stickmaker | JOHT: Santayana Was Right

The Joy of High Tech

Rodford Edmiston

Being the occasionally interesting ramblings of a major-league technophile.

Please note that while I am an engineer (BSCE) and do my research, I am not a professional in this field. Do not take anything here as gospel; check the facts I give. If you find a mistake, please let me know about it.

Santayana Was Right

(Or: Never Throw Anything Away, Including Ideas)

George Santayana wrote in Reason in Common Sense "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." This is oh, so true.

The Greek concept of the music of the spheres is often misunderstood. While some ancient Greeks may, indeed, have thought of literal musical tones when considering the concept, the basic idea was that there were mathematical, harmonic relationships between the movements of heavenly bodies. Much as there were mathematical, harmonic relationships between the strings of an instrument. They didn't have good enough observations - being limited to unaided vision and some fairly simple angle-measuring instruments - to take the idea much further than that. However, we have better tools, now. Early modern astronomers noted there was, indeed, a mathematical relationship between planetary orbits.

In school you (hopefully) learned of the Titius-Bode Law, named after two men who independently and at roughly the same time derived it. This gives a mathematical relationship between planetary orbits, even including the asteroid belt and Uranus and (to a lesser extent) Neptune. The asteroids and outer two gas giants weren't even known in antiquity. There were some recorded observations of Uranus, but it moves so slowly it was thought back then to be a star. (One reason people questioned Pluto's status as a planet, right from the announcement of its discovery, is that it doesn't fit the equation. Neptune isn't a great fit, either, but it's a lot closer to the law than Pluto is.) This "law" (actually more a rule of thumb) has been around for centuries, and many experts thought it was just some cosmic coincidence... like the way the continents appear to fit together on maps. However, modern analysis of planetary orbits (and the average orbit of bodies in the asteroid belt) shows they are due to a complex gravitational resonances. Because of these dynamic interactions, the planets (primarily Jupiter) pumped each other into mutually resonant - and stable - orbits. Producing a - if you'll pardon the expression - harmonious arrangement. Oh, and the continents appear to fit together because they used to be together.

As for Neptune, later analyses show it is in resonance with the other planets, it's just not quite the resonance predicted by the Titius-Bode Law. This world likely suffered a massive collision which knocked it out of the standard resonance at some time in the distant past. Much as Uranus was knocked on its side by an impact. (Its rotational axis almost points at the Sun, actually at 97.77 degrees from the plane of the ecliptic, so Uranus in a sense rolls around on its orbital path.)

Now, about those continents... As soon as the first good maps of the world became available people noticed that some continental shorelines were mirror images of others. There was a great deal of speculation and even argument about this. Perhaps continents literally mirrored their opposite numbers across the vast oceans. Many wondered if the continents might float on the sea, somehow, and actually had been together in the past.

Of course, as science progressed both of those concepts and many others which attempted to explain the "jigsaw puzzle" feature of the continents were deemed invalid. The consensus eventually ruled that the shapes - which were far from precise on any scale, and became less so the smaller one went - were simply coincidences. Though if you compared continental shelves instead of the parts above water the fit was better...

They aren't coincidences. Recognizing this, and understanding the reason behind the "jigsaw puzzle fit" of the continents led to a revolution in not only geology but planetology. We now know, pretty well, why the Earth is the way it is (vast crustal plates of relatively light material float on a dense ocean of molten rock, slowly moving around due to currents in the fluid) and how other rocky planets are similar and different. Both Venus and Mars are too small for plate tectonic movement - at least now; they could have had it in the past - even though both have cores hot enough to produce volcanoes. One reason Olympus Mons on Mars is so huge is that the crust is fixed in place; the plume which created that monstrous volcano keeps feeding it, instead of the volcano moving away and others being created in a chain, as happens with the Hawaiian Islands and Yellowstone.

In his book Ignition: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants Dr. John D. Clark repeatedly laments that young propellant techs and engineers are so ignorant of the history of their own profession that they repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. One example he cited was a guy who went out of his way to order plain red fuming nitric acid, because he didn't know what the I in IRFNA meant. He then wondered why his acid turned green and the drum began to build up a layer of noxious sludge in the bottom.

That letter stands for "Inhibited." IRFNA has a tiny amount of a fluorine compound added, for the purpose of producing an impermeable fluoride coating on the metals the IRFNA touches, which prevents the acid from attacking the drum or plumbing. This has a negligible effect on performance but keeps the acid from ruining itself. Or its container. Or the guy you sent to move the drum, which was so corroded on the inside that it burst.

Dr. Clark also reports on repeatedly seeing some young turk have a brilliant idea and run with it without bothering to check the literature first. Worse, neither do their supervisors. There follows an expenditure of effort and money leading to grudging acknowledgement that the idea just doesn't quite work. At which point someone taps them on the shoulder and pointedly asks why they wasted so much money and time and money and effort and money duplicating work from the Fifties. Besides, the solution to the "insoluble" problem they wasted all that time (And Money!) on was discovered in the Sixties, and they didn't even find that!

Moving on to the ills that flesh is heir to, phages were an early scientific attempt to deal with infections. These are the "ad infinitum" bugs which feed on dangerous bacteria. The problem is finding something which will eat, say, staphylococcus but not you. Antibiotics presented a much more practical method of disease control. These use natural substances - extracted and purified - or artificially designed similar compounds to directly attack some metabolic pathway used by the offending organism but not us.

Unfortunately, living things evolve. Today there are many strains of dangerous bacteria which have developed defenses against some antibiotics, and are already working on others. Worse, because of a phenomenon known as conjugation - by which bacteria exchange DNA - this developed resistance can spread rapidly. Phages are coming back into vogue, since they - hopefully - will evolve as fast as the things they feed on.

Indeed, many uses of living organisms in the treatment of certain health problems are seeing renewed application. Maggots can remove dead tissue while leaving the healthy stuff untouched, working far more precisely than a surgeon's knife. Leaches aid in limb transplants, removing excess blood and improving blood flow.

On Star Trek: Enterprise Dr. Flox and his methods may have occasionally been played for laughs, but he was definitely on to something.

The cause of most peptic ulcers is Helicobacter pylori. The problem is, most doctors refused to accept this until very recently. John Lykoudis, a general practitioner in Greece, treated patients for peptic ulcer disease with antibiotics, beginning in 1958. More recently, Helicobacter pylori was independently identified in 1982 by two Australian scientists, Robin Warren and Barry J. Marshall, as a causative factor for ulcers. The medical profession took some convincing, but eventually this cause was accepted, and treatment changed. Today such ulcers give far less trouble when properly treated than they used to.

Part of the reason for this stubbornness is that the previously used treatment for ulcers worked! Just not very well... Said treatment included doses of pink bismuth. It turns out, Helicobacter pylori is adversely affected by pink bismuth (aka bismuth subsalicylate)! Something which I believe was known back in the Thirties, though I haven't been able to verify this.

Of course, previous assumptions should never simply be either accepted or rejected as is, but rather like all assumptions they should be tested... though even then with knowledge of the past to provide context.

Arthur C. Clark was far from the first scientist to propose using electronic circuitry to generate sound waves to cancel existing sounds. As he mentioned in one of his White Hart stories that wouldn't actually work, though not for the reason in the story. One of the Rick Brant Science-Adventure novels (The Whispering Box Mystery) actually was closer to right, with the two equal but opposite waves - pure tones in both cases, actually - in the story creating a harmonic much lower in frequency. (In the book, since both devices were producing rather powerful sounds the harmonic was almost deafening.) The biggest problem is one of scale, in both distance and time. Sound travels relatively slowly even on the scale of a large room. Active sound cancellation of variable sounds in a large volume simply can't work in any sort of practical way. So, those knowledgeable about the matter generally labelled the concept as a clever idea which would only work in specific, narrow circumstances. Such as when you know the source you want to cancel is a pure tone and you have that frequency.

Today you can use sound-canceling headphones to reduce or eliminate any steady sound. Not because the laws of physics have changed, and only partly due to smaller, faster electronics. The main reason is simply that these devices apply the concept in a different way; directly at the ears. You're countering the sounds at your ears, instead of trying to block a whole room.

You'd think, with the Internet and everything, that doing a basic check of previous art would be the second step, right after having the idea. However, most people today seem to have no more inclination to do this than folks did in the past. Let's just hope some wise ones continue to do so.