"We Drove That Car As Far As We Could, Abandoned It Out West"

In 1993 I moved back to America from Europe to get married. I had been living there for three years with my girlfriend, but she had tired of Europe and wanted to come back.  If I'd had my druthers, I would have stayed there. But I was in love and so I came back too.

When we married, her parents gave us $2000 and we decided to buy our first car together. We had each owned cars before, but we had sold them before moving to Europe where we didn't need them. We needed one in America. Since we couldn't afford reliability, we decided on promise instead. Older restored American cars had caught my eye but they were still out of our price range and we knew we'd have to compromise. And compromise we did. A newspaper ad (this was 1994--no craigslist) offered a 1963 Ford Thunderbird in Greeley, CO. We made an appointment and went to see it.

The car was over 30 years old then but had only had two owners. It had been stored in a barn for years, but showed lots of sun damage. I didn't care. That's what project cars are for. Thinking back, what must have been going through my head was that I could blend ingenuity and curiosity with need. Plus I carried the absurd notion that I was helping fix-up a part of America's past.

The seller got the car started and that was enough proof for me that it still had life. Prophetically, the car made it home the 30 miles or so--but just an hour later it had two flat tires. We took it to a local shop the next day and got four new tires all around--the tire guy saved us the best looking old one as a spare. We figured new tires on a 30-year old car was a reasonable investment.

Now the 1963 Thunderbird was a nice design. Here is what ours might have looked like new:

Detroit stylists had conceived the design as a convertible. Of course ours was a hardtop. but I didn't mind so much. Colorado wasn't exactly convertible weather much of the year. The one thing I was wary of was rust. Thankfully, Colorado doesn't salt their roads and the car checked out free of rust.

After the tires, the next item I deemed essential was the windshield washer reservoir (later, I found that virtually all the plastic parts--moving or not--had deteriorated and need replacing. In those days, the washer reservoir was essentially a bladder under the hood off to the side. A small "aquarium pump" sent fluid to the nozzles which squirted the windshield. Those were the early days of Internet marketing and I was pleased when I found a vendor in Arizona who sold remakes of the vinyl originals. I ended up sending them quite a bit of money over the years. The new bag looked like this:

That shiny new accessory on the dirty old Bird looked like a Fendi bag on a bag lady. Of course I also had to replace the little electric pump as well. I spent that spring and summer fixing all kinds of little things throughout the car.  I bought the wiring diagram (a factory schematic) and later on -- a shop manual. I replaced a power window motor and its switch, the cigar lighter—not a cigarette lighter—the 1963 Thunderbird was a gentleman's car afterall. I even bought a replica owner's manual to keep in the glove box. I was stylin'.

My wife suggested that we make a cross-country road trip in the Bird and I had been invited to give a talk at the Berkeley Chemistry Department. I didn't think the front suspension was roadworthy and so I took it in for its first "big repair" which amounted to a front suspension overhaul: idler arms, ball joints--the whole works. My mom and dad visited early that summer from Wisconsin--my dad wanted to see what I had foolishly bought into. I remember him chuckling and telling me that he too had fallen for such a Thunderbird but had returned it to the dealer when he realized just how bad it was on gas mileage. There was something else weird about that visit. My dad was showing symptoms of what seem like a constant sinus infection--like a cold that wouldn't go away--except that it was summertime.

My folks had been to our wedding in Denver the previous fall but they wanted to see more of Colorado and so we went on a road trip further west to Mesa Verde, Four Corners, Monument Valley, and the Grand Canyon--all places very close geographically but separated by chasms of culture and epochs. My wife didn't come along because she had recently started a new job and wanted to save her time off for our California road trip later on. We took my dad's car because my T-Bird was still entirely too unreliable. For me, that vacation reprised the family road trips I knew and loved as a child. I may have suspected, but I didn't know then--that it would be our last.

Later that summer my wife and I hit the road in the 'Bird. She dolled it up with makeshift seat covers and a boom box stereo. The car only came with an AM radio which still worked and actually out-performed the boom box--for AM reception--in the desert. We took I-80 from north of Fort Collins, CO to Berkeley. That old car could move at a jaunty clip! We made it to the coast with no problems. I gave my talk--a triumph for me because I met the author of a famous 1950's paper on equilibrium isotope effects. I came to challenge his dogma, preaching my own brand of their causality. He listened politely and said he enjoyed my talk. Afterwards, we cruised the Bird up and down University Avenue before heading down to L.A.

From Berkeley, we headed back over to I-5 to get to Los Angeles. We had previously done the scenic route down the coast and we were kind of in a hurry.  I had noticed that the car was using oil but there was no visible smoke in the exhaust. The car made it fine down the "Big Valley," consuming a quart or two of oil. By the time we got to the The Grapevine--the relentless climb over the mountains from the San Joaquin Valley into the L.A. basin, the Bird began to falter. We barely made it up that long steep grade. The Bird began seriously consuming oil. Going uphill, exhaust leaked through the heating duct into the interior. We could see and smell it. Slowly and surely, we made it up and over that mountain. The car was fine on the other side, going downhill just fine.

In L.A., we stayed with friends and took the car to a shop in Long Beach. The mechanic laughed when he gave the verdict: "blow-by." That is a mechanic's term for a motor whose pistons are so worn that they no longer hold compression. The gases just vent around the piston rings, sometimes leading to ring failure. That explained the oil consumption because the oil gets blown through too. But still no blue smoke.

We went camping on Catalina (I wrote about it a bit back here) where they don't even allow cars and I was happy to be rid of it for a while. After Catalina, we visited my wife's sister who lived in Costa Mesa in Orange County. We were all sitting there in the living room when my mother telephoned from Wisconsin. Her voice was nervous but steady as she said "Bruce, your father's tumor has come back. You need to come home now."

So we left the Bird in Costa Mesa and flew back to face reality. Months later, after he died, I paid to have the car trailered back to Colorado. I wasn't going to give up that easily. I ended up rebuilding the motor and got the thing running well again. We used that car for years--our kids even remember it, though I sold it several years ago--for $2000.

Here it is, where it sat in California for several months, waiting for me to get back to it:

 The '63 T-Bird was wider and lower-slung than today's cars. 

Fundamental Inequalities

Equality is a cornerstone of the law, but it's not at all a feature of natural law.

Consider Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle (but not in any deeper sense than the nature of the symbols):

 

On the left, Δχ and Δρ (position and momentum) are physical variables; on the right is a fixed value—i.e., half of ħ, the imponderable Planck constant.

Equations are like sentences with the equal sign being like the verb "to be;" they represent either equality or the more subtle notion of equivalency. Inequalities are also familiar from algebra but an inequality also expresses—more or less—an important direction of inequality. In this case, the observables are greater than or equal to the constants.

Bell's Theorem has been called "the most profound [theorem] in science" and it too reduces to an inequality. There's another: the Clausius Inequality, which embodies the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and which expresses changes in entropy against a value of zero. Comparing all three—without even understanding them—it strikes me that they all specifically pit observables against abstract constants. Is this general?

Cultural Metamiction

The term is synonymous with "cultural rot" but avoids the loaded politics and challenges the reader to hunt the meaning of the term. Once cornered, the quarry yields a new gem, asking only for meaning in terms of change versus status quo.

Forces of Exclusion

Forces of exclusion are repulsive. Talking chemistry, it's called hydrophobia. Grease, for example, will not dissolve like salt does in the sea; instead it clots together, usually floating on top because it lacks the gravitas of water. And while grease is hydrophobic, it is lipophilic, a word that, like hydrophobia, also comes to us via Greek, rooted in the word lipos.

Lipids and water don't mingle. It's not that lipids are weak--they are very strong internally, giving us energy--they just lack enough polarity to part water like salt can. Salt ions actually direct water: cations attract the oxygen part of H₂O and anions attract the hydrogen part. These are electrostatic forces. They are intermolecular forces meaning between atoms and molecules:

While lipids have strong intramolecular forces, they lack intermolecular forces like hydrogen bonding in water (this also explains hydrocarbons' volatilities). Because lipids don't mingle with water, they appear to seek their own kind, separating out. But why don't they mingle with water? It's because they restrict water's freedom. They have no charge to slake. Most lipids don't hydrogen bond like water does:

Notice the orientation of white to red (hydrogen to oxygen, plus to minus),  H-bonding is an attractive force, not unique to water, but best exemplified by it. When a lipid or a hydrophobe enters the picture, the waters give up their ordered coziness and are forced to reorient around each hydrophobe to make what's called a cage--without enthalpic recompense as with a salt. Thus the exclusion is an entropic effect because it relates to physical law and order.

Tipping Points And Change

Bill Whittle makes a number of excellent points in this video.  I can relate to his mention of tipping points and change at 14:48.  I tried to convey some of this abstractly and mathematically back here: Tipping Points And Change. Downhill change always has an easier (lower energy tipping point); uphill change comes late and requires sustained effort. Inevitable change is downhill.

Kudos for also mentioning the Titanic at around 24:30.

Fight The Dour!

Once more, if Nature had given a scope for things
To be forever broken more and more,
By now the bodies of matter would have been
So far reduced by breakings in old days
That from them nothing could, at season fixed,
Be born, and arrive its prime and of life.
For, lo, each thing is quicker marred than made;
And so what'er the long infinitude
Of days and all fore-passed time would now
By this have broken and ruined and dissolved,
That same could ne'er in all remaining time
Be builded up for plenishing the world.
But mark: infallibly a fixed bound
Remaineth stablished 'gainst their breaking down;
Since we behold each thing soever renewed,
And unto all, their seasons, after their kind,
Wherein they arrive the flower of their age.

Lucretius, "On The Nature Of Things" (50 BC) link
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The Power of Dour fights the Flower
Fight the Dour!

Frank Lloyd Wright's German Warehouse

Frank Lloyd Wright's monolithic German Warehouse stands forlornly on the corner of S. Church and E. Haseltine in Richland Center, WI. I've watched that building now for almost half a century. Highway 14 used to run right through town and the warehouse was on the left, exactly where we always turned right to get to my grandma's house when I was growing up.  I was back there recently and got another look. The old Warehouse is looking worse--it actually looks abandoned:

German Warehouse, northern facade and back

German Warehouse, eastern facade detail 

German Warehouse, rear portico

German Warehouse, rear portico

German Warehouse, service entrance

German Warehouse, loading dock 

German Warehouse, decay in 2012 

German Warehouse, decay in 2012 (detail)

I'd like to know who owns it and more about the problems associated with keeping it intact. I did not get a look inside--it's probably pretty awful--Wright's roofs were notoriously leaky and the German Warehouse had a flat one--a worst case scenario in Wisconsin winters.

Wright designed the building as a warehouse with some small retail space, but it never caught on. What could it be used for today? Not for its original purpose--storing stuff.  Practically anything Wright-related not nailed down is already owned and safely housed somewhere else so a new museum of his "stuff" would probably not fly. Richland Center is not exactly a tourist destination. And yet it could be something--it must be something...*

When I was in Richland Center, I drove my kids and my mom around town, letting her free associate about her past: who, what, where, & when. Wright was born in that town in 1867 and my mom can still point to the house which she knew growing up as "his," but she admits that it's always been controversial. Wright left Richland Center early on for Madison, only returning there after the First World War to build the Warehouse for a client named A.D. German. Things never went well. The people of Richland Center never fully embraced their native son. I still heard the echos growing up in the 1960s: "The Warehouse is different" ("different" is Wisconsin code for ugly); "he never paid his debts" or "he ran that coed school over in Spring Green"--that's code for scandalous.  But times change.

My mom also showed me a tiny cemetery outside of Richland Center where four of her sisters lie buried. They bracketed her in age but three died as young children and their graves lay hidden and forgotten for 70 years--much like their stories--until she finally bought them a decent tombstone this year. She showed me where. I know that there is a Wright somewhere back in my mom's genealogy and I noticed the name "Wright" on a nearby gravestone so I wonder if we're related--she didn't know but I'm tempted to find out.

If only the people who cared about Wright's legacy could unite around this particular building and help transform it. Perhaps people who care don't even know the problems that this building faces, and so I can spread that word at least--for now. I'd do much more if I had the means.
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*...what after all are these buildings now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of Frank Lloyd Wright?

Parable Of The Gas Explained

A while back I wrote The Parable Of The Gas without explanation:

Consider a spherical, sealed glass container of gas. Further suppose that the gas inside is all the same -like helium in a balloon. Room temperature and stable. Everything equal inside...but it's not. The individual gas atoms in the container have unequal energies because there's a range--a statistical distribution--of energies present: Some atoms move more slowly than others, some more quickly, some much more quickly.

How can we make things fair? How can we make it such that each individual (atom) has the same energy as its next nearest neighbor? We cannot. The only way to approach that state is to remove energy from the entire system. Cool the economy. Everything slows. Eventually, approaching zero Kelvin, all motion stops. Of course catastrophic things like condensation (downsizing from gas to liquid) and solidification (loss of liquidity) occur along the way. But the goal is achieved: every atom is finally the same (or nearly the same) energy wise.

Here is what I was picturing:

Original

The figure shows how at higher temperatures the average speed increases but so does the spread (inequality). The range narrows at lower temperatures which is what some policymakers seem to want. But what they want is also unnatural and contrived. An Austrian physicist named Ludwig Boltzmann first came up with the mathematical model behind all this in 1877. He based his derivation on entropy--arguing that a situation where all members of a group have identically the same velocity is highly improbable--as improbable as all the gas molecules being located on just one side of the vessel. It's much more probable (favorable) to allow each member of the group to experience a range of velocities and not to constrain them into one single energy or spatial configuration.

Another physicist named Max Planck extended Boltzmann's ideas and also changed the world by extending statistical mechanics to heat and light thus introducing quantum mechanics.  Einstein ran even further with Planck's ideas.  Both men would have their doubts--"God doesn't roll dice" and all that--but neither man denied reality.

Added:  When I liken the economics of wealth and poverty to a gas, it's important to remember that "rich" and "poor" may interconvert: link

That's What Matter Does

Blogger EBL linked a striking photograph yesterday in honor of Memorial Day.  I'm putting it here to make another point. Notice how all the gravestones line up in a regular array:

Original

Now focus on just the gravestones and mentally factor out the trees and the slight unevenness of the land. Pretend it's perfectly flat and that you are at eye level with the gravestones. Depending on which way you look, you can see through the array--even all the way through. This is what matter does too (atoms and molecules) when it crystallizes. Order ensues as the one becomes a greater whole. The individuals buried at Arlington are united in a common whole. But unlike the men and women buried in each grave, each atom in a crystal is essentially the same, and we can get insight into the structure of the one by shining light on the whole.

Ignore The Skidmarks

Thirty years ago and I still recall a problem on a physics final exam at UW-Madison. It went something like this:

A tire is rolling at a constant speed along a pavement. A brake is suddenly applied, bringing the tire to a screeching halt. If the initial temperature of the tire is T_o, what is the final temperature of the tire? You may ignore heat exchange between the tire and road. 

The solution required a couple more pieces of info like the tire's velocity and mass, as well as the heat capacity of the tire.  I omitted those details. I remembered the problem because it was such a nice example of the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

First--all of the kinetic energy (called angular momentum) of the rolling tire changes into thermal energy (heat) as the tire skids to a halt. Nothing is "lost." The rubber in the tire heats up accordingly.*

Second--entropy increases for the energy transformation, meaning that all the well-ordered motion of the rolling tire transforms into the chaotic thermal vibrations of the warmer tire. The second law says that the reverse will not occur. In other words, a rolling tire can suddenly stop and heat up, but heating a tire will never make it roll.
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James Joule spent part of his honeymoon in Switzerland measuring temperature differences between the tops and bottoms of waterfalls. His hypothesis was that the water should be warmer after the kinetic energy of the falling water is converted into heat. There were no forthcoming reports of frictional experiments with his bride.

Portrait of an Enzyme

Enzymes "herd" molecules and accelerate reactions. They affect change, but do not themselves change. They exist in minuscule amounts, doing their work on more abundant molecules called substrates, building up new molecules or demolishing old ones, leaving behind smaller molecular fragments for further digestion. Enzymes cannot make the impossible happen--they just make the possible happen faster.

Enzymes bring together pieces and stabilize any awkwardness of the encounter.

Let me unpack that sentence. "Bring together pieces" means that enzymes gather pieces using available molecular forces--usually just simple repulsion and attraction--to orient molecules in space.

"Repulsion" usually means hydrophobia, but may also be simple blocking effects. "Steric" is a term of art relating to the latter effect. "Steric hindrance" means that my standing somewhere blocks you from standing in the same place--it's a repulsive effect. Enzymes use repulsive effects to restrict degrees of freedom to reduce the randomness of molecular encounters.

"Attraction" is more familiar. Enzymes deploy acids and bases within their active sites to spatially arrange substrates--they may use a base (negative) to attract and hold an acid (positive) on a substrate. Hydrogen bonding works similarly and is like a shared common interest.

"Stabilizing any awkwardness of the encounter" is the real key to understanding enzymes. This was Linus Pauling's idea.^‡ Enzymes don't just bring together and stabilize substrates--if they did just that their insides would soon clog up with unreacted substrates. They have to stabilize the awkward encounter--not just a roomful of substrates looking at each other.

Here's a visual of what I'm trying to say, taken from organic chemistry. Imagine that the enzyme's role is to surround and stabilize each of the following chemical species, but especially the one circled in red:

original

Stabilizing whatever's in the red circle brings down the height of the blue hump. That's acceleration.

Enzymes lure substrates together, polarizing and fostering attack. Polarize, attack, depolarize
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‡ See for example, link

Crystalline Rot

When Marie Curie coined the term "radioactivity," a competing term--hyperphosphorescence--was thankfully never adopted. Hyperphosphorescence, while descriptively accurate--lacks simplicity.  Metamictization is another concept that needs a simpler term.

Crystals are highly ordered structures. The word "metamictization" refers to internal destruction, usually caused by radioactive uranium or thorium inclusions--their radiation destroys the crystal's integrity in a sort of rotting from within. "Stone cancer" might seem appropriate, but remember that cancer is unchecked growth.

"Crystalline rot" might work as a simpler term than metamictization because it conveys the notion of havoc wreaked from within--like an organized nation's structure.

Entropy Machinations

Entropy* is a difficult concept to grasp. It's like the silent chaos created when ice melts to water. The crystalline phase disappears; internally, frustrated solid-phase lattice vibrations silently convert into liquid liquid-phase translations and rotations; degrees of freedom are conserved but increase their measure. Proton transfer becomes possible. And yet nothing has changed chemically because ice is still water except in degree. Entropy increased. Disorder ensued.

Entropy can also decrease--enzymes do this unto entropy all the time as does anything which expends energy ordering things around. This video animates making order out of chaos--decreasing entropy: the red and green blocks sort themselves and separate. The ordering happens because the red blocks differ slightly from the green blocks and fit together better.

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*entropy
1868, from Ger. Entropie "measure of the disorder of a system," coined 1865 (on analogy of Energie) by German physicist Rudolph Clausius (1822-1888) from Gk. entropia "a turning toward," from en "in" (see en- (2)) + trope "a turning" (see trope). Related: Entropic.

"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."

The Parable of the Gas

Consider a spherical, sealed glass container of gas. Further suppose that the gas inside is all the same -like helium in a balloon. Room temperature and stable. Everything equal inside...but it's not. The individual gas atoms in the container have unequal energies because there's a range--a statistical distribution--of energies present: Some atoms move more slowly than others, some more quickly, some much more quickly.

How can we make things fair? How can we make it such that each individual (atom) has the same energy as its next nearest neighbor? We cannot. The only way to approach that state is to remove energy from the entire system. Cool the economy. Everything slows. Eventually, approaching zero Kelvin, all motion stops. Of course catastrophic things like condensation (downsizing from gas to liquid) and solidification (loss of liquidity) occur along the way. But the goal is achieved: every atom is finally the same (or nearly the same) energywise.

[added: an explanation here: link]

Tipping Points and Change

Worthwhile change always requires sustained effort. Getting from point A to point B is an uphill slog and has a tipping point--the point where just enough energy and will power is expended to get to point B. The tipping point comes late along the uphill pathway. To illustrate:

Tipping points are important because measured in effort they represent the maximal effort required to get to point B. From the the tipping point it's but a short distance to B, the goal. For example, I don’t decide to lose weight, join a gym and credibly say I’ve changed (psychologically perhaps, but not physically) until I reach that tipping point which is well along towards the goal. Understanding the factors involved in the tipping point could, in theory, lower the barrier to such a change.

Downhill change also has a tipping point, but it lies closer to the starting point A:

Downhill change is "easy" in the sense that not much effort is required to reach the tipping point: gravity, age, chaos and disorder bring us to a point B which is lower than where we started from at point A. In this scheme, "effort" is not negative, but rather represents what it would take to climb backwards from point B to point A. A lifetime of cascading tipping points can ratchet down to a dire circumstance.  Death and decay are the ultimate energetic low points. The only way back out is a sustained uphill effort.

The Herd Instinct

Once upon a time in a previous career I saw an eminent biochemist give a seminar on how enzymes work.  Enzymes are those little catalytic dynamos that do the heavy chemical processing in biological systems. Our livers and guts, for example host many enzymes and their job is to neutralize any foreign substances that we consume as well as to breakdown foodstuffs to give us energy.

The guy was well past retirement age, but he had only recently turned to computer modeling to solve some questions that had nagged him his entire career.  What he had turned to relatively late was the modelling of reactions in silico, a term meant to distinguish it from experiments in vitro and in vivo.  Modelling complex things in silico (like the weather for example) has taken a hit in the public eye lately,  but this guy was smart enough to know the pitfalls of his own techniques.

Now I don't have the time to explain how enzymes work but part of the theory is the so-called lock and key model:

Original

The multicolored molecule on the right is a substrate (the key) and the thing under it is an enzyme (lock). The lock and key metaphor comes from the very specific fit between the substrate and enzyme so that other keys can't fit the lock.  There are very specific reasons why we wouldn't want other keys to fit. Getting back to the seminar, the general topic was how to model the lock and key model for a particular enzyme and substrate.

A typical substrate molecule is not a very static thing.  If I could animate the cartoon above, the substrate would be flip-flopping and rotating, and generally moving every which way. So how does an enzyme get a substrate molecule to fit the lock?  The stock answer is that the substrate is held in place and then induced to react by a mixture of different chemical "forces" available to the enzyme: electrostatic, hydrophobic, hydrogen bonding, etc.  These little cumulative forces "pin down" a substrate. But the gist of the speaker's news was that it's not a matter of making sure that the substrate orients or lines up in preferred conformation; rather, it's a matter of expending enough energy to prevent a substrate from doing many motions and gyrations that it would otherwise do in the absence of the enzyme. That might be a subtle point but I grasped it immediately because it struck a chord with work I had previously done.

After the lecture I approached the older man at a wine & cheese mixer, introduced myself, and explained how I had worked with some very special kinds of solvents (called liquid crystals) which are able to get much smaller molecules dissolved in them to line up. Turns out that the orientation occurs not because the smaller molecules are attracted to the larger molecule but rather because they are prevented from adopting certain conformations- i.e., their freedoms are restricted (but not completely of course). The old man smiled and told me that I may have been the only other person in the room who "got" what he had been trying to say earlier.

Later on I thought about a non-technical way to explain the same thing. Being the father of a toddler, I  likened it to how a parent watches over a toddler, preventing the child from doing certain things which it might otherwise do given limitless options. Watching over a small child is often not instilling in the child to do the right things but rather restricting its choices--herding if you will.