Mysteries. The Frontiers of Science (and Beyond).
(2002-10-02)
What's the magnetic field of the Earth? What's its origin?
How does it change over time? Why?
Einstein once remarked that the origin of the Earth's magnetic field was
one of the greatest mysteries of physics.
The magnetic field of the Earth is not quite dipolar, but the dipolar component
is dominant.
The so-called magnetic poles of the Earth are the intersections of the dipolar line
[the axis of symmetry of the field's dipolar component] with the surface of the Earth.
Curiously, the poles of magnets
(including compass needles) have been named according to
which magnetic pole of the Earth they would point to.
This implies that the North Magnetic Pole of the Earth has the same polarity
as the south pole of a regular magnet.
There cannot be any ferromagnetism deep inside the Earth because
it's too hot there:
Iron loses its usual magnetic properties at the
Curie Temperature of 1043 K
(about 770°C or 1418°F).
Instead, the magnetic field of the Earth may be due to some kind
of dynamo effect
(there's no significant magnetic field around Venus
which seems to rotate too slowly to produce a similar effect).
References:
-
Fatal Attraction
-
Ronald T. Merrill, Michael W. McElhinny, Phillip L. McFadden
"The Magnetic Field of the Earth" Academic Press,
San Diego, CA © 1983, 1996, 1998. ISBN 0-12-491246-X.
(2002-11-11)
How do new life structures appear?
The basic mechanisms of the evolution of species are now well understood.
Normally, the so-called gene pool of a given species is larger than
the number of genes of a given member of the species.
If one gene gives a particular advantage to the survival of its bearer,
it will tend to be more frequent among individuals that have survived long
enough to reproduce. The frequency of such a gene will therefore increase from
one generation to the next until most members of a species carry it.
This is the idea of
natural selection first advocated
by Charles Darwin
(1809-1882),
whereas the broader idea of the evolution of species is a much older concept
(known to the ancient Greeks).
If a sudden change in the environment makes a gene essential to individual survival,
it may even be the case that all members of a new generation will end up
carrying the life-saving gene.
This is what happens among insects when a new insecticide is massively introduced:
The so-called susceptible insects are eradicated but there may be a few
resistant individuals whose descendants will multiply at an increased rate
to fill the space vacated by a much higher mortality rate among the rest of the species.
The richness of the gene pool is thus essential for species to respond to new threats.
This richness is depleted when a gene is "used" in response to an actual attack
(as the "better" gene completely replaces alternate choices) but the gene pool
is also replenished by random mutations, which occur at a very slow rate
due to rare errors in genetic duplications
(which may be induced by cosmic rays, or other violent causes at the molecular level).
Even in the absence of drastic environmental changes, the above evolutionary mechanism
allows species to become better adapted and/or more competitive with other species
in the same niche.
Some species keep winning the survival race for millions of years, others become extinct
much faster.
Quite a few drastic "inventions" have occurred in the evolution
of life on this planet of ours.
Some of these are so radical that it may be hard to rule out the existence
of something more potent than the above evolutionary process.
For now, however, we may have no other solution but to
believe (rightly or wrongly) that, given enough time, unlikely events do occur
and may help generate previously unknown innovations.
First among these mysterious innovations is the appearance of life itself from a
prebiotic environment.
We discuss this in the next article;
a few other deep life mysteries are listed below:
Proteins Synthesis
Nucleus
Sex
Symbiosis and Endosymbiosis
Lichens are, in fact, the mutually beneficial association of two organisms a
fungus (called mycobiont) and a cyanobacteria
(called photobiont).
The fungus provides minerals, moisture and protection from overexposure to sunlight,
whereas the photobiont is able to photosynthesize organic food from the
carbon dioxide in the air, even when no other food supply is available.
This type of association is known as a symbiosis;
it allows at least one of the constituents to live under conditions where it could
not survive by itself.
Not all types of symbioses are mutually beneficial, but most of them are.
Note that a lichen's photobiont is often described as an alga
in most introductory presentations,
which are clearly unduly influenced by the fact that
cyanobacteria are still called
"blue-green algae" in spite of the fact that these
photosynthetic prokaryotes are not algae at all...
There is an even closer form of symbiosis,
called endosymbiosis, which is exemplified by all higher
life forms, including you and me.
Each of our own cells harbors a number of mitochondria, which are
(like blue-green algae) an elementary form of bacteria lacking a nucleus.
Human cells could not function without them,
and human mitochondria only reproduce within a human cell...
However, mitochondria have their own genetic material (a single chromosome
containing a circular strand of DNA) and their replication is independent from the
replication of the rest of the human cell which harbors them
When a human cells divides, after replicating its nucleus, about half of the mitochondria
in it will go into each new cell and they will reproduce there, as needed.
As human tissue grows, the mitochondrial population within its cells grows as well.
When a human egg is fertilized by sperm, it so happens that
the male mitochondria remain in the sperm's tail, which never enters the egg.
Therefore, all mitochondria in a human embryo will be the same as
the mitochondria present in the cells of the mother.
Mitochondrial DNA (often abbreviated mtDNA)
is thus inherited from mother to daughter in an asexual way.
As the evolution of mtDNA is only subject to slow mutations over time,
it has been shown that all human maternal lineages have died out, except one...
Therefore, all humans are descendants of a single woman
(called the "mitochondrial Eve") who lived about 200 000 years ago.
She probably lived in Africa, because the mtDNA of African populations shows
more variation than what is observed on other continents:
This suggests that the descendants of "Eve" lived exclusively in Africa for a long
period of time before migrating to other regions.
This is the basis of what's now known as the "Out of Africa" theory.
Neanderthals became extinct (and/or were exterminated by our Cro-Magnon ancestors)
about 30 000 years ago.
Mitochondrial DNA from their bones showed that their species was clearly separate from
our own. They are not our ancestors,
contrary to what was previously thought, and we did not interbreed.
(2002-10-06) Origin of Life (Abiogenesis, Autogenesis)
When did life appear on Earth? How?
The Solar system itself is believed to have condensed in a rather short time
[a few million years] out of interstellar gas and debris from nearby explosions
of an earlier generation of stars,
in which heavier atomic nuclei where synthesized
(including some radioactive ones which have been slowly decaying ever since).
The age of the nucleosynthesis of the stuff which made the Solar system
can be precisely estimated from the current isotopic abundance of some
key radioactive elements found on Earth and in extraterrestrial rocks.
Such methods indicate consistently that the Earth (and the other
solid bodies of the Solar system)
formed about 4.55 billion (4550 000 000) years ago, give or take
50 million years or so.
The main fossil record goes back only to the so-called
Cambrian explosion, about 600 million years ago,
which marks a date when there was a burst of new life diversification,
from an earlier epoch of bacterial life.
In fact, huge bacterial colonies have produced layered rocks
(stromatolites)
which have been found to be as much as
3.5 billion (3500 000 000) years old, in western Australia.
There are also preserved imprints of ancient bacteria in solidified mud
(called microfossils) which have been found in rocks of about the same age.
This earliest fossil record
indicates a degree of diversification which implies
that bacterial life had already been evolving for quite a while.
This is confirmed by some
older
carbon deposits (dated to be about 3.85 billion years old)
which show an enrichment in carbon-12,
normally attributed to the presence of life forms.
On the other hand,
it's unlikely that life could have appeared in the first 500 million years of
the Solar system: The young Earth was still too hot and was constantly bombarded
by large asteroids (at a rate probably sufficient to sterilize its entire surface).
Therefore, life on Earth appeared 3.9 billion years ago,
give or take 100 million years or so...
The early atmosphere of our planet had virtually no free oxygen in it.
Surprisingly enough, to the first life forms which evolved in that environment,
oxygen was then a poisonous gas.
(It has been established that sulfur, not oxygen, was the key oxidizing element
2.45
billion years ago.)
This changed only at the halfway mark, about 1.8 billion years ago,
when massive quantities of free oxygen finally appeared in the atmosphere,
because of the ubiquitous presence of
cyanobacteria
(which are also known as "blue-green algae",
although there are not algae at all).
The proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere went from much less than 1%
to the current level of 21% or so (by volume).
Earlier life forms had to evolve into revolutionary organisms adapted to this new
oxygen atmosphere.
The appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere also allowed the formation of the
so-called "ozone layer".
(This is, in fact, not a "layer" at all.
The term comes from the fact that the presence of ozone throughout the upper
atmosphere is traditionally measured in terms of what the thickness of
an equivalent layer of pure ozone would be at sea-level.)
This important UV shield made it safe for life to move to shallow waters and,
eventually, establish itself on dry land.
Before all this happened, the Earth was exclusively populated with
anaerobic
bacteria, called archaea
(the term archaeobacteria is being deprecated).
A few of these survive to this day in oxygen-free environments,
but they are so different from other living things that they form one of
only three "domains" underlying our
current classification of life
("domains" are more fundamental than "kingdoms").
Viruses are simple infectious agents consisting of genetic material (RNA or DNA)
surrounded by a capsid (a protective coat of protein).
A virus is not usually considered a life form
since it cannot normally reproduce outside of the living cell it infects.
However, there does not seem to be universal agreement on this definition and viruses are
sometimes considered "alive".
So are even simpler structures capable of self-replication using the same
basic mechanisms as ordinary living organisms.
One of the simplest such things consists of a strand of RNA containing only
220 nucleotides and known as
Spiegelman's Monster.
It was first obtained by the American microbiologist Sol Spiegelman,
at the University of Illinois,
by putting one of the simplest known viral forms
(RNA with about 4500 nucleotides)
in an environment containing free nucleotides and replicase.
Under such conditions, smaller mutants tend to replicate faster and will crowd
every other viral life out of existence, until a better and smaller mutant appears.
This selective process repeats until the appearance of some minimal self-replicating
RNA strand, like Spiegelman's monster, whose mutants are either too
large to compete or too small to even "recognize" the replicase
(which makes them effectively "sterile", so to speak)...
In 1974, the German biologist Manfred Eigen (originator of the
so-called Quasispecies
Model) and his coworkers
ran a similar experiment, but they did not introduce
a single strand of RNA into the proper uncontaminated broth.
Surprisingly enough, RNA strands appeared spontaneously which were almost as large
as Spiegelman's monster (about 120 nucleotides, on average).
So, it seems that something almost alive will necessarily appear, provided the
proper building blocks are put together in a relatively crude way...
In 1953, the celebrated
Miller/Urey
experiment proved conclusively that the most basic constituents of life
(the 20 amino-acids) could indeed form spontaneously rather easily,
in the presence of lightning, under the very anaerobic
conditions prevalent at the surface of the young Earth.
Although this is very far from a final solution to the puzzle,
this constitutes a pretty strong hint that, given enough time,
some kind of broth could form naturally with all the constituents that would make
the appearance of rudimentary replicating "things" more or less unavoidable.
On the other hand,
the fact that the simplest "life forms" have such an apparent reproductive advantage
makes one wonder why the evolution of life did not stop as soon
as some random assembly of nucleotides became large enough to self-replicate.
Part of the answer is that there is more to life than replication:
The physicist Freeman Dyson has argued that the smallest self-sustaining
metabolic systems must contain at least 10000 nucleotides of at
least 10 different types.
This is clearly much larger than the smallest self-replicating viral "parasites"
manufactured by either Spiegelman or Eigen...
Also, the favorable conditions under which such a purely reproductive advantage
exists would not be expected to last long in a natural environment.
In a soup populated with doomed little monsters,
there must have been some solution to the riddle, possibly in the form
of a larger and more resistant mutant which was allowed to win
the reproductive battle only because a slightly harsher environment
did not allow anything else to multiply.
Life may thus have appeared only because of some catastrophic event which
killed something that was not even alive yet.
This primordial "catastrophe"
may well have been of a strange and delicate nature, though.
Could it be that a very slight change in the temperature or acidity of a warm pond
brought into survival a primordial life form whose descendants are still kicking,
writing and reading? Maybe...
References
(2002-11-02)
Is there any extraterrestrial life? Any extraterrestrial intelligence?
Anybody who could communicate with us?
Anybody who will? Anybody who has?
There is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on
other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
If we believe some arguments presented in the above article,
life will necessarily appear under conditions that are not too different
from those prevalent on the surface of the young Earth,
and we must definitely give a positive answer to the first part of the question.
That's because such conditions are not so special as to prevent
a repeat occurrence in each and everyone of the many planets in orbit around one of about
100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars
in the observable Universe, or even one of "only" 400 000 000 000 stars
in our own Milky Way.
It all boils down to statistics.
A quantitative estimate was attempted in 1961 by
Frank
Drake (b. 1930)
in the form of a formula giving the probability of existence of an advanced civilization
in some random star system.
It's the product of the following factors, for which our best guessses
(mostly following Carl Sagan's estimates) are indicated in square brackets:
- [0.3] The probability that a star has a planetary system.
- [2.0] The avg. number of bodies suitable for life in such a given system.
- [0.3] The probability that life arises in a suitable environment.
- [0.1] The probability that rudimentary life evolves into intelligent beings.
- [0.1] The probability that intelligent beings will form a technical civilization.
- [0.0000001] The ratio of such a civilization's lifetime to the life of the star.
All these numbers are highly speculative of course,
but none is as critical as the last one,
which says essentially that a technical civilization (like the one we are in the
process of building) could not possibly last much more than 1000 years before
it self-destructs, with little or no hope of renewal before the host star dies.
This time frame could be a gross underestimate,
but it could also be quite optimistic (think about it)...
Well, if we put any trust at all in the above speculations, the probability that
a random star currently harbors a technical civilization could be somewhere around
1 in 5000 000 000.
This would translate into no more than about 80 star systems
harboring a technical civilization right now, in the entire Milky Way galaxy.
None of these would be expected to be anywhere within reasonable range [a few hundred
light years, say] even if we have been very pessimistic with that critical last number.
On the other hand, if the above is somewhat optimistic,
we could even be the only "advanced" civilization in this galaxy of ours.
(We may as well discard the billions of advanced civilizations which are surely in other
galaxies, because any form of contact is ruled out over intergalactical distances.)
However, there is one other interesting possibility discussed at length by the late
Carl Sagan and others, which says that a sufficiently advanced civilization
could have wise [green?] men in its midst who would forecast impending doom and
[maybe] have the talent to convince their comrades to work unselfishly for the survival
of their species and their culture. Their advanced technology would be used
to send colons to nearby suitable star systems as soon as they achieve the possibility
of interstellar spaceflight.
If that's the case, it could take the colons only a few centuries to multiply
on a new planet and build the resources to embark a few of their own
on another successful star-hop, preciously keeping the knowledge to do so
and expanding on it between hops.
Work out the math:
If this idea is sound, it must have occurred to a few of the many
advanced civilizations that have been around in the past few millions years
(surely, we're not the first to achieve our current state,
and think about what we'll be able to do in just one more century).
Some of them must have been spawning rapidly for millions of years
and hundreds or thousands of successive generations of colons.
They should be everywhere by now.
So much so that colons from many different lineages should be scouting suitable
worlds like our own very regularly.
The Earth should have been colonized by a technically advanced civilization
at a time when the dinosaurs where still around. Maybe even earlier.
This did not happen. Why?
Like Carl Sagan, you may enjoy speculating about the many possible reasons which
could make this scenario unlikely. Don't let me spoil your fun.
One of many explanations, however, is that some of the above guesses for
the parameters of Drake's Formula are grossly overestimated.
For example, George Wetherhill ran
computer simulations in 1992 which seem to indicate that a dominant outer planet
the size of Jupiter reduces by a factor of at least 1000 the probability that
major bolides would hit inner planets capable of harboring life.
If major extinctions had occurred on Earth
every 26 000 years instead of every 26 million years
(as the fossil record discussed next indicates)
we would not be here to discuss anything...
So, a huge outer planet like Jupiter might well be absolutely necessary.
Also, a potential life-supporting planet may well need substantial tides
to enrich its coastline chemistry in order to allow the emergence of life.
A satellite like the Moon may thus be needed too...
As a result of these and other factors, it could very well be that
it's only a rare galaxy that has
ever harbored a civilization capable of interstellar travel.
Our Milky Way doesn't appear to be among those yet, and it may never be unless
we get our own act together...
(2002-12-01) Nemesis: The Sun's lethal companion?
Is there a periodic pattern to mass extinctions of species on Earth?
Could a distant companion of the Sun ["Nemesis"] explain this?
Around 1983, the two paleontologists David Raup and J.John ["Jack"] Sepkoski
put together what was then the largest collection of data ever assembled
about the extinctions of families of marine life.
Summarizing their work with a graph similar to the one at right,
they observed that the peaks in the rates of extinctions tend to occur with a period
of 26 million years or so (corresponding to the arrows shown in the graph).
In fact, a set of arrows spaced about 26 millions years apart would fail to point to an
extinction peak in only two cases.
This is quite puzzling, because at least two of the last three mass extinctions
are firmly linked to the impact of a large asteroid crashing into the Earth.
In particular, Luis W. Alvarez
(1911-1988; Nobel 1968),
Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro and Helen Michel
showed beyond a reasonnable doubt, in 1979, that the extinction which
wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous ( 65 milion years ago)
was due to the impact of a large asteroid [dubbed Chicxulub
or Chixalub ] in the Yucátan peninsula.
A priori, major asteroid impacts would be expected to be random events,
not subject to any kind of periodicity.
Most of the asteroids that could impact the Earth or other planets have already
done so, when the Solar System was young.
Major impacts in the mature Solar System are rather rare.
However, it is conceivable that the sufficiently close approach of a large enough body
[a star or a brown dwarf] could upset the delicate balance of solar
orbits and send some asteroids into new random orbits, not yet "time-tested"
for staying clear of the Earth's path.
This could significantly increase the probability of impacts for a few million years...
The observed periodicity of extinctions due to impacts could then be explained
if we assume that the "large body" is, in fact, a not-too-distant companion to
the Sun and that the two bodies are in a very elongated orbit around each other,
with a period of about 26 million years.
Also, our reservoir of comets (the so-called Oort cloud)
is very large and would undoubtedly be deeply affected by such a close approach,
sending a steady shower of comets through the normally peaceful inner solar system.
Rich Muller and others have dubbed
"Nemesis" this hypothetical
companion of the Sun, after the daughter of Night,
the Greek goddess of retributive justice and inescapable divine vengeance,
whose name is now commonly used to denote
a formidable foe and/or the source of impending doom.
Assuming the mass of Nemesis to be much smaller than the Sun's,
the "observed" period of 26 million years implies that Nemesis
would be at an average distance of about 1.4 light-years
(about 1/3 of the way to Proxima Centauri, the closest known star).
However, since the orbit must be a very elongated ellipse, the maximum distance
of Nemesis would be almost twice as large, and the current distance
would be close to that maximum, namely 2½ light-years or so.
If we take into account the mass M
of Nemesis (expressed in solar masses),
the above distances should be multiplied by the cube root of (1+M).
This amounts only to a 3% correction if Nemesis is 10 times less massive than the Sun,
whereas distances would be 26% larger if Nemesis and the Sun have the
same mass, in which [unlikely] case the maximum distance of Nemesis
would be about 3½ light-years.
Little else is known about this Death Star,
whose gravitational disturbances could increase periodically
the probability of major destructive impacts on Earth.
Conceivably, Nemesis could also drag its own cloud of asteroids and/or comets,
but they would not be as likely to impact the Earth as solar objects
with disturbed orbits:
An extrasolar body passing through the Solar System has only
one [minute] chance of hitting the Earth,
whereas a solar object could have many similar opportunities
(one per orbit, essentially)...
It has also been observed that the known extinction impacts
have left iridium-enriched clay boundaries in the geological record,
which have isotopic ratios matching those of the Earth's crust.
This is a very strong indication that the impacting bodies originated within
the Solar System.
However, this evidence alone would be inconclusive to rule out
asteroids from Nemesis, which may not be distinguishable at all
from their solar counterparts, since Nemesis and the Sun could
well have formed together about 4.5 billion years ago
(as a single binary system).
Although the gravitational pull of passerby stars would not allow
a very elongated orbit to remain stable for much more than a billion years or so,
the actual orbit of Nemesis
could very well have evolved from a rounder and more stable
orbit into a very elongated and relatively unstable one
(which could still last for another billion years,
before the Sun and Nemesis drift apart permanently).
The Search for Nemesis
As a brown dwarf more than 2 light-years away,
Nemesis could easily have escaped detection up until now.
Alternately, it could have been observed already but its close distance (high parallax)
would not have been recognized yet.
Astronomers call
"proper motion" the tiny angular speed which makes a nearby star move,
over a period of years, against the background of distant objects.
Unlike most close stars, Nemesis would have a low relative speed and,
therefore, low proper motion.
At first, it could be mistaken for a distant object.
If/when a potential Nemesis candidate is found at the correct distance,
its speed relative to the Sun should also be considered to establish the actual orbit.
For example, consider our closest known stellar neighbor,
Alpha Centauri, which would be a suprisingly good Nemesis candidate, if it was
not for its high speed relative to the Sun, which indicates that it's not
even gravitationally bound to it:
Alpha Centauri (also known as Rigil Kent)
is actually composed of 3 stars:
a-Centauri A
is 9% more massive than the Sun, and
it's tightly bound to a-Centauri B,
which is 10% less massive than the Sun. The third star,
Proxima,
is a red dwarf (only 15% of the Sun's mass),
which happens to be closer to us than any other known star.
Proxima is much younger than the other two and
it may
not be gravitationally bound to them.
For the sake of this argument, however, we'll assume that it is,
and we shall considerer the whole thing as a single body of about 2.14 solar masses
at a distance of about 4.40 light-years (according to the latest Hipparcos
data for the A and B components).
An object of 2.14 solar masses which reaches a maximum distance of 4.4 light-years in
a very elongated orbit would have an orbital period of about 29 million years,
which is surprisingly close to the extinction periodicity we're after (anything
between 26 and 35 million years would do).
However, Alpha Centauri cannot be Nemesis, because its relative
speed is not nearly low enough for an object in elliptical orbit at that distance,
as shown in the next paragraph.
The yearly
proper
motions involved are
3.7096" for the A star, 3.7241" for the B star, and
about 3.7086" for their center of mass
(we're ignoring Proxima in this computation).
At a distance of 4.4 light-years, this corresponds to a transverse speed of
about 23.7 km/s. In addition, the average blueshift of the light from
Alpha Centauri indicates that it approaches the Sun
at a radial speed of about 22 km/s, so its total speed, relative to the Sun, is
about 32 km/s. Way too fast!
If Alpha Centauri and the Sun were actually in any kind of
elliptical orbit around each other,
that speed should be less than 0.4 km/s (much less if they were near
maximum separation, in the hypothetical case of an elongated orbit)...
On 2005-06-04, Bill Yeung
wrote:
I accidentally read your writing about Nemesis online
while I was setting up my robotic telescope in New Mexico.
I have to admit, after researching this project for one year,
that your writing reflects very much what I have been thinking.
I am a Canadian amateur asteroid hunter who has discovered
more than 2000 asteroids
over the last few years.
I am in the process of designing a parallax survey to see whether Nemesis exists or not.
|
Another Tentative Explanation, Without a "Death Star":
At least one other mechanism exists which could disturb periodically
the outer fringes of the Solar System and increase the number of solar bolides
that hit the Earth:
The Sun goes full circle around the Galaxy in about 240 million years,
but it oscillates "up" and "down" through the
Galactic plane with a period of only 66 million years
(and an amplitude of 250 light-years on either side).
This means that the Sun traverses the Galactic plane every 33 million years or so.
Whatever drives this very oscillation [ordinary matter or exotic dark "stuff"]
could be more concentrated near the midway point (which we went through about 2 million
years ago) and may be causing severe gravitational disturbances in the outer Solar System
with a periodicity that's roughly consistent with mass extinctions...
One of several problems with this Galactic explanation concerns the phase
of the extinction "cycle":
We seem to be currently near a trough, not a peak...
References:
-
Nemesis Page
of Dr. Richard A. Muller
(of UC Berkeley
and LBL).
-
Online
article by Lynn Yarris (Spring 1987. LBL Research Review).
-
Online
article by Robert Roy Britt (2001-04-03. Space.com).
- "Cosmic Terrorist"
& "I Think I See It" by Richard Muller (1944-),
in "The World Treasury of Physics Astronomy and Mathematics"
Edited by Timothy Ferris. Back Bay Books (1991).
New York, NY. ISBN 0-316-28133-6. pp. 261-271.
- "The Solar System Has Two Suns", Chapter 6 of
"Nine Crazy Ideas in Science" (2001) by Robert Ehrlich (1938-)
Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-09495-0. pp. 102-121
(2002-10-02)
What are some of the latest challenges to established scientific dogma?
It is a healthy scientific practice to question established principles.
Revolutionary science may come from such challenges, but very few of them are ever
successful at dethroning accepted scientific wisdom.
The promising ideas listed below may still be destined to fail,
but some of them could be the seeds of new science, yet to come...
(2002-10-05) Gentle Debunking
What are some of the most popular unexplained things?
Some of the topics listed below have probably little or nothing to do with Science.
The media and/or the general public found them intriguing at one time
or another.
Impressive human artefacts whose instruction manuals
have been lost (or were never written) are bound to capture our collective imagination.
So are extraordinary natural phenomena...
Have some investigative fun but please don't take "results" too seriously...
Ancient Geodesy:
Aristotle knew that the Earth was spherical.
This much can be derived from proper
interpretations of basic astronomical observations
(the circular shadow of the Earth in a lunar eclipse,
the changing angles of celestial bodies observed from various geographical
locations, etc.).
The curvature of the ocean's surface is also obvious to any sailor who has ever watched
the coastline disappear under the horizon
(or to anyone on the beach who has ever
observed a departing sailboat disappear hull first).
Was some cryptic kind of latitude/longitude system used by some elite
of an ancient civilization?
Probably not, but we may dream:
The dimensionless constants of nature are the same in all consistent
systems of physical units.
In the final theory of physics (if there is such a thing),
the values of all of these are expected to be expressed purely mathematically.
There has been a plethora of guesses about what such expressions might be.
Invariably, such guesses have been invalidated by sufficiently precise new
experimental measurements.
This has not stopped people from making new guesses based on the latest measurements,
so we have many proposals for the following dimensionless physical constants
which are not yet invalid...
- Ratio of gravity to electrical force between electrons:
»
2.4´10-43.
- Sommerfeld's Fine Structure Constant:
a » 1 /
137.036.
- Weinberg's
weak mixing angle :
qw
» 28°.
[Defined here.]
- Equivalent of the "Fine Structure Constant" for the strong force:
as » 1.
- Various mass ratios: muon/electron »
207,
proton/electron »
1836 ...
- ... ...
More than 20
numbers from which the above can be derived.
Another
popular view
is that there could be many equally consistent
complete theories of physics in which selected values of dimensionless constants
could be plugged in.
Such theories would describe widely different universes for widely different
values of those parameters.
Only when the constants are finely tuned would the resulting universe permit
the development of intelligent beings like us who would be able to
wonder about a number of coincidences in the observed values.
Presumably, many "parallel" universes could "exist" in some sense,
but there would not be any observers in them...
This type of argument is based on what is now known as the
anthropic principle.
If the ultimate explanation for
our own Universe is purely anthropic, there can't be mathematical expressions
for all dimensionless constants of physics
(it would still be a blessing to discover mathematical relations between
some of them).
Ball Lightning
A very popular subject.
It's highly unlikely that any new physics is involved in this well-documented class of
not-so-rare phenomena.
There's a vast uncharted territory out there, populated by
many strange objects allowed by the most ordinary laws of physics...
Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC)
There's no such thing as a live person spontaneously catching fire.
You have to look elsewhere for a proof of the existence of the Devil.
There have been, however, a number of documented instances of incapacitated
(or dead) people who literally burned like candles when their clothing was set on fire
by some heat source or open flame.
The clothing acted as a wick and body fat was the fuel.
In a few such cases, there was little or no fire damage around the poor soul
and the legend was thus born of some weird phenomenon that would
"spontaneously" turn a human being into ashes and smoke.
Very few chemicals are known to ignite spontaneously.
One of them is a gas once known as "phosphuretted hydrogen"
(or phosphorated hydrogen)
which the young French scientist Philippe-Joachim Gengembre (1764-1838)
first obtained in 1783, by heating phosphorus with potassium hydroxide (KOH).
The gas obtained by Gengembre actually consists mostly of phosphine
(also called phosphane, PH3 )
which does not ignite spontaneously below 38°C,
but it also contains some diphosphine
(or diphosphane, P2H4 ) which does
and may lower the autoignition point of the mixture to room temperature.
This was explained in 1845 by the French chemist Paul Thénard (1819-1884)
who obtained nearly pure diphosphine from the hydrolysis of
calcium monophosphide
(itself made from tricalcium diphosphide by reaction in
an excess of white phosphorus):
2 CaP + 4 H2O
®
2 Ca(OH)2 + P2H4
In 1876, a patent for sea flares was awarded to a British telegraph engineer by the name of
Nathaniel John Homes, who realized diphosphine from the above reaction
could ignite acetylene gas produced by hydrolysis of calcium carbide:
A mixture of CaP and CaC2 produces a bright flame upon contact with water.
| CaC2 + 2 H2O |
® |
Ca(OH)2 + C2H2
+ 458 kJ |
| C2H2 +
5/2 O2 |
® |
2 CO2 + H2O
+ 1256 kJ |
Phosphine is clearly produced in the advanced putrefaction of cadavers,
and some diphosphine was found in fermentation experiments with human fecal bacteria.
Although we're not aware of any documented instance,
it's thus not entirely impossible for a decaying human cadaver to ignite spontaneously,
but this seems extremely far-fetched for a live person, or a recently deceased one.
Why some people enjoy trampling somebody else's crop is indeed a mystery.
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