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  PRESENT AT THE FUTURE

  FROM EVOLUTION TO NANOTECHNOLOGY, CANDID AND CONTROVERSIAL CONVERSATIONS ON SCIENCE AND NATURE

  IRA FLATOW

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I THREE POUNDS OF GRAY MATTER

  Chapter 1 The Mind’s Window

  Chapter 2 Memory: Senior Jeopardy!, Anyone?

  Chapter 3 Oliver Sacks: Music Makes the Memory

  Chapter 4 Pathways of Addiction

  Chapter 5 Sleep and Learning: Caffeine in Your Beer

  PART II COSMOLOGY

  Chapter 6 Where the Very Big Meets the Very Little

  Chapter 7 It’s a Dark World After All

  Chapter 8 String Theory: We Have a Problem

  PART III GETTING READY FOR GLOBAL WARMING

  Chapter 9 Is Every Coastal City a New Orleans Waiting to Happen?

  Chapter 10 The Moral Imperative

  PART IV ENERGY: WHICH WAY TO GO?

  Chapter 11 It Makes Your Hair Hurt

  Chapter 12 Forests and Fields of Alcohol

  Chapter 13 The Nuclear Option

  Chapter 14 Is Coal Still King?

  Chapter 15 The Wind Rush Is On!

  PART V NANOTECHNOLOGY

  Chapter 16 The New Small Is Big

  PART VI LEAVING THE EARTH

  Chapter 17 There’s No Business Like Space Business

  PART VII THE OCEANS ARE IN TROUBLE

  Chapter 18 Sylvia Earle: Sounding the Alarm

  Chapter 19 Craig Venter Goes Fishing for Genes

  PART VIII SCIENCE AND RELIGION

  Chapter 20 Fitting God Into the Equation

  Chapter 21 Evolution: Still Under Attack

  Chapter 22 The Dover School Board Case

  PART IX PIONEERS PRESENT AT THE FUTURE

  Chapter 23 Jane Goodall

  Chapter 24 Ian Wilmut: Dolly Plus Ten

  Chapter 25 The Wizard of Woz

  PART X THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER

  Chapter 26 Whither Cyberspace?

  Chapter 27 The Universe as Computer

  PART XI BEAUTY IN THE DETAILS

  Chapter 28 The Joy of Knowing

  Chapter 29 The Case of the Mice Cured of Diabetes

  Chapter 30 The Misbehaving Shower Curtain

  Chapter 31 Why an Airplane Flies: Debunking the Myth

  Chapter 32 The Great Champagne Bubble Mystery

  Chapter 33 Open-Source Biology

  PART XII THE QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY

  Chapter 34 Stem Cells, Cloning, and the Quest for Immortality

  Acknowledgments

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  One of the joys of being a science journalist is the “aha!” moment. That brilliant flash of light, that moment of epiphany, when all the cylinders in your head click and you come to understand something you had never understood before. Sometimes your mouth may actually fall open as your eyes wander around the room, not really seeing anything but not under conscious control of your brain, which has just latched on to an idea that had eluded it for quite some time.

  As I say, one of the joys of being a science journalist, especially the host of a popular radio program such as Science Friday, is the ability to share that moment with millions of others. And one of those moments, among many others, stands out in my mind. It involves solving a problem I was having with one the most widely accepted “truths” about the world around us: why airplanes fly.

  Like every science journalist who ponders how things work, I was more than casually acquainted with the commonly accepted ideas about the physics of flight. After all, the explanation for why airplanes fly is one of those unquestioned beliefs in science education, a dogma that has been repeated for generations and taught in eighth-grade science class along with why the sky is blue. (Oh, you were out that day?) In fact I have mouthed the simple explanation countless times on radio and television talk shows. I had sung its praises in my own (previous) books. High-school teachers who coach award-winning teams in science competitions would all say the same thing: “The basis for why airplanes fly is a concept in physics called Bernoulli’s principle. We all know that.” No-brainer. Period. End of discussion.

  Just what is Bernoulli’s principle? It’s quite simple to state: Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician, discovered in 1733 that the faster a fluid flows, the lower its pressure.

  And that explanation has been used ever since the 1930s to explain why an airplane flies. In short, the explanation states that because of the design of a wing, air will fly faster over the top than the bottom. According to Bernoulli, faster-flowing air on top means less pressure on top. More pressure on the bottom than on the top lifts the wing. So the wing is literally sucked up into the sky, the same way you suck up soda in a straw. Complex science-fair projects and even simple strips of paper over which you blow—the paper flies up—have been used for decades to demonstrate Bernoulli’s principle. And as I say, I too, when asked to explain in simple terms what makes an airplane lift off the ground, would say the same thing: Bernoulli’s principle.

  That all came to an end one day in 1989. After that day, I would no longer freely mention Bernoulli and flight in the same breath, unless it was to denounce the principle. Because on that day I met a man who would change my life forever. And I vowed to set the record straight.

  I had just finished making a speech to a group of folks at a science conference at the University of Vermont. After polite applause and a brief question-and-answer period, people began to file out. Just as I was about to collect my papers and head for the door, the real answer to why airplanes fly appeared before me in the form of Norman Smith. Norman Smith had spent more than two decades as a research aerodynamicist for NASA and before that for its pre-space predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. He was the author of more than a dozen science books as well. And now in his later years, after a very successful career in aviation, he was on a one-man crusade: to get rid of Bernoulli’s principle as the explanation for why airplanes fly.

  “I listened to your speech and was very impressed with what you had to say,” said Smith. “Except for one thing. That explanation about why airplanes fly.”

  “Oh. Did I say something wrong?”

  “Yes, you did. That explanation you gave, the one using Bernoulli’s principle, is no longer acceptable. It’s old and not really accurate.”

  Smith was trying to be polite. What he would have really liked to have said, I think, was “You dummy, get with the program. Here’s another guy I’m going to have to reeducate.”

  Education was what Smith did best. As far back as 1972, in a book and in an article published in that most sacred of all science-teacher magazines, The Physics Teacher, Smith met the enemy wherever he found it. Wherever teachers banked on Bernoulli to teach the theory of flight—in newspapers, in magazines, in a lecture hall—Smith was there to remove Bernoulli from its central role in flight. He called it the “Bernoulli myth” and said it was “the most persistent, pernicious error in school science books.”

  Not only is Bernoulli used to explain aircraft lift, Smith lamented, but “I have found articles on ornithology that borrow the error to explain bird-wing lift!”

  Smith handed me a copy of one of his magazine articles from The Physics Teacher and asked me to read and see for myself.

  “The math is pretty easy for a smart guy like you.”

  By now I was more than intrigued. Embarrassed might be a good word. Here I had just lectured to hundreds of people—I was a role model, an author, an “expert”—and now, if Smith was right, I was an idiot. Smith could see my sheepi
sh look, and his smile told me Not to worry; you’ve merely made a mistake common to physics teachers around the world. Join the crowd.

  “Just what is the right explanation, then?” I needed to hear his take.

  “Very simple: Newton. And his laws of motion. You can easily—and correctly—explain why airplanes fly from first principles. No need to resort to Bernoulli. He was created—really pulled out of a hat—around World War II when the airplane was becoming popular and people wanted a simple explanation. But in reality it takes more time to explain the complicated workings of Bernoulli’s principle than it does the simple laws of Newton. In this case it’s very simple: Airplanes fly because the wing makes the air go down, so the airplane goes up. Action—reaction. Newton’s third law. How hard is that to understand?”

  I took Smith’s papers home and read them. They made a lot of sense. I researched Smith and uncovered other articles about him and his quixotic quest to set the record straight. Jerry Bishop, a highly respected colleague of mine and science writing icon of the Wall Street Journal, had come across Smith in 1972 and had written a major Wall Street Journal article about the quest. Being the great journalist that he is, Jerry presented the case but never reached a conclusion. He let the reader decide.

  But I was convinced. Of course it was Newton! The beauty of flight was in this detail.

  Thus began my own crusade to replace Bernoulli with Newton, just as Smith had tried to do. I soon found and talked with other like-minded science teachers who had begun to make their own contributions. They began to question the very basics of accepted textbook ideas about how air flows over a wing, and they discovered that they were wrong.

  I chatted with airplane pilots who had never once relied on Bernoulli to fly. They talked about “angle of attack” and “stalling the wing” and “airspeed” and such. A helicopter pilot showed me his “movable wing” plane—his copter—and told me to take a close look at its shape. He pointed to the end of the wing and said, “Does this look at like your textbook Bernoulli airfoil? Of course not: it’s symmetrical. Contrary to Bernoulli dogma, wings don’t have to be rounded on top and flat on the bottom. See? Mine are symmetrical, rounded on top as well as bottom. And I’m getting off the ground!”

  I decided to take flying lessons to learn the details firsthand. My flight instructor told me that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) still requires using Bernoulli’s principle as a teaching aid, despite the growing belief that it’s an inadequate explanation. It’s even on the FAA exam. My flight textbooks and CDs all had Bernoulli. But not once during my training, not on takeoffs or landings, not when recovering from a stall or learning how to “trim for level flight,” did the word Bernoulli come up.

  So I knew that in writing this book I had the opportunity to set the record straight. No longer would Bernoulli be the centerpiece of any chapter about why airplanes fly. And for me, a baseball fanatic, there was an even greater injustice: the use of Bernoulli’s principle to explain why a curveball curves or a fastball “rises.” I too bow my head and plead “guilty as charged.” But no longer.

  So if the section in this book titled “Why an Airplane Flies: Debunking the Myth” appears more detailed or perhaps more passionate than the others, please bear with me. I’m getting a lot off my chest. I’ve spent almost 15 years thinking about this, and we all know there is no greater crusader than a reformed sinner.

  This episode serves as a case in point about another myth: that science knows everything. I’m reminded of the letter I received the first week that Science Friday was on the air in 1991. A woman—let’s call her Barbara from New Jersey—wrote that she had just listened to a program we had broadcast about the extinction of the dinosaurs and the possibility that they had been wiped out by a comet or asteroid hitting the Earth. On that show, a scientist with a competing theory phoned in to say that he disagreed with this new asteroid theory about extinction. The caller got into, shall we say, a frank exchange of views with my guest about their competing theories. They got into a professional “disagreement.” Barbara wrote that she was shocked to hear scientists arguing. She had never heard researchers disagree. “Isn’t that what science is for? Science knows the truth, doesn’t it?” Imagine that! Scientists arguing! A concept, I think, foreign to most laypeople.

  After watching science do its thing for a while, you realize that knowledge is really a moving target. What we know today will probably be wrong tomorrow. And science is that tool for discovery. When science tells us something, chances are that it will tell us something different a few years from now.

  And that’s what makes truth stranger than fiction.

  PART I

  THREE POUNDS OF GRAY MATTER

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE MIND’S WINDOW

  A Fox enters the storeroom of a theater. Rummaging through the contents, he is frightened by a face glaring down on him. But looking at it closely he discovers it is only a mask, of the kind worn by actors. “You look very fine,” says the Fox. “It is a pity you haven’t any brains.”

  —AESOP’S FABLES

  Is it possible to understand our minds? To understand what consciousness is all about? What happens in our brains when we learn or remember? What goes on when we “enjoy” or feel “depressed?”

  Understanding the complex biochemistry that turns electrical and chemical energy into thoughts, memories, and feelings is one of the greatest challenges of science. Neuroscience has become “the neurosciences” as genetics, physics and engineering, pharmaceuticals, psychology and psychiatry, and computer science have gotten into the act and contributed to what we know. But the brain is so complex that neuroscientists have a long way to go before we can understand completely how the brain works.

  We know that people have been fascinated with the brain for at least 6,000 years. About 4,000 BC, an anonymous writer put down the very first observations of how the brain works, anticipating The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by noting that eating poppies induced feelings of euphoria and well-being. It seems that people also have always been hitting their heads: The ancient Egyptians documented on papyrus medical treatments for 26 different kinds of brain injury, and pre-Inca civilizations practiced primitive brain surgery, probably for mental illnesses, headaches, or epilepsy. In the Middle Ages, many people witnessed miracles, wonders, and visions—perhaps because they didn’t realize that their brains were tripping on LSD. In 1938, Dr. Albert Hofmann, a distinguished Swiss chemist who was interested in the medicinal properties of plants, was studying the ergot fungus at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel. He found that ergot contained a kind of lysergic acid with hallucinatory properties, an acid that Hofmann synthesized into LSD for the first time. Ergot fungus often affects grain. In medieval times, grain with the fungus could have been milled into rye bread, causing hallucinations—and along with them, superstitions and religious fervor that could have been due to altered brain chemistry.

  Today, we know that the brain runs on electricity—though not the kind of electricity that lights up the lamp over my desk or runs my computer. I’m talking about bioelectricity, which allows the neurons, or cells in the brain, to communicate with one another. Every living cell functions with electricity. When food is digested and turned into blood sugar, or glucose, and dissolves in water inside a cell, its atoms lose or gain electrons. They become free-floating particles called ions, which have either a positive or a negative charge. Since electricity is charge in motion, the movement of charged ions inside a living cell is electricity. When ions move, there is a corresponding shift in charge, an electrochemical change that produces an electric charge, the nerve signal. Every fraction of a second, each nerve cell in the brain and body receives signals that prompt it to respond or not. When a neuron sends a message to another neuron, the signal moves along as a traveling electric pulse. Recently I saw a photo of a neuron hooked up to a nanoscale plastic circuit on a chip—just one experiment in nanotechnologists’ efforts to build a super-tiny transistor no bigger than a
molecule.

  While ancient peoples thought that epilepsy was caused by demonic possession, we know that an epileptic seizure is an outward sign of abnormal electrical activity in the brain, due to an imbalance in neural activity that leads to an increase in the rate of neural firing, which can then spread to other parts of the brain. But there are still so many mysteries left, especially how our memories, our hopes and dreams, our intelligence, and everything else we’re thinking of when we say mind are encoded in our brains.

  MAKING CONNECTIONS

  One of the biggest mysteries about the brain is how it begins. When a fetus is only one month old, its first brain cells, or neurons, are growing at the mind-boggling rate of 250,000 neurons a minute. Eventually, those neurons form literally trillions of connections, called synapses, between cells. These connections are well organized, not random: Each neuron finds its correct place in the brain. By the time a baby is born, it has 100 billion neurons, and its brain looks very much like an adult’s. It’s more developed than any other part of the baby’s body, and it’s disproportionately large. After birth, the brain begins to be shaped by environment—the world around the infant and the baby’s experiences. Newborns spend more than 20 percent of their sleep in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which some researchers think involves a kind of learning process. Neurologists are studying how the brain shapes itself in response to the demands the environment makes on it. They know the brain changes over a person’s lifetime, as it thinks, controls muscles and limbs, learns, and remembers. The billions of neurons in a person’s brain continually connect and reconnect on many different levels, in response to what their owner does and experiences.

  Some of the things we don’t know about the brain are surprisingly basic. One thing that babies and very young children do a lot is sleep. In fact, they spend half their childhood asleep—and every parent knows how important that is and what their kids can be like if they don’t get their naps. Adults spend about a third of their time asleep, and that doesn’t appear to be an enormous waste of valuable time. Experiments where people have tried to stay awake for as long as 200 hours have induced hallucinations and paranoia. If adults have troubling sleeping—and according to a 2005 poll from the National Sleep Foundation, 57 percent of Americans do—nearly every aspect of their lives is affected, leaving them prone to making mistakes at work, having car accidents, being too sleepy for sex.