Link: LED at 50

Another day, another great History of Science BBC audio slideshow. This one's on the LED, the Light Emitting Diode, invented in 1962 by Nick Holonyak. He invented the lower energy red LED 50 years ago and it's taken much of that half-century to work our way up into the other (higher energy) colours so we can have white light. Holonyak says each higher energy colour required learning from the previous colour how to do it-- a very methodical, incremental way of cracking a problem.

Are blue LEDs out of focus for you? For me they are diffuse splodges compared to the red ones. 

Nick Holonyak and his Red LED

Hamlet in the Lab: Watson v. Franklin (et al)

Previously on The Most Elegant Puzzle, I read the prologue of James Watson's The Double Helix and decided despite claims to honesty and accuracy, it was just as it also claimed to be--a retroactive diary, unreliable. While useful and interesting, it should be only be approached with the utmost skepticism. Part way through, I noted that I didn't consider Watson's attempt to backtrack a bit on his treatment of Rosalind Franklin in his personal account to be good enough. I said that would be a whole other blog post.

This is that blog post, and then some.

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was an x-ray crystallographer, which means her work involved firing x-rays at the atoms in crystals to create an image that enables someone to determine their structure, something Patricia Fara (in her four thousand year history of science) describes as requiring 'huge amounts of skill and patience'. In the early fifties and at the time of the events of the Double Helix, she was working at King's College London. She is best known for taking the photograph that clinched the double helical shape of DNA-- a photograph that was 'borrowed' without her knowledge by Maurice Wilkins (also working at King's) and shown to James Watson and Francis Crick.

This more tangible injustice, however, is not the end of it. In The Double Helix, Franklin gets the most unfavourable description of anyone. I stole this condensed version of Watson's description of Franklin from this excellent mini account of Franklin's life, but it's accurate to the early part of Watson's book.

By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. . . . There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. . . . Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. . . The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.

Charming, eh? Watson never criticises her abilities as a scientist and I have no reason to believe that he is not abolutely sincere when he says she was good at what she did. After all, it was her photograph that provided him with the evidence to make his famous discovery. We should remember, also that Watson claims he is writing as if he was in the early fifties. He also does comment earlier that the women at King's were required to eat separately from the men, implying he views this as injust.

However, this does not undo the sexist nature of his comments and I think this is worth a bit of attention. A blogger called Nick B., writing here, concludes:

All indications are that she [Franklin] was a very brusque and forward person. She, according to her close friends, could be bossy and impatient, not because she was mean, but because she was so serious about science. One of her friends, Anne Sayre, pointed out that she could often come off as far more stubborn or opposed to an idea than she actually was. Watson’s account of her personality was confused and incorrect; he clearly didn’t fully understand her, as he admitted in the epilogue. But I think, generally speaking, he probably accurately described their initial interactions and first impressions, which was Watson’s stated goal.  

 As I said in my previous blog post, Watson's personal truth has no bearing on the historical accuracy of his statemnt and the fact remains that this is the record that he has left behind-- and did so with full knowledge of what he was doing. If he actually started planning the book in 1953, he had over 15 years to work out the exact language of his book. He chose not (only) to focus on her stubborn, bossy, impatient personality, as Nick B. implies, but on her looks (decrying her lack of lipstick and 'unimaginative' clothing choices). To me, this is a complaint made particularly of women by people who seem to be under the impression that a woman has a duty to look a certain way in order to appear professional (when few uphold such standards for men). This is, of course, pure sexism.

The final comment, that a feminist belonged in someone else's lab, stems from tension between Franklin and Wilkins. They were both working on DNA, and both apparently under the impression that DNA was theirs to work on. Wilkins was, according to Watson, under the impression that Franklin was to take an assisting role. Franklin was under no such impression and naturally refused to be subjugated.

In 1976, Jerry Donohue (also an insider to this story with an instrumental role to play in the structure of DNA) wrote a comprehensive review following the publication of a book by the aforementioned friend of Franklin, Anne Sayre. The book was called Rosalind Franklin and DNA and posthumously told Franklin's story. Donohue's review not only covers his response to this book but also Watson's dismissive (yet cutting) so-called non-response to its publication ("It’s just too complicated. She [Sayre] might as well have her fun. No comment.") It also tackles a longer reposte from Farooq Hussain, writing (with some possible bias) from King's College itself.

Franklin's (and Ray Gosling's) X-Ray photograph of DNA

But let's put the details of Donohue's review aside because I think that there is something to be said about the furor (Donohue uses the word "brouhaha") surrounding Watson's memoir. The amount written about this period is astonishing. Dozens of people have tried to unpick this story, detail by detail, personality by personality, interaction by interaction, and tell that honest tale of the discovery of DNA. The events of 1951-53 are only the beginning. The whole backlash decades later is Act II.  It's Hamlet in the lab, heaving with characters and confusion.

Almost everyone involved has weighed in, or been required to weigh in--perhaps because of the delay of Watson's book often long after the fact. It is evident that Sayre interviewed Wilkins and Francis Crick in the seventies in order to her write her take on Franklin. Wilkins wrote an autobiography (2003), which must be an interesting read. Hussain, as he was at King's College and worked in the field clearly had a vested interest. Jerry Donohue, as I have already said, was also involved-- he shared an office with Watson and Crick. We haven't even mentioned Ray Gosling, Franklin's assistant, and of course J.T. Randall, the Director of Biophysics at King's, who fatefully muddied the waters between Wilkins and Franklin by misleading them both on their roles. Part of this has to be that Franklin died in the late fifties, long before Watson assassinated her character and her gender in his retroactive diary, so her voice--of all the clamouring voices involved in this tangled story--is crucially missing. 

Would her voice put the discussion to bed? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The drama, and the drama about the drama, goes on.

Oddly though, Watson the ultimate winner, the last voice, because of what he says at the beginning of his book. Remember? He wrote:

As I hope this book will show, science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

And--although probably didn't intend it the way it turned out--having created with the publication of his 'honest' tale a perfect storm of conflicting reports, records and memories, wasn't he entirely right about that? 

*

In addition to the works linked in the post above, I also read this Independent article (which I remembered seeing the news about when it happened): "Fury at DNA Pioneer's theory: Africans are Less Intelligent than Westerners." It does nothing to dispell a very dim view of James Watson.

The Jerry Donohue review is called 'Honest Jim?' and can be found in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 51, No. 2, Jun., 1976  pps. 285-289.

I also read the Wikipedia entry on Rosalind Franklin, which is where I got her photograph. 

The Nobels and the Nazis

I've been reading Sam Kean's book The Disappearing Spoon, a very fun read that takes you through various stories surrounding elements, their discoveries and the scientists who discovered, isolated or otherwise messed with them to good effect.

A young de Hevesy

One story I just have to share, and from some quick googling I know that it is not only me who, out of all the great stories in Kean's book, has picked this one out as particularly impressive. After all, it has Nazis, tension, a healthy dash of derring-do and (drumroll) science!

It was 1940, the Nazis were marching into Copenhagen in Denmark, and Neils Bohr and Georges de Hevesy found themselves in possession of two Nobel prizes. They weren't theirs-- two physicists, fearing their medals would be seized and lost forever under the rise of the Nazis, had sent them from Germany to Copenhagen for safekeeping. Their discovery could be deadly, because exporting gold from Nazi Germany was forbidden and the names of the recipients were inscribed on the medals.

Bohr and de Hevesy had only hours and, knowing the Institute would be searched, initially thought of burying the medals-- although a freshly-covered pit would no doubt be discovered. So what did de Hevesy do? He dissolved them.

Gold in Aqua Regia

Gold, it turns out, doesn't dissolve easily. The same stability which means it sits around in Pharoah's tombs untarnished for thousands of years also means it stubbornly resists efforts that would rid a lab of, say, a silver medal. However, such a problem only needs one workable solution-- and solution it was, as, the Nazis breathing down his neck, de Hevesy slowly dissolved the medals in a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid called aqua regia.

The bright orange resultant liquid was bottled up and carefully stored on a shelf and, despite the Institute being searched and both de Hevesy and Bohr ultimately fleeing Denmark themselves, it was still there after the war, sitting on the shelf. De Hevesy simply precipitated out the gold and returned it to the Swedish Academy where it was once again turned into two, shiny gold medals inscribed with the names of their owners.

 Great story, eh? This story may be the quintessential example of this:

Probably how de Hevesy looked when dissolving the medals,

Review: Shock of the Old (Part II)

This post constitutes part two of a review of David Edgerton's book Shock of the Old. I shall attempt to make this post stand alone by itself but read Part I if you want the review of the actual book rather than my mad musings.

In Part I, I ended by facetiously summarising my objection to the ideas in the book by saying: Yes. And?

I agree with David Edgerton's ideas. I don't see much problem with them: of course we should take a complete look at the history of technology, rather than one that--as this 2006 Guardian interview with Edgerton says--describes 1940s technology history as one of supersonic flight and atomic power.

Supersonic 1940s: The Bell X-1

When I read this interview (before having read the book) my response was dramatic. Who thinks that the 1940s was a decade of supersonic flight? Is this a popular conception that I've somehow missed out on or an absurd academic one? In the Guardian interview and in the book, Edgerton insists on using the term "we" to describe the position he is attempting to counter. "We think that..." "We believe..." Who is this we and why do they have a rather bizarre view of the 1940s? I absolute agreed, before reading the book, that the 1940s were more of a time of "tanks, aeroplanes, cars, coal and wheat and pig farming."

You could ascribe my objection to pure high and mightyness: I don't think that because I am superior and magically have more knowledge (or the right kind of knowledge) than most. 

Let me defend myself by trying to explain why I think I didn't come into this book with the expectation that technology history, either popularly or academically, never seemed to be quite as extreme as Edgerton makes out (perhaps we should allow that he may have been hyperbolising to make a point).

Finally I will actually disagree with Edgerton. Hold on to your hats, things will get crazy.

Still reading? Something of what Edgerton is worried about, this focus on the absurd magic of the cutting edge, seems to come from the futurist ideas of the 50s-70s, when people were landing on the Moon and everyone fully expected we would have at least a Moon colony and flying cars by now. The science fiction of this period--think Thunderbirds, 2001 and even Back to the Future--are I think symptoms of the possibly more sensible expectation of the everyday person. The future was going to be awesome and it was barely fifty years away, if that.

Alternate future: the Firefly crew on their crowded, jury-rigged bridge.

But I was born in the mid 1980s and my teenage TV science fiction was quite a different story. Dark Angel (2000) was set in a post-apocalyptic future populated almost exclusively by the kind of technologies Edgerton wants to draw attention to: bicycles instead of cars, jury-rigged ways of keeping up with the vanguard of technology. Firefly (2002), the beloved space western, was similar-- the heroes didn't have the cutting edge technology. Unable to access the most cutting edge technology, they too made us of elderly technology (although it looked futuristic to us). Even Stargate which gives us an alternate 'now', has humans in general scrambling to keep up with other technologies and doing many of the things Edgerton wants to highlight: borrowing, reverse-engineering, imitating, jury-rigging. The Dial Home Device for the Earth Stargate was missing and Earth scientists have managed to hack one together out of what, compared to the original technology, amounts to some bits of string and duct tape.

 A generation after Edgerton, I think, the myth of the future has changed from one of the gleaming inventiveness of humanity to one of borrowing and jury-rigging. It's changed enough for me to be genuinely surprised that anyone would look at the 1940s and think "supersonic flight" above "Spitfire" or would feel it necessary to be quite so bombastic about making this point about old technology being important as if it was completely groundbreaking. 

 That's the "Yes" of my fascetious argument. The 'And' therefore expects more from this line of argument. If we have in fact established that there is more to technology that what was invented yesterday, how can we begin to investigate this or make sense of it? This is what I would have liked to read in the book-- some clear suggestion not only that we should look at old, borrowed, regressive and maintained technology as equally important but how we should approach it. The book contains plenty of examples, but I don't think I ever got the sense that Edgerton really knows what the next step is. Perhaps he's got there now, as the book is now a good six years old!

*

And now I must disagree with Edgerton. Or rather, I must query how he appears to conceive of technology (or perhaps how he appears to conceive of how "we" conceive of technology). There is a sense that technologies invented are intended to eclipse their predecessors. For example, I see no reason why the machete as a killing tool should necessarily be outmoded by the gun, bomb, rocket or atomic warhead-- which the book appears to suggest is what is intended by the rocket's invention. If I live in London and want to get people in Paris, I don't have to be in Paris to kill them if I have a rocket. I can simply line up my rocket and fire it. It may not be the cheapest, most efficient or effective method, but it plays quite a different role.

In fact, technology rarely eclipses a previous technology complete because-- like Darwin's semi-apocryphal finches--it occupies quite a different evolutionary niche. A "better" bird doesn't necessarily entirely displace the previous bird because the ways in which it is different may outweigh the ways in which it fills the same task as the earlier bird.

In the killing technology example, the bomb will never replace the machete entirely because the bomb will always play a different role: it is more difficult to acquire, especially in quantity (even with the internet), more indiscriminate and less personal. It destroys people in quite a different way, which must have sociological and psychological implications.

1869 Ladies' Pedal Bicycle

We walk for different reasons and on different journeys than we bike, take a train, drive  or fly. While these are successive transport technologies I just don't see that anyone really dismisses biking because planes exist. This is the level on which Edgerton makes his stand: Bicycles fly in the face of the innovation myth. But do they really?

Consider the bicycle made today. Not the bicycle grandfathered--that's a different story--but the bicycle constructed today. It has a certain shape--penny farthings and choppers being unusual--an airfilled rubber tire, air brakes, a unisex (usually) diamond frame.

There has been innovation. Something has happened to the bicycle to refine it: each component has been initially invented and used and nowadays there is a general consensus on how to make an affordable general-use bicycle that is modern at least to the last 30 years. Even where poverty abounds and jury-rigging is rife, people tend to take what is best and use it. This bicycle is not old at all! The concept of 'a bicycle' may be over a hundred and fifty years old, but since then it has undergone near-continous innovation taking in advances/changes in design, materials, construction methods, methods of maintenance, social norms and changes in use-- all the things Edgerton wants to talk about.

A different kettle of fish: The modern diamond-frame bike.

For me, that is the history of technology and it is absolutely one of innovation. The main invention of technology is important but not nearly so important as the inventions that will improve it-- and they are inventions and I can't really get behind the idea that they aren't new.

I saw a thing once about a lighting technology used in some towns in the Philippines which consisted of a plastic bottle full of water wedged in a hole in the roof. You can try this at home! The water acts as a lens to 'capture' and redirect the light more effectively than a simply using a piece of plastic as a window.

Edgerton would love this as a piece of Old Technology. But is it old? It makes use of simple materials and a basic understanding of light (or even an observation of it), it's cheap and near-universally available. But it wasn't being done ten years ago and now it's being done. It's not advanced, certainly, but that's not necessarily what we're talking about.

The Shock of the Old has something to say, but it doesn't seem to have enough to say. We need to know: what is a distinct technology? When is a technology newly invented and when merely updated? If an old thing like a bicycle is made out of radically innovated parts and materials, is it still an old technology (I'm looking at you, Bugatti Veyron)? Is the Concorde a new thing entirely or just an updated plane? Shouldn't we be looking at technologies more closely (e.g. the tires of a bicycle rather than the bicycle as a whole) to make more sense out of the progress of technology? Are innovations in maintenance of old things innovations? What role does the niche of technology play in how it is eclipsed, or not? Without these questions being at least addressed-- at least asked-- the whole book boils down to the rather unshocking observation of: "not everyone uses the newest stuff".

Yes. And?

World's First Colour Moving Picture

1902!

What is fascinating about this is when they say that the projection system didn't work properly, so it was considered a failure. But the system works! The pictures were recorded! Incredible.

Nikola Tesla: The Greatest Geek

The Oatmeal's Drawing of The Greatest Geek

The internet loves Nikola Tesla. The Oatmeal recently promoted a successful bid to raise money to purchase a New York State building called Wardenclyffe from which Tesla was once going to wirelessly power our homes. With The Oatmeal's promotion, the fundraising project raised over $850,000 USD in around a week.

It's safe to say that the power of the internet has voted in favour of the reclusive electric genius Nikola Tesla. What is interesting about this is why; after all, when I was growing up it was Thomas Edison, Tesla's direct rival, who was the inventor of electrical things.

Well, The Oatmeal gives the biggest hint, saying,

Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived

and backs up this enormously grandiose claim with an impassioned comic explaining very clearly why.

But the important thing here is not that Tesla was a geek it's that geeks, along with bowties, are cool. Is there a suggestion that geeks make better scientists implicit in this statement? 

To me, Tesla seems to fulfill one type of scientist-hero stereotype: the lonely/introverted, maverick, somewhat or very eccentric scientist, screwed over by aspects of society, nevertheless goes on to work horrendous hours and develop ideas that ultimately prove to win everyone over-- but not at great personal cost. Tesla, dying alone and quite definitely crazy, fits this description perfectly.

The BBC four series Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity (presented by Jim Al-Khalili) uses Tesla's story to frame their second episode, the Age of Invention, noting that the drama of Tesla's life makes him interesting. His inventions have a wacky side which makes him a darling of fantasy: an electrical zap gun in the show Warehouse 13 is called a Tesla, and in Sanctuary Tesla was a part-vampire.

QMx's 'Tesla' Zap Gun from Warehouse 13

Edison, on the other hand, has no supernatural alter-egos and no zap guns. He's known popularly for electrocuting dogs to prove that Tesla's Alternating Current was dangerous, and for stealing his employees  inventions. He's popularly derided for being the chieftian of an incremental research group-type science.

But hang on, Edison may not have had the same electrifying (heh) sparks (heh) of genius that Tesla did, but the vast majority of scientists work the way that Edison did-- as part of a group where everyone has a clearly defined role and a clearly defined pay, and everyone contributes to developing a certain product, often a better version of something that already exists (ahem, Samsung vs. Apple). While alternating current won the day, much of what we run on alternating current got its start in Edison's company.

What I don't want to do is contest that Tesla's popularity, especially after a long period of being rather unsung, is not absolutely deserved. I certainly approve of giving him in a museum in the country which he loved and did the vast majority of his spectacular living and inventing.

That said, this conflict* interests me: we, in our geek-championing society, want to value the scientist as an individual creator and we applaud his or her individual contributions. However, the overwhelming amount of actual science, engineering and design that goes on is done by people who work in company models very much like the one Edison created where the individual inventor's contribution is--at best--indistinct.

*Or perhaps it's not a conflict at all, just an expression of the human like of a good story.

X-Ray Vision

In the sky, there are things that glow. In fact, they radiate. For a very long time, astronomers were limited to observations made the light visible to the human eye, which occupies only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Early X-Ray Astronomy: Something hot in the region of Scorpius.

With the prediction and discovery of radio waves in the mid 19th century, suddenly there was more than meets/is detected by the eye. X-Rays, discovered by Wilhelm Rontgen in 1895, were even more mysterious.

As the Earth's atmosphere blocks x-rays, looking for x-ray sources in the rest of the universe had to wait until the 50s and 60s, when rockets and satellites could go beyond the protective blanket. This BBC audio slideshow, in the news this morning briefly covers the 50 years since the start of x-ray astronomy.

Something in the Wikipedia article linked above caught my eye, although it's discussed on in the slideshow too.

Unlike visible light, which is a relatively stable view of the universe, the X-ray universe is unstable. It features stars being torn apart by black holes, galactic collisions and novas or neutron stars that build up layers of plasma that then explode into space.

The visible light universe-- the one we and astronomers from much of human history see when we go out in the back garden or peer through a telescope-- is a relatively calm place, almost the unchanging heavens of the pre-Galileo era. The x-ray universe is violent, dramatic, in constant turmoil. What a totally different picture we get of the same places when we change the instruments we are able to use to observe things around us.

V.