Virginia Trimble: ‘Who first got it right’ is not necessarily important

In 1986, Caltech astrophysicist Virginia Trimble wrote a paper titled ‘Time Scales for Achieving Astronomical Consensus’ that explored the time-arc that major scientific observations took to be understood completely.

For 16 years, Virigina Louis Trimble wrote the most widely read annual reports on astrophysics for which she digested over 700 papers and publications. The reports are remembered for being brilliant and funny, in equal parts. Reading tomes of publications and research over a decade led her to think deeply about how science evolved, who was involved in the making of science, and how long it took to reach consensus.

Trimble photographed by Life Magazine

"Discovery" refers to the moment when at least a few people agree that something has been observed that requires an explanation. A problem counts as "solved" when most of the community has converged on an explanation and the convergent point has held down to the present.

In this journey, “The question "Who first got it right?" is not necessarily an important, or even appropriate, one.”

Every scientific consensus is preceded by a period of puzzlement, during which multiple theories and observations collide, combine, or splinter into other theories, until one or two survive the trial by fire. As the poet Mary Oliver knew, “Things take the time they take.”

Scientific conundrum and years spent in resolution (Data collated by Prof. Trimble)

“Norman Lockyer's announcement of the discovery of a new element, helium, was such a success that other observers were enticed to invent other –iums.” In quick succession, scientists across the world proposed coronium, nebulium, casseiopeium, asterium, aidebarium, decipium, phillipium and mossandrum – none found consensus.

Thousands of scientists spend time pursuing ideas that don’t pan out, and that do not receive consensus. Each of those ‘failed’ explorations becomes a lighthouse for scientists in that field- ‘ships wreck here, try another shore’. No scientist’s contribution is inconsequential, and no mad pursuit was in vain. Trimble’s conclusion is poignant given how her husband Joseph Weber is best remembered for his failed efforts to record gravitational waves. Joseph Weber was publicly shamed and discredited by his peers when his gravitation wave experiment results were found to be impossible to replicate. He passed away at 82, refusing to accept for 40+ years that his hypothesis did not check out. Trimble famously said,

Science is a self-correcting process, but not necessarily in one’s own lifetime.

Do Nothing Machines

A salt shaker rolls across a table, dropping salt along the way and tips over a spatula resting on a coffee tin. The coffee tin rolls and falls abruptly over the edge of a stack of books. The weight of the coffee tin is perceptible. A thud, a click after, a brush weighted down by a lock rushes rapidly down the slope of a ruler (what else are rulers for, but a surface to slide down). The brush scoops the fallen salt on to a spoon. Passing the salt, wait for it.

What role was each actor meant to play, were they used for their weight, heft or shape? In this ballet of moving objects, no one is meaningless, not a paper clip nor a grain of salt. And the anticipation! The not knowing what’s going to happen next, it’s all edge of your seat action. Those are the greatest Rube Goldberg machines.

If you have a long table this is a useful way to pass the salt to the opposite end. Pass the Salt, by Joseph, a Youtube creator.

While we grapple with meaning making in our daily pursuits, there are some things that exist for no reason at all. Hours of labor are put into making something that does very little. Rube Goldberg machines take an extra ordinary effort to accomplish a trifling task. The machines are named after American cartoonist, Rube Goldberg who designed and drew eccentric contraptions that employed the forces of pulleys, wheels, cogs, strings, spoons, fans, balls, windows, doors, parrots and candles.

Rube Goldberg lived in the golden era of inventions, a time when people were filing patents for things like a Hat With Integrated Radio, Wooden Bathing Suits, a Single Wheel Motorcycle(!). Goldberg just took this madness one step further. The contraptions that he dreamt up were a “symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.” My favourite one is this no-more-oversleeping alarm clock that takes away your bed so you literally cannot snooze.

The drawings are labelled sequentially and come with a description of how it works (see image above). He never built any of these machines, but by 1930s, the phrase “Rube Goldberg” had appeared the dictionary, to mean, ‘Having a fantastically complicated improvised appearance or to be deviously complex and impractical’.

In 1957, Charles and Ray Eames designed a whimsical do nothing machine with the colors and all the lightness of summer. Do-nothing but bring joy, that’s what this machine does.

In 1957, the Eameses designed the SOLAR DO-NOTHING MACHINE. Whimsical and joyful as was everything that the Eames couple made.

In 1989, the Rube Machine Contest became a national competition and in 2013, the national collegiate contest moved from the Purdue campus to COSI Columbus in Ohio. Every year, the contest sets up a task that needs to be accomplished in no more than 70 steps, and in under 2 minutes. Past challenges have included, zipping a zipper, applying a bandage, toasting a slice of bread, assembling a hamburger.

How we love seeing the sequence of interlocked events that make the machine work, the visual display of cause and effect. Daniel Kahneman says, "We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone's intention." Children as young as 6 months old, see a sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. Rube Goldberg machines are a visual firework display of cause and effect, the very epitome.

This piece of art was directed by CRICTOR, Rafael Sommerhalder Commissioned by Kuratorium Aargau 2010

An unforgiveable tension between stability and sensitivity

“[It is] an unforgivable tension between stability and sensitivity”, says Janna Levin of the 30-odd year scientific endeavour to build the instrument that would detect gravitational waves produced a billion light years away from us.

In her fascinating and lyrical book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Jana Levin writes about the astronomical human endeavour to detect gravitational waves, as evidence to support Einstein’s model of how the universe works. Lighter stars like our sun will die as white dwarfs (spheres of matter as large as the earth, comprised of densely packed electrons that resist a total collapse). Heavier stars die out and completely collapse into black holes. When two black holes collide, a large amount of energy is released. This energy peaks in the final seconds of collapse. It is not released as light or heat as we would expect it to, but as a gravitational wave. “While astronomers voraciously collected the sky’s light into telescopes”, Levin says, the LIGO team set out to record the sounds of the universe, opening up a whole new set of data for us to understand the universe by.

When two black holes collide, a large amount of energy is released. This energy peaks in the final seconds of collapse. It is not released as light or heat as we would expect it to, but as a gravitational wave.

Gravitational waves were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) exactly 100 years after Einstein first presented his paper, ‘On the General Theory of Relativity’. The first gravitational waves we ever heard, exactly confirming Einstein’s hypothesis, were produced by ”two black holes, orbiting each other at close to the speed of light, and finally crashing together to merge into a single black hole that shudders a bit before settling down.” (Source)

The idea that drives LIGO (the gravitational waves detector), is that light takes a specific amount of time to travel a tube that is 4 kms long. If that tube is stretched, the light will take longer. If the tube is shortened, light will reach sooner.

Gravitational waves cause tubes and space (and yes, the cells in our body) to stretch and shrink. Gravitational force is one of the weakest known forces. “The gravitational pull of the entire earth is easily resisted by mere human muscle – we can jump.” LIGO is sensitive enough to detect and measure a change in tube length that is 1,000 times smaller than a proton.

Equally, LIGO has to be made insensitive to numerous sources of noise, like: Traffic, farming activities, ocean waves, winds, effects of the sun & the moon, seismic noise, thermal noise from the vibration of atoms in the mirrors, beam jitter and much more. This is all so complex that gravitational science could well be the new rocket science, especially given how mainstream rocket science has become (thanks, Elon). Hours before the first ever detection in 2015, scientists at LIGO were driving alongside the tubes in a noisy jeep, banging on the walls to see how the instrument held up to that commotion.

LIGO has two 4 kilometres long tubes, called arms, that meet at right angles. A laser source sends light from the intersection point, down each of the arms. At the end of each arm is a mirror. The mirror reflects the light back to the intersection of the arms, where there is an interferometer. If the length of the arms are unaltered, light will cancel out on one side, and add up perfectly on the other side. A passing gravitational wave contorts the length of the arms, and this change is captured and recorded as a wave form. An identical detector is placed in two cities hundreds of kilometres apart, to validate the results.

It has also been compared to a glissando, that thing when a rock star drags fingers from left to right across the piano keys with great flourish – rather appropriate for such a cosmic event.

A gravitational wave sounds joyful, like the chirp of a bird or like Mari Kondo’s ‘ting’, her vocal reaction to a spark of joy. It has also been compared to a glissando, that thing when a rock star drags fingers from left to right across the piano keys with great flourish – rather appropriate for such a cosmic event.

A large wave from a pair of colliding black holes, one billion light years away, glides across the skies. It washes over neighbouring galaxies, before entering the Milky Way, and then our own solar system, crossing Pluto, Neptune, Saturn before reaching us and ringing the LIGO detectors.

The aim of the entire 30+ years project, with thousands of scientists from across the world and hundreds of millions in funding, is to keep the machine stable when that big wave sweeps by, sensitive to the tiny perturbance caused by the wave, and yet be insensitive to all the noise around. The perpetual struggle to balance stability & sensitivity beautifully sums up human existence – isn’t this what all our lives are made up of?

The perpetual struggle to balance stability & sensitivity beautifully sums up human existence – isn’t this what all our lives are made up of?

References:

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

Making Math Beautiful

When we use the words ‘therefore’, ‘truth’, ‘self-evident truths’, and ‘proof’, we are basically channeling Euclid. In ~300 BCE, Euclid wrote the Elements of Geometry that is a compendium of 12 books on geometry. His rigorous mathematical proofs have been the foundation for all mathematics & physics. 23 centuries later, Oliver Bryne rewrote the first 6 books in an effort to make Euclid’s geometry easier to comprehend.

Oliver Bryne named it quite simply as, The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid in Which Coloured Diagrams and Symbols Are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners.

To fully appreciate how Bryne could have saved your math scores in 9th grade, read this, slowly & entirely:

Bryne uses the 4 primary colours and geometric shapes, to tell us everything we need to know about which angles, which sides and which triangles are equal (or not) and why. When you see a theorem set in modernist colour blocks like this, you can’t forget it.

It is noteworthy that Bryne’s style of illustration precedes the modernist art movement across the world. The Bauhaus movement, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and so many more modernists have used this classic combination of solid colours and shapes. One can only wonder if all of these celebrated artists learnt geometry from the same book. Ellsworth Kelly’s large geometric shapes of solid colour displayed at SFMOMA would make Bryne quite proud.

Bryne’s book is out of publication and extremely hard to find. Luckily for us, the University of British Columbia has scanned every page – http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/Euclid/book1/book1.html browse to your heart’s content, and maybe learn some math!

In 2017, a small publisher Kroncker Wallis started a kickstarter campaign to fund the completion and republication of Oliver Bryne’s work. A group of mathematicians & designers came together to illustrate all thirteen books in the style of Byrne’s original book https://www.kroneckerwallis.com/product-category/euclids-elements

The power of great design could not be more evident as it is in Bryne’s work. A subject as loathed as geometry, was made delightful and beautiful even, by deliberate choice of colour, shape and proportion.

Sounds from a Balmy Afternoon on Mars

You’re sitting on your balcony, a breeze is running rough shod on a hot summer afternoon, catching dry leaves and the clothes line with the same gusto. Feels just like the low rumble of wind on Mars.

NASA’s InSight Lander which reached Mars just a few days ago, sent us an audio photograph. Press play for the low rumble of wind captured by the air pressure sensor and the seismometer on board.

You’ll need earphones for this one.

If all science were wiped out, what few words would we pass on?

On September 2nd, a fire engulfed the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, destroying decades worth of scientific and archeological findings. Multiple floors of the museum were blazing orange and in a few hours most of the museum was gutted.

“Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge have been lost.” - Brazil President Michel Temer

What if some cataclysmic event resulted in wiping out of all scientific knowledge? This seems less unlikely each year - what with the threats of climate change looming over our heads. How would humans redevelop the knowledge we have today?

Will an apple fall on the right man or woman’s head, and how long will it take for him to rewrite the critical F=G(M1*M2)/d2 ?

If we had to pass on one sentence to the next generation, basis which they would rediscover all the things that we know, what would it be? Richard Feynman had thought about this 50 odd years ago, and had a very specific answer.

“All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”

This statement he said, contained the most amount of information in the fewest number of words, and would enable humans to recover their wealth of knowledge about the way the universe works.

The physicist had his biases, so we’re curious to know what single reductive sentence other fields of science would choose to pass on to the next generation.

"the same observer saw it again, in exactly the same place, a star.."

Before the invention of the telescope, Tycho Brahe managed to create a chart of planetary motion that is accurate to 1 degree. .

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If you’re wondering like we did, what these manual observations looked like and sounded like, here’s a little excerpt from Tycho Brahe’s notebook: “After [the nova] had thus absolutely disappeared, the place, where it had been seen, continued six months vacant. On the seventeenth of March following, the same observer saw it again, in exactly the same place, equal to a star of the fourth magnitude. On the third of April, 1671, the elder Cassini saw it, it was then of the bigness of a star of the third magnitude, he judged it to be a little less than [the star] in the back of the constellation; but, on the next day, repeating the observation, it appeared to him very nearly as large as that, and altogether as bright; on the ninth it was somewhat less; on the twelfth it was yet smaller, it was then less than the two stars at the bottom of Lyra; but, on the fifteenth, it had increased again in bigness, and was equal to those stars; from the sixteenth to the twenty-seventh of the same month he observed it with a peculiar attention; during that period it changed bigness several times, it was sometimes larger than the biggest of those two stars, sometimes smaller than the least of them, and sometimes of a middle size between them.”

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