A Nerds who Read Book Review by Michael Isenberg.
I have a longstanding complaint about science education.
When I was learning physics as an undergraduate, and during the first year or so of graduate school, the lectures only covered what, for lack of a better term, could be called settled science (Yeah, I get that some of you object to that term. But keep reading and it will be clear what I mean.) One didn't get a sense of how messy the actual sausage-making was—the false starts, the incomplete information, the unpredictable flashes of insight, the dead ends, the egos, the politics, the waits for time on the equipment, the perennial funding crises—students saw very little of this until they were well into graduate school and began their thesis research. Yes, there were undergraduate research projects, but they weren’t quite the same.
Perhaps it has to be this way. Most sciences require considerable grounding in the basics before students are ready to do productive work. But the flipside is that they don't get a sense of what the day to day pursuit of science is actually like until they have committed five or six years to it.
The general public has a similarly warped view of science, thanks to a failure to understand this paradox: that even though science eventually gets to a fair level of certainty, there’s a great deal of uncertainty and questioning along the way. We see this when non-scientists weigh in on the global warming debate. One side focuses only on the holy "certainty" of the end result, and refuses to question anything. The other side focuses only on the questioning, and refuses to believe anything. Neither really understands how science works.
The book takes its title from a conversation the author had with legendary physicist Richard Feynman in the early 1970s. Steinhardt, a Cal Tech undergraduate at that time, was presenting a formula for the motion of a Super Ball. The equation predicted that if the ball were dropped with just the right spin, it would bounce of the floor at a nearly horizontal angle.
“That’s impossible!” Feynman declared.
Steinhardt produced a Super Ball and dropped it with the required spin. In spite of Feynman’s skepticism, it behaved exactly as predicted. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The incident launched Steinhardt on a lifetime of thinking about the word impossible. “I had learned early on to pay close attention whenever an idea is dismissed as ‘impossible,’” he writes.
Most of the time, scientists are referring to something that is truly out of the question, like violating the conservation of energy or creating a perpetual motion machine. It never makes sense to pursue those kinds of ideas. But sometimes, an idea is judged to be “impossible” based on assumptions that could be violated under certain circumstances that have never been considered before. I call that the second kind of impossible. If one can expose the underlying assumptions and find a long-overlooked loophole, the second kind of impossible is a potential gold mine that can offer a scientist the rare opportunity, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to make a transformational discovery.
Steinhardt would hear that word “impossible” from Feynman again, and once again it was the second kind of impossible. The year was 1985 and Steinhardt, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had travelled back to his old alma mater to present his theory of quasi-periodic crystals, or “quasicrystals” for short. This previously unknown form of matter demonstrated symmetries that were, well, impossible, according to the laws of crystallography developed in the 18th and 19th centuries by René Just Haüy and Auguste Bravais. It is the story of quasi-crystals that Steinhardt sets out to tell in his book.
The book is divided into three parts, each with its unique character. The first, “Making the Impossible Possible,” tells the story of how a computer model of a rapidly cooled solid showed the symmetry of an icosahedron—the shape of a Dungeons and Dragons die, something “impossible” under the Haüy and Bravais laws. This set Steinhardt and his graduate student Dov Levine on the path that would eventually lead to a theoretical model of quasicrystals. Simultaneously, Dan Shechtman, of the Technion in Israel, discovered an actual, manmade quasicrystal. “Making the Impossible Possible” is the most scientifically challenging part of the book, with many diagrams of crystal structures, diffraction patterns, and Penrose tiles.
It only took about five years to develop the theory of quasicrystals, discover them in a laboratory, and get them accepted by the scientific community. But Steinhardt wanted to take the investigation one step further. He wanted to find quasicrystals in nature. And that would take another thirty years.
The second part of the book, “The Quest Begins,” reads more like a detective or a spy novel than a scientific text. In it, Steinhardt tells the story of a quasicrystal that was found in the collection of the University of Florence’s Natural History Museum. Steinhardt, somewhat prematurely, submitted a paper to the journal Science claiming it was naturally-occurring. When subsequently, objections are raised, he must race against the clock on an international quest to find the origin of the Florence crystal before the publication date, or face the agonizing decision of whether to withdraw the paper.
Along the way we meet many colorful characters, such as Luca Bindi, head of the Department of Mineralogy at the Florence museum. Bindi has an amazing intuition for which crystals are most worthy of study, and an uncanny knack for unexpectedly pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat, earning for himself the title as L’Uomo dei Miracoli—the Miracle Man. Not everyone Steinhardt runs across is so helpful however. For example, Steinhardt claims that Leonid Razin, who had been director of Russia’s Platinum Institute during the old Evil Empire days, demands a hefty bribe before he would say anything—and his old ties to the KGB may just still be lethal.
In one passage, about presenting the project to Ed Stolper, geologist at CalTech, Steinhardt really gives us a sense of the difference between how science appears when you study it in the classroom, and how it appears when you're in the middle of it, and in particular, the human element. It was a high stakes meeting. Stolper carried a lot of weight with some of the senior members of Steinhardt’s "red team"—who would probably bail in the face of a negative review from him.
My pent-up anxiety was slowly melting away as I listened to Ed. It is always hard for me to explain to my university students how difficult it is for a scientist, even an established scientist such as myself, to challenge conventional wisdom. Everything always appears to be simple to others in retrospect. They lose sight of the fact that making scientific progress is always a struggle that requires a great deal of personal endurance. There is a huge amount of peer pressure to conform. For example, after Luca and I suggested that our sample of metallic aluminum might be of natural origin, which was generally thought to be impossible at the time, we were subjected to more than a year of skepticism and withering criticism from certain experts, including our own colleagues on the red team. It had not been easy. The negative comments were sometimes so harsh that the two of us were left dispirited. But work is a great coping mechanism. We kept plowing ahead, incrementally gathering additional evidence to test our thesis. After fourteen months of hard work, it was greatly satisfying for me to hear Ed validate our efforts.
After a series of twists and turns, Steinhardt eventually learns that the Florence sample came from a remote region of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The third part of the book “Kamchatka or Bust” is an adventure story, as Steinhardt and his team travel there to obtain more samples, in the hopes of learning just how nature managed to create such an unusual substance, and whether it was formed deep in the bowels of the earth, or fell from the skies in a meteorite. As they travel across the tundra and up into the mountains in their two “Behemoths”—vehicles that resemble a trailer atop of tank treads—they encounter desolate but beautiful landscapes, fierce hordes of mosquitoes, deadly Kamchatka brown bears, spectacular rainbows, blinding storms, one case of hypothermia, heaps of fresh salmon and caviar, and gallons of vodka.
Now that's how you do science.
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Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
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