Randy Barnett has been substituting for Glenn Reynolds over at Glenn's MSNBC column, writing cogently on the second amendment (right to bear arms) to the U.S. Constitution.  Most recently, one of Barnett's readers, arguing weapons of mass destruction must lie outside individual protections of the U.S. Constitution (possibly a worthy topic that I shan't otherwise address), proclaimed:  “The framers never imagined such things [as weapons of mass destruction] in their wildest dreams.”

On the contrary, America's founding fathers dreamt of many things beyond the ken of latter-day dogmatics.  American founding saint (if I may so characterize him) Benjamin Franklin pointed the way, nay even unto weapons of mass destruction:  ¹

The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.  It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter….

If that's too vague a presentiment to be regarded by some as conclusive proof of 18th-century imagined WMDs, recall that Franklin's scientific reputation during the later 18th century was immense:  he was known as conqueror of lightning (for invention of the lightning rod) and tamer of troubled waters (for experiments on tempering storm wave action by introduction of an oil slick).  Moreover, it was a remarkable scientific age, and while in France the first flights in the history of mankind took place, one ascent of which Franklin personally witnessed and wrote about: ²

The morning was foggy, but about one o'clock the air became tolerably clear, to the great satisfaction of the spectators, who were infinite; notice having been given of the intended experiment several days before in the papers, so that all Paris was out, either about the Tuileries, on the quays and bridges, in the fields, the streets, at the windows, or on the tops of houses, besides the inhabitants of all the towns and villages of the environs.  Never before was a philosophical experiment so magnificently attended….  Between one and two o'clock all eyes were gratified with seeing it rise majestically from among the trees and ascend gradually above the buildings, a most beautiful spectacle.  When it was about two hundred feet high, the brave adventurers held out and waved a little white pennant, on both sides their car, to salute the spectators, who returned loud claps of applause.  The wind was very little, so that the object, though moving to the northward, continued long in view….  I had a pocket-glass with which I followed it till I lost sight first of the men, then of the car, and when I last saw the balloon it appeared no bigger than a walnut.

These were the Moon shots of the age.

Franklin went on to presciently deliberate the impact of aircraft in war: ³

[Invention of aircraft might] possibly give a new turn to human affairs.  Convincing sovereigns of the folly of wars may perhaps be one effect of it; since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions.  Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?

Franklin even brought up plate tectonics (continental drift); remember, this is the 18th century! ⁴

Such changes in the superficial parts of the globe seemed to me unlikely to happen if the earth were solid to the centre.  I therefore imagined that the internal parts might be a fluid more dense, and of a greater specific gravity, than any of the solids we are acquainted with; which therefore might swim in or upon that fluid.  Thus the surface of the globe would be a shell, capable of being broken and disordered by the violent movements of the fluid on which it rested.

Franklin, in fact, was regarded by many of the British as nearly superhuman in his cunning and scientific acumen, and a mortal danger to Britain's Empire (a perception which history ajudges correct), where he positioned himself, in the midst of their enemies, in France.  Of British fears, here's what Horace Walpole had to say, writing in 1778 (a little tongue in cheek no doubt), about Franklin's perceived threat to Britain (in a story which surely made its way back to him): ⁵

The natural philosophers in power believe that Dr. Franklin has invented a machine of the size of a toothpick case and materials that would reduce St. Paul's to a handful of ashes.

Imagine what such a device would have done to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Thank God Franklin was on our side!

(I daydream of an alternate “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in which at the end of the Revolutionary War a matchbox-sized box is wheeled into a warehouse full of secret weapons of unimagined horror….)
 

¹ Benjamin Franklin, letter to Priestley, February 8, 1780; quoted in Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, Viking Penguin, 1991, p. 658.

² Benjamin Franklin, letter to Sir Joseph Banks, December 1, 1783; quoted in ibid., pp. 701-702.
³ Benjamin Franklin, December 6, 1783; quoted in ibid., pp. 702.
⁴ Benjamin Franklin, letter to Abbe Soulavie, September 22, 1782; quoted in ibid., pp. 660.
⁵ Horace Walpole, February 27, 1778; quoted in ibid., p. 660.

A participant in an Alternate History mailing list asks the question:

Perhaps by this [medieval] time the Muslims would also be struck with the idea of sailing westward across the Atlantic.  From a religious point of view this could mean more land to make converts in.

Muslims during the mid-Middle Ages were as acquainted with ancient Greek philosophers as the Europeans were later to become.  Aristotle pointed the way west, for any willing to hear it, at the end of his proof of the sphericity of the Earth (still as valid today as when written in the 4th century BC).  It's worthwhile reviewing Aristotle's words, which incidently demolish the prevalent myth nowadays that cultivated ancients believed the world was flat.  After mentioning several logical arguments for the Earth's sphericity (which have not held up over time), Aristotle wrote: ¹

The evidence of the senses further corroborates this.  How else would eclipses of the moon show segments shaped as we see them?  As it is, the shapes which the moon itself each month shows are of every kind — straight, gibbous, and concave — but in eclipses the outline is always curved: and, since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth's surface, which is therefore spherical.  Again, our observations of the stars make it evident, not only that the earth is circular, but that it is a circle of no great size.  For quite a small change of position to south or north causes a manifest alteration of the horizon.  There is much change, I mean, in the stars which are overhead, and the stars seen are different, as one moves northward or southward.  Indeed there are some stars seen in Egypt and in the neighborhood of Cyprus which are not seen in the northerly regions; and stars, which in the north are never beyond range of observation, in those regions rise and set.

All of which goes to show not only that the earth is circular in shape, but also that it is a sphere of no great size: for otherwise the effect of so slight a change of place would not be so quickly apparent.  Hence one should not be too sure of the incredibility of the view of those who conceive that there is continuity between the parts about the pillars of Hercules and the parts about India, and that in this way the ocean is one.

Beyond that initial beckoning of the way, I've run into a couple of references to actual expeditions west across the Atlantic prior to Columbus (and I don't mean the Vikings!), originating from Iberian or Mediterranean ports.  One such mention is Samuel Eliot Morison's The European Discovery of America, where in discussing the lead-up to Columbus's voyage Morison wrote: ²

When [Columbus] had learned enough Latin to read ancient and medieval cosmographers, he ascertained that Aristotle was reported to have written that you could cross the Ocean from Spain to the Indies paucis diebus, in comparatively few days; and Strabo recorded that certain Greeks or Romans had even tried it but returned empty-handed “through want of resolution and scarcity of provisions.”

The second mention of earlier voyages I've seen is Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way, in which Ferris wrote: ³

Columbus's plan appeared foolhardy to anyone who possessed a realistic sense of the dimensions of the earth.  To sail westward to Asia, as the geographers of the court at Castile took pains to inform Columbus, would require a voyage lasting approximately three years, by which time he and his men would surely be dead from starvation or scurvy.  The voyage had been attempted twice before, by Moorish explorers out of Lisbon and by the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa in the thirteenth century; none had been heard from since.

I'm trying to gather more information about any pre-Columbian expeditions west.  If anyone has additional information, or is aware of a halfway serious study concerning them, please let me know!
 

References

¹ Aristotle, "On the Heavens," Book II, Chapter 14, The Works of Aristotle, Oxford University Press; pp. 297-298.

² Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages AD 1492-1616, Oxford University Press, New York, 1974; p. 17.

³ Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Anchor Books/Doubleday, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, 1988; p. 56.
 

There will come a time in the later years when Ocean shall loosen the bonds by which we have been confined, when an immense land shall be revealed... and Thule will no longer be the most remote of countries.

Seneca

Everyone using Blogger is going through pains as the transition to “New Blogger” proceeds, replacing Blogger's old problems (which one could usually work around) with an entirely new set.  As I put it recently in an e-mail to Donald Sensing:

I'm not that happy with New Blogger, personally, so far.  The old Blogger never ate my archives (of which I have a local copy anyway), and I was always able to work around its problems.  The New Blogger issue of apparently only allowing a maximum of a couple of screen-fulls of text in each posting is potentially a killer for me though; hopefully they'll fix it soon.

Sensing has since run into another problem with New Blogger, whereby “Blogger eats posts.”  Bill Hobbs replied to Donald's concerns in One Hand Clapping's Comments section with the following words of advice:

The new improved blogger sometimes isn't.  I always highlight and copy my text before I hit the post button, just in case.

And for longer stuff, I build it in MS Word, or I enter a bit and post then add some and post... and add some and post... and think about moving to Movable Tybe... and add some and post...

Bill's advice is so sensible, in fact, that I thought I'd add a more extended commentary to flesh it out a little.  Sensing, of course, is far from a newbie (and has since noted that the lost posting was only a few lines long, and he normally does use an off-Blogger editor so postings can be separately saved).  However, the issues are common, and experience gained through hard knocks is usually painful.  I believe Bill's advisory applies well beyond just the world of Blogger, or blogging, into how to act effectively in a “noisy” (read: real world) environment.  Following is my commentary from One Hand Clapping:

I'd like to emphasize what Bill Hobbs said above.  It's a cliche that newbies (I don't mean you Donald!) fail to save while writing an entire document, or don't backup their hard drive, and then weep tears of frustration when the system or hard disk crashes.  We all know (from bitter experience) that's STOOPID — you have to save and backup your work.  Why do folks think one can do otherwise with blogs, or that the server can be trusted to save it perfectly (even if New Blogger is successful)?

I second Bill on using MS Word while writing a posting.  Word is convenient for building postings because (in addition to locally saving the document) Word's outline mode is handy while writing it, and macros are available to manipulate it line by line (or whatever), which has been useful for me from time to time.

After typing a posting into Word, it takes only a handful keystrokes to save and post it — Ctrl-S to save it; Ctrl-Home, Shift-Ctrl-End to highlight the whole thing, Ctrl-C it into the clipboard, Alt-Tab over to Blogger (or whatever the interface), and Ctrl-V to paste it in.

Bill's other point — on sometimes making only a few trivial little changes, saving, posting, looking at the results, repeat — is also very important.  The iterative procedure may not be needed if you're just building a text posting, but if one is doing anything fancy with HTML, or making more than a small change to your template, say, it's all too easy to break things drastically so that, sometimes, nothing shows up.  If you've made numerous changes (and discarded the previous version of the document or template to boot), the task of identifying and undoing the error can be extremely frustrating and unpleasant.

The elementary solution is to hold onto the previous version and make only a few alterations before trying out the new one.  If things go haywire, reintroduce the changes one by one until it fails, then you know where it's going wrong and what needs to be fixed.  Or, you can simply revert back to the earlier version and forget it!

Charles Austin replied on the thread, noting “One must be careful about the use of fonts in MS Word when cutting and pasting into Blogger.  Not all characters in all fonts are recognized.”  Charles' point is well taken, and my advice would be to disable some Word features, under “AutoFormat as you type” (pull down “Tools,” then select “AutoCorrect”), such as “smart quotes” and symbol characters.

Labels: Fourth of July

(Damn this New Blogger limitation on posting size!)

It's true that Marie Curie devoted great energies in the pursuit of X-ray technology during World War I — a deadly vocation until proper appreciation for the dangers developed much later.  To illustrate this fact along with her later life, I'll quote from Encyclopædia Britannica's description: ¹

The sudden death of Pierre Curie (April 19, 1906) was a bitter blow to Marie Curie, but it was also a decisive turning point in her career: henceforth she was to devote all her energy to completing alone the scientific work that they had undertaken.  On May 13, 1906, she was appointed to the professorship that had been left vacant on her husband's death; she was the first woman to teach in the Sorbonne.  In 1908 she became titular professor, and in 1910 her fundamental treatise on radioactivity was published.  In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, for the isolation of pure radium.  In 1914 she saw the completion of the building of the laboratories of the Radium Institute (Institut du Radium) at the University of Paris.

Throughout World War I, Marie Curie, with the help of her daughter Irène, devoted herself to the development of the use of X-radiography.  In 1918 the Radium Institute, the staff of which Irène had joined, began to operate in earnest, and it was to become a universal centre for nuclear physics and chemistry.  Marie Curie, now at the highest point of her fame, and, from 1922, a member of the Academy of Medicine, devoted her researches to the study of the chemistry of radioactive substances and the medical applications of these substances.

In 1921, accompanied by her two daughters, Marie Curie made a triumphant journey to the United States, where President Warren G. Harding presented her with a gram of radium bought as the result of a collection among American women.  She gave lectures, especially in Belgium, Brazil, Spain, and Czechoslovakia.  She was made a member of the International Commission on Intellectual Co-operation by the Council of the League of Nations.  In addition, she had the satisfaction of seeing the Curie Foundation in Paris develop and the inauguration in 1932 in Warsaw of the Radium Institute, of which her sister Bronia became director.

One of Marie Curie's outstanding achievements was to have understood the need to accumulate intense radioactive sources, not only for the treatment of illness but also to maintain an abundant supply for research in nuclear physics; the resultant stockpile was an unrivaled instrument until the appearance after 1930 of particle accelerators.  The existence in Paris at the Radium Institute of a stock of 1.5 grams of radium in which, over a period of several years, radium D and polonium had accumulated, made a decisive contribution to the success of the experiments undertaken in the years around 1930 and in particular of those performed by Irène Curie in conjunction with Frédéric Joliot, whom she had married in 1926 (see Joliot-Curie, Frédéric and Irène).  This work prepared the way for the discovery of the neutron by Sir James Chadwick and above all the discovery in 1934 by Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie of artificial radioactivity.  A few months after this discovery Marie Curie died as a result of leukemia caused by the action of radiation.

(As we see below, this last means the action of X-radiation, not action of ionizing radiation as a result of ingestion of Radium.)

¹ Encyclopædia Britannica, “Curie, Marie,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1997 CD Edition.

Labels: Marie Curie, physics science, radium, x-rays

Marie Curie, famed to the world as “Madame Curie,” but who began life as Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, in what was then the Russian Empire — winner of Nobel Prizes in two highly technical fields (Physics, 1903, which she shared, and Chemistry, 1911, which she did not), a feat almost unheard of for anyone, male or female — passed away 69 years ago this July fourth.

Madame Curie's fame was great earlier in the twentieth century, and she has stood as a towering example for generations of aspiring young scientists female and male.  Since then her reputation has become somewhat clouded, for no fault of her own I'd say, partly due to public fears and paranoia about anything “nuclear” (Marie coined the term “radioactivity”), and partly since she was popularly (and even scientifically) supposed to have died (though at the not inconsiderable age, particularly for those times, of 66) as a result of extensive exposure to radium during her great work separating out the element from uranium ore.

Why either of these factors should taint her reputation — even given the public's phobia about radio-anything — is hard to understand, but the first as a reason for trivializing the reputation of a scientific giant is ridiculous and risible, I'd say (Marie Curie deserves better than having a cloud placed over her head by public ignorance and prejudice), and now the latter should finally be put to rest as well, as yet another in the large class of urban legends (though perhaps not known to be such until recently).

In 1995 Madame Curie's body was exhumed as part of granting her France's highest honor (first time for a woman, for her own achievements), burial in the French national mausoleum, the Panthéon.  To forestall the possible escape of radioactivity from her body during the process of reburial, France's Office de Protection contre les Rayonnements Ionisants (ORPI) took charge of the investigation.  An article in the scientific journal Nature describes ORPI's findings thusly: ¹

Curie's body was found to be enclosed in a wooden coffin, surrounded by a lead coffin, which itself was inside a further wooden coffin.  ORPI found that the level of radiation caused by radium within the interior coffin was, at 360 becquerels per cubic metre, significantly higher than the 13 Bq m⁻³ found at the entrance to the cemetery.

But the level was still well below the maximum accepted safe levels of public exposure to radium of 7,000 Bq m⁻³.  Given that the half-life of radium is 1,620 years, ORPI has concluded that Curie could not have been exposed to lethal levels of radium while she was alive.

Although Curie's laboratory was highly contaminated with radium, an ORPI official points out that radium poses risks only if it is ingested either orally or through the skin.

ORPI therefore speculates that Curie's illness was more likely to have been due to her use of radiography during the First World War, when precautions to protect against X-rays had not yet been introduced.

Sounds pretty conclusive to me.  However one feels about France at present, whatever jokes might fly in that direction, no one can deny that France knows its nuclear power and ionizing radiation — about 80% of the electrical power needs of France (an advanced industrial nation) are supplied from nuclear sources.  If their ORPI says Curie could not have been exposed to lethal levels of radium while she was alive, I'm tempted to say Q.E.D.  Let's put paid to this urban myth.  And sleep well, Maria Sklodowska Curie.

¹ Nature, Vol. 377, No. 6545 (14 September 1995), “X-rays, not radium, may have killed Curie,” p. 96 (article not available online).

Labels: Marie Curie, physics science, radium, x-rays

When considering issues of space travel and exobiology (life originating beyond the earth), the question often arises of the dangers of infection of alien biologies by earth organisms or earth biologies by alien organisms, should they come into contact.  The issue here is not ecological contamination (on which I'm silent for the moment), but the internal infection of living beings by other “disease-causing” organisms.  In my considered view, the danger of infectious agents “jumping” into creatures of fundamentally different evolutionary origin (whether going in either direction) has been considerably overrated.

Most diseases that we see here on Earth are closely attuned to the life cycle and other intimate aspects of the specific organism they infect.  Pathogens which can transmit much beyond a single species across a broader related group (e.g., rabies) are few; while diseases more typically almost have to be coaxed into jumping from one species into even a closely related one.  The reason is clear: creatures' cells and their immune systems fight like hell against being taken over, and the alien environments of non-adapted-to species (much less the really alien environments of a never seen before, wholly different evolution) are just too difficult for even opportunistic agents to endure, much less triumph.  The probability an Earth organism could infect a creature from a totally different evolutionary origin is thus remote (i.e., the Martians should have won ”The War of the Worlds”).  The converse (alien diseases infecting earthlings) is also quite unlikely — except, that is, in the case of an intelligently designed disease-causing agent (a la Harry Harrison's A Plague from Space), using technology basically beyond what we have even today, but which might well then be unstoppable.

After hearing me say that (on a mailing list discussing alternative futures and pasts of Harry Turtledove's books), a correspondent wrote back:

But I've heard speculation about mankind facing possibility of infection while exploring space; and the first astronauts endured severe quarantine procedures.

Yes (I replied), people worry about it, and I'm not going to say that precautions aren't in order (just as we might want to take precautions against asteroidal impacts), but the overall probability of running into trouble as a result of (naturally evolved) alien diseases appears quite low.  (Fortunately, as the first astronauts' quarantine procedures weren't really all that good.)

Labels: disease, extraterrestrial life