Weird Science

 One of the podcasts I listen to while trodding the treadmill is Alan Alda’s “Clear and Vivid:  Conversations about Communicating and Connecting.”  At the end of each interview, he asks his guests seven questions.  In case I’m ever famous, I’ve got my answers lined up.  Being on his podcast is on my Wish List, along with being the Guest Celebrity on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” showing up as a clue in a Will Shortz crossword puzzle, and lamenting how no political party wants a post-middle age white moderate male on Margaret Hoover’s reboot of “Firing Line.”  I’ve given up on winning the Pulitzer Prize for humor, although it would be fun to be known as The Dave Barry of Medicine.  One of my prize possessions is a book my Dad had him sign inscribed, “To Howard, my idol, Dave Barry.”  

Question one of the seven inquiries is “What is something you wish you really understood?” and I would really like to know how things work.  Take physics.  (Please.)  I took high school physics the last semester of my senior year and got a D.  All I remember is shooting darts at tin can lids suspended from strings and rolling Hot Wheels cars down ramps to see how far they’d go.  The D was because physics is all about math, and while I am not morally opposed to math, our relationship is distant at best. I’m like those folks in the grocery store who are perfectly happy that food exists, but have no real interest in how it got there.  To be fair, there are a few principles of physics that I’ve found useful.  I understand the analogy of Schrodinger’s Cat (if there’s a cat in a box, you don’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you look inside the box) and have adapted it to explain Schrodinger’s Liver, where you don’t know if you have hepatic failure or not until you start drinking and turn yellow.  Boyle’s Law applies in explaining the effects of altitude at the Pole, and Poiselle’s Law…stating that the flow rate through a tube is proportional to the tube’s diameter…helps explain why large intravenous catheters run fluid so fast and the urinary passage of a 60-year-old man is so agonizingly slow that you could write a novella if both hands were free.

Because I don’t understand math, nor particularly care to do so, much of the truly groundbreaking science we do at the Pole is far beyond my comprehension.   But I try to learn as best I can.  It probably comes as no surprise that some of my best education has come after an adult beverage or three.  A few weeks back a small group of Polies were having a 3 AM confab about, well, what we talk about when we drink.  I was saying how you can always tell where the ER people are sitting having breakfast and drinking Red Beer (tomato juice and Budweiser), as all the tables around them clear out because everyone else’s appetite gets ruined.  An ex-military Supply Guy noted that kill ratios are all the rage in their alcoholic musings.  Then the physics and engineering guys started rolling, and I vaguely recall something about helium and Kelvin and LIDAR and was totally adrift until they noted that the temperature in any given space is really an average of the temperature of each atom or molecule in the space as they fall along a bell curve, meaning that in any particular space out of the kazillion atoms that are floating about there is one as close as possible to absolute zero and one that’s infinitely hot.  This struck home with me, as I realized that given a similar distribution of life events, at one end of the spectrum there probably is a carrot that’s standing upright on the kitchen floor as you wash dishes in the nude, and another carrot which is lying so flat it may exist only two dimensions.  I shared this thought with my colleagues on an ER physician social media site, and was pleased to find that others had also considered this idea this in a most profound manner and had recognized that given the probabilities of temperature distribution, there was chance that the carrot could not only land upright, but could be superheated to a million degrees Kelvin.  Another also noted that “The South Pole” would become her favorite anatomical euphemism.

These deep science conversations are not limited to the late night hours.  Last week at breakfast I wandered into a conversation about the correct pronunciation of the planet Uranus.  The Vampire Engineer, who knows an abnormal amount of stuff, insisted on Yer-a-nuss, because it’s right, while the rest of us went with Yer-anus, because it’s funnier.  It was then noted that in Uranus, Missouri, you can get a box of candy and a tee-shirt that says, “I got my fudge packed in Uranus.”  In an attempt to raise the level of discourse (which after seven months locked up with us he should have known better), our undead walking fund of knowledge explained that when the planet was first discovered, it was called “King George’s Planet” after King George III of England.  This led the group to then consider if our neighbor should be better known as “King George’s (euphemism for lower colonic sphincter) and  like much of the cosmos, it was full of dark matter; and that maybe Yer-a-nuss was really just the plural of urinals.  This latter thought delighted the grammar nerd in me, because I could easily make this fit into the Allan Sherman song “One Hippopotami” about singulars and plurals, the best line of which is:

“And when Ben Casey meets Kildare,

That’s a paradox!”

We have also learned that the Vampire Engineer wears sunglasses when he goes to the communal restroom at night to “avoid the glare,” but we all know what happens to vampires when exposed to light.

(You’ve probably already figured that “kazillion” is not a true number.  A “google” is a one followed by a hundred zeros; a “googleplex” is a one followed by a google of zeros, or ten duotrigitillion.  As the total number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be about 4 x 10⁷⁹, give or take a few, it seems like that as a number kazillion might be just a tad short of googleness, or googlousness, or googleosity.)

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One of the experiments here that boggles my poor earthbound mind is called Ice Cube. The Ice Cube is designed to detect neutrinos.  A neutrino is a fundamental particle of matter originating from nuclear reactions in the heart of stars.  The neutrino has essentially no mass, no charge, and like diet soda no calories as well.  They are hard to find, as their lack of charge means that they cannot be found by looking for electromagnetic blips, and even though they continually stream towards the earth in vast numbers they seldom collide with other fragments of matter.  This latter point is hard to fathom.  But what we perceive as solid is really not so; a rock is comprised of bazillions of atoms (clearly less that a kazilion, because “K” is after “B” in the alphabet), but each atom is mostly empty space between the protons and neutrons gathered in the nucleus and the sparse electrons whirling about the center.  It’s a stretch to think about, but it’s true that any solid object is mostly empty space; and the probability of an outside particle dashing through the rock and not hitting anything else would overwhelming beat the house in Vegas.  To give you a sense of just how rare these interactions are, one source estimates that of the 100,000 billion neutrinos that pass through your body each second, only one will interact with your personal conglomeration of chemical compounds during your lifetime.   

Ice Cube is billed as a neutrino detector, though in truth it really doesn’t detect neutrinos.  When the instrument “sees” a neutrino, what it really senses are the results of that rare collision of the neutrino with a molecule of water in the ice.  Depending on which direction the debris (a light particle, or photon) from the impact is scattered, you can get a general idea from which direction the neutrino originated.  You then point a telescope towards that point to see what has happened to generate the neutrino shower.   It’s kind of like a detective looking at the pattern of bullets at a crime scene; noting the scatter of the slugs and casings one can deduce the location of the shooter. The impact gives off charged particles such as electron which can then be detected by the Ice Cube modules. 

The technical aspects of the experiment are impressive. Ice Cube is not a single device, but several hundred strings of basketball-sized detectors over a square kilometer of ice.  Each string connects multiple detectors buried nearly a thousand feet deep into the ice.  (Each detector has been given a pet name; there’s a poster in the Ice Cube lab listing over 5,000 of them.)  The detectors report to a large server room on the top floor of the laboratory. When a photon emission form a suspected extraterrestrial neutrino collision is spotted, an alert goes off on the radio and the Ice Cube folks run to notify similar experiments around the world that maybe the detectors might have seen something that could be an indication of a supernova but might also be a message from an alien civilization asking for more reruns of “I Love Lucy” because their Supreme Leader is called The Babaloo. 

(Flashback to a sign in high school chemistry class:  “In this Laboratory let’s have more LABOR and less ORATORY.”)

It turns out that while specialists in physics and cosmology like to ask the “Big Questions,” one you should not ask is “What would you do if you had a can of neutrinos?”  They’ll twist and turn and hem and haw because the real answer is they have no idea.  You’ll hear something about how we didn’t know what to do with quantum physics when it was first proposed but now we’re working on quantum computers and of course we have the Ant-Man and Wasp movies, but the truth is they haven’t a clue if neutrinos will provide us with a new way of looking at the universe or if we should just sprinkle them like Bac-O’s over a salad.  To take their minds off this conundrum, some of us have decided to create a dating website for our Ice Cube colleagues called NeutrinoChicks.com, where hot girls from Asia and Eastern Europe seeking love (and not running water or cable TV) can hook up with PhD’s to talk about their favorite kind of neutrinos and exchange suggestive banter like “I’m the one in a lifetime that’s gonna interact with you, baby.”  If that doesn’t work, there’s always IveGotABigTelescope.com, but I hear that hopeless romantics on this site are often disappointed when they learn it’s only a small narrow-band radio dish.   

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The other big project that sends my brain into conniptions is the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, or BICEP.  This device scans the sky for cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).  The CMB is a remnant of the Big Bang, which in this case is not the best night of your life but the unique event at the origin the known universe.  It had been theorized that if the Big Bang occurred, high-energy radiation from the initial event would eventually cool down as the universe expanded fall into the low-energy microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Since the confirmation of its’ existence in the 1960’s the CMB has been an intense focus of cosmologic interest.  The science folks have a pretty good idea what happened from about the first 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang until now.  What they don’t know is what happened before, or what’s going to happen in the future.  Answering the latter question is what BICEP’s all about.

There are several possible futures for the universe.  The most optimistic one (so of course it can’t be right) is that the universe is stable. It has existed, and will continue to exist in its’ current shape and form. However, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble ruined our complacency when he noted that other stars and galaxies were racing away from us, almost as if they took a good look at Earth and ran as if they knew exactly what they were doing.

The question for the cosmologist is if the universe will keep expanding or contract back into it’s original state.  Neither option is particularly pleasant.  If expansion is unchecked, not only do stars and galaxies fly apart fly apart from one another, but so does every kind of matter.  Over time the molecules of gas within the stars begin to separate, as do the components of the rocks and minerals that make up the planets and everything on them; eventually the atoms that comprise the molecules distance themselves from one another, and then subatomic particles do the same.  After “The Big Rip,” the universe becomes nothing more than an endless void dotted with occasional bits of matter.  I’m told that I shouldn’t worry about this, as humanity will be long gone by then, the stars having burned out or the atoms within the starts too far apart to join in fusion making heat and light, and it’ll be a dark, dead place long before the end.  Somehow I’m not comforted. 

The other option is to think of the universe as an infinitely large yo-yo.  Just as the spin on the toy forces it descend down the string and then pop back up in your hand, it’s thought that the forces driving the expansion after the Big Bang will eventually be constrained by the gravity which exists between objects, and over time the universe will be brought back together and collapse in on itself, an even called “The Big Crunch.”  While there’s a certain poetic symmetry to thinking of the birth and death of the universe as a mandala, again there’s little comfort as the naked biped searches for meaning.  

(This bleak outlook is no doubt this is why cosmologists say they have the darkest sense of humor, as all they do is sit around and contemplate nothing.  Fortunately, our science crew here is a pretty festive lot.  There’s the Vampire Engineer, who knows a ton about stuff you didn’t know you needed to know and probably still don’t, and also does a passable Sinatra on Karaoke Night.  There’s the Dean of Flugeyball and The Polite Young Man from Some Country that Starts with “Sw”...Switzterland, Sweden, Swaziland…we’re never quite sure.  And then there’s My New-Found Son, who looked nothing like me before we got on the ice but now, after seven months of being unshorn, bears an eerie resemblance to a younger, hairier me, and I wonder if maybe there was a night in Tijuana just beyond my recall.  But the part where he enters the Interpretive Dance Contest and rips off his shirt as he simulates a night with his Best Girl Methamphetamine?  That’s gotta be his Mom.)

It’s thought that the fate of the universe can be foretold by studying the CBR.  The CBR comes in two flavors called E-modes and B-modes.  The difference lies in the type of polarization of the electromagnetic waves; the easiest way think about it is that E-mode radiation comes at you with clarity, while E-modes are distorted by the expansion of space.  The idea is that if we see E-mode patterns suggesting the inflation of the cosmos, the Big Bang is most certainly true and the universe is fated for infinite expansion.   If they’re not found as predicted, the case for the Big Bang is not quite cinched.

If the Big Bang Theory is correct, and the universe originated from a single point in space-time, one should see consistently decreasing strength of the microwave signal as we peer farther from earth and a continuous distribution throughout the sky.  Instead, maps of the CMB shows spots of more or less activity scattered across the cosmos, and after nearly thirty years of effort as of yet nobody has been able to prove that the theory of the infinitely expanding is actually correct.  My friend The MIT PhD Who Makes Me Feel Better About Myself Because at Least I knew the Word ”Bazongas” thinks that because of these inconsistencies, the whole CMB thing is quite possibly hoohah, which is incidentally the same term we applied the swollen nether regions of Polly the Dog when we forgot to get her spayed and she first came into heat. 

(After spaying, she sulked silently in a corner for three weeks just staring at us.  It’s rough knowing your dog hates you because she can’t have a boyfriend.) 

I asked the Vampire Engineer what they would do if it turns out that they can’t find support for the continued expansion of the universe and the eventual Big Rip.  “Probably build a bigger telescope,” was his reply.  You’ve got to admire the continued quest for grant funding…sorry, I meant to say knowledge…rather than admit defeat and realize that again, it’s the interstellar pixies sitting just off the edge of the universe who turn to each other after a few beers, drop a plugged-in microwave oven into the void, and turn to each other saying, “Hey, everyone watch what the Earthlings make of this,” before laughing their socks off.  

While it makes my late-in-midlife crisis worse to think about cosmic annihilation in any form, the experiment itself is fascinating.  The BICEP detectors look for small temperature changes caused by the CBR.  Electromagnetic radiation of any kind produces heat, but the heat form the CMB is at levels so low they defy imagination.  Scientists often use the Kelvin scale to describe these extremes.  Absolute zero, which is the temperature at which the entropy (the measure of disorder in a substance or system caused by the motions of atoms and molecules) and enthalpy (the internal energy of a system from the motion of those same particles) reaches its’ minimum value, is 0 Kelvin; the same point is -273 on the Celsius scale and -459 Fahrenheit.  The heat produced by the CBR is subKelvin, or less than 1 degree K.  BICEP can only detect this heat if the receiver is cooler than that CBR, so if you’re going to find evidence of the CBR your detector has to be cooled to an even lower value using pressure and liquid gases.  Once chilled, however, even the small change in temperature induced by the CMB can produce an electric charge within the detector; the sum of these charges are used to develop a picture of the sky.  

(Please try to use the words entropy and enthalpy in a sentence this week.  Thank you.)

The whole scheme works surprisingly well unless you put the wrong gas in the detectors.  For example, nitrogen liquefies and freezes at a higher temperature than helium.  If nitrogen gas gets into the system, you can’t cool the instrument down to the temperature needed to record the CMB.  BICEP can be down for weeks while the engineers purge nitrogen from the system and refill it with helium.  But since the telescope went down for a bit this year and we’re still here, I suppose we didn’t really miss anything.  I’m proud to have played a role in this process of discovery; a couple of times I’ve gone out and helped knock snow off the telescope mount.  It’s pretty bizarre to be out there with a broom and a brush, doing the lowest of tasks on the device that may reveal the fate of the universe.    

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Our third major astronomical toy is the South Pole Telescope.  SPT looks like an overgrown satellite dish, with a large parabolic saucer focusing the gathered electromagnetic radiation on an array of supercooled detectors.  While the scan of the SPT is more narrow, the detectors are more densely paced so the telescope has greater sensitivity to its’ point of interest.  It’s also freely moveable to target any point in the sky.  (BICEP is mostly a passive receiver with limited mobility.)  It’s part of a worldwide network of instruments collectively known as the Event Horizon Telescope, and was a key contributor to the first photographs of a black hole.  

It’s really pretty amazing to see.  About a fifteen minute walk from the elevated station, the SPT building literally chirps as pumps circulate liquid gases through the telescope’s detector array.  From the outside you watch the dish move as it scans the sky; from inside the structure, you view a large, toothed wheel turn on a vertical axis, the pivot surrounded by a network of cables carry the superchilled gases, each cable painfully cold to touch.

There are a host of other experiments here as well.  Some of the more prominent ones include the South Pole Remote Earth Science and Seismological Observatory (SPRESSO) which measures tectonic activity.  It’s located about five miles distant from the Station, with sensors buried up to 1000 feet deep in the ice to avoid data errors from vehicle vibrations or aircraft operations at the Pole.  Several LIDAR installations project a beam up into the sky to determine cloud levels and thickness for meteorological reports by timing how quickly and with what intensity the laser light is reflected back to the origin point.  The Super Dural Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) is an array of antennas on the other side of the Geographic Pole (I would say north, but everything is), part of a worldwide radar network that studies atmospheric phenomena, especially the activity of plasma in the ionosphere that forms auroras.  Which makes it a silly experiment, because deep in our hearts we all know it’s just the pixies again.

(One final Pro Tip:  Should you have a chance to go drinking with astrophysicists and engineers, one fun way to get the conversation rolling is to tell them that their favorite toy for cosmic eavesdropping is not a telescope but a detector.  The difference, as I understand it, is that a telescope collects light…itself comprised of elementary particles called photons…and delivers it to a detector, which then determines the various qualities of the light stream.  I don’t like that answer, even if it happens to be correct, because every advanced astronomical device gathers photons and everything tries to analyze them, which means there’s no point in picking the fight and no fun to be had in doing so.  Instead, I like to think that a telescope can be pointed at things, while a detector just sits in a fixed positon to see what drops by.  So the South Pole Telescope is, in fact, a telescope, while the Ice Cube and BICEP arrays are just mere detectors.  Put in human terms, a telescope is the old guy in the Homeowner’s Association Golf Cart who drives down your street to measure your grass and then write you a nasty letter, while a detector just peers out of his house with a pair of binoculars and hopes your blinds are open.)

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A final science point of note.  One bright spot in vapid months of austral winter has been following the YouTube adventures of Eric Hecker.  Eric spent a winter on-ice at the Pole over a decade ago.  According to his story, however, he was a firefighter with total access to everything going on at the South Pole.  This is half-true; he was a firefighter, but in the same sense that we have some over-winter folks trained in basic fire suppression, but that’s not their primary job.  And pretty much everyone has access to everything except the Booze Barn.  Nothing is locked up because if you steal something, where are you going to go?  But surely he must have had special privileges, because he's clearly an authority.  He wears a blue polo shirt with lots of patches, and if I’ve learned anything in my six decades of life it’s that you shouldn’t get engaged too quickly because anyone can be on good behavior for at least six months, and that the more authentic-looking patches you have on your shirt or jacket the more you must certainly know what you’re talking about.

Eric has earned his fifteen minutes of fame (at least on this continent) for his “whistleblowing” on the many classified activities occurring on-station.  I’ve been here eight months and while I’ve witnessed some odd behaviors, I had no idea we were communicating with both aliens and our own fleet of faster-than light spacecraft.  I didn’t know that we had an Exotic Matter reactor buried under the ice at the site of the original South Pole Station, nor that the Ice Cube neutrino detector is actually a cleverly disguised earthquake machine.

There are lots of ways to dismantle these arguments.  One is to simply point out the facts, but that would be no fun.  You might note the hundreds of folks it would take to build and staff these reactors and weapons, and wonder why none of them has ever mentioned them before, but of course they don’t talk because the government plays hardball.  Of course nobody currently on station knows about such things because it’s a secret, so why would they tell us?  I think the best argument against these speculations is to simply look at the personalities on-site.  If you’ve read the blog this far, you already know something about me and my friends.  We’re like the Island of Misfit Toys.  Would you let me anywhere near an earthquake machine?  “It’s Saturday.  I’m a Gator fan.  Let’s pop Tallahasse.”  I thought not.

You’ll have to excuse me…time to transmit Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 to the pixies at the edge of the universe.  They’ve been asking about the telekinetic dog.  That microwave popcorn they're snacking on will screw up the telescope for sure.