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Now that's what I call boring
Lab ruts Superhuman powers of persistence can pave the way to scientific glory
58 | NewScientist | 19/26 December 2009 & 2 January 2010
A
STONISHING discoveries in space, revelations about human nature, frightening news on the environment, medical advances that will banish lifethreatening diseases: an inexhaustible stream of wonders runs through the pages of New Scientist. All tell the same tale. Science is exciting. Science is cutting-edge. Science is fun. It is now time to come clean. This glittering depiction of the quest for knowledge is… well, perhaps not an outright lie, but certainly a highly edited version of the truth. Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring. My own brief and undistinguished research career included its share of mind-numbing
TOM GAULD
tasks, notably the months of data processing which revealed that a large and expensive orbiting gamma-ray telescope had fixed its eye on the exploding heart of a distant galaxy and seen… nothing. I tip my hat, though, to New Scientist’s San Francisco bureau chief, who spent nearly three years watching mice sniff each other in a room dimly lit by a red bulb. “It achieved little,” he confesses, “apart from making my clothes smell of mouse urine.” And the office prize for research ennui has to go to the editor of NewScientist.com. “I once spent four weeks essentially turning one screw backwards and forwards,” he says. “It was about that time that I decided I didn’t want to be a working scientist.” Yet when it comes to the sober and sobering business of scientific drudgery, the denizens of New Scientist Towers qualify, at best, as mere dabblers. Here we wish to pay tribute to the truly heroic figures: those who have pushed back the boundaries of boredom and
against all odds broken through to the sunlit uplands of scientific revelation – or not. People like the celestial mechanic Urbain Le Verrier. By the mid-19th century, astronomers were aware that the outermost planet then known, Uranus, was travelling in an orbit that couldn’t quite be explained by the influence of the sun and the other planets. The gravity of a new, unseen body was thought to be to blame. But where was it? Through a feat of mathematical monomania that occupied the best part of a year, Le Verrier worked backwards from the orbital irregularities of Uranus to establish where the hidden planet ought to be found.
”Astronomers are the champions of one popular discipline of science tedium: the long stare”
His prediction, within 1 degree of the true position, allowed the German astronomer Johann Galle to spot the body we now know as Neptune from his observatory in Berlin. The discovery led to instant acclaim for Le Verrier, adding a disappointing lustre to an otherwise satisfyingly dull achievement. Astronomers in general have a strong claim to be champions of the most popular discipline of scientific tedium: the long stare. Amateur supernova hunters, for example, still eyeball galaxies through their telescopes night after night, comparing what they see with the features recorded on standard charts in the hope that a bright new point of light will suddenly have appeared. While a few among this band are lucky enough to see several supernovae, others may pursue a lifetime of observation without ever witnessing the explosion of a single star. At least there is a certain romance in the idea of a lonely stargazer scanning the >
19/26 December 2009 & 2 January 2010 | NewScientist | 59
TOM GAULD
cosmos for evidence of convulsions in distant galaxies. Sitting at a desk staring at photographs lacks even this vestige of glamour, yet until the advent of digital cameras most professional astronomers used their telescopes to expose photographic plates, and pored over the results to catalogue stars and galaxies. Understandably, they preferred whenever possible to get other people to do the poring for them – often women, who were deemed unsuited to more intellectually challenging tasks. Henrietta Leavitt was one such human “computer”, who scanned photographic plates at Harvard College Observatory in Massachusetts for two decades from 1895 to catalogue the brightness of stars. Brilliant and stoically dutiful, Leavitt performed this uncongenial task first as a volunteer and later for a salary of 25 cents an hour. Leavitt built up a catalogue of 1777 stars that varied in brightness within the Magellanic Clouds – two dwarf galaxies near to our own Milky Way. In this great mass of data she noticed something. Among a class of variable stars known as Cepheids, she found that the
PATIENCE PENDING To excel in the field of boredom, surely one of the most promising strategies is to embark on an experiment that will take a very, very long time. A few months clearly won’t cut it. Even a project lasting years does not require the kind of resolve we are after. Decades, and you might be getting somewhere. The true mark of dedication, however, is if you expect your experiment to outlive you. Take the example of John Lawes and Joseph Gilbert. In 1843 at Rothamsted research station in Hertfordshire, UK, they set out to test the effect of different fertilisers and growing schemes on crop yields. Their personal collaboration lasted a mere 57 years, but comprehensive results from these particular fields of scientific research would take a little longer. Some of Lawes and Gilbert’s original experiments are still running more than a century and a half later. There seems to be something about soil that attracts the contemplative mind. Together with his son Horace, Charles Darwin investigated the powers of the earthworm by setting a stone into the ground and monitoring its downward
progress, at a speed of 2.2 millimetres per year, as the busy worms excavated soil from beneath it. Their worm stone continues its slow descent into the netherworld at Down House, on the outskirts of London, to this day. While it would be pointless to actually sit and watch the effects of worm action, another infamously slow experiment does actually present a chance for you to see something happen – if you are very lucky, that is. At the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, pitch is dripping out of a glass funnel. The flow was started in 1930, and since that date eight drops have formed and… dropped off. This illustrates that although pitch behaves as a brittle solid – it smashes if you hit it with a hammer – it is actually runny. Just not very runny: the Brisbane sample is about 10 billion times as viscous as water. No one has yet witnessed a drop fall, so if you can tune in to mms://drop.physics. uq.edu.au/PitchDropLive you could be the first. Don’t be confused by the voice-over, which dates from almost a whole drop-age ago. With luck you might only have a few years to wait.
60 | NewScientist | 19/26 December 2009 & 2 January 2010
These past glories, magnificent as they are, need not limit your ambition. Assuming that some form of civilisation endures, why not devise experiments that will yield results only after many millennia? Today’s researchers can see evolution in action only by using rapid breeders such as bacteria, as in the experiment that followed 40,000 generations of E. coli over 20 years. We can look forward to watching the evolution of mice. Or humans – an experiment that would take around 1 million years for the same number of generations. Or how about giant tortoises? The pitch-drop set-up might be reproduced with an even more viscous fluid – or perhaps even glass. Contrary to the widespread notion that medieval windows have slowly flowed to become thicker at the bottom than the top, there is no evidence that any form of silica glass is fluid at room temperature. In the interests of scientific thoroughness, though, we should make sure. A carefully controlled 10,000-year experiment should do the trick. Some descendant will have the pleasure of writing up the results: “Nothing happened.”
period of pulsation is closely related to the star’s absolute brightness. This provided a way to measure cosmic distances: find a Cepheid somewhere in the sky, time its pulsations, and you know how much light it puts out; compare that with how bright it looks, and that tells you how far away it is. It was thanks to Leavitt’s distance calibration that Edwin Hubble was able to show that our galaxy is only one among billions, and to discover that the universe is expanding.
Brain drain That’s a pretty huge outcome. Such reward is by no means guaranteed. For every researcher who has ridden to triumph on the back of scientific perseverance, many have been carried away into obscurity. Especially worthy of honour in this regard is George Ungar, who claimed that memory could be transferred between animals by sucking out some of one creature’s brain and sticking it into another. In one experiment published in Nature in 1968, he and his group went to the lengths of using electric shocks to train 4000 rats to fear the dark. They then dissected the animals, pulped their brains and used various methods to leach out some of the chemicals from the resulting goo. Mice injected with these rat extracts, Ungar reported, chose to spend less time in the dark than normal, non-ratted mice. The legion of rats was not enough for Ungar. He went on to train 17,000 goldfish to distinguish between colours, then painstakingly dissected each one and puréed their brains in the name of science. Yet in the end it came to nothing. When other groups failed to reproduce Ungar’s results, the idea of memory transfer became discredited. All that pointless butchery must have been draining for poor Ungar, but even his efforts were trifling compared with science’s most famous Herculean labours. To confirm the existence of their suspected new element, radium, Marie and Pierre Curie took tonnes of residue from uranium ore and processed it by hand. Fitting the pattern of women getting the really grim jobs in science, Marie did most of the hard graft. She describes how she worked in “a wooden shed with a bituminous floor and a glass roof which did not keep the rain out… It was exhausting work to move the containers about, to transfer the liquids, and to stir for hours at a time, with an iron bar, the boiling material in the cast-iron basin.” Over a span of four years, she turned a tonne of ore into 100 milligrams of radium chloride. But here’s the surprise. The Curies actually
JUST HOT AIR Carbon dioxide is infamous today as the tiresome, unwanted by-product of just about everything we do. But working out its ill effects on our climate has itself been a lesson in tedium. It begins in the long northern winter of 1894, when the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius decided to distract himself from marital problems with some interminable quill-scratching. His aim was to find out whether reduced levels of CO2 in the atmosphere might have caused past ice ages. CO2 was already known to trap infrared radiation. To arrive at the size of the effect on Earth, though, took Arrhenius more than a year of laboriously calculating the feedback effect of clouds and chopping up the globe’s surface into zones of vegetation and landscape that reflected sunlight differently. He eventually found that a lack of CO2 could indeed have caused temperature drops equal to those seen during glaciations – and also, incidentally, that doubling levels of the gas would raise temperatures by more than 5 °C, which is close to modern estimates. Yet Arrhenius himself seemed singularly unimpressed with the result of his labours. “It is
unbelievable that so trifling a matter has cost me a full year,” he said. He should have counted himself lucky: the same gas was to occupy the American atmospheric scientist Charles Keeling for more than 40 years. Rather than taking Arrhenius’s mathematical route, Keeling chose that other well-trodden path to the land of scientific nod: that of persistent, precise observation. Starting in 1958, he monitored the concentration of CO2 in the air to find out whether the overall global level was changing, be that change ever so slow. It was rather like setting out to watch the grass grow, without knowing whether grass actually does grow. With true dedication, Keeling made his measurements in isolated places such as the peak of Mauna Loa in Hawaii to eliminate any interesting local fluctuations that might be caused by forests or factories. Funding agencies tend not to smile on such slow-burn projects, and even after Keeling found the first evidence that CO2 levels were rising, he faced years of wrangling with various committees to keep the money coming in. His medal for monotony hangs from a tangle of red tape.
”He trained 17,000 goldfish to distinguish colours, dissected them and puréed their brains for science” enjoyed their work. “We were very happy,” Marie wrote. “We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream.” They are not the only ones. One of the great staring feats of modern times – a Nobelgarlanded staring feat, no less – belongs to John Sulston of the University of Cambridge. During one 18-month stretch he spent every available hour gazing down a microscope at growing nematode worms, eventually tracking the fate of every single cell from egg to adult. Squinting at grey blobs for a year and a half may sound dull to you and me – but it wasn’t to Sulston. “It was fun. I love looking down a microscope,” he says. Boredom, it seems, is very much in the eye of the beholder. Scientists at the top of their game rarely become jaded, possibly because
it is only the most tenacious individuals who ever succeed in research. Those with shorter attention spans – and you may pass your own judgement on the New Scientist staff mentioned earlier – are soon weeded out. It’s not all natural obsessiveness, though; there’s an element of nurture too. Sulston points out that the most repetitious stuff happens only after years of working around a problem, trying to find a way in. By the time you are “strictly turning the handle”, as he puts it, you may be the most skilled person at your chosen technique. Sulston ranked among the best in the world at keeping a close eye on slimy, grey microscopic worms, so using this skill became a pleasure. We have every reason to be grateful for scientists’ exceptional stamina. But if by now you have had enough of the tedious details, you can turn the page or click on the next story. Normal service will then resume as more glittering baubles of science are brought forth for your amusement. ■ Stephen Battersby is a writer based in London
19/26 December 2009 & 2 January 2010 | NewScientist | 61
58 | NewScientist | 19/26 December 2009 & 2 January 2010
A
STONISHING discoveries in space, revelations about human nature, frightening news on the environment, medical advances that will banish lifethreatening diseases: an inexhaustible stream of wonders runs through the pages of New Scientist. All tell the same tale. Science is exciting. Science is cutting-edge. Science is fun. It is now time to come clean. This glittering depiction of the quest for knowledge is… well, perhaps not an outright lie, but certainly a highly edited version of the truth. Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring. My own brief and undistinguished research career included its share of mind-numbing
TOM GAULD
tasks, notably the months of data processing which revealed that a large and expensive orbiting gamma-ray telescope had fixed its eye on the exploding heart of a distant galaxy and seen… nothing. I tip my hat, though, to New Scientist’s San Francisco bureau chief, who spent nearly three years watching mice sniff each other in a room dimly lit by a red bulb. “It achieved little,” he confesses, “apart from making my clothes smell of mouse urine.” And the office prize for research ennui has to go to the editor of NewScientist.com. “I once spent four weeks essentially turning one screw backwards and forwards,” he says. “It was about that time that I decided I didn’t want to be a working scientist.” Yet when it comes to the sober and sobering business of scientific drudgery, the denizens of New Scientist Towers qualify, at best, as mere dabblers. Here we wish to pay tribute to the truly heroic figures: those who have pushed back the boundaries of boredom and
against all odds broken through to the sunlit uplands of scientific revelation – or not. People like the celestial mechanic Urbain Le Verrier. By the mid-19th century, astronomers were aware that the outermost planet then known, Uranus, was travelling in an orbit that couldn’t quite be explained by the influence of the sun and the other planets. The gravity of a new, unseen body was thought to be to blame. But where was it? Through a feat of mathematical monomania that occupied the best part of a year, Le Verrier worked backwards from the orbital irregularities of Uranus to establish where the hidden planet ought to be found.
”Astronomers are the champions of one popular discipline of science tedium: the long stare”
His prediction, within 1 degree of the true position, allowed the German astronomer Johann Galle to spot the body we now know as Neptune from his observatory in Berlin. The discovery led to instant acclaim for Le Verrier, adding a disappointing lustre to an otherwise satisfyingly dull achievement. Astronomers in general have a strong claim to be champions of the most popular discipline of scientific tedium: the long stare. Amateur supernova hunters, for example, still eyeball galaxies through their telescopes night after night, comparing what they see with the features recorded on standard charts in the hope that a bright new point of light will suddenly have appeared. While a few among this band are lucky enough to see several supernovae, others may pursue a lifetime of observation without ever witnessing the explosion of a single star. At least there is a certain romance in the idea of a lonely stargazer scanning the >
19/26 December 2009 & 2 January 2010 | NewScientist | 59
TOM GAULD
cosmos for evidence of convulsions in distant galaxies. Sitting at a desk staring at photographs lacks even this vestige of glamour, yet until the advent of digital cameras most professional astronomers used their telescopes to expose photographic plates, and pored over the results to catalogue stars and galaxies. Understandably, they preferred whenever possible to get other people to do the poring for them – often women, who were deemed unsuited to more intellectually challenging tasks. Henrietta Leavitt was one such human “computer”, who scanned photographic plates at Harvard College Observatory in Massachusetts for two decades from 1895 to catalogue the brightness of stars. Brilliant and stoically dutiful, Leavitt performed this uncongenial task first as a volunteer and later for a salary of 25 cents an hour. Leavitt built up a catalogue of 1777 stars that varied in brightness within the Magellanic Clouds – two dwarf galaxies near to our own Milky Way. In this great mass of data she noticed something. Among a class of variable stars known as Cepheids, she found that the
PATIENCE PENDING To excel in the field of boredom, surely one of the most promising strategies is to embark on an experiment that will take a very, very long time. A few months clearly won’t cut it. Even a project lasting years does not require the kind of resolve we are after. Decades, and you might be getting somewhere. The true mark of dedication, however, is if you expect your experiment to outlive you. Take the example of John Lawes and Joseph Gilbert. In 1843 at Rothamsted research station in Hertfordshire, UK, they set out to test the effect of different fertilisers and growing schemes on crop yields. Their personal collaboration lasted a mere 57 years, but comprehensive results from these particular fields of scientific research would take a little longer. Some of Lawes and Gilbert’s original experiments are still running more than a century and a half later. There seems to be something about soil that attracts the contemplative mind. Together with his son Horace, Charles Darwin investigated the powers of the earthworm by setting a stone into the ground and monitoring its downward
progress, at a speed of 2.2 millimetres per year, as the busy worms excavated soil from beneath it. Their worm stone continues its slow descent into the netherworld at Down House, on the outskirts of London, to this day. While it would be pointless to actually sit and watch the effects of worm action, another infamously slow experiment does actually present a chance for you to see something happen – if you are very lucky, that is. At the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, pitch is dripping out of a glass funnel. The flow was started in 1930, and since that date eight drops have formed and… dropped off. This illustrates that although pitch behaves as a brittle solid – it smashes if you hit it with a hammer – it is actually runny. Just not very runny: the Brisbane sample is about 10 billion times as viscous as water. No one has yet witnessed a drop fall, so if you can tune in to mms://drop.physics. uq.edu.au/PitchDropLive you could be the first. Don’t be confused by the voice-over, which dates from almost a whole drop-age ago. With luck you might only have a few years to wait.
60 | NewScientist | 19/26 December 2009 & 2 January 2010
These past glories, magnificent as they are, need not limit your ambition. Assuming that some form of civilisation endures, why not devise experiments that will yield results only after many millennia? Today’s researchers can see evolution in action only by using rapid breeders such as bacteria, as in the experiment that followed 40,000 generations of E. coli over 20 years. We can look forward to watching the evolution of mice. Or humans – an experiment that would take around 1 million years for the same number of generations. Or how about giant tortoises? The pitch-drop set-up might be reproduced with an even more viscous fluid – or perhaps even glass. Contrary to the widespread notion that medieval windows have slowly flowed to become thicker at the bottom than the top, there is no evidence that any form of silica glass is fluid at room temperature. In the interests of scientific thoroughness, though, we should make sure. A carefully controlled 10,000-year experiment should do the trick. Some descendant will have the pleasure of writing up the results: “Nothing happened.”
period of pulsation is closely related to the star’s absolute brightness. This provided a way to measure cosmic distances: find a Cepheid somewhere in the sky, time its pulsations, and you know how much light it puts out; compare that with how bright it looks, and that tells you how far away it is. It was thanks to Leavitt’s distance calibration that Edwin Hubble was able to show that our galaxy is only one among billions, and to discover that the universe is expanding.
Brain drain That’s a pretty huge outcome. Such reward is by no means guaranteed. For every researcher who has ridden to triumph on the back of scientific perseverance, many have been carried away into obscurity. Especially worthy of honour in this regard is George Ungar, who claimed that memory could be transferred between animals by sucking out some of one creature’s brain and sticking it into another. In one experiment published in Nature in 1968, he and his group went to the lengths of using electric shocks to train 4000 rats to fear the dark. They then dissected the animals, pulped their brains and used various methods to leach out some of the chemicals from the resulting goo. Mice injected with these rat extracts, Ungar reported, chose to spend less time in the dark than normal, non-ratted mice. The legion of rats was not enough for Ungar. He went on to train 17,000 goldfish to distinguish between colours, then painstakingly dissected each one and puréed their brains in the name of science. Yet in the end it came to nothing. When other groups failed to reproduce Ungar’s results, the idea of memory transfer became discredited. All that pointless butchery must have been draining for poor Ungar, but even his efforts were trifling compared with science’s most famous Herculean labours. To confirm the existence of their suspected new element, radium, Marie and Pierre Curie took tonnes of residue from uranium ore and processed it by hand. Fitting the pattern of women getting the really grim jobs in science, Marie did most of the hard graft. She describes how she worked in “a wooden shed with a bituminous floor and a glass roof which did not keep the rain out… It was exhausting work to move the containers about, to transfer the liquids, and to stir for hours at a time, with an iron bar, the boiling material in the cast-iron basin.” Over a span of four years, she turned a tonne of ore into 100 milligrams of radium chloride. But here’s the surprise. The Curies actually
JUST HOT AIR Carbon dioxide is infamous today as the tiresome, unwanted by-product of just about everything we do. But working out its ill effects on our climate has itself been a lesson in tedium. It begins in the long northern winter of 1894, when the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius decided to distract himself from marital problems with some interminable quill-scratching. His aim was to find out whether reduced levels of CO2 in the atmosphere might have caused past ice ages. CO2 was already known to trap infrared radiation. To arrive at the size of the effect on Earth, though, took Arrhenius more than a year of laboriously calculating the feedback effect of clouds and chopping up the globe’s surface into zones of vegetation and landscape that reflected sunlight differently. He eventually found that a lack of CO2 could indeed have caused temperature drops equal to those seen during glaciations – and also, incidentally, that doubling levels of the gas would raise temperatures by more than 5 °C, which is close to modern estimates. Yet Arrhenius himself seemed singularly unimpressed with the result of his labours. “It is
unbelievable that so trifling a matter has cost me a full year,” he said. He should have counted himself lucky: the same gas was to occupy the American atmospheric scientist Charles Keeling for more than 40 years. Rather than taking Arrhenius’s mathematical route, Keeling chose that other well-trodden path to the land of scientific nod: that of persistent, precise observation. Starting in 1958, he monitored the concentration of CO2 in the air to find out whether the overall global level was changing, be that change ever so slow. It was rather like setting out to watch the grass grow, without knowing whether grass actually does grow. With true dedication, Keeling made his measurements in isolated places such as the peak of Mauna Loa in Hawaii to eliminate any interesting local fluctuations that might be caused by forests or factories. Funding agencies tend not to smile on such slow-burn projects, and even after Keeling found the first evidence that CO2 levels were rising, he faced years of wrangling with various committees to keep the money coming in. His medal for monotony hangs from a tangle of red tape.
”He trained 17,000 goldfish to distinguish colours, dissected them and puréed their brains for science” enjoyed their work. “We were very happy,” Marie wrote. “We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream.” They are not the only ones. One of the great staring feats of modern times – a Nobelgarlanded staring feat, no less – belongs to John Sulston of the University of Cambridge. During one 18-month stretch he spent every available hour gazing down a microscope at growing nematode worms, eventually tracking the fate of every single cell from egg to adult. Squinting at grey blobs for a year and a half may sound dull to you and me – but it wasn’t to Sulston. “It was fun. I love looking down a microscope,” he says. Boredom, it seems, is very much in the eye of the beholder. Scientists at the top of their game rarely become jaded, possibly because
it is only the most tenacious individuals who ever succeed in research. Those with shorter attention spans – and you may pass your own judgement on the New Scientist staff mentioned earlier – are soon weeded out. It’s not all natural obsessiveness, though; there’s an element of nurture too. Sulston points out that the most repetitious stuff happens only after years of working around a problem, trying to find a way in. By the time you are “strictly turning the handle”, as he puts it, you may be the most skilled person at your chosen technique. Sulston ranked among the best in the world at keeping a close eye on slimy, grey microscopic worms, so using this skill became a pleasure. We have every reason to be grateful for scientists’ exceptional stamina. But if by now you have had enough of the tedious details, you can turn the page or click on the next story. Normal service will then resume as more glittering baubles of science are brought forth for your amusement. ■ Stephen Battersby is a writer based in London
19/26 December 2009 & 2 January 2010 | NewScientist | 61