Guitar Noir

A favorite song from a favorite band I never saw, the Aqua Velvets:

I always thought those guys should write scores for movies.

Two from the Foo

Conversations with Henry

Henry: I give you a C+ for that last effort.

Me: On ruthenium?

Henry: Yes. Don't you read anymore? I'm sorely disappointed in you this time. How could you leave out Allen and Senoff? And my stuff?  And worse, you forgot to mention ruthenium's starring role in artificial photosynthesis.

Рутений Made It Possible

Ruthenium, or Рутений in Russian, was named for Russia. We should call the element russium--that would at least be more historically descriptive--but ruthenium it is.* The first detectable amounts came from platinum ores in the Ural mountains--first discovered in the 1820's. The element is exceedingly rare--and thus expensive--and yet it too has its unique chemical niche. 

Ruthenium is the first element in the series 1 to 44 which can be fully stripped of 8 electrons to give a stable oxidation state of VIII.** Step just one atomic number backwards, to technetium, and there aren't 8 valence electrons to lose--only 7; step one element to the right, to rhodium, and the nucleus is already too electronegative to give up more than 6 electrons.  This makes ruthenium special--its willingness to fully yield to rapacious oxygen.

Ruthenium isn't really famous for much. It enjoyed brief fame in 1952 when ruthenocene was prepared by analogy to ferrocene, but it always seemed a little under-represented in catalysis until a chemist named Robert Grubbs (originally from Possum Trot holler in Kentucky), put ruthenium on the map with his Nobel-prize winning work centered around olefin metathesis.

"Olefin metathesis" has interesting history as a term--taken apart, "olefin" comes from oléfiant which means oil-forming and which ultimately comes from the roots oleum + facere. Olefin is an old word as chemistry words go--not so old to be practically archaic like oleum or vitriol, but still old. The modern term for olefin is alkene--organic hydrocarbons having one or more unsaturated double bond. The terms "polyunsaturated fat" and "trans fat" refer to olefins, FWIW.

Metathesis is a special word meaning rearrangement. There's a grammatical sense of the word which means transposition, and the chemical sense is just a metaphor. If we let the equal sign be a double bond, olefin metathesis refers to

a=b + c=d --> a=c + b=d.

See what happened there? Transposition.
________________________________
*Ruthenia corresponded to a much smaller region of what is now in the Ukraine. The Ural region was unknown to the Romans.
**Wikipedia notes claims to the existence of Fe(VIII) as in FeO₄ but the claim is tentative.

No Reservations

Hüsker Dü, "No Reservations" from their epic 1987 LP "Warehouse: Songs & Stories":

Keep Cool....

"Air Cooled"

...to the thrill of it all:

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.
___________________________

*...what after all are these buildings now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of Frank Lloyd Wright?

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

Very cool tribute to Syd Barrett

The First Quantum Mechanic

Max Planck was the first quantum mechanic.  He began as an "old school" mechanic, thoroughly steeped in Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell's electrodynamics; those laws conveniently sorted physics into the "corpuscular" and the "ethereal" domains, a dichotomy that corresponded to things having mass and things lacking mass, i.e., radiant light. Higgs had something to say about this later.

Isaac Newton had solved the age-old riddle of why apples fall, allowing astronomers to predict the motions of the heavens. Miracle, mystery and authority. Newton also dabbled in light, describing reflection and interference--along with his famous prism experiments--but the mathematical laws governing light propagating "through the ether" were first described by a Scotsman, James Clerk Maxwell. Newton's Laws of Gravitation governed masses while Maxwell's electrodynamics ruled the waves. Planck came along in 1900 and sort of melded the two theories at their interface.

Physics then had a big unsolved problem called "black body radiation." Heating kilns and ovens made the inside walls glow--first red, then yellow, and finally white hot. Glass makers and potters could even gauge an oven's temperature based on its color inside. Adding more heat to an oven made the walls give off progressively higher energy light but there was a limit: ovens would not begin to emit UV light. Light bulbs were another 19th century invention that used heat (electrical resistance) to produce light and Planck was motivated in part by practical concerns.

What Planck did can be summarized visually with a plot of light intensity versus wavelength:

Planck's theoretical curves (berechnet) agreed beautifully with experiment (beobachtet). Note that there are seven different non-overlapping curves corresponding to progressively higher temperatures. Prior attempts to predict the same phenomenon, based on classical electrodynamics, had failed. These attempts are neatly summarized in this graphic:

The green line corresponds to Planck's law and to reality; the red line, Rayleigh-Jeans Law, only worked at low frequencies (long wavelengths), while the blue line, Wien's Law, worked only at the high frequencies (short wavelengths).  As an aside, the red line's straight up ascent was later referred to as the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe" as a sort of metaphor for the failure of classical theory to account for the reality of Planck's Law. But Planck did more than meld two theories--he invented anew.

The newer science of thermodynamics and Maxwell Boltzmann in particular had shown that tiny invisible yet indivisible atoms could statistically sum to bulk properties. The details are grounded in probabilities rather than certainties, much like my Parable Of The Gas. What Planck did was to apply Boltzmann-like statistical mechanics to the problem of black body radiation.

Planck viewed a red-hot oven (black body radiator) as material in equilibrium with light--sort of a transubstantiation of the ethereal and corpuscular. He named the nexus--the unseen--"resonators" and counted them in a statistical way, describing their behavior mathematically. This was all well before anyone knew or even thought that atoms were held together by electrons--atoms were still thought to be amorphous blobs. That something as seemingly seamless as light should be treated like discrete masses when it interacted with matter was an assumption but it proved key to deriving the solution to the black body problem. There was no other way to explain the behavior. What Planck did was revolutionary, but he did not do it because he understood why--he did it because his theory fit experiment. Werner Heisenberg later stated Planck's insight most succinctly and in most certain terms:

Radiant heat is not a continuous flow and indefinitely divisible. It must be defined as a discontinuous mass made up of units all of which are similar to one another. 

Around the time of Planck's insight, another, younger German physicist appeared on stage. He was then a Swiss patent examiner and barely known, preoccupied with developing his own theories of relativity, but his elastic mind intuitively wrapped around what even Planck had trouble fully accepting and generalizing.  Einstein took Planck's teachings and explained the photoelectric effect--why blue light but not red light could make certain metals conduct electricity. It seemed counter intuitive that even the most intense red light could not do what the faintest of blue light could do. Einstein explained that only blue light was energetic enough to knock electrons free. There were energy thresholds and band gaps at the atomic level. Discontinuities and E=hv.

According to Thomas Kuhn, Planck needed the goading of Einstein and Paul Ehrenfast afterwards to fully realize what he had done. Certainly Planck's older contemporaries were doubters too. In Planck's words:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Planck and Einstein remained close friends throughout the 1930's. Planck, conservative Christian, and Einstein, agnostic Jew, enjoyed making music together when not discussing physics in Wilhelmine and Weimar Berlin--while it lasted (maybe they did discuss the physics of music--frequencies, harmonics, metered beats). Planck tried in vain to intervene on his friend's behalf during the rise of the Nazi regime but he ultimately failed.

There was even greater sadness for Planck besides the exile of his great friend Einstein; there was the trial of his eldest son Erwin at the hands of Roland Freisler, whom I described back here. The Nazis executed Erwin Planck just a few heartbreaking months before the whole regime finally collapsed. The older Planck never recovered from the loss of Erwin and died just two years later in 1947. Here they are during happier times:

Max and son Erwin Planck

Erwin Planck on trial for his life before the People's Court, arrested and charged as part of the July conspiracy to assassinate Hitler:

Erwin Planck vor dem Gesezt in 1945

Erwin Planck, like so many others, was only involved in aftermath planning--helping to draft a post-Hitler German Constitution--and not the actual assassination plot.

The elder Planck's life sort of tracked a shape: A half-century of slow triumph peaked in the 1930's and then precipitously declined, much like the shape of one of his triumphant black body radiation curves which conquered physics. Post-war Germany honored Planck by renaming the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (its premier scientific society) the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

Got Wood Shop?

That's a pedestal table I made in a shop class I took in high school.  My mother still has it and I guess that I will have it again one day. We had an excellent shop teacher and we did everything: conceived an original design; drew scaled blue prints (orthographic and isometric projections); selected the wood (black walnut in my case). Then we machine cut, planed & jointed the lumber; we glued a square peg and turned the leg on a lathe; we mitered the angles and routed the edges; sanded & varnished. We all had different designs, but we all made a pedestal table; we competed in craftsmanship. We were judged and graded in the end.

Do high schools still teach that stuff?

Breaking Away

My mother found and saved an old diary I kept when I went to Italy in 1979 to meet an Italian exchange student I had known in high school. It's mostly the sort of stuff people write when they're 19, but I found two interesting entries. The first is the very first entry--written when I flew alone to Europe via on Icelandic Air to Luxembourg. I caught a train south to Milan and then another to Turin. Despite all my random punctuation and thoughts, I captured the moment when I first set off on my own. This was also my first time on a jet airliner.

21 luglio
Chicago O'Hare 

I'm looking at the jet, which turn- excuse, I had to get on it.*
I'm sitting in a window seat, just abreast of the starboard wing. I'm very excited. The seating is very comfortable. I'm alone in my seat--I've got 3 seats to myself and the armrests come up out of the way so that could actually stretch my legs out sideways or sit indian style.
We'll be served dinner in an hour. They just stepped on the gas and we're moving forward--I'm writing so fast I want to look out the window--Oh, I never thought this dream would come true. We're taxiing now, picking up speed now, there's no getting off now. Step on it! roller coaster! thunder rumble! bouncing on the ground then a firmness under me. I can see Chicago out there, a city of lights as far as I can see, lines and triangles of light, squares like luminous patchwork quilts, lots of red, orange, green. The pilot just banked the jet away from the city and we're off to Iceland.
Just had dinner--pretty good considering where I am. They served chicken breast in rice, a salad, a stuffed tuna tomato, and after dinner coffee and cognac. It's about 10:50 CST and I think I'll shut my light out. I'm really fortunate to have these seats to myself. 

An hour later, I noted the date change. Pretentious me also thought it cool to mark the calendar dates in Italian:

22 luglio 

It's about 12:54 CST and I still can't sleep I'm so excited. The sun no sooner vanished to the west when it rose in the east. It's getting light out now and looking out the window I can see a foamy sea of clouds, a bluish white blanket covering what must be the sea beneath. I tell you, from this point of view the earth verges on unreality.
The plane ride feels much in the way of a bus ride, except for the view out the window--the light of the sun is now on the plane.
I just set my watch ahead 5 hours; we're descending to Iceland for a stay of 45 minutes. We're going to drop through the thick of these clouds now--it's like fog--I can't see past the tip of the wing; my ears are popping like crazy it's getting rough now--the world below, the sea, just came into view. I can see Iceland, a lighthouse, the land looks barren, very rocky no trees, steam is rising from a point in the distance.

After a brief stopover at the Reykjavik Airport, the flight continued on to Luxembourg:

I believe I'm flying above the Scottish countryside. The clouds are dense but scattered. It's a patchwork of green and gold fields. I can see also winding rivers.
Upon taking off from Iceland (that wretched, barren wasteland), I was joined by a middle aged French couple who speak no English. Had lunch. I ate every calorie--I don't know when I'll eat next. 

The next entry is fragmentary but describes the landing:

like plunging into a gaseous sea and then the land reappearing. 

__________________
* "which turn- excuse, I had to get on it" makes no grammatical sense. I can't tell if a word is missing or  if I just meant to be cryptic. I was aware at the time of the inevitability, but I don't recall exactly what I was thinking 33 years ago. I had left behind a serious girlfriend who was upset that I was leaving for a month (which turned into 8 weeks).  I had no regrets at the time.

Chowchilla

Chowchilla 'Busnapper' Wins Release From Prison

The headline took me back to 1996 or so. We used to hang around a beer garden/bar named Zott's up in the hills behind Stanford University. The bar was an amusing diversion and was still filled with Ken Kesey types.  One of the guys we met at Zott's was sort of a permanent house sitter for one of the three guys in prison for the Chowchilla incident. He lived in an apartment above the detached garage/converted stables of the convicted busnapper ringleader parent's estate. The old main house sat on several prime acres of Portola Valley real estate. The name of the guy in prison is in the public record but I don't know if the story of the house/estate is. Apparently all the heirs but him are now dead. So there it sat in 1996, empty. Power and lights had long been shut off.

One Halloween (must have been '96 or '97) we got invited to a party up at the caretaker's. After much consumption of alcohol he took us on a flashlight tour of the old house which was amazing because it had been abandoned completely furnished. This apparently had long been an annual thing--a guided flashlight tour of the "haunted house." Just imagine a scaled down "Downton Abbey" with cobwebs. The coolest thing I remember was a bedroom upstairs--completely furnished--on the wall was a pennant from the 1936 Berlin Olympics showing all the nation's flags--including the Nazi flag. The place was like a time capsule. I'm also pretty sure that that's where the arrests occurred for the kidnappings.

Two Disparate Songs In Common

In euchre, bauers trump aces, kings and queens.

The Posh, Posh Traveling Life For Me!

My kids are very close in age (16 months apart). When they were little, they were small enough to fit together inside a wicker laundry basket and we'd always play a little game together before bedtime. I'd hoist them in the basket high up in the air over my head and give them a "balloon ride" and sing that Lionel Jeffries song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  They knew the song because that movie was on a seemingly endless loop at our house.  Kids love routines--especially when they're so little. It was just all part of the safe little bubble that fathers create in families. My dad did similar things. He had a white canvas mail sack with a rope closure. My brother and I would fit inside (one-at-a time) and he'd whirl us around outside in the yard before he went off to work at night. When we got too big for the sack, he'd hold us by one arm and leg and spin us around so we could pretend we were airplanes. It was something moms wouldn't do then--not because it took physical strength--but because what if you banged into a tree with a kid or something?

Today, I'm flying the kids back to Wisconsin to visit my mom in Madison and my brother who lives up near La Crosse. I had a whole slew of half-finished things to post here but they'll have to wait. I'm working on some new sketches too.

Frederick (1979)

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

Rumford, Soddy, and The Crash

Frederick Soddy (1877-1956)

Despite years of formal education in chemistry, I'd never really heard of Frederick Soddy until I started reading about the early days of radioactivity. He wrote a book called The Interpretation Of Radium (1909) which is available free online here.  The book so influenced H.G. Wells that he dedicated his book, The World Set Free (1914), to Soddy.

Soddy seems to have had two careers--first as an accomplished physical scientist (Chemistry Nobel in 1921) and then as a sort of social scientist, but more accurately as a social activist during the Great Depression. In this way he was a prototype Linus Pauling, who won both a Chemistry Nobel and a Peace Nobel for his activism.

Soddy was a chemist by training but today he'd be called a radiochemist. He must have seen or heard firsthand many of the key discoveries in nuclear physics in the late 19th and early 20th century, first at Oxford and then as graduate student with Lord Rayleigh. Afterwards, Soddy moved to Canada around the same time Ernest Rutherford did and the two joined forces. Together they discovered the natural transmutation of elements. Soddy's Nobel Prize citation reads:

for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes.

His isotope work came later.

Recall that Count Rumford first paid attention to the heat given off boring cannon and thereby converted our notions of energy.  Like Rumford, Soddy first realized how much heat and energy radioactive decay gave off--orders of magnitude more energy than burning fossil fuels did and it was also seemingly inexhaustible. Soddy was so prescient regarding how much energy was locked inside uranium, radium, and thorium that he warned Britain's government about the dangers of "atomic" bombs during the First World War.

The notion of cheap and abundant atomic energy crested in 1954 with Lewis Strauss' famous too cheap to meter statement, though it appears that he was referring to hypothetical hydrogen fusion reactors.

Soddy died in 1956 in relative obscurity. This (from the Wiki bio) is intriguing:

In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a 'quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships', offering a perspective on economics rooted in physics—the laws of thermodynamics, in particular—and was 'roundly dismissed as a crank'. While most of his proposals - 'to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort' - are now conventional practice, his critique of fractional-reserve banking still 'remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom'. Soddy wrote that financial debts grew exponentially at compound interest but the real economy was based on exhaustible stocks of fossil fuels. Energy obtained from the fossil fuels could not be used again. This criticism of economic growth is echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

England Swings Like A Pendulum Do

A pendulum endlessly interconverts potential (a) and kinetic energy (v)--at the high point of each upswing, the weight is motionless as it reverses course-at that moment all its energy is potential, given by the weight. As the weight swings downward in an arc, that potential converts to pure kinetic energy as it swings through the midpoint.  Back and forth it goes, slowed only by friction in air or of the pivot point.

Soothing harmonics blogged to make a point later.

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 Kiss Precise

The Kiss Precise by Frederick Soddy

For pairs of lips to kiss maybe
Involves no trigonometry.
'Tis not so when four circles kiss
Each one the other three.
To bring this off the four must be
As three in one or one in three.
If one in three, beyond a doubt
Each gets three kisses from without.
If three in one, then is that one
Thrice kissed internally.

Four circles to the kissing come.
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the center.
Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of the squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum.

To spy out spherical affairs
An oscular surveyor
Might find the task laborious,
The sphere is much the gayer,
And now besides the pair of pairs
A fifth sphere in the kissing shares.
Yet, signs and zero as before,
For each to kiss the other four
The square of the sum of all five bends
Is thrice the sum of their squares.

Published in Nature, June 20, 1936