Curiosity

Artist's Rendition of Curiosity on Mars

This morning, we witnessed the launch of the latest Mars roving explorer, aptly named, Curiosity. What a wonderful moniker for a machine that will, hopefully, spend the next few years exploring the surface of Mars and sending back gigabits of new types data to the anxiously awaiting scientists here on Earth.

Curiosity is something that you don't hear much about these days but it is very clear that curiosity has been one of main drivers of our technological advances for millenia.  Certainly, a lot of technology developed less from curiosity and more from simply trying to fill a need.  But with all the potential solutions that people tried, there had to be a lot of, "I wonder what will happen if...".

Boulton and Watt Steam Engine

You might argue that curiosity is more a driver of science than technology. Science is almost entirely based on the desire to learn and understand - not a bad definition of curiosity itself. As technology developed, it often preceded the science of understanding how the physical world worked. Steam engines, for example, developed before the thermodynamics of steam were understood. Once the science caught up to the technology, major advances and refinements became possible.  James Watt had the benefit of 50 years of scientific investigation of steam before he made his much-heralded advances in the improvement of Thomas Newcomen's original steam engine design.

It seems to me we live in an age of curiosity but most people experience it in ways that aren't so much related to science and technology. We are social creatures and seem to be endlessly fascinated with what other people are doing.  We try to keep up with them through any number of social networking websites. We are curious about the rich and famous and scan the gossip magazines and newspaper columns for juicy tidbits.  We check our smartphones to find out the latest football score or read our email. As humans, we cannot help but be curious.

As you can tell, I am all for curiosity.  We need to follow our desire to know more than we do.  But what we seek out is at least as important as the desire to seek in the first place.  We might need to lift our sights a bit and seek to know something more interesting than what's the latest on Lady Gaga. We might want to spend just a little time learning more about what is going on in our world. What's behind Occupy Wall Street? What's happening in Egypt? What's happening in electric vehicle design, or climate change, or even green energy initiatives?  Most of what I see going on in social networking is like a candy bar - a quick energy boost but no substance.

Personal Disclaimer: I also spend a fair amount of time each day on Twitter and somewhat less time on Facebook. What I follow on Twitter are posts that relate mostly to news, technology, science, and culture. Why? Because I find them interesting. There is so much that is being put out there each day that it is nearly impossible to keep up with it. I try to screen the Tweets that relate to technology and technology history and put them up on my own Twitter Stream - TechAlmanac1.  As I screen this torrent of information, I learn a lot that I otherwise would be unaware of. 

I am not advocating for Twitter or any other particular  web tool. I am not even advocating for the internet. Curiosity can be pursued anywhere.  Curiosity is like a muscle - use it or lose it. The more you open yourself to wondering about something, the more you find the world an interesting place.

We need more well-directed curiosity.  The great thing about curiosity is that it requires no particular preexisting expertise.  It only requires a desire to learn something new.  I believe that if we are not learning something new our minds are stagnating and even going backwards. Let's hear it, then,  for Curiosity.

p.s. Stay tuned over the coming months to Curiosity, the Mars Rover. Its landing on Mars eight months from now will be one of the most technically challenging landings ever attempted by a space craft. JPL has put together a really good animation of how they plan to get Curiosity on the surface.

Technologies R'Us

The Conservation of Energy is one of the fundamental laws of our physical universe. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can - and is - transformed continuously from one form to another.  Potential energy to kinetic energy. Heat to work. Work to motion. Energy moves constantly through our universe making the universe as we know it possible.

I sometimes think of technology in its broadest sense as a form of energy. While it gives the illusion of having been created through countless inventions, new technology always comes from a convergence of older technologies which make the new technology possible.  It is a flow, not an aggregation of static ideas. In the 18th Century, a new understanding of steam and other gases opened the door for the first steam engines to pump water from mine pits.  Coal powered not only the first steam engines but it also made possible the scientific fabrication of steel. Steel and the steam engine opened the door to manufacturing on an industrial scale.

In the 19th Century, iron and steel and the steam engine morphed into a revolutionary form of transportation - the railroad.  With the easy movement of goods and people, more trade evolved. The movement of goods and people became faster and cheaper. Costs dropped dramatically as manufacturing increased in scale. For the first time, almost everyone in the 19th Century owned at least something that was factory made.

Paralleling the advances in manufacturing and transportation came equal advances in communications, illumination, and motors - all based on a growing knowledge of electricity. The telegraph made communications across long distances virtually instantaneous. Eventually, transoceanic cables made the world a much smaller place.  As the century progressed, people wanted the electric lights, telephones, and electric street cars made possible through new technology. By 1900, the world was poised to explode on a wave of mass production facilitated by transportation, communication, and distribution networks.

The early parts of the the 20th Century were dominated by the emergence of the automobile.  The lure of being able to travel where you wanted when you wanted, free of the train and trolley schedules, was irresistible to anyone who could afford a car. New and better roads led to everything from suburban living to extended vacation travel across the country.  Mass consumption demanded a ready-made mass market which was created by raising consumer advertising to a virtual science.  Now, people commonly owned the products of technology - radios, refrigerators, washing machines, irons, and telephones. Not only did people buy these products but an ever-wider array of choices became available. There were products for people to buy not just for their function but as symbols of a rising status in the world.

The 20th Century unleashed people's feelings of autonomy. They could travel when they wanted, where they wanted. They could listen to any number of radio programs, choose the style of clothing that suited them best, and furnish their homes with a seemingly-endless array of consumer goods.  After World War II, new technologies and mass consumption kicked into yet a higher gear. Radio gave way to television. Live broadcasting was supplemented with video tapes and DVDs. A panoply of cable channels supplemented the major television networks. Music was unfettered from the home and car radio and became a more personal and portable form of entertainment through the Walkman and later the iPod. Electronics opened the floodgates to affordable information technologies starting with the personal computer which morphed into the internet and then to the wireless world of smart phones in an endless variety of models and capabilities.

We stand at the doorway of the 21st Century which will surely be the age of ubiquitous and constant information. Everything will communicate in some way with everything else. Information will wrap the planet in a garment of bits so thick that we will no longer remember what it was like to have to write a physical letter, or find a pay-phone, or do our taxes by hand and mail them at the post office (which may also disappear).

The advances of the last three centuries have been mind-boggling.  We have gone from a mostly agrarian world to a predominantly urban and connected culture.  But each advance has carried its own costs - its own Conservation of Good and Bad.  As people moved to the mill towns of the 18th century, they lost their independence and became dependent on the mill owners for a (usually poor) wage. The air became fouled with smoke and pollution. The density of housing with poor sanitation brought epidemics of disease. Eventually, of course, the worst of these ills of the mill towns started to be addressed - by new and better technology. Technologies moved on but so did the side effects.

In the 19th Century, more and more people gave up the farm for the factory, for what clearly seemed to be a better way of life. The route to prosperity was through the middle class with its better wages and better education for the children. More people worked for larger companies which, with the advent of the railroads, gave rise to the modern corporation. People were no longer just owners or laborers but occupied intermediate rungs on the corporate ladder.  Time became regulated by the clock to dictate everything from the hours of work to the schedules of the trains. The world became more networked with the sharing of stock prices by ticker tape and the creation of world time zones to unify travel and communication. Cities grew ever larger and more congested.

The 20th Century gave people a sense of autonomy while at the same time making them evermore interconnected and interdependent.  There were more choices of products but fewer choices on how to earn a living without being part of the interconnected web of commerce.  The population continued to grow and with it came more cars and traffic jams, more need for electricity and more air pollution. The world was both much richer and much more complex than ever before.

Now we face the Knowledge Age with only the slightest grasp of how pervasive and powerful it will become in our lives. We gain a sense of exponential connectivity while at the same time we face the specter of losing our privacy almost completely.  We will live in a world where our actions and intentions become the stuff of marketing research and directed advertising. Our children will never know what it was like to live in the Prewired World - and likely they would not choose to live there if they could.

We live in a world where we are becoming increasingly inseparable from the technology that we create and that surrounds us. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it should give us at least some pause for thought.  Can we control our technology or has it moved beyond our control into a stage of evolution that is almost biological in form?  Technologies now define us, define how we work and how we play.  We use communications technology ubiquitously. We social networker on Facebook, Google, and Twitter.  We are hooked to our iPhone even while we watch a movie in a theater. We drive and talk on our cell phones and think nothing of it.  Technologies make our everyday life possible. Do we know how many functions in our automobiles are now controlled by computers?  Digital electronics run our refrigerators and even our furnaces.  We have crossed the threshold and there is no going back.  But this is not a new phenomenon. The same was true a century ago - just to a lesser degree. We live in a world that is evermore shaped by our own hands and minds but that same technology is now shaping us.  We may no longer be masters of our own destiny.  Ready or not, Technologies R'Us.

Why Not Technology News?

Disclaimer:  After a glass of wine and watching the network news on television, I decided to have an "Andy Rooney Moment" and bitch.  (For those of you who don't know who Andy Rooney is, he's on CBS's 60 Minutes but you can get a sense of his style here.)

______________

If you want to find stories about what's new in science, just open almost any newspaper or magazine.  The New York Times has a whole section on Tuesdays.  Scientific American, Science, Nature, Discover, and a host of other media outlets have a constant parade of what's new in most scientific areas, including stories, blogs, Tweets, and Facebook listings.

But what if you are more interested in technology?  Well, if you are talking "hi-tech" - which is to say the web, cellphones, social networking, e-readers, or a host of other personal technology - you don't have much trouble finding out the latest news.  Everybody runs stories.  David Pogue in the NY Times is a big source for me but so is Gizmodo, Tech Crunch, CNET, and a boat load of other websites.

I find most of the hi-tech stuff interesting but not very inclusive.  If I want to know what's new in other technology areas (which includes virtually any area other than electrical engineering and computer science), I  have to do some digging.  Even Popular Science and Popular Mechanics come up short when it comes to the cutting-edge of new, non-silicon technology.  Why is that?  Why is science and hi-tech news so easy to come by yet other technology news so hard to find?  Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge any of these other areas their news streams.  People should know something about science and certainly most of the younger crowd wants to know what's the New New in wireless and personal tech.

But we seem to have hit the Yawn Threshold when it comes to other technologies.  It doesn't seem to matter whether they launch a Space Shuttle or complete an enormous bridge across the Colorado River (as they just did), you would be hard pressed to know anything like this is happening.  And yet, it is this very same technology that underpins so much of our lives.  You might think that Green Energy news would be everywhere but it gets buried under the deluge of social networking and political noise on the web.  Same goes for the fact that our economy is in shambles because we are losing our older technology base (read: manufacturing economy) that kept this country going for the last century.

I realize that this sounds a bit jaded, especially from a blogger who writes about the history of technology.  While I admit to being biased, I think that most people can find something of interest in the technology that makes the world they live in possible - even if it is only from the human interest side of the story.  Maybe you even want to protest against a technology but at least you might be better informed about it. And some positive news might just get some kid interested in a great career path.  I would love to see a front page headline in the major newspapers of this country with something like, "Largest Solar Installation in the World Goes Online."  But I'm not holding my breath.

______________

Post-Disclaimer:  When the wine imbibed is metabolized, a sense of calm returns... for better and for worse.

Of Science and Technology

I was reading the local paper this morning.  On Mondays it has a section on Science and Technology with current stories and even reviews of blogs that might be of interest.  This got me thinking about the ubiquitous phrase, "science and technology".  You see this phrase everywhere and you might believe it represents one big concept.  But science and technology are very, very different beasts.  My dictionary defines science as:

the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world.

The Latin root of the word, scire, means to know.  Science attempts to understand the world around us.  The goal is not to change that world.  Change is the domain of technology.  Again, my dictionary gives three definitions of the word technology:

the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry; the machinery and equipment developed from such scientific knowledge; and the branch of knowledge dealing with engineering and the applied sciences.

The word derives from the Greek, tekhne, which means craft.

Another layer in the confusion over the word technology is that it has come to mean computer, internet, or electronic gadget technology.  If you are interested in "tech", you must be into the world of the geeks.  Anything that is written under that banner is generally about some company in Silicon Valley or a new computer virus or the latest iPhone.  Those are cool but our broader understanding of technology and how it affects us every day is very limited if we just consider those types of stories.

No, the stories of the broader issues in technology are all over the newspaper, not just in the Technology section. Let me illustrate using today's (July 19, 2010) New York Times.  Let's start with BP.  The Gulf oil disaster has been in the headlines almost every day for three months.  Today's news is that the new cap is holding so well that BP might just leave it closed.  Interestingly, the government is less optimistic that this might happen. There is even a hint that leaving it closed lets BP off the hook for some civil damages because the true rate of the oil spill will never be known.

The story at its heart is one of technology. The story includes the following description:

The cap that was eventually used was designed and built more or less from scratch, although off-the-shelf valves and rams were used.  And as with any engineering project, particularly one being conducted by remotely operated submersibles a mile underwater, installation procedures had to be devised and practiced.

A second story details that many people in the Louisiana Cajun population are looking to leave the Gulf Coast because of the damage caused to the fishing industry by the oil spill (translation: failed technology).

Another front page story in today's Times talks about how job training programs are falling dismally short of getting people back to work.  Part of this story is simply that there are five people unemployed for every job vacancy.  No amount of training can fix that problem.  But the second part of the story is that the needs for training keep morphing as the jobs that do exist become ever more technical.

One example of a program that seems to be working is in my old backyard of Minneapolis.  The Hennepin County Technical College is offering retraining programs to shift people from the manufacturing jobs of the past (which included mainframe computers) to something that the Twin Cities is very strong in - medical devices.  The article quotes Richard Kelley, who oversees the Hennepin Tech program, as saying, "Nobody wants to see a pacemaker stamped, 'Made in China'".  Many of the jobs that are open but unfilled are skilled technology jobs.  This is the dilemma we face as we have outsourced lower-skilled manufacturing jobs to Asia and Latin America.

I could go on but I think you get the idea.  Technology stories are everywhere - they are just not the "High Tech" stories found on the business pages.

So back to where I began, the phrase "Science and Technology".  You see a lot of interesting articles about the latest discoveries in science but you see very little in the news that speaks to what is happening in technology beyond Silicon Valley (if I might use that term to capture our current definition of High Tech).  We need more news about the rest of the technology spectrum.  It impacts our daily lives in ways much deeper than whether you get a new iPhone.  The stories are there, indirectly at least, but you have to read between the lines to find them.  I would just like to see them given a little more visibility.

Maybe that's the job for this blog?

Sagan and the Symphony of Science

I came across a unique website via Discover Magazine's Discoblog, called the Symphony of Science.  A musician named John Boswell has put together a number of mashup videos on his website that use old science program footage, digital re-mixing, and auto-tuning software to transform spoken text into a sort-of singing.  One of the scientists he features prominently is Carl Sagan and his series, Cosmos, which I blogged about last year.  Other scientists who "sing" in his videos include Steven Hawking, David Attenborough, Neil deGrasee Tyson, Jacob Bronowski, Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynman, and many more.

Boswell got into this to try to combine his interest in electronica, music tools, and his love of science.  The results are very cool.  You can see his first (and most watched) video, A Glorius Dawn, below but click through to his website to watch the others.  They are all different, and all intriguing. Boswell deserves kudos for his creativity. Nicely done!

Sean Carroll and the Arrow of Time

Sean Carroll is a cosmologist at CalTech. He is also a gifted teacher.  I became aware of Carroll when my wife and I ordered a lecture series by him from the Teaching Company.  His course was entitled, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe.  In the 24 lectures of this course, Carroll explains why the "stuff" we can see in the universe is only five percent of what is thought to be there.  Twenty-five percent is Dark Matter, needed to explain gravitational effects, and seventy percent is Dark Energy, needed to explain the perpetual expansion of the universe.  I would recommend the course. Even though it is taught using layman's language, it is very detailed.

Carroll prepared that course in 2007.  Since that time, he has written a new book called From Eternity to Here: the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.  This book attempts to explain why time goes in only one direction.  "Well", you say.  "Duh?"  But it is not so obvious why time goes in one direction.  The fundamental laws of physics work with time going in either direction.  How can it be that we only get older?  Turns out, entropy has a whole lot to do with it.  Entropy is a measure of disorder and it can only get bigger.  Entropy explains why eggs turn into omelets but not the other way around.

You can see Carroll in action (and for free!) in a two-part video lecture he gave at the University of Sydney in December of last year.  Part One is here and you can see the link for Part Two on the right of that page. Each video lasts 30 minutes. If you like what you see, you can order his book from this link at Amazon or you can read the blog, Cosmic Variance, to which he contributes at Discover Magazine.  He also has his own website. Enjoy.

Solar Storms and Damage to the Communications Grid

I was interested to read over at the Discover Blog, 80 Beats, that NASA is going to be launching a new satellite next week tagged the Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO.  For all that is known about the solar system and the universe, surprisingly little is known about the engine of our own sun - specifically the deep causes for solar storms.  The SDO's mission is to take a very high resolution image of the sun every 60 seconds in order to provide visual clues to measurable electromagnetic behavior here on earth.  The hope is that eventually, NASA will be able to forecast solar storms.

One of the biggest storms ever observed occurred on Sept. 2, 1859.  The electromagnetic field was so strong that telegraphers operating between Boston and Portland, Maine were able to communicate without any electricity in the system except that generated by the solar storm.  They actually had to disconnect the batteries that normally powered the telegraph so as not to burn the batteries out.  I had never thought about the communications grid being vulnerable even in the days of the telegraph!

In 1989, a massive solar storm took out some of the power grids in the United States and Canada.  Last year, the National Academy of Sciences released a study report that estimated the damage to the power and communications grids from a solar surge the size of the 1859 storm at one trillion dollars.  The sun operates on an eleven-year sunspot cycle and reverses its magnetic poles every twenty-two years.  While the 1859 storm has been established to be the single largest event in the last 500 years, it is only a matter of time before another major solar storm erupts.

At least solar storms are a force of nature and while they can damage the grid, it is not the same as the damage from malicious hacking attacks.  Given the ever-increasing dependence on the grids, however, anything that can be done to harden them seems like a good investment.

Science Ideas to Consider

I put together a short video of some quotations that I like that have to do with science.  It works best if you let the video load about halfway before you begin watching it.  Hope you enjoy.

The Universe, in Awesome Color

The New York Times has a review of the book Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle, by Michael Benson.  This new book (which I have not seen) is reported to have some simply spectacular images that Benson has collected from the world's greatest observatories.  An accompanying slideshow on the Times site (with 16 of the images) can be seen here.  The image on this post (and part of the slideshow) of the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebulae is taken from the Hubble telescope.  This book review particularly caught my eye after I wrote about Hubble in one of my last posts.  The book is not about Edwin Hubble but it does give you a sense of the fascination that motivates those who look deep into the night sky. I highly recommend watching the slideshow to get some sense for the awesome beauty that can be found in our universe.

Edwin Hubble

My wife and I have been watching a Teaching Company lecture series entitled "Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe", taught by Sean Carroll.  It is a fascinating look into the makeup of the universe, of which only five percent is the stuff that is known to be visible anywhere.  Twenty-five percent is Dark Matter which can't be seen but which behaves like particles and exhibits a gravitational pull.  The other seventy percent is Dark Energy which does not behave as particles and is thought to be evenly distributed throughout the universe.  It is postulated to be there because it is the only way in which the behavior of the universe can be explained.

Carroll is a good teacher.  In his second lecture, he was talking about the expansion of the universe and the role that Edwin Hubble (1889 - 1953) played in providing data to show that this expansion was taking place. Hubble was able to demonstrate that the farther a galaxy was from any observation point (like the earth) the faster it was receding away from that point.  This is now called Hubble's Law.  It works no matter where you might stand in the universe.  If you are a long way from the earth, it is not that the intervening galaxies would be seen to be coming towards your point of observation.  They would be seen as receding even there.  It seems counter-intuitive, as is much of particle physics and cosmology.

My ears perked up a bit higher when Carroll was describing the path that Edwin Hubble took to become a world famous astronomer.  Turns out, he was a bright kid and a great high school athlete.  He excelled at track-and-field at the University of Chicago and set a high jump record while a student there.  He won a Rhodes Scholarship and went on to Oxford University where he first studied law and then switched his major to Spanish.  When he came back to the States, he taught Spanish, physics, and mathematics at the New Albany, Indiana High School before enlisting in the army in World War I.  Does this sound like the path to becoming a world renowned cosmologist?

After the war, Hubble returned to the University of Chicago to pursue what he had decided was going to be his career: astronomy.  He studied at the Yerkes Observatory at the University and after he received his Ph.D., he was invited to join the staff at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles.  He spent the rest of his career at Mt. Wilson.

There is hope for all of us late bloomers who can't quite figure out what we want to be when we grow up.  It took Hubble some time to figure out where he needed to be but when he did, he was extremely productive.  Hubble was not alone.  Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton were both accomplished artists in their first careers before finding later success in technology.  Henry Ford was a mechanic at the Detroit Edison.  Thomas Edison was a telegraph operator.  It would seem that a lot of creative people don't come into their own until they have passed through an incubation period of shorter or longer length.  What seems to be common among these people is that when they heard their muse, they followed it.  Maybe we would be better off as a society if more people left their dead-end jobs for more creative paths.  Certainly, Hubble didn't go directly from the high school classroom in Indiana to Mt. Wilson.  He needed education, and he got it at the University of Chicago.  So what if it takes a little retooling?

Most of us are not going to have a scientific law named after us or a satellite-based observatory named in our honor.  But that's not the point.  It seems to me that the point is to do what releases what is best in each of us.  The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, is quoted as having said, "Follow your bliss".  I think following your passion would do just as nicely.

Even Apollo Required Mundane Fixes

I wrote in my last blog about the new images of the moon which show the Apollo landing sites and even the astronauts, footprints on the moon. The photos also show the scientific experiments that were placed there to monitor the geophysical makeup of the moon. These experiments were collectively called the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (or ALSEP). Each Apollo mission carried a set of experiments but the mix of experiments was different on every flight. [The image to the left was from Apollo 16 and you can see the Lunar Rover in the background next to the Lunar Lander.]

I began working for Bendix Aerospace Systems Division in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1970, right after graduating from the University of Michigan. Bendix was the prime contractor for the ALSEP experiments. The Apollo 11 and 12 missions had already successfully landed on the moon by the time I joined Bendix. Shortly after I started, the Apollo 13 disaster occurred (April, 1970) and it set back subsequent missions by more than a year. I was involved in engineering efforts on all the subsequent Apollo science packages (14 through 17).

A little background about the experiments: ALSEP was designed to be a package of experiments that shared a common communication and power source. The Central Station housed all of the communications electronics and telemetry systems. It is the tall, gold structure in the photo below. The antenna for transmitting data is the pole-like object on top of the Central Station. The gold is actually metal-coated mylar-plastic film and it was used to control the thermal environment inside the Central Station. Keep in mind that the moon in the daytime is over 200 degrees F and it is -200 degrees F at night. That is a tough environment and controlling the temperature in the electronics in all of the experiments was a major challenge.



The little gray, finned object to the left and behind the Central Station is the Radio Thermal Generator or RTG. It is the power source for all of the experiments. Electricity is generated by converting the heat from a Plutonium-238 fuel cartridge inside the RTG. As an aside, one of the Apollo 12 astronauts said that he could feel the heat from the Plutonium cartridge all the way inside his space suit when he was loading the cartridge into the RTG. That's hot (in more ways than one)!

The silver disk-like object in the foreground is actually a lunar seismometer, part of something called the Passive Seismic Experiment or PSE (the program just loved acronyms). It was designed to measure "moonquakes". Actually, you are not looking at the seismometer but at the thermal shroud (think blanket) which covered the seismometer. The instrument was so sensitive that if it had been directly exposed to the lunar day and night, it would have "creaked" due to thermal expansion and contraction. Even with the thermal shroud, it still creaked a little and buggered up the data.

All of the experiments (and there are three more that are out of the picture) were connected to the Central Station by cables. You can just make these out in the photo as copper/gold-colored ribbons in the lunar soil. They really were ribbons, by the way, ribbons that were about three inches wide, each of which carried multiple wires.

By the time I got to Bendix, the system and the experiments had already been designed (the work started in 1966). Bendix was in the process of building the final instrument packages and testing them to make sure they were ready for their missions. As a young engineer, my job was to work on problems that came up from experiences on previous missions. One of those experiences happened on the Apollo 16 mission. Astronaut John Young was deploying some of the experiments when his boot became entangled in one of the flat-ribbon cables. With the bulk of his suit and the changed sensations of lunar gravity, he was completely unaware that he had snagged a cable. When he moved, he accidentally tore the cable out of the experiment (it was an experiment for measuring heat flow) and the experiment was wrecked. Several million dollars gone in an instant. You can see this happen in the movie below if you start watching around the 11:36 mark. (The whole movie tells the story of the Apollo 16 mission. It is worth watching.) [movie from Internet Archive]



I was at work the afternoon that the ALSEP deployment was being broadcast live from the moon. We were all in a conference room watching a television and we could see Young get tangled up in the cable and everyone in the room started yelling at the set as though Young could hear us. There was a palpable gasp that went up from the group when we saw the cable snap. We knew before Young did that it was not going to be repairable. It is just not possible to put a broken cable back together on the surface of the moon.

Not surprisingly, shortly after the mission, orders came down from NASA to look at ways to prevent this from happening again. Despite the best of planning, nobody had really thought about strengthening the cable connections. Each of us has tripped over an extension cord or laptop power cable sometime in our lives. Usually, a plug pops out of its receptacle but sometimes plugs can be damaged or broken. Same here. But there were no plugs to come undone (the cables were hardwired in place). The cable snapped. My job was to design a better cable strain relief that would withstand the impact of a skipping astronaut in full gear. We couldn't change the basic cables so we had to find a way to spread the load out. A combination of well-rounded mounting brackets and reinforcing fiber tapes seemed the best way to get the job done.

But how do you test something like this to know it will work? You can't go to the moon to do it. We rigged up a test system in the lab and enlisted our "test astronaut" to see he could break the cables in a deliberate accident. What you see in the first picture below is the ALSEP package of experiments (a non-flight model) in the form that it is stowed in the Lunar Lander and before it is unpacked. Attached to the front of the package is our redesigned test cable with a heavy lace to put around the test astronaut's leg. Yours Truly is standing with my back to the camera in the stripped shirt.



It didn't seem like a fair test to have the high friction between the bottom of the ALSEP package and the floor of the lab so we put the package on a greased plate to decrease the friction and more closely simulate the friction in the lunar dust.

The next photo shows the test in progress with the astronaut putting his full weight into the cable. Two assistants stood on either side of him to catch him if he fell. You can see the cable snap taut.



The last photo shows me examining the cable stress relief after the test. It worked; the cable was intact and fully functional. This wasn't the only testing but it was the most convincing. We retrofitted all of the cables on the Apollo 17 mission with the new strain reliefs. Of course, the astronauts were now extremely mindful of getting tangled in the cables and nothing untoward happened on that mission.



Complex missions like the Apollo Program were staffed by tens of thousands of engineers doing the same sort of unglamorous, day-to-day jobs like fixing cables. Nothing is perfectly designed the first time. Not every contingency can be planned for. (If you want to see the ultimate example of this, rent the movie Apollo 13). To tell the truth, many days were pretty mundane but I still feel proud of the fact that I was there and had a tiny part in the Apollo missions. We have so few things in life that command the kind of vision that the Apollo Program did. It brought out the best passions in so many people. As Georg Hegel, the German philosopher said, "We may affirm absolutely nothing great in the world that has been accomplished without passion." Apollo proved that to me. I wish there were a comparable challenge to stir the dreams of the next generation.

Postscript: The ALSEP packages went on sending back data until September 30, 1977 when for the reason of budget cuts, the experiments from all the flights were powered off to save costs on the earth-side monitoring station.

P.S.S. Today mark's the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing on the Apollo 11 mission.

Cosmos

Almost 30 years ago, a television series debuted which had a profound impact on our popular understanding of science, especially the science of astronomy. The series, Cosmos, was hosted by astronomer Carl Sagan. The series was the most widely-watched public television series in history until Ken Burns' series, The Civil War, was produced in the 1990’s. Cosmos is now available in its entirety (and for free) on Hulu.com.


[Image of Hulu video. If the video does not show up, click through to original post]

Despite its age, the series is still worth watching. The passage of time does date the film somewhat. The special effects are pre-Star Wars and the pacing is much slower than today’s quick-cut-editing television. But the writing is beautiful and the pace actually lets you contemplate what is being said.

Sagan, who died in 1996, reminds me a lot of Lewis Thomas, another lyrical scientist who wrote several wonderful books of essays on science including The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. Both men manage to convey that at the bottom of all we know there is still an awe-inspiring mystery that is capable of humbling us if only we will pause long enough. We need to look up at the stars or down at a flower at least once in awhile to stay connected to a bigger reality. Sagan said that we are made of “star-stuff”, the very atoms that were once parts of stars are now what make up our bodies and everything else in the universe. As we get bogged down in the daily grind of the 24-hour news cycle about the latest economic disaster or the Celeb-of-the-Week Club, we would do well to remember that “This too will pass”, as will the stars themselves. But the mystery will remain.

Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilisation and perhaps our species as well.
- Carl Sagan

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Great Leaders Are Made, Not Born

Recently, I watched a riveting documentary on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer on Public Television's American Experience. The program covered the span of Oppenheimer's life but focused in particular on what the film-maker termed the Security Clearance Trial in 1954. Oppenheimer's reputation and sense of self-worth were destroyed by the verdict of that trial (really more a hearing than a true trial). But the program made clear that the verdict had been decided in advance by Oppenheimer's enemies. In particular, Lewis Strauss, a powerful industrialist and head of the Atomic Energy Commission who wanted to silence Oppenheimer for taking positions that Strauss opposed. Strauss believed in power, the power over men and the power over nations. He wanted a nuclear arsenal so vast that the Soviets would never dare use their own nuclear weapons. As a result of the resulting arms race, the U.S. went from possessing a few hundred atomic weapons in the 1950's to over 70,000 thermo-nuclear weapons at the peak of the arms race in the 1980's. Oppenheimer was arguing for limitations on these weapons which clearly had the power to destroy humanity.

While Oppenheimer was the victim of the vendetta to destroy his reputation, the film makes it clear that he was at best a difficult person to live with. Brilliant and introverted, he used his intellect to brow-beat his students and other physicists who didn't measure up to his standards. Both before World War II and after the war, he was arrogant and aloof, a person who was never comfortable with himself and covered up that lack of self-esteem through his arrogance.

But during World War II, Oppenheimer, who had never managed anything, not even an academic department, was given the job of leading the scientific team of the Manhattan Project. He absolutely excelled in this herculean management task. How was that possible? How could someone who could barely get along with people, who was disliked and who distanced himself from others change almost completely into a team player, a cheerleader, a man who could add good suggestions to solving almost any problem, a man who even the academic prima donnas (excepting Edward Teller) could work for?

The film doesn't answer that question but it gives some hints at the answer. Oppenheimer knew that the Manhattan Project and his role in it were going to change the course of history. His idealism called forth his best qualities to lead a team to produce an atomic bomb before the Germans did so. He was the intellectual equal of the brilliant people whom he managed - and they knew it.

Some time ago, I read an interesting book by Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman entitled Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration. Bennis and Biederman identified what they called Great Groups, teams of people that came together and accomplished extraordinary things. The original Apple Computer team was one example. So was the Skunkworks at Lockheed Aircraft. Another of their examples was the Manhattan Project. Here are the distilled take-home lessons from the book:

1. Greatness starts with superb people.
2. Great Groups and great leaders create each other.
3. Every Great Group has a strong leader.
4. The leaders of Great Groups love talent and know where to find it.
5. Great Groups are full of talented people who can work together.
6. Great Groups think they are on a mission of such importance it is almost a mission from God.
7. Every Great Group is an island – but an island with a bridge to the mainland.
8. Great Groups see themselves as winning underdogs. They believe they are up against either a real or imagined establishment.
9. Great Groups always have an enemy. The enemy may be imaginary but it builds a sense of cohesion within the group.
10. People in Great Groups have blinders on.
11. Great Groups are optimistic, not realistic.
12. In Great Groups the right person has the right job.
13. The leaders of Great Groups give them what they need and free them from the rest.
14. Great Groups accomplish what they set out to do.

Perhaps the biggest lesson that Bennis and Biederman outlined was that great work is its own reward. The authors also highlight the fact that by their very nature Great Groups are time limited. When the job is done, the group has no choice but to fragment and the people move on.

What does this have to do with the film on Oppenheimer? I think it reinforces some of the messages from the book. Oppenheimer was a superb intellect. His own capacity as a great leader was created even as he himself created the Project.

The real leader of the Manhatten Project was General Leslie Groves. He especially embodied principle number 13: he gave Oppenheimer and his team what they needed and got everything else out of the way for them.

Maybe the bottom line on this for me is that you can never really be certain what someone is capable of doing. The circumstances, the other members of the team, the mission of the group all interact to produce sometimes surprising and, more rarely, astounding results. I take some comfort from this. Maybe in the right circumstances, the rest of us can also rise to greatness.

Eureka in the Hot Tub

This sounds almost impossible to believe but I had an Archimedes-like "Eureka Moment" the other night. And it even had to do with the displacement of water in a bath. Let me explain. I have been struggling for months to figure out why the venturi jets in our Florida home's hot tub work intermittently. Oh, the jets draw water all right but they don't pull in the air stream that makes for those refreshing bubbles. I have been asking everybody who seems to know anything about it why it doesn't seem to work. Or to be more exact, works only at times.

One way we've gotten the jets to bubble is to pull out the filter cartridge which is in line with the pump feeding the hot tub. When the filter is out, the pressure drop in the line goes down and the velocity of the water moving through the pipe goes up. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I remember Bernoulli's Equation which states that the pressure varies inversely with the square of the fluid velocity. Speed up the fluid and the pressure drops enough to suck air into the jets. The trouble with this is rather obvious. Who wants to go out and pull out the filter every time you want to use the hot tub?

A really smart pool guy came by the other day and looked over the situation. He looked at the location of the venturi air tube that comes out of the tub and diagnosed it as having been installed too low, hence the amount of water that had to be pulled through the tube to bring in air was too high. But the tube is set in concrete, not easy to move.

So back to my Eureka Moment. My son and I got in the tub the other night to try to puzzle out the problem. I displaced my volume of water out the overflow trough into the pool. The water surface level didn't change. But when I got out to get a towel I took my volume out of the pool, the water level dropped, and, "Eureka!", the bubbles started. The lower water level was just enough to pull the air into the venturi air tube. We were ecstatic to see that the tub worked and, wonder of wonders, Bernoulli's Equation told us why. The pressure is not only inversely related to the velocity of the fluid, it is also inversely related to the height of the column of water in the air tube. Lower the hot tub surface and the height goes down increasing the vacuum pressure to suck open the air tube. We finally understood how the system worked and with that knowledge we can make it work consistently.

So what did I learn out of all this? Observe carefully and make notes on what you observe. Look for correlations between changing one variable and the response in another parameter. Try to understand the physics. Hypothesize about what is happening but always be open to the happy accident, the Eureka.

Archimedes would surely have been proud of us. And Bernoulli, too. Centuries have passed since these two intellectual giants showed the way. There is something very comforting in seeing that the laws of physics are as applicable today as they were then.

I gotta run. The hot tub is calling.