Brilliant blunders can be portals to discovery

Mario Livio takes comfort in the gaffes of the greatest scientific minds of all time.

“There is something very reassuring in the fact that even these giants made major blunders,” he said during a talk Wednesday in Seattle to promote his new book. “People would ask me what the book was about; I’d tell them it’s called Brilliant Blunders, and it’s not an autobiography.”

Mario Livio spoke about his latest book, Brilliant Blunders, May 15 at Town Hall Seattle. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

In Brilliant Blunders Livio, senior astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, examines major mistakes by some of the greatest scientists ever: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling, Lord Kelvin, and Fred Hoyle. He talked about three of the examples during his lecture at Town Hall Seattle.

First, Livio took on Darwin and evolution, which Livio called “the single best idea that anybody has ever had.” Darwin’s blunder, though, was adopting a theory of blended heredity, which was a fairly widely accepted viewpoint of the time. Blended heredity held that the characteristics of a mother and father would be mixed, as one might mix a gin and tonic.

“Darwin did not understand, at first at least, that with blended heredity there is no way natural selection would have ever worked,” Livio said, noting that if you bred black and white cats, within a few generations you would only have gray. “In your gin and tonic, if you mix it with lots of tonic, in the end there is no gin.”

In Darwin’s time Gregor Mendel was coming up with the correct model for genetics, but Livio said Darwin didn’t know of Mendel’s work, and if he had he probably would not have understood it—“Darwin was very weak in mathematics,” he noted—but somehow Darwin had nailed evolution.

“When you have somebody who is a real genius some of the steps along the way may be wrong, but somehow their insight leads them to the correct result,” Livio said.

The next big blunder considered was Linus Pauling’s attempt to come up with a structure for DNA.

“Pauling’s model for DNA had the wrong number of strands, it was built inside out, and there was nothing to hold it together. Worse yet, he tried to hold it together with hydrogens,” Livio marveled. The “A” in DNA stands for acid, which Livio explained means that when you put it in water it should release hydrogen. But in Pauling’s model hydrogen was holding the structure together, so it couldn’t release it.

“Here was the greatest chemist of the world proposing a model the violated the basic rules of chemistry!” Livio exclaimed. He discusses Pauling’s shortcoming at length in the book, but said it may have been a combination of a race to publish and a bit of egotism from previous successes.

“If I work out the basic structure,” Livio surmised Pauling may have been thinking, “all of the other details will work out.”

Finally Livio took on Einstein, whom he called “the embodiment of genius.” Livio noted that when Einstein developed the theory of relativity he assumed that the universe was standing still. But that couldn’t be, because its gravity would cause it to collapse on itself. So Einstein added what Livio called a “fudge factor”—the cosmological constant—to make things balance out.

Then, when Lemaître and Hubble found the universe to be expanding, Einstein concluded he didn’t need the constant and took the term out of his equation. Fast-forward to 1998 and the discovery that the expansion of the universe was accelerating—because of the constant.

“Einstein’s blunder was to take the term out, not to put it in!” Livio said. “If he left that term in he could have predicted that the universe should be accelerating.”

The conclusion Livio draws from these brilliant blunders is that science can be messy and that there’s no straight line to the truth. Goofs are good.

“When you think outside the box you’re likely to make mistakes every now and then,” he said. “If you want to be certain all the time, your progress will be so incremental that you actually may miss the real breakthroughs.”

“This is not to advocate for sloppy science,” Livio continued. “This is just to say that you have to allow for these things that I call brilliant blunders. You have to allow for the possibility of making breakthroughs through processes that occasionally will actually hit upon various obstacles.

“Scientific blunders can be portals to discovery.”

Mario Livio highlights week of great space and astronomy events

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Writers should generally avoid clichés. Given today’s end of a great streak of good observing weather, and some great choices for science lectures in the next week, “When it rains, it pours” seems an apt statement even for an astronomy blog.

Mario Livio will speak about Brilliant Scientific Blunders at Town Hall Seattle Wednesday evening.

The headliner for the week is astrophysicist and author Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute, who will speak at Town Hall Seattle on Wednesday, May 15, about his new book, Brilliant Blunders, being released this week. Livio’s premise is that even the great ones like Einstein and Darwin goof, and that’s good; science thrives on error, advancing when incorrect theories are disproven. Livio also is the author of Is God a Mathematician?, and he’s one of half a dozen experts featured in an article of the May issue of Astronomy magazine who help explain the size, shape, and limits of the universe. Livio’s talk at Town Hall begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 and are available online.

Other choices for the week:

MONDAY

Another Town Hall Seattle event May 13 is actually a triple feature. At 6 p.m. University of Washington Ph.D. students Patti Carroll and Meg Smith will talk about their work as part of the U.W. Science Now series. Carroll will talk about radio astronomy and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Hint: It’s not exactly like the movie “Contact.” Smith will talk about the mysteries of Mars and the possibility that life once existed there. As a bonus, tickets for these two talks also get you in to a 7:30 p.m. lecture by Daniel Dennett titled “Thinking About Thinking Itself.”

TUESDAY

At a “Science Café” event May 14 at the Swiss Pub in Tacoma U.W. Prof. Joshua Bandfield will give a talk titled, “To the Moon, Mars & Beyond: Robotic Spacecraft Exploration.” Bandfield will discuss the pros and cons of using no-crew spacecraft to explore the solar system. Bandfield is an engaging speaker who keynoted the Seattle Astronomical Society annual banquet in 2010. Admission is free to the Science Café, though it would be good to buy a brew. The series is sponsored by the Pacific Science Center and KCTS9 television.

WEDNESDAY

The Seattle Astronomical Society meets at the U.W. on Wednesday evening, with its main topic being a discussion of considerations for buying a first telescope. It’s just late for Mother’s Day, but it’s never to early to start thinking about Christmas! SAS meets at 7:30 p.m. in room A102 of the Physics/Astronomy Building on the U.W. campus.

Also at the U.W. May 15 they’ll hold one of the bi-monthly open houses at the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory. Three different U.W. students will give talks during the evening, and Seattle Astronomical Society volunteers will be on had for tours of the vintage building and, if weather permits, a look through the Alvan Clark Telescope in the dome. Events begin at 9 p.m., and advance reservations are strongly encouraged for the talks.

Jon Jenkins will give two talks about the hunt for exoplanets Thursday at the University of Washington

THURSDAY

Back to the U.W. again on May 16 for a pair of events featuring Jon Jenkins of the SETI Institute and the NASA Ames Research Center. Jenkins will speak at the U.W. Astronomy Department Colloquium at 4 p.m. in room A102 of the Physics/Astronomy Building, and give a public lecture at 7:30 p.m. in Kane Hall room 120. The colloquium will be a highly technical talk about the Kepler mission, while the public lecture will be a more general exploration of the search for exoplanets.

You can keep track of area space and astronomy events by watching the Seattle Astronomy calendar. Also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Galileo was a sneak

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Galileo still has many folks bamboozled. The narrative persists more than four centuries after he trained his telescope on Jupiter that Galileo’s discovery of the giant planet’s moons proved, despite the dogmatic objections of the church, that Copernicus was right about the sun being at the center of the solar system.

Dennis Danielson

Dennis Danielson says much of that common narrative is false. Danielson is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Milton is his professional bailiwick, but he’s got a strong interest in rhetoric and the history of science, which has led him to publish a couple of books on astronomy and astronomers. He’s the editor of The Book of the Cosmos (Basic Books, 2002) and wrote The First Copernican (Walker & Company, 2006). It was during his work on the latter, about Georg Joachim Rheticus, the young German mathematician who was largely responsible for getting Copernicus’s De revolutionibus published, that Danielson developed what he calls a “perfectly discreet, I assure you, love affair with Copernicus.”

Danielson spoke Thursday at the University of Washington astronomy colloquium, and later that evening at a meeting of the Boeing Employees Astronomical Society. He said that in addition to Galileo’s obvious genius in many areas, he was a top-notch public relations practitioner, a successful propagandist, and a bit of a sneak.

Danielson said Galileo wasn’t telling the whole story with his masterwork Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the publication that supposedly confirmed Copernicus and got Galileo into hot water with the Vatican.

“I really do want to be respectful of Galileo, but he sewed some misinformation, starting right on the title page of his work, that I would propose to you has played into the twisted story of cosmology” and some longstanding misperceptions, Danielson said.

The catch, according to Danielson, is that the title page and the entire Diologo depict the scientific debate as one between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. In fact, Ptolemy’s system was well on its way out by the time the Dialogue was published in 1632, and the system drawn up by Tycho Brahe in 1588 was much favored by scientists for many decades to follow. The Copernican model was not really proven for some 200 years.

In fact Galileo’s own observation of the phases of Venus in 1610, 22 years before Dialogue, essentially knocked Ptolemy out of the cosmological playoffs.

“This was in fact striking another blow to the scientific underpinnings of the Ptolemaic system,” Danielson said, “but this demonstration supports Copernicanism only if there is no alternative other than Ptolemy.”

But Tycho’s system was an alternative that also correctly predicted the phases of Venus. Kepler with The Rudolphine Tables in 1627, Riccioli with Almagestum Novum in 1651, and Hooke with An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations in 1674 all tended to favor the Tychonic system over Copernicus more than a century after “De Rev” and 42 years after Galileo’s Dialogue.

“If the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems truly were the only two great systems of the universe, then you could logically affirm the one by denying the other,” Danielson said. “But Galileo was wrong that those were the two great systems. Not in his day, not in Hooke’s. There was a third, the Tychonic system, which answered most of the criticisms of the other geocentric and geostatic systems without getting into all of those absurd claims about a moving Earth.”

There were other scientific challenges for proving Copernicus. They couldn’t detect parallax, as it turned out the observations were not yet precise enough. Some stars appeared as disks in telescopes, which turned out to be an illusion but argued against Copernicus at the time. Scientists expected to observe a Coriolis effect if Earth rotated, but Coriolis didn’t get around to finally seeing it until 1835.

“The physics that underpinned Copernicanism wasn’t fully developed until Newton,” Danielson said, “and the scientific impediments to a full-scale acceptance of Copernicanism were not removed until the 19th Century.”

Danielson gives Galileo credit for being right in the end.

“His book was powerful. He so firmly planted the idea that there was an A or a B, so established that way of thinking, it became easy for us to forget” that Tycho’s was long the preferred model until Newton came up with the physics that supported the Copernican model.

Lee Smolin says time is real

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Seattle is a city full of geeks, it seems, and a bunch of us piled into the dark basement of Town Hall Seattle on a beautiful spring evening Tuesday to hear three talks about quantum mechanics, neutrinos, and the nature of time.

Dr. Lee Smolin was the headliner of the evening. Smolin has kicked up quite a ruckus with his new book, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. In it, Smolin takes issue with a core notion of modern physics.

“We experience the world in time, we think in time, we act in time; this is so central to our conception of being human,” Smolin said. “But the scientific world view teaches that time is an illusion.”

Smolin added that, in his view, that claim is based on several incorrect arguments.

“Einstein and others who took that point of view are wrong for scientific reasons, and I try to make the scientific case for bringing back time to the center of our thinking and the center of our conception of nature,” he said.

Smolin rejects the notion that a mathematical description of the universe outside of time is the true reality, and that is the “crisis” of the book’s subtitle.

“If the experience of time is not central to reality, then neither are any human hopes and aspirations and the qualities that we so admire like decisiveness and imagination,” he said.

Smolin acknowledged that his arguments live somewhere in between physics and philosophy.

“I think that it’s essential to have the benefit of the history of thought when you’re tackling the deepest and hardest questions that we face, and the nature of time is one of them,” he contended.

The notion that time is an illusion has had its uses over the years, Smolin suggested, but added that the main fallacy of the approach has been what he called “physics in a box”, a method for studying small parts of the universe and then trying to extrapolate universal truths from that study. But he noted that you can’t put the whole universe into a box, and that the observers and the measuring systems in the experiments are typically outside of the box. And he said that even the laws of physics must be evolving, or if they aren’t, then they aren’t science.

“If the laws are truly outside of time then they’re inexplicable to any method that is checkable by science, because science requires experimentation and we can only experiment on things that can be modified,” Smolin said. “So if the laws are outside of time we just have to become mystics.”

The nature of time is a challenging topic for an hour-long talk, and Smolin had to punt a few times, noting that several concepts were topics for another hour, and that much more in-depth discussion could be found in the book.

We’re intrigued enough to grab a copy. You can get yours here.

Two talks by University of Washington graduate students preceded Smolin’s presentation. The talks were part of the UW’s Engage: The Science Speaker Series.

Ironically, Alan Jamison’s talk was definitely physics in the box. He gave an engaging presentation, titled “Cooling Atoms With Blinding Hot Light,” about his lab work to look at the behavior of ytterbium atoms, an element he joked “sits in a dark corner of the periodic table.”

“The first step in cooling atoms,” Jamison said, “is to heat them up.” As they vibrate intensely in the heat, individual atoms break off. Then they cool them down by shining lights on them; ytterbium has a resonance with certain green and purple wavelengths, and they can eventually slow the motion of the atoms down enough to get photos of clusters of them and study their behavior.

More on Jamison’s work at the Ultracold Atoms Group at the UW.

Jared Kofron followed with a talk about “A Massive Problem: A Brief History of the Tiny Neutrino.”

Kofron noted that the neutrino is the smallest particle we know of. “It’s a very strange, mysterious particle that has taught us a lot about the universe.” His talk was an accessible history of the neutrino.

The particle was dreamed up in the 1930s as a way to explain why energy seemed to be vanishing with beta decay. This created something of a panic, and German physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed the neutrino as “a desperate remedy to save physics.” The notion of a particle that was incredibly penetrating, basically massless, and never observable was not too popular among scientists at first. But it fixed everything.

“Experiments made sense when viewed in the context of the neutrino,” Kofron said. “If you added the possibility that this little guy was carrying off all of the missing energy, all of a sudden the books balanced. From an experimental point of view, this was a real coup, this was a beautiful addition to the theory.”

More about Kofron’s work at the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics at UW.

Reviews of Time Reborn:

Resetting the Clocks, New York Times, May 3
Is Time Real? National Public Radio, April 30
Physicist argues, controversially, that time is real, NBC News, April 26

Other books by Lee Smolin:

Planetary Resources holds G+ hangout to celebrate first birthday

Calling the 12 months since they went public with their asteroid-mining mission an epic journey, Planetary Resources, Inc. held a a live Google+ hangout from its intergalactic headquarters in Bellevue, Washington today to celebrate its birthday and talk about what’s on the horizon.

President and chief asteroid miner Chris Lewicki spelled out an ambitious plan that includes having the company’s Arkyd 100 telescopes in orbit by 2015 and playing a key role in NASA’s efforts to retrieve an asteroid and bring it into the Earth-Moon system.

Planetary Resources plans to have a “constellation” of its Arkyd 100 telescopes in low-Earth orbit and at work spotting asteroids by 2015. They’ll launch smaller cubesats to test the 100′s avionics next year. Photo: Planetary Resources.

“There’s going to be a lot of story to share,” Lewicki said of the next few years.

They actually hope to have hardware in space a year from now. Planetary Resources is working on the “A3″, a small vehicle that is essentially three CubeSats. The A3 will allow them to try out the avionics that will be used with the larger Arkyd 100.

“The best test bed is space itself,” said Chris Voorhees, company VP and spaceship wrangler. Voorhees added that asteroid mining will be a decades-long effort that will require lots of small steps.

“It’s one of those big leaps that mankind has ahead of it,” he said. “For us, on a day-to-day basis, we need to take that into bite-size chunks that we can work and realize, from one step to the next, an incremental process where the successes, sometimes failures, certainly the lessons learned from each step in the process helps educate what we do next.”

Voorhees noted that there is a lot of education needed.

“The biggest challenge that we have with asteroid mining is ignorance; we know precious little about the ore bodies that we have out there,” he said.

“We know enough that it’s tantalizing,” Lewicki added. “The opportunity is out there.”

“We’re an information company before we’re a mining company,” Voorhees concluded.

The Arkyd 100 will be a key part of that information gathering. Getting the telescopes into space will allow Planetary Resources to give the technology a real test, and to begin the work of finding asteroids and figuring out which ones have the best potential for mining.

Interestingly, a primary target of the company’s mining efforts will be water. It’s the essence of life, but perhaps more importantly, it can provide protection from radiation in space and the hydrogen contained can be used as a propellent. It’s expensive to launch into space but may well be cheaper to mine out there.

“Water is going to be the molecule that really unlocks the solar system for humans to expand off the Earth and get into space permanently,” Lewicki said. “Water is the gateway drug of space; it’s the enabler!”

Planetary Resources recently announced a partnership with Bechtel, and Lewicki said it’s exciting to have that company on board.

“When a large mining company calls and wants a mine built, Bechtel helps them get that done,” he said. “We have a partnership with them for the future of space and look forward to working with them.”

Similarly, Planetary Resources is looking forward to working with NASA on the asteroid retrieval project.

“It’s going to be challenging, it’s going to be awesome,” Lewicki said of the project. “If this does get approved in the budget it’s certainly something that we think we can probably contribute to a lot in terms of how NASA does that mission. A lot of our technologies can probably help to buy down NASA’s risk.”

Lewicki said they appreciate working with the space agency because they owe it a lot.

“It’s not without the last 50 years of space exploration that a company like ours would even be able to exist,” he said. “We’re standing on the shoulders of a great investment by not only our country but other countries.”

You can read Seattle Astronomy’s coverage of last year’s rollout of Planetary Resources here. Full video of today’s hangout is below.

Coopertition is key for commercial space exploration

SpaceUp Seattle, an unconference about space exploration, happened over the weekend at the Museum of Flight, and while a big appeal of the format was that the agenda was written on the spot by attendees, it was clear that a big part of the draw for the event was the presence of some major players in commercial space ventures. Erika Wagner of Blue Orgin, Garrett Reisman of SpaceX, and Chris Lewicki of Planetary Resources all made presentations on day one of the conference.

Wagner, business development manager at Kent-based Blue Origin, said the company’s goal is to get more people into space, and that they have to do two main things to accomplish it.

“We have to change the risk profile, we have to make this less risky; and we have to change the cost, make it less expensive,” Wagner said. She added that a key to cost containment will be to develop reusable rockets.

Garrett Reisman of SpaceX spoke about the company’s work at the SpaceUp Seattle conference Saturday at the Museum of Flight. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Reisman, a former astronaut who is now a program manager at SpaceX, agreed.

“Affordable reusability is the key to having a real breakthrough in spaceflight,” he said.

Reisman feels it’s a great time to be an aerospace engineer.

“We’re at the cusp of what I think is going to be a golden age of spaceflight,” he said, comparing the era to the time of rapid advancement in general aviation that occurred around World War II. “Right now, we don’t know what a spaceship is supposed to look like, and that’s awesome!”

The two said their companies aren’t really in competition with each other. In fact, Wagner called it “coopertition” as they work together on regulatory and education issues. “We’re trying to build an industry right now,” she noted. “The market will sort it out.”

Reisman added that competition is good for the companies.

“It’s also really good for NASA. It gives them leverage and it makes us try to outperform each other. The end result is a much better product,” he said.

In addition, they’re pursuing different niches within the industry. Blue Origin is focused on suborbital spaceflight, while SpaceX is pursuing near-Earth orbit, geosynchronous Earth orbit, and beyond. The latter is partly because of the aspirations of SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

“My boss wants to retire on Mars,” Reisman quipped, “so the clock is ticking.”

Blue Origin, meanwhile, sees lots of customers for its suborbital work.

“We’ll be looking up and looking down,” Wagner said. “We believe there’s a real market for space science and Earth science payloads aboard these spacecraft.” She said NASA could never go into space frequently enough or inexpensively enough to make it happen, but if companies can drive the cost down, it will open things up for space tourists as well as university and corporate researchers—even small, local, science-fair projects might be able to scrape up the cash to be launched into space.

“Let’s put space in the hands of the people,” Wagner said.

Reisman agreed the doors to space will fly open once they get the cost of launching stuff down into the range of hundreds of dollars per pound.

“All the promises of science fiction—that suddenly becomes really doable when you get down to that level,” he said.

Speaking of science fiction, Lewicki, president of Planetary Resources, gave a talk that wasn’t about his asteroid mining company. Instead, he gave a presentation from the Keck Institute for Space Studies about a plan for lassoing an asteroid and bringing it close to Earth for further study. The notion drew some interest because NASA recently requested funding for preliminary work on the project.

Lewicki said it isn’t such a far-fetched notion to fly out to a small asteroid, capture it, and then park it in a Lagrange point for safe keeping and easy study. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is finding a suitable asteroid for the purpose.

There’s a wealth of information about the asteroid return mission on its project page.

At SpaceUp Seattle

We’re up and running at SpaceUp Seattle at the Museum of Flight!

As we reported earlier this week, SpaceUp is an unconference, at which all of the participants can suggest topics and decide what to talk about. It really works! Here’s a photo of the agenda for today–dozens of topics were suggested and the most popular made the grid, easily moved around with masking tape!

I’m at the first session, an overview of Blue Origin. There are also folks here from SpaceX and Planetary Resources. But there also will be civilian-led topics, including discussions of space law, storytelling, and how to get more public support for space travel and exploration.

SpaceUp Seattle goes on today and tomorrow. We’ll file occasional dispatches.