Inspired By Amba

Amba wrote this a while back on her blog Ambiance:

Matter is a corrective. Matter exerts a resistance, a counterforce, like wood to a carving knife or water to a ship’s keel or air under an airplane’s wings, that paradoxically enables us to get somewhere by making it more difficult. link

To which I responded:

OK, this is way off-topic and perhaps I should write it as another “inspired-by-Amba” blogpost, but I had to mention two connections this triggered for me. The first was the old-fashioned way that nations used to settled trade imbalances: there might be trade exchanges in one direction: goods or services for example. At the end of the day, there would be a reckoning and something like gold would flow in the other direction. In this way gold, having gravitas, kept thing[s] grounded. 

The second was the way chemical reactions occur. Chemistry is valence electrons exchanging and rearranging. The nuclei hardly change at all (unless we’re talking nuclear chemistry). Anyways, electrons, being flighty and fleet, are forever waiting around for the heavier nuclei to get into the right configurations for exchange. When the laggard atoms finally are…zip…the electrons are already there like magic. link

She responded:

Anyways, electrons, being flighty and fleet, are forever waiting around for the heavier nuclei to get into the right configurations for exchange. When the laggard atoms finally are…zip…the electrons are already there like magic. 

That is totally what it’s like to write, or perhaps to create in any medium. You have to do the heavy, lumbering work of getting yourself properly aligned, then–inspiration is there. link 

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For too long I've behaved like water or electricity -- always seeking the path of least resistance. If I wish to channel my thoughts -- to steer them in a meaningful direction-- I must also do the work of building the embankments to contain them. I'll have to move a few atoms. I've done this before and so am no stranger.

Ouroboros For Our Times

Frederick Soddy was fascinated with circles but also with alchemy; he related circles to his discovery of the natural transmutation of elements. Link

Through alchemy, Soddy became familiar with Οὐροβόρος ouroboros, the mythological symbol of the serpent eating its own tail. Ouroboros was also August Kekulé's inspiration for the structure of benzene, a generation before Soddy:

I may have been thinking similar thoughts when I tried to describe the circularity of political extremes and the chemical elements here. Whatever. Consider the following sketch an explicit update--ouroboros for our times--showing the demographic bulge of wealth and talent that must somehow transfer to the next generation (I should make it into an animated flip book).

Ouroboros For Our Times (click to enlarge)
Ball Point Pen on 8 1/2" x 11" white copier paper

"The Cause of Death is the Envy of Entropy"

Annie Gottlieb's ambivalent insight stuck with me--that's why I marked it as a favorite on Twitter.

But what is the "envy of entropy"?  Perhaps it's the moment--or a series of moments when the struggle to stay together and mount life's challenges is lost. Life is endergonic and physical death is chaotic and disorderly--entropy.  Letting chaos ensue by letting go is the "envy of entropy."

Amba Schooled Me (again)

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859)

While on the topic, the man who built the SS Great Eastern (and the Great Western before her) was Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  There he is, pictured above, in a photo which might have stoked the rage and scorn of Dickensian socialists. Yet today, Brunel ranks highly in polls of "Greatest Britons."

I put this here to celebrate another wealth maker and also to note how Brunel exploited something which Amba schooled me on a few months ago: Surface area to volume ratio.  As a shipbuilder, Brunel understood that the carrying capacity of a ship increases by volume, while the water resistance (friction) only increases with the submerged area of its dimensions. This meant that large ships were intrinsically more fuel efficient, which was very important for long voyages across the Atlantic.

Taking the Piss out of Vitalism



Friedrich Wöhler (1800-1882)

The notion that matter from living beings essentially differs from matter derived from non-living sources used to be called vitalism. Vestiges still remain. Historically, the terms "organic" and "inorganic" delineated the chemistry of life from the chemistry of inanimate matter. Over time, "organic chemistry" morphed into the generic chemistry of carbon and, within that genus, biochemistry came to mean the chemistry of living things. This left "inorganic chemistry" to cover the chemistries of every other element. That is more or less the state of things today. Biologists have encroached on biochemistry with molecular biology, bringing along their cellular frame of reference.

We credit Friedrich Wöhler, a 19th century German chemist, with undoing the notion of vitalism in chemistry. He synthesized urea, which had only ever been isolated from urine. The whole story is beautifully retold here. As part of an Internet wager, I tracked down the original letter from Wöhler to his erstwhile mentor, Professor Jakob Berzelius; I partially translated it from German:

Berlin, February 22, 1828

Dear Professor!

Although I surely hope that my letter of January 22nd and the post-script from February 2nd have arrived, I live every day, or rather every hour with the anxious hope to get a letter from you. I wanted to wait to write again but I cannot, so to say, "hold my chemical water" and must say that I can make urea without the use of kidneys or even an animal, whether it be human or canine. Ammonium cyanate is urea. [1]

Wöhler went on to describe how natural urea from urine, Pisse-Harnstoff, was the same as artificial urea.  He then ended with a possible "out" for the adherents to vitalism:

This artificial formation of urea--can it be an example of forming an organic substance from inorganic materials? It is remarkable that cyanic acid (and ammonia) are originally produced from an organic substance, and a natural philosopher would say that both come from an animal carbon, and from the resulting formed cyanic compounds, the organic has not yet disappeared, and therefore an organic body is produced yet again. 

Your Wöhler.

How Wöhler took the piss out of vitalism (so to speak) is a nice example of what T. H. Huxley meant when he later wrote:

The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

I got into a friendly wager over on Twitter after I discovered that both Wöhler and Huxley were credited with that pithy saying.

I tweeted: Who wrote "The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."?

"T.H. Huxley" responded StarlessTwit

Not so fast I responded: "That's what the Internets would have you believe but there is this."  The link goes to a Wiki link crediting Wöhler with the saying.

I wagered that Wöhler had said it originally and that Huxley had been miscredited: link

That's when amba, the fact checker, weighed in, citing original source: "sorry to disappoint"

I can't finding anything close to what Huxley said in the original letters between Wöhler and Berzelius.  Wiki is wrong on this count.

Never bet against amba.

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[1] Wöhler treated cyanic acid, HOCN, with aqueous ammonia and generated ammonium cyanate, NH₄CNO. Ammonium cyanate is unstable and spontaneously rearranges to the more stable urea in situ:

Inspired By Amba

Amba wrote here:

There is a fascinating fundamental disagreement here about what is courage and what is cowardice. What is defending our civilization and what is betraying it. The views are diametrically, 180 degrees opposed. And in some crazy way they chase each other in a circle, like a snake swallowing its own tail.

There is the irony of defending an open society by closing it.

But there is also the irony of being so tolerant you tolerate intolerance.

Meditate on that pair for a while.

OK, imagine a line segment having at each end an opposite charge. Along the line between the two ends is a "continuum" with neutrality in the middle.*
It might look something like this:

The views are diametrically, 180 degrees opposed.

Political opposites supposedly repel each other, but suppose that just as in nature, opposites actually attract. They attract but never merge with each other, like two oppositely charged ions: Na⁺ and Cl^-.

A political analogy could be like the "attraction" between fascism and communism along the border between Germany and Russia in WW II. But in that case, the attraction was an action-reaction phenomenon. 

Now suppose that the two ends begin to attract each other, bending the line into a circle trying to meet. We have the makings of: 

The views are diametrically, 180 degrees opposed. And in some crazy way they chase each other in a circle, like a snake swallowing its own tail.

                

The more neutral elements along the continuum between the two extrema are not directly involved in the polarized attraction, yet they "feel" the strain of the curvature.

There is the irony of defending an open society by closing it.

The political spectrum is closing up on itself. Perhaps it's just a reflexive defense posture but I sincerely doubt such polarized "circling of the wagons" is unprecedented. It's been a while since we've had something truly unprecedented and I doubt this is it--yet. Anyways the circle is just a metaphor.

But there is also the irony of being so tolerant you tolerate intolerance.

I hear this mostly from those who feel uncomfortable being "polarized" by the extremes at one end or the other. They are the neutral ones, the "covalent" elements.* In the circle scheme they are around the ring from, and approximately equidistant away from, the polarized heads, yet they feel the strain.  Perhaps the irony comes from being so far removed. As the Dutch learned, there's nothing good about tolerating intolerance.

The polarized ends of the spectrum are actually surrounded by smaller, oppositely charged entities:

 
A coterie of independent detractors surrounds each extreme. They serve an important purpose: they neutralize some of the raw charge of the extreme. They also prevent direct and destructive collisions and arcing between the polarized ends. They are part of free speech and they ultimately help to unbend the spectrum, to relax it back to a more linear shape.
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*The spectrum model is analogous to a periodic row of elements with lithium and fluorine being the two extrema and the covalent elements B, C, N lying in between. link [Fixed the link]

I am connascent with Mad Men

There is a very brief close-up in Season 1, Episode 1 of Mad Men of a calendar dated March 1960 which is my birth month/year (linkage). I am connascent with the storyline of this TV show.  Connascent was my response to a word challenge posed by amba over here and is supposed to convey the notion of "being born at the same time" in a historical sense.

Most of the characters in Mad Men already have quite a few years on them in 1960.  That explains why I haven't found anyone to identify with yet. I mean, some of the characters remotely resemble some of the grownup people I recall from back then. But growing up in the backwater of Madison and semi-rural Wisconsin is a far cry from Manhattan. Maybe I should start looking at some of the kids (i.e., baby Gene) for self identity. Maybe I should give it up. My recollections of 1965 are being around lots and lots of other kids.  I'm not getting that feeling from Mad Men.

If you don't follow Twitter you should do it just to follow the Mad Men "live-tweeting" remarks on Sunday nights by @vbspurs and @kngfish.