greg goebel / public domain
* VECTORS is an original newsletter of fact and commentary on aerospace, technology, science, and historical topics.
* The United Kingdom has been demonstrating a certain enthusiasm for the internet revolution. By the spring of 2006, about 19% of UK residents had broadband internet connections, a higher proportion of the population than in the US, and the broadband networks cover the entire country, with any resident able to obtain access at will. Now the UK's British Telecom (BT) is taking a great leap forward, embarking on a project to convert the nation's telephone system completely to digital internet protocol (IP). BT plans to shut down all 16 of its legacy X.25 and ATM digital telephone networks by 2012, replacing them with a single IP network, linking the nation's 22.5 million households. The plan, known as the "21st Century Network (21CN)", is already in motion, with some British phone subscribers performing calls over IP by the end of 2006, unaware of any change in the status quo.
No other nation currently has plans for a complete IP makeover of a national telecom system. It is not a trivial exercise, either, since it means merging the current computer-based IP network with the current telephone network, and both have their own equipment, protocols, software, billing systems, and staff. That is precisely why the merger is being done: a unified network means elimination of redundancy, and enormous cost savings -- at least once the enormous cost of the transformation has been absorbed.
* The system is initially being implemented in South Wales. The telecommunications system there is handled through three large "superexchange" offices or "metro nodes", one each in Newport, Swansea, and Cardiff. There are six subordinate exchanges as well, with all nine exchanges reaching homes through 70 local offices. The end user connections currently include two services: traditional telephony and "digital subscriber lines (DSLs)". If a household uses both services, its copper lines are connected at the central office to a "splitter", which separates the voice channel from the DSL. The voice channel goes through a "circuit switch", a computer that handles making the connection to the remote phone -- a system initiated in the 1970s. The DSL channel is passed on to a "DSL access multiplexer (DSLAM)".
Maintaining dual systems is expensive, demanding more equipment, support, and even office space, with the central offices traditionally crammed to the ceiling with gear and wiring networks. Under 21CN, the circuit switch and DSLAM will be replaced by a single "multiservices access node (MSAN)". The IP network will use a scheme known as "multiprotocol label switching" to simulate the "virtual circuits" for phone conversations previously created by earlier digital technologies such as ATM.
The MSANs are the key to the 21CN system, and there will be over 5,500 of them by the time the conversion is complete, accounting for 40% of the cost. The MSANs were obtained from Fujitsu of Japan, which had already been selling DSL gear to BT, and to Huawei Technologies of Shenzhen, China, a relative newcomer. BT officials admit that Huawei won on price and that BT has no previous experience with Huawei as a vendor, but add that the company was "thoroughly vetted" before being awarded a contract: 21CN is a big project and nobody wants to court disaster. Huawei will also supply some of the "transmission equipment" to convert between fiber-optic links and end-user digital systems.
Ciena Corporation of Linthicum, Maryland, USA, is also providing transmission equipment. Ciena is a major manufacturer of fiber-optic gear and the award of a contract by BT to the company was no surprise, nor were other contract awards to big players like Alcatel, Cisco, Juniper, and Siemens. However, the failure of Marconi Telecom, a long-time supplier to BT and the last major British telecommunications equipment supplier, to win any contract for 21CN, was a shock, in fact enough of a shock to push Marconi Telecom into bankruptcy. In late 2005, Marconi's equipment businesses were bought out by telecommunications giant Ericsson of Sweden.
Ericsson had long been a major vendor to BT, supplying such things as central-office switches and software for direct-dial international calling, call waiting, caller ID, voice mail, three-way calling, call logs for billing, emergency service, and so on. 21CN implied moving all this software to a new "inode" computers that are replacing the old switches; there was absolutely no alternative to selecting Ericsson to do that particular job, and so Ericsson got an exclusive contract.
That was, not so incidentally, the only single-vendor deal for 21CN. BT was otherwise very cautious about relying on any one vendor the rest of the system. In particular, the core routing network, which sends torrents of digital data over the trunk lines that link the metro nodes, is completely duplicated, with one set of terabit routers from Cisco and the other from Juniper. The rationale was that a virus penetrating the network would shut it down for days, but since each of the duplicate networks uses different software and different security technology, it would be very difficult to compromise both at the same time.
* The new technology is being complemented by a new regulatory regime. In August 2005, BT and UK government regulators agreed to restructure the rules for phone service and broadband. Back in the 1990s, to encourage competition, the UK Office of Telecommunications required that BT identify specific services -- access from a user connection to a central office, trunk lines from one city to another, and so on -- and sell them wholesale to other providers. The idea was popular at the time; it worked well in France, somewhat indifferently in the UK, and was a bust in the US. In 2003, oversight of UK telecommunications, plus broadcast TV and radio, was consolidated into a new regulatory organization, the "Office of Communications (OfCom)". Of course, one of the first things OfCom did was conduct a review of the existing ways of doing things, examining the relations between OfCom and "the companies we regulate, and citizens and consumers." Over the following two years, OfCom and BT hammered out an agreement titled "The Undertakings", which consisted of 230 individual agreements that effectively subdivided BT.
The "last mile" copper connections from households to central offices, and most of the central office operations themselves, were split off into a BT subsidiary named "OpenReach". If it were a stand-alone company, it would be one of the biggest in the UK, with 30,000 employees. OpenReach is now one of five BT subsidiaries, the others being:
The idea behind the subdivision was to ensure a "level playing field" between OpenReach in particular and competitors. Clive Feather of Demon Internet, the UK's oldest internet service provider and one of the biggest, was asked whether the scheme was fair; he replied: "It seems to be." The shakeup is still settling itself out, and the judgement is still out on some innovations -- such as "wholesale line rental", in which a customer gets a "package deal" bundling telephone, broadband, and mobile phone under a single service and billing system.
* Despite the fact that 21CN had the potential of being a complete disaster, so far everything seems to be well-planned and working neatly. BT took a big chance on the scheme. It would have been organizationally easier to have made incremental changes, but over the long run taking the plunge and rebuilding the UK telecom system almost from the ground up will have a bigger payoff. In any case, the ball is rolling and there's no going back.
* The cellphone revolution has led to ever smarter cellphones that begin to seem more like pocket computers. To no surprise, they now make a tempting target for hackers trying to penetrate their operating systems, sometimes for profit but sometimes just for the malicious hell of it. The first virus to infect cellphones, a self-replicating "worm" named "Cabir", appeared in June 2004. It seemed to have originated in Spain, with its author simply posting it to a website but not trying to propagate it himself. He didn't need to, since others were more than happy to do it for him.
Researchers at F-Secure, a Finnish computer security firm, began to study Cabir to see what made it tick. This was trickier than probing malware infecting a desktop PC: although a desktop PC can usually be disconnected from a network simply by unplugging a networking cable, it's not that simple to isolate a cellphone from the greater network. Initially, the study team worked in a basement bomb shelter. Later, two special study labs, encased in aluminum and copper, were then built to ensure security.
Cabir, it turned out, was a purely experimental virus, designed simply to propagate itself. However, in two years it had been followed by about 200 cellphone viruses, with some disabling phones, others deleting data, and still others ordering the phone to send messages to high-priced phone numbers.
* The first computer virus, named "Brain", was introduced in 1986. Even two years after that, computer experts were claiming viruses would never be any more than a minor nuisance, an idle fad that would pass once the virus writers got bored. Now over 200,00 known viruses have been identified, and malware writers have used them to assemble huge "zombienets" of compromised PCs whose computing power they lease out. As far as cellphones go, it is now 1988, but this time nobody is being complacent: with over two billion cellphones in operation on the planet, the potential for trouble is enormous.
Up to recently, cellphone viruses were also regarded as a curiosity because cellphones weren't highly standardized, with different vendors using different proprietary technologies. A virus written to nail one type of cellphone would not work against another. The new generation of "smartphones" is much more standardized, with many running the Symbian operating system (OS) and a good number (mostly in the Far East) running "pocket" versions of the Linux OS. The smartphone installed base is growing rapidly; a modern smartphone has more computing power than a PC of the mid-1980s, and soon the smartphone will be the most common personal computing device on the planet. The smartphone network makes an irresistible target for virus writers.
At present, smartphone technology is very easy to compromise. Many smartphones have a "BlueTooth" interface, which is a short-range secondary wireless communications channel allowing a phone or other device to trade data with another BlueTooth node within about ten meters distance. Normally, a device with a BlueTooth interface operates automatically, linking to any other BlueTooth node in range -- which not only makes a BlueTooth-enabled smartphone easy to infect, but also makes it a virulent source of infections once it has been compromised. Users can set their smartphones to a "nondiscoverable" mode so that it won't hook up automatically with another BlueTooth node, but most smartphone users don't know they can turn their BlueTooth connection on and off at will.
For example, consider the operation of the worm "CommWarrior.Q":
Although CommWarrior.Q wasn't designed to make money for its creator, that doesn't mean it won't rip off Bob and Alice. They have to pay a premium for each MMS file they send, and CommWarrior.Q industriously sends them out in volume, running up a bill.
The first cellphone virus designed to make money was "RedBrowser", which appeared in early 2006. It was actually a "trojan horse", based out of a website that offered downloadable goodies for cellphones. The website actually installed a Java program -- which can run on any OS that runs Java -- that then quietly sent out calls to a special phone line that charged a hefty fee for each call.
Smartphones are increasingly being used as "electronic wallets", making the incentive to try to compromise them just that much greater. There's also the threat of "spyware", with one virus, "FlexiSpy", reporting a log of the calls and MMS transfers from a compromised phone. New phones have voice recording facilities, and virus writers are sure to try to listen in on the recorded conversations.
* Makers and service providers for smartphones have something of an advantage in that they can see the virus threat coming. It wasn't taken all that seriously on PCs in the early days, but now everybody knows what a nightmare it finally turned into. Smartphone viruses are still fairly primitive: none of the hundreds of malware programs written so far actually exploit holes in the operating system, instead trying to trick users into letting them in.
Some antiviral programs are already available for smartphones. Firewall software, to warn users when a program on the smartphone tries to open an internet connection, needs to be developed. Some service providers monitor traffic and block MMS files corrupted by viruses, but all the providers need to do so as a standard practice. The "Trusted Computing Group" has been working on standards for microcircuitry to provide improved security for smartphones, and the latest versions of the Symbian OS also include improved security schemes. Symbian now requires any programs installed on a smartphone to have a "digital certificate", which has to be obtained from Symbian and is hard to simulate.
Governments also need to get their act together on dealing with cybercrime, providing penalties and enforcement. However, the ultimate responsibility will rest on users. All the tools in the world won't help if the users don't take advantage of them, and go on answering YES just because malware won't take NO for an answer.
* Anybody with a background in the electronics industry knows about the heroes of the domain, such as Bob Noyce and Jack Kilby, but few remember the name of Jack A. Morton of AT&T Bell Labs. Morton's career promised to make him another hero of the industry, but in the end he made decisions that would reduce him to obscurity. His rise and fall makes for an interesting story.
Jack Morton was from Saint Louis, obtaining an electrical engineering degree from Wayne University in Detroit, where he was also on the football team. In 1936, he hired on to AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, pursuing a doctorate from Columbia University in New York. During World War II, Morton worked on radar and microwave technology, with his work leading to the development in the postwar period of a compact microwave vacuum tube that became a key to the microwave telephone relay towers that sprouted across the USA.
In 1948, Morton took on responsibility for development of the newfangled solid-state transistor that promised to replace vacuum tubes. The transistor had been demonstrated in 1947, by three other Bell Labs researchers, including William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain. However, it was strictly a lab prototype device and not remotely a commercial product. As Morton said later, the performance of the transistor was likely to shift "if someone slammed a door."
Morton was sharp, determined, aggressive, and single-minded. By 1950, Western Electric, AT&T's manufacturing arm, had transistors in production. These were still crude "point contact transistors", with the more modern "junction transistor" being demonstrated in 1951. Morton saw its potential and got it into production in a year. These early devices were made of germanium, but a few researchers like Shockley were convinced that silicon would do a better job, the problem being that silicon devices were more difficult to fabricate. In 1954, AT&T brass decided to develop the first "electronic switching system (ESS)" for telephone exchanges, and the decision devolved down to Morton as to whether it would be based on germanium transistors, then in reliable production, or the still-experimental silicon transistors. Morton grasped the nettle and chose silicon. The ESS-1 switching system, introduced in the early 1960s, would prove an outstanding success.
* That would turn out to be the zenith of Morton's career. By the late 1950s, researchers like Noyce at Fairchild and Kilby at Texas Instruments were pioneering the first integrated circuits (ICs), which combined multiple transistors and other electronic components on a single silicon crystal. At the outset, like any other new technology, ICs were not particularly impressive, with a limited number of devices per chip and an expensive pricetag. The US military, requiring compact electronics to fit into missiles, was funding the technology and willing to pay the price. AT&T didn't have to worry about lightweight electronics for their switching systems and the like, and so the company had no immediate motive to be concerned about ICs.
Morton had become a company vice-president in 1958. He was convinced that ICs weren't going to go much farther. His concerns were not unreasonable; the way he saw it, the more devices on a chip, the higher the probability that the chip would be defective. To ensure a working chip with a thousand transistors would require that the failure rate per device would be well less than 1 in 1,000. He also believed that operational reliability would be a problem, and that tooling up IC production would be so expensive as to present an obstacle to technical improvement. Morton wasn't subtle in expressing his objections, either, with one of his employees saying later: "Morton was such a strong, intimidating leader that he could make incorrect decisions and remain unchallenged because of his aggressive style." When competitors began to talk about "LSI" or "large scale integration" in the mid-1960s, Morton sneered at the competition as "large scale idiots".
However, by the end of the decade the writing was on the wall, with competitors employing the new "metal oxide semiconductor (MOS)" technology to make ever denser chips. In the early 1960s, Morton had decided that MOS technology was unpromising and ordered work on the technology at AT&T abandoned. There's a saying that being on the rear of the advance means being in the forefront of the retreat, but Morton's predictions of a retreat turned out to be dead wrong and AT&T ended up in the rear, period. The reality was that the problem of chip yields, though hardly a simple issue, could be addressed even as chips started to begin their rapid rise towards millions of devices. The reliability of a one-chip device was vastly greater than that of a comparable system wired together from simpler components; and though fabricating chips was and remains an expensive business, manufacturers never hesitated to update their processes as fast as they could. If they didn't, they went broke.
* By the end of the 1960s, Morton's failure was becoming apparent, though his prestige didn't suffer. LSI was still in its infancy at that time and Morton could continue to think that he would be vindicated in the end, but given his headstrong personality he was frustrated at being stuck at the corporate VP level. He took to drinking more and more, his favorite hangout being the Neshanic Inn, located in Neshanic Station, New Jersey, not far from where he lived.
On the evening of 10 December 1971, Morton had returned from a trip to Europe and gone to the Neshanic Inn from the airport, driving his Volvo. The inn was closing when he got there, but two men, Henry Molka and Freddie Cisson, offered to give him a drink from a bottle in their car. The two men robbed Morton in the parking lot. Of course, given his aggressive disposition, he fought back, but he was outmatched. They beat him unconscious and threw him in the back seat of his Volvo. They drove it a block down the road and set it on fire. In the dark hours of the morning of 11 December 1971, firemen arrived to put out the fire, to then be shocked to find Morton's charred corpse in the back seat. An autopsy revealed Morton's lungs were singed, meaning that he was still breathing when the fire started. Molka and Cisson had murdered Morton for all of the $30 USD he had in his wallet. They got life in prison, but only served 18 years.
* The story of Jack Morton's life and death provides a certain morbid fascination of how chance and decisions could lead down a branching path of possibilities to a man's destruction. Organizationally, the story of Morton's failure to see the future suggests a less dramatic lesson anyone who's ever worked for a big bureaucracy knows perfectly well: that a good leader can be an SOB -- but there's a lot of SOBs in management and the only ones that are any good also happen to be right. There's a subtler lesson, in that objections to a new course of action can be raised that seem perfectly sensible and valid at the time, but turn out to be completely wrong in hindsight.
* INTRODUCTION: In the summer of 1945, nuclear weapons were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending World War II. These weapons were a product of an aggressive development effort conducted at great expense and deep secrecy in the deserts of New Mexico, with the work performed by some of the world's greatest minds in physics. The two bombs dropped on Japan would be the only nuclear weapons used in anger in the 20th century, but they would set off a massive arms race that led to the development of vastly more powerful weapons. This series will provide a history of the origins of the atomic bomb, and of the nuclear arms race which followed.
* DISCOVERING THE ATOM: The notion that the materials of the Universe are made up of indivisible fundamental particles, or "atoms", goes back to the ancient Greeks, but it didn't become a truly scientific notion until the 19th century, when chemists were able to categorize different fundamental "elements" of matter, defined as materials that could not be chemically broken down into any other materials, and described these elements as being composed of different atoms, with different relative weights and other properties.
By the end of the 19th century, the notion of atoms was well-established in the chemical community, though the physicists had a few reservations. The objections would dealt with in the early years of the 20th century, making the atomic theory universally accepted by the scientific community. Ironically, by that time the atom was no longer seen as indivisible. In 1897, the British physicist Sir Joseph John "J.J." Thomson had shown that atoms contained very small particles with a negative electric charge. These particles were named "electrons" and made up ordinary electric currents.
The heavier atoms had more electrons than the lighter atoms. Atoms are normally electrically neutral; removing electrons left the atom with a positive charge, adding electrons left it with a negative charge. The implication, Thomson realized, was that the atom itself was a matrix of some sort that was positively charged, with the negatively-charged electrons swimming around inside of it and neutralizing the overall positive charge. "Ionizing" the atom by removing or adding electrons gave the atom a net charge. The scheme was called the "plum pudding" model of an atom, since it was reminiscent of a plum pudding with raisins embedded in it. It was not a completely accurate image of things, but it was a good first approximation.
In the meantime, Henri Becquerel discovered the mysterious energetic emissions of some materials that became known as "radioactivity". The French husband and wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie following up this revelation by discovering the radioactive elements radium and polonium, which would break down into other elements, releasing energy in the process. The atom, despite its name, was not indivisible and immutable. It had components and could break down into other elements, releasing some of those components. The breakdown rate of different unstable atoms proved to be very predictable, with any given collection of such atoms having a distinctive "half life", giving the amount of time it took for half of the atoms to "decay" to other atoms.
Radioactivity decay involved a release of energy much higher than could be
maintained by any chemical process. Albert Einstein's theory of special
relativity, published in 1905, had led to the famous "mass-energy
relationship":
energy = mass * speed_of_light^2
-- or "E = MC^2". Mass was being converted to energy in radioactive
processes. Since the speed of light was a large value, those energies might
in principle be enormous. In 1914, the British novelist H.G. Wells would
speculate about super-powerful "atomic bombs" in his book THE WORLD SET
FREE, though of course he had no concept of how such a thing would work.
In fact, the physicists were still struggling to understand atom and were not yet in any position to exploit the energies locked up within it. In 1910, the New Zealander physicist Ernst Rutherford, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in England, discovered that the atom had a nucleus. Rutherford was conducting an experiment in which he bombarded a gold foil with energetic radiation known as "alpha particles". Every now and then one of the alpha particles bounced back at him, as revealed by flashes on a phosphorescent screen. This made no sense with the Thomson plum pudding model, because in that scenario the positively-charged matrix of the atom was not dense enough to have much effect on the energetic alpha particles. The answer was that the mass of the atom was not uniformly distributed through the atom's volume, but was concentrated in a nucleus. Instead of firing at a piece of paper, he was firing at mostly empty space with a small solid blob in the middle of it. Every now and then an alpha particle would hit a "nucleus" and bounce back.
The First World War put serious research into the atom on hold, but once the conflict was over, Rutherford determined that the nucleus contained a set of particles known as "protons", each of which had a positive charge equal to the negative charge of an electron -- but were about 1,837 times heavier than the electrons. This immediately led to a puzzle. Given that an atom of a specific element had a known number of electrons, it had to have the same number of positively-charged protons to balance out the negative charges of the electrons. However, the masses of atoms were known, and they were as a rule roughly twice as heavy as might be expected from the needed number of protons. One guess as to why this was so was that the nucleus also contained a number of electrons that partly neutralized the set of protons in it.
In addition, just before the war Rutherford's student Frederick Soddy had shown that a specific element could come in a range of masses, varying slightly in mass but otherwise with the same chemical properties -- though they could have different radioactive properties, which was what tipped Soddy off. The existence of "isotopes" for the elements was one of the reasons that relative weights of elements as calculated in the last century seemed to increase by varying steps: the weights calculated were averages of different isotopes.
After the war, in 1919 another one of Rutherford's students, Francis Aston, came up with a scheme to sort out isotopes of elements, inventing a device known as a "mass spectrograph". In its modern form, it features an injection system that strips a sample of an element of an electron or two -- "ionizes" it -- and then electrically accelerates the beam of ions through a magnetic field. The magnetic field forces the paths of the ions to curve, with the curvature greater for lighter isotopes. A row of detectors could then count up the relative concentrations of isotopes in the sample.
* While the experimental physicist Rutherford and his students were probing the atom, theoretical physicists were trying to come up a framework to make the atom understood. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, working in Rutherford's lab for a time, was able to come up with an ad hoc model of the atom, which explained a number of processes that didn't make sense under classical physics. The essential feature was that the electrons orbiting an atom could only occupy a certain specific set of orbits around the nucleus. This explained features such as specific spectral patterns of light emission from an atom, but the model didn't explain why there were such specific sets of orbits.
His work was generally sidetracked by WWI, but in the 1920s the theoreticians went back to the task with a vengeance. With Bohr as a senior figure, theorists including the Germans Werner Heisenberg and Max Born, as well as the Austrian Erwin Schroedinger and Swiss Wolfgang Pauli, were able to come up with a much more adequate model of the atom based on "wave mechanics", in which the electron orbits were modeled as a resonant states of waves representing electrons. In this model, the specific sets of orbits correspondent to the possible resonant states of the electrons in orbit. The details are devious and beyond the scope of this series, but some of the principal players in the effort would be involved in the effort to obtain the energy from the atom.
The experimentalists were overshadowed by the theoreticians for a time, but they soon came back to the fore. In 1932, the British physicist James Chadwick had discovered that the atomic nucleus consisted not only of protons, but also neutral particles otherwise similar to protons, which logically became known as "neutrons". This allowed the clumsy idea of the nucleus containing electrons to be discarded: the additional mass of the nucleus was due to the neutrons. In addition, it explained isotopes: they had differing numbers of neutrons.
The discovery of the neutron led in turn to another discovery. Since particles with the same electric charge repelled each other with a repulsive electromagnetic force, as described by Werner Heisenberg in 1932 there had to be some force stronger than the electromagnetic force to keep the nucleus from flying apart. However, while the electromagnetic force has unlimited range, this "strong force" had to be a close-range force, only acting between neighboring particles in the nucleus; otherwise it would have effects outside of the nucleus, and none had been observed.
As nuclei incorporated more protons, the long-range electromagnetic forces between the protons tended to make the nucleus more unstable. However, neutrons could be added to a nucleus to provide additional strong-force couplings to keep the nucleus together; since neutrons are electrically neutral, they don't introduce electromagnetic couplings and so can shore up the stability of the nucleus to an extent. As atoms grow heavier, the average ratio of neutrons to protons tends to increase. Of course, the instability still increases, with elements tending to be more unstable as their atomic mass increases, and elements approaching a hundred protons tending to be so unstable as to be difficult to accumulate in quantity. The number of a hundred is not a coincidence: the strong force is about a hundred times stronger than the electromagnetic force, and so a hundred long-range electromagnetic force couplings will overwhelm the short-range strong force.
One of the interesting things that had been discovered in the investigation of the isotopes of atoms was that, even after determining the mass of a particular isotope, it would be somewhat less than would be expected by adding up the masses of the appropriate number of individual protons and neutrons needed to make up that nucleus. This was known as the "mass defect" (or equivalently rephrased as the "packing fraction"), and it was quickly realized that it was Einstein's E = MC^2 relationship in operation. In binding together, some of the mass of the nucleons was converted into energy, released, and lost. Not surprisingly, this energy was referred to as the "binding energy".
In terms of the ratio of mass defect to atomic mass, the defect grew larger as elements grew heavier up to iron, and then began to shrink again. This had significant implications in terms of energetics of nucleosynthesis: as a rule, creating heavier elements released energy overall up to iron, but for heavier elements nucleosynthesis absorbed energy. On the other side of the coin, breaking down these heavier elements released energy.
* In any case, the discovery of the neutron completed the basic modern model
of an atom, with an atom consisting of an atomic nucleus composed of an
agglomeration of protons and neutrons, with a number of electrons matching
the number of protons orbiting the nucleus. Elements could have multiple
isotopes, differing in their number of neutrons; some isotopes may be stable
and others may be unstable, with some elements having no stable isotopes .
For example, ordinary hydrogen, the simplest possible and most common atom,
has one proton, no neutron, and one electron. Such ordinary hydrogen can be
referred to in a shorthand form as:
H<1/1>
In formal terms, the "atomic mass" and "atomic number" of hydrogen are both
1. The much rarer "deuterium" or "heavy hydrogen" has a neutron along with
the proton, and is given as:
H<2/1>
The atomic mass has increased to 2, while the atomic number remains the same,
1 -- necessarily, since if it didn't the atom wouldn't be hydrogen any more.
While heavy hydrogen is stable, there is another isotope of hydrogen,
"tritium", that is unstable and radioactive. Tritium has a proton and two
neutrons, and so is given as:
H<3/1>
Now the atomic mass is 3, while once again, the atomic number is 1. The next
element in the atomic series is helium, normally with two protons, two
neutrons, and two electrons, given by:
He<4/2>
-- meaning an atomic mass of 4 and an atomic number of 2. Incidentally, an
alpha particle is just a normal helium nucleus stripped of its electrons.
There are isotopes of helium, but now the pattern should clear. For
examples:
Be<9/4> Beryllium-9, a stable isotope.
Be<10/4> Beryllium-10, an unstable isotope.
C<12/6> Carbon-12, a stable isotope.
C<14/6> Carbon-14, a stable isotope.
Fe<56/26> Iron-56, a stable isotope.
* For the moment, all this was a purely theoretical issue, but the real world
was gradually intruding into the ivory tower of the physics community. In
1933, a rightist government under Adolf Hitler, a rabid antisemite, took
power in Germany. Einstein, long the target of German antisemites, had
already left for the US in December 1932, ending up at Princeton in the USA.
He would eventually become an American citizen.
In the spring of 1933, Hitler passed a law throwing all Jews out of the civil service jobs. That included the state educational system, and all Jewish professors were promptly dismissed, including many who had been raised as Christians and had never been in a synagogue in their lives. It didn't matter: if they had Jewish ancestry, they were Jews. Many of the dismissed professors were Hungarian Jews, who had left Hungary for Germany in the early 1920s after a rightist and antisemitic regime came into power, evicting a short-lived Communist government. Now the Hungarians had to move again.
The exodus of Hungarian Jews included a clutch of promising physicists, including Leo Szilard, who had been an associate of Einstein's at the University of Berlin. Britain would welcome many of the refugees, and Szilard quickly made his way to London. He had read H.G. Wells' THE WORLD SET FREE in 1932 and had found the novel's concept of an "atomic bomb" intriguing. At the back of his mind, Szilard no doubt suspected that it wouldn't be very long before such a terrible weapon would be needed.
TO BE CONTINUED
* THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES: Darwin's 1858 presentation on natural selection to the Linnaean Society was hardly a bombshell. In fact, nobody paid too much attention to it, likely because it had just been thrown out briefly as an idea without much backup to validate it and demonstrate its implications. Darwin followed the presentation of the papers with a little over a year of lively work on a much more complete exposition of his ideas, something that would do a proper job, though it wouldn't be the excruciatingly detailed multivolume work that he felt was really required.
The book was published on 1 November 1859 under the title of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY THE MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION. Not surprisingly, it became known by the simpler title of ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Darwin presented his argument in a well-structured fashion, working through the basic elements of the theory:
Along with the notion of natural selection, Darwin also introduced the concept of "sexual selection". The elaborate tailfeathers of a peacock obviously served no useful purpose for survival and so natural selection couldn't explain it. However, since only males had the fan of tailfeathers, that suggested that sex had something to do with it. Under sexual selection, peahens were attracted to peacocks with more elaborate tails, and so peacocks with bigger tails tended to propagate more than those with smaller tails, ultimately leading to a riot of elaboration. Sexual selection could be regarded as a subset of the concept of natural selection, with the selection focused on survival of a line of life-forms through procreation.
This phenomenon was particularly striking with respect to isolated islands like the Galapogos. In the first place, the islands were only home to life-forms whose ancestral forms could have made it across the ocean in the first place: birds and some reptiles, but no large mammals. In the second place, these life-forms were clearly related to life-forms found on the nearest land mass. In the third place, even among the island group, life-forms on each island tended to visibly differ from their cousin life-forms on the other islands, as if the set of organisms on all the islands were evolving down along different branching paths.
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES did admit there were weaknesses to the idea, such as the existence of complicated and highly refined organs that would seem unlikely to have arisen by a chance scheme; the incompleteness of the fossil record in determining transitional forms; and the lack of known mechanisms by which changes occurred in individuals and were passed down to descendants. Darwin did not feel these were fatal problems, simply issues that needed to be addressed farther down the road. As far as the evolution of humans from other life-forms went, Darwin did nothing more than hint at the possibility in ORIGIN OF SPECIES, since he knew that would be controversial, and so he wanted to make sure he did an adequate job when he addressed the issue in earnest. As far as the origins of life itself, that was basically out of the domain of his concern, though he did privately speculate on how it might have happened.
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES is a painstaking, thorough, plodding work. It is not exactly a stimulating read to the modern eye, and it says something about Darwin's insistence on nailing down the details that he actually wanted to write something much bigger, more definitive, and no doubt more eye-glazing. In fact, its very plodding nature was the key to its importance: Darwin had clearly done his homework, and THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES was too formidable to simply be ignored. He had put the word "Darwinism" -- the evolution of species by natural selection -- into the dictionary, and nobody would ever be able to take it out it again.
* THE UPROAR OVER DARWIN: Although Darwin's 1858 presentation to the Linnaen Society had been ignored, THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES was not. On the day after Christmas, 1859, the normally conservative TIMES OF LONDON published a glowing review of ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Darwin didn't know at the time that the author was his correspondent T.H. Huxley. Darwin hadn't told Huxley too much about the theory before the presentation to the Linnaen Society the year before, but Huxley found Darwin's thinking sparkling.
Huxley didn't agree with Darwin in all the details, in particular backing saltationism and indicating to Darwin that he shouldn't have even touched the issue of the origins of life, but THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES still held immense appeal to Huxley. Darwin was retiring in demeanor and reluctant to rock the boat; Huxley was charismatic, aggressive, and very much a bomb-thrower who wanted to upset the established order. Although the conventional scientific wisdom of the time was opposed to the concept of evolution, there were others beside Huxley who were impatient with the old ways and wanted change. Huxley was their natural leader, a fiery prophet to spread the doctrine of Darwin. Huxley was actually looking forward to a war under the banner of Darwin, writing the master that as for the "curs that will bark and yelp" Darwin should realize that he had friends with an "amount of combatativeness" that will "stand you in good stead." Huxley concluded with anticipation: "I am sharpening my claws and beak in readiness."
Huxley joined with Hooker, Lyell, and the American Asa Gray (1810:1888) to create what was called the "Four Musketeers" in defense of Darwin -- though Gray, a devout Presbyterian, eventually created a theistically-flavored view of evolution that the others weren't entirely comfortable with. As Gray saw it, there was certainly common ground in the thinking of Charles Darwin and John Calvin: did not Calvin believe that only a small number were chosen for salvation while the rest were damned? What really was the difference between that and natural selection? Certainly Gray gets credit for trying to reconcile Darwin and Christianity, which would have a long, troubled relationship.
Huxley was correct in his belief that there were those who were inclined to "bark and yelp". Partly this was due to the inertia of catastrophist creationist dogma among the scientific community of the era, but Darwin's notions of the chance nature of evolution by natural selection, based on what amounted to throws of the dice and the selection of winning throws for survival, seemed like a hard thing to swallow. Worse, the implication that humans had evolved from earlier primates -- what everyone called "apes", though technically speaking the ancestors of humanity were also the ancestors of apes -- was downright offensive, implying the rejection of the idea of the superiority of humans to all other animals. Adam Sedgwick went through ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES and wrote Darwin, in a civil but strained fashion, that he had read it with "more pain than pleasure".
Huxley was more than willing to take on such skepticism. At the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, he took on Owen in a argument over the similarity of the brains of humans and gorillas. This was followed by a debate with Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805:1873) of Oxford, who sneered at the concept of evolution. Huxley listened in contempt since the bishop was implicitly declaring the superiority of religious doctrine over scientific observation, which to Huxley was an entirely unacceptable idea. Wilberforce asked Huxley if he was descended from a apes on his grandmother's or grandfather's side. Huxley, who it seems had been expecting a jab along such lines and already the response in his pocket, responded eagerly, whispering to a colleague: "The Lord has delivered him into mine hands." -- and then standing to reply:
BEGIN QUOTE:
If then the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion -- I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape!
END QUOTE
The result was a near-riot. The devout Captain Fitzroy was in the audience, waving a bible in the air over the shouting. The fact that Wilberforce had grossly insulted Huxley first did not do much to soften outrage over Huxley's counterattack. Huxley cared little for the outrage and stuck by his guns. In 1873, Bishop Wilberforce fell from a horse, struck his head, and died, with Huxley providing an uncharitable epitaph: "For once, reality came into contact with his brain, and the result was fatal." Such was Huxley's aggressiveness that he became known as "Darwin's bulldog".
TO BE CONTINUED
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