement) with what Maya/Ellie has asked you to do (take her word because I'm so mean). Guess which one is the way scientists settle arguments and which is more common to creationists...

John

[1] E.g., her statement that "John has recently been following me on a few of my neighbor's sites, responding to my comments with insults and referring back to this very old post." The truth is, I haven't; I tend to avoid Ellie [a]. I have been on other folks blogs, usually either via invitation (as was the case for Steve Betz) or through chance (e.g, finding them listed on the This is Good page). But I try to ignore Ellie, just as I ignore other posters who substitute feelings for facts and unfounded accusations for argument.

[2] E.g., her assertion that "My only guess for his motivation was the fact that he works for an oil company - and I had been very critical of Exxon. In any case, it's been a long arguement." Again, her statement is simply wrong, as this started back when I worked for a science museum. As for being critical of Exxon [b] – please see my comment on Inside Passage’s blog.

[3] That's why it is a law.

[4] It may have, but it need not do so. For example, when ice crystals melt, the total amount of energy is constant, but the entropy has increased as the water molecules are no longer ordered.

[a] My life is full enough without trying to teach those who are unwilling to learn.

[b] I rather wish that the court had decided the other way on the damages; it might have led to a more cautious approach to drilling in the North Slope.

Today is the first day of the Season of Lent. Are you giving anything up for the next 40 days?

Yes. I am giving up persecution. You see, today also happens to be the 396th anniversary of the day that Galileo went before the Inquisition. After showing him the instruments of torture [1], Cardinal Bellarmine ordered Galileo to "give up altogether the said false doctrine [that Earth moves around the sun] . . . and if you should refuse . . . you should be imprisoned." [2]

Galileo recanted his views [3] and spent the rest of his life imprisoned [4]. Admittedly, it was at his home in the country, but it was still a prison; he could not publish any new papers, nor leave his estate, nor have colleagues at his home without permission of the Roman Catholic Church. To add insult to injury, his work was placed on the Index Liber Prohibitorum; merely owning a copy of it was a sin, and production of it was banned.The Roman Catholic Church would not apologize and admit that Galileo had it right for 376 years [5].

So I'll be giving up persecuting heretics [6] for the next 40 days. And the 40 after that, and the 40 after that...

John

[1] Standard operating procedure in those days - show the accused what they risked (in addition to their souls) if they persisted in their heresy.

[2] And probably tortured as well. Giordano Bruno was burned to death at the stake only 16 years earlier for proposing (wait for it) a heliocentric universe, just like the one Galileo proposed [a].

[3] Wouldn't you? "Hey buddy, here's the pear, and here's the cradle, and here's the tickler. Do you want to recant now, or do we get to have some fun first? Have a comfy seat while you decide..."

[4] Thereby showing the level of trust that one may place in the promise of any administrator.

[5] In contrast, the Roman Catholic Church never banned Darwin's works and took only fifty years to issue an edict that there was nothing in evolutionary theory that contradicted Church doctrine.

[6] I do have an advantage in that I work in a field in which successful heretics are heroes. For example, Wegner is widely admired for his fatally-flawed hypothesis of continental drift; without his careful observations, Vine, Morely and Matthews would never have been able to piece together the theory of plate tectonics.

[a] There was a difference in that where Galileo's heliocentrism sprang from his observations of the physical universe, Bruno's was rooted in certain philosophical views. But a Church that can't stand to be argued with and burns people at the stake to show it is right isn't much of a Church, IMHO.