How Advances in Science Are Made
How Advances in Science Are MadeIntroduced by the Master of Ceremonies: Douglas Osheroff won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics and is a professor at Stanford University. The list of his achievements is long, but his most important trait, the host said, is that he is a very entertaining speaker, as the audience heard when he spoke here the year before.
It’s my pleasure to be here today. Now, I must say that I thought Charles gave a spectacularly good talk. I was already worried, because my talk actually had rather little to do with any of the other talks; I guess I had my head somewhere else. And so then Charles gives this wonderful talk, and I just hope that I will not put you to sleep.
This is actually a collage of two different talks I give. At least I think it starts out with a very nice picture of the Earth. In fact, this is, I think, the Red Sea, I believe. Anyway, let’s go on. I have lots of favorite slides, because I’m an avid photographer. So you actually get two different first slides: “How Science Changes Our Lives” and “How Advances in Science Are Made.” I’ll talk about both of these things, because they’re obviously interrelated. This, of course, is the Golden Gate Bridge, and we all know about that.
From Copernicus to James Watt
So we’re starting out with Nicolaus Copernicus. I think we all know who he was and what he did. He was really the first really serious scientist, I would say. Unfortunately, I can’t—if I get back up here, I think I can probably read this a little bit better. Anyway, Copernicus was, in fact, a spectacular person.
But I think the next person in line, in terms of really great scientists, was Galileo, and it’s really hard to top Galileo. Galileo was considered the father of modern astronomy. He did a lot to improve the quality of telescopes, and he, of course, was the first person to actually see the four largest moons of Jupiter.
We’re going on; it gets better and better, I suppose. Now, this, of course, is Sir Isaac Newton. The fact that the French would actually put an Englishman’s picture on one of their postage stamps suggests how great the French consider Sir Isaac Newton to be. It’s kind of interesting what it says here: we perhaps owe more to Sir Isaac Newton than to any other early scientist. He developed the mathematics of calculus to understand particle motion, and the idea of a gravitational field that helped to explain the motion of the planets.
And then this is what Sir Isaac Newton said about himself: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” So you can get some feeling for what was going on in Newton’s mind.
I dare say that James Watt was not a scientist. He was really an inventor. And it’s kind of interesting—I didn’t show you, but typically I chose scientists such that one of them died just before the next one was born. Anyway, this is James Watt, and what he did, really, was to greatly improve, using thermodynamics, the efficiency of steam engines, by roughly a factor of four. That really made a lot of difference. In fact, what it did was allow the industrial age to come.
Coal, falling water, and a warming planet
Unfortunately, once you start burning coal, you end up with a terrible effluent. I dare say that, thanks to what Watt did, I suppose, for quite a long time major cities had air that was fouled by not just the carbon dioxide, but a lot of worse things that come with the burning of coal.
So this is Lake Powell, during a period of drought, and now you can see—if I go back here—these are two smokestacks. Oops, there we go. So here we have three that probably are burning more coal than what I just showed you, but these are modern coal-fired electric generating plants, and they scrub the effluent that’s coming out. They get rid of the particulate matter in particular. You can’t get rid of the CO2 that way, but it ends up looking fairly clean. However, if you look on a longer scale, here now are those three electric generating facilities, and if you look, coming out here there is a wisp of sort of brown haze, which is a result of the burning of the coal. Otherwise everything else is the same here.
One can do a lot with falling water, and so certainly, if you want to choose a clean source of energy, probably the cleanest is a hydroelectric plant. This shows how it works. I think everyone can imagine: the water comes down, it turns a turbine, and the turbine turns a generator. This is a blow-up: this is the turbine, and this is the generator. These generators, by the way, are typically something like, I would guess, maybe 30 feet in diameter. I’ve seen these things up close, and they’re really remarkable. This is Itaipu, and I think there’s a big argument as to whether that is the largest electric generating plant in the world. This is at the border between Paraguay and Brazil. The generator is above this floor, and the turbine is below this floor, and this shaft is about four feet in diameter, to give you some idea how big and how strong these things are. And this thing makes absolutely no noise. It’s really remarkable.
But now let’s get back. For a long time we didn’t use falling water, and of course there’s a limited amount of energy one can get from falling water. This shows, over a thousand years, what CO2 has done to our atmosphere. Here we’re looking at the average temperature, from the year 1000 to 2000, and what you see is that, kind of slowly, the average temperature, measured by a number of different means, is slowly dropping. But then, just in the last hundred years, there’s a very sharp rise, and this is really due mostly to our burning of coal, of fossil fuels.
This is CO2 in the atmosphere. It is basically determined by looking at bubbles of gas trapped in ice. It’s pretty steady, but then again, about a hundred years ago, it started a very sharp upturn. If you compare this with our estimate of the carbon emissions that have occurred over the last few hundred years, you can see that basically all of these upturns are essentially the same thing. And this is really a problem that we have. I dare say there are ways of generating electricity that don’t involve burning coal, but coal is, in fact, the cheapest way of doing that. It’s not the best.
This shows the melt of the Arctic ice sheet over different periods of time. These are different years. So 1979 here: it started turning up rather quickly; this is as you’re cooling back down. But if you compare this—this is 1979, and this is what’s happening in 2007—you’re losing a lot more ice in 2007 than you did in 1979. And there’s just no way of compensating for this. We are, in fact, warming. We are putting a lot of CO2 into our atmosphere, and CO2 actually has the effect that it reflects infrared back to the Earth. So it’s not just that the [infrared] can’t get out; it’s actually reflected back. NASA, by the way, has satellites—I like to say they’re down-looking satellites—that actually measure the CO2 concentration in our atmosphere. But measuring something and doing something about it are entirely different things.
So you might ask, how is the U.S. doing? I choose the United States—there are lots—but I dare say it’s easy to choose the United States, because we are the worst country in the world, I think, in terms of per capita production of CO2. The U.S. consumes the energy equivalent of 3 million megawatts of energy, constantly. Most of this is from CO2, but not all of it. That’s 1,000 watts per person. I very quickly realized, before I ever read that number, that in fact I was using about 1,000 watts as a homeowner. This is over four times the world average, and twice the consumption of the European countries. The United States is really a bad actor when it comes to, particularly, I would say, the CO2 problem. But in general we consume more than our share of energy.
Our strong dependence on oil makes the U.S. vulnerable to strong fluctuations in petroleum prices as the world begins to run out of petroleum. And yet the United States has done literally nothing about this. We must start now to apply science in developing synthetic liquid energy sources, and hopefully not ones that compete with resources used to grow our food supply. And then, down here in red, which is kind of hard to read: we must create sustainable energy sources, not dependent on fossil fuels, that do not pollute our land, our air, or deplete other resources. And I don’t know when that’s all going to happen.
This shows Greenland, and the bottom line is that in 2002 the Greenland ice cap had melted back considerably from where it had been in—I can’t read that—1992. It’s nice being in the audience.
Dewar, Kamerlingh Onnes, and the cold
So now I’m really going to switch a lot, talking about how advances in science are made, and what they do.
This is James Dewar. He’s one of my favorite people because, as a low-temperature [physicist], I use James Dewar’s flask, the Dewar flask, for holding my liquid nitrogen and my liquid helium. Dewar, by the way, was Scottish. That’s not terribly relevant until we get to the next slide. These are the years that he lived. But Dewar was in a competition with this man here, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who was a Dutchman. These two, I dare say, were vying for whoever could make devices that would be most useful, and I suppose the person that won that game was Kamerlingh Onnes.
What he did, though—well, I have to go back. Okay. What Dewar was doing was systematically measuring the temperature at which various atmospheric gases liquefied, and where the liquids solidified. He was doing this for virtually everything. And so Kamerlingh Onnes decided he would try to do something similar. But Dewar had actually done most of the interesting gases. One that he hadn’t touched was helium, which is one of my favorite substances, helium gas. So he did exactly what Dewar had done: he liquefied the helium. I think we all know that helium is a liquid at atmospheric pressure at 4.2 kelvin. But then he tried to solidify helium under its own vapor pressure, and he worked on that for a long time.
The trouble is that helium actually does not solidify under its own vapor pressure at any temperature. I’ve cooled helium down to one ten-thousandth of a degree above absolute zero, and it stays very happily in a liquid state. I will confess that I was actually cooling helium-3 and not helium-4, but the same thing would have been true for [helium-4].
So Kamerlingh Onnes decided he needed to do something different. People were debating what would happen to the electrical conductivity of a very pure metal if you cooled it all the way to absolute zero. One school of thought was that at some temperature the electrical conductivity would cease. And so Kamerlingh Onnes got a very pure sample of mercury, which is a metal—it’s a liquid, actually, at room temperature—but it is a metal that’s very easy to purify. So he had very pure mercury, and he instructed his associate, Gilles Holst, to measure its electrical resistance as a function of temperature.
So this is resistance zero. This is 0.0005 ohms. This is one thousandth of an ohm. These are very small resistances. The resistance is dropping as he’s cooling it down. This is 4 kelvin; this is 4.5 kelvin. And then, all of a sudden, there was a precipitous drop of the electrical resistance, to a value which was, as best they could tell, less than 10⁻⁵ ohms. This was, of course, the first observation of superconductivity, something that has been studied, I dare say, ever since that time. So it was kind of exciting. This is not something that they expected to see. But in fact this opened up a new world for low-temperature physicists, such as myself.
Life, light, and medicine
But now I’m going back a bit in time. I now want to talk more broadly about a lot of advances, and what they’ve done for mankind, other than making money for some people.
So this is paleontology. This looks like a Tyrannosaurus rex. I’m not sure that’s what— People are nodding their heads. Either I have put some of you to sleep, or you agree. I can’t tell which. But anyway, it’s important because this is where we came from. I mean, I don’t think I’m faintly related to this animal here. But you can see, through studying the fossil remains of animals, the evolution of the species and the growth of different species.
So: life on Earth and our place in the cosmos. The study of fossil remains of animals and plants that lived millions of years ago provides us with an understanding of the history of life on our planet. This is a story which helps us to better understand the origins and evolution of life on Earth, and it also helps us to appreciate the complex processes that produced the human race—at least for some of us, we may think that’s the case. The evidence suggests that this planet is some 4.5 billion years old, and that our universe is some 14 billion years old. Our sun is one of perhaps 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and with the Hubble Space Telescope we can estimate that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies presently observable from Earth. So it’s unlikely that we’re alone.
These studies do not enable us to create new technologies to improve our lives, but they do help to improve our intellectual well-being. And the technologies developed to make these studies can and do find other uses, some of which do benefit mankind.
So now we’re going on. This is Charles Darwin. Now, I’ve got to brag a little bit here: I will be going to the Galápagos Islands in another month. It’s a really exciting thing to do. And of course Charles Darwin is the person that did visit the Galápagos Islands, and by looking at the different species of animals on these isolated islands, he developed his theory of natural selection and published his book on the origin of species. This really was a phenomenal—I would say giant—leap for mankind in our understanding of the evolution of animals on Earth.
Well, this is James Clerk Maxwell. I think everyone that has taken a course in electricity and magnetism appreciates the fact that Maxwell, while looking at the equations that describe electric and magnetic fields, recognized that there was one term missing. And when he put in that last term, he realized that electromagnetic waves should propagate. Electromagnetic waves include radio waves, microwaves, light, X-rays, and gamma rays. Really quite remarkable, with one tiny term that I’m sure lots and lots of high school or even college students probably left out at one time or another.
So this now is Alexander Fleming, who got the Nobel Prize for penicillin. And of course, this was just the start of a rash of wonder drugs that really saved a lot of people’s lives. But if you look at the bottom here, health care in the United States costs us $2.4 trillion. That was in 2007. So you get what you pay for, or you pay for what you get, I suppose, in some sense.
This is kind of an interesting story, and it’s kind of a sad one. This is the DNA double helix, and the Nobel Prize for discovering the double helix went to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins in 1962. But really, there’s someone else that deserves to have that prize, or share that prize, and that’s this person here, Rosalind Franklin. I don’t know how many people here know the story about Rosalind Franklin. But in fact Wilkins actually got one of her X-ray crystallography pictures and ported it to that other group of people that were working on this. Ultimately, what happened, unfortunately, was that Rosalind Franklin died, and that’s probably the main reason why she didn’t get the Nobel Prize. I don’t know if it’s available now, but there was a play called Photograph 51. How many people have seen that play? Oh, it was a spectacular play. Oh, you did. Okay. It was amazing. Unfortunately, she died, but I think she really deserved to share the prize. There is a problem with Nobel Prizes: you cannot give the Nobel Prize to more than three people. And so that’s why this sort of thing happens.
Nuclear magnetic resonance
Okay, well, now we’re getting into my realm. I use nuclear magnetic resonance for a lot of my research. It’s hard to explain what nuclear magnetic resonance is to a lay audience—I don’t know how lay you guys are—but you can imagine that the nucleus of an atom is like a spinning top. However, because it has charge, as it spins, it creates a magnetic field.
I have it here: just as a gyroscope precesses about the Earth’s gravitational field when the axis of rotation is tipped away from the direction of the gravitational field—now we have a magnetic field, B, and we’re tipping the spin away from that—the nuclear spin precesses in a magnetic field when the direction of its spin is tipped away from the direction of the magnetic field. The nuclear spin carries a magnetic dipole moment. As this moment precesses, it generates an oscillating voltage, which can be sensed in a pickup coil. The strength of this voltage depends upon the number of spins precessing, and the frequency of this oscillating voltage is the same as the frequency of the precession of the spin itself.
So this really explains how NMR works. I started doing NMR, I think, when I was an undergraduate at Caltech. But first I should give credit where credit’s due. NMR was invented by these two people: Felix Bloch at Stanford University, and Ed Purcell at Harvard. I didn’t know Felix Bloch; he died before I became a professor at Stanford. But Ed Purcell is one of the kindest, gentlest, brightest people I’ve ever met in my life. I think he’s dead too. But if I had hero figures in my life as a scientist, Ed Purcell was one of them, for sure.
So this shows the evolution of nuclear magnetic resonance. I showed you its inception. I was looking at a mixture of liquid and solid helium-3 under pressure, about 34 bars of pressure. So you had some liquid and some solid helium-3, and I wanted to separate out the NMR signal that came from the liquid helium-3 from the solid helium-3. I did that by applying a magnetic field that was larger at the bottom than it was at the top. And so then, if I applied a single frequency to this NMR coil, I would generate a resonant layer, and if I swept that frequency upward, that resonant layer would move downward, where the magnetic field was larger. So this, in fact, was an early form of MRI. And I actually sent a preprint of my paper describing how I did that to the people, mainly Paul Lauterbur.
Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield used a much more sophisticated form of MRI to image— This is a very healthy human knee. Now, this knee is titanium, and this one is not very healthy. But in fact you can do a much better job at seeing some of the details inside the human body using MRI, and it doesn’t involve any ionizing radiation. It’s really a very benign thing. So Lauterbur and Mansfield shared the Nobel Prize. It’s interesting: if you look at all of the Nobel Prizes that were given for advances in nuclear magnetic resonance, there were four. It’s a really remarkable technology.
And this is the last. This one hasn’t won a Nobel Prize, but I think it should. This is called functional MRI, magnetic resonance imaging. Seiji Ogawa and David Tank created pulse sequences which allowed them to see those places in the brain that were processing information. So you can’t tell what the patient is thinking, but you can see where his brain is actually functioning. It’s absolutely amazing technology.
Okay, so we’re off of NMR. Some people are saying, thank God he’s done. It’s terrible when people are talking about something that they love deeply; the rest of you can’t resonate with that. I understand that. So we’re going on. I know deep down in your heart you would love to have known more about NMR, and if you come to one of my lectures, I’ll tell you.
From Bell Labs to space
We’re really going back in time now, I suppose. This is Karl Jansky, who was working for AT&T Bell Laboratories. I worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories myself for many years, 20-some years. AT&T saw some extra noise that they didn’t understand, and they asked Karl Jansky to find out where that noise was coming from. So he created a very strange-looking radio antenna. But what he basically found was that the noise was coming from up there. It was coming from outside our atmosphere. And so this was really the start of something big.
In 1978, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who had done a lot of work studying this, shared the Nobel Prize. It’s kind of interesting: this is the device that Penzias and Wilson used. It was basically a horn antenna that AT&T had used to look at the feasibility of using satellites to do telephony. That is to say, you could beam a signal up to a satellite and then beam it down to a base station somewhere else. And when AT&T was done doing their tests on this, they gave this piece of equipment to Arno Penzias and Wilson, and they then wanted to look at radio signals coming from extraterrestrial sources. This is a horn antenna, which means you can point it in a specific direction. But inside this shed was, in fact, the greatest technology of its day, and, well, it’s Charlie Townes’s.
This is basically ammonia maser two, the second ammonia maser that Charles Townes made. And this was, of course, the prototype for lots of other things. Ultimately, Nicolaas Bloembergen, at that other university on the East Coast—people at Stanford have trouble pronouncing it—Harvard. That’s Charlie. This is Jim Gordon, who was, I think, working with Charlie at that time. Anyway, this was the start of something very big. This huge thing was actually not the technology that ultimately was useful, but this work led people on to do other things. Well, I guess I missed that one.
So we’re going on, though, looking at other things. AT&T had been using—what were they using before transistors? Tubes. Electron tubes. They produce a lot of heat, and they’re not small. And so AT&T went to John Bardeen and asked Bardeen if maybe he could put together a group—they were all at Bell Laboratories—to invent some solid-state device which would allow us to not have to use electron tubes. And so Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented the transistor. And I dare say that is not the technology that we use in our radios and television sets today.
So here’s—I think this is iPhone 3. I’ve got iPhone 5; most of you probably do. And you can compare this with this. How many people here—I want you to be honest—raise your hands if you’ve ever used a dial phone. That’s impressive. Okay, how many people have not used a dial phone? They’re all young. They’re all young, as you can imagine. Okay, so this is exactly the computer that I’m using right now.
So I’m changing gears quite a bit, and really talking about the progress of technologies. Of course, NASA sent two robots to Mars, and I think no one expected those robots to last the first winter. But in fact, I think they’re in their third year. I mean, it’s amazing. What a technology. And the idea that we control something that’s on the surface of Mars—it just brings goosebumps to the back of my neck every time I think about it. So, really quite a remarkable technology.
This is the Hubble Space Telescope, which really allowed us to look at astrophysical objects further away than we’ve ever been able to see before. This isn’t one of those things, but I just went to get something that looked interesting. This is a spiral galaxy.
I have to say that NASA’s done some wonderful things, but I’m afraid that the space shuttle wasn’t one of them. I was actually on the board that investigated the Columbia shuttle accident, and that was an accident that never should have happened. It was a terrible, terrible mistake, and there’s no reason why all of the people on board should have perished. This wasn’t the first accident; this was the second accident. So you might say, well, surely they learned after their first accident. That was where they had hot gases leaking through these rubber O-ring seals. But anyway, I was on the board that investigated the Columbia accident. I remember exactly what happened when I came home and told my wife that they’d asked me to be on the board to investigate the Columbia shuttle accident. I was also chairman of the physics department at Stanford University, and my wife said, “Don’t you do that. Don’t you do that.” That was the most fascinating thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was very sad, but it was fascinating.
Okay, so here we’re back to Penzias and Wilson again. But now we look at the final—basically, this is their view of the cosmos. You see these fluctuations in the temperature of the radiation that’s coming from various parts of the sky. The average temperature is 2.725 kelvin. But what we understand now is that the fluctuations in the temperature were due to fluctuations in the density of the early universe, at the point where, basically, matter and energy separated. So, basically, some of this is [inaudible] other places.
Satellites, Nobel banquets, and travel pictures
Okay, so we’re almost done. How many people recognize where this is? This is Red Square, looking down. So this is a typical satellite [image]. During a period of time when we wanted to know what the Russians were doing, and the Russians wanted to know what we were doing, I suppose that these downward-looking satellites actually were important for peace. They really were.
But now, in fact, I can go to— This is Red Square, with St. Basil’s Cathedral in the background. A little bit of snow didn’t hurt. I’m mainly a very avid amateur photographer, and I love going around the world and getting these pictures. So, in fact, you don’t have to look down anymore. You can actually go to Red Square. You can see all of these things. You don’t have to worry about being thrown into the clink. This is right inside the Kremlin itself. This is an old cannon. But the idea that I, as an American citizen, could be inside the Kremlin was just an absolutely amazing thing for me.
Okay, so we’re almost done here. This is December 11, 2001. Does anyone know what happened on that date, 100 years earlier? That was when the first Nobel Prize was given out. And so I was there. They had all of the Nobel laureates come back, which is a lot. This is a banquet table. I think it seated something like, I don’t know, over 100 people. Thank God I wasn’t there. I mean, I was; they didn’t have enough room, so I was out in one of the large areas. But if you guys ever have the opportunity, keep in mind that if you’re at one of these banquet tables, you can only talk to the person on your left and your right. You can’t talk to anyone else during the entire time. So make sure that person is a really, really interesting person.
Okay, so this is kind of fun. I should say this is my wife. This is Harold Kroto, who also had a Nobel Prize, and this is Lady Kroto. But does anyone know who this guy is? [Someone in the audience: “That’s you.”] No. That means I laugh myself to death. No, no. This is Fred Sanger, who won two Nobel Prizes, for protein and for DNA sequencing. And you didn’t even know who it was. Shame. Shame. There are a handful of people who have won two Nobel Prizes, but it’s a very, very small group.
Okay, so now I’ve really completely collapsed. One of the things I love is that as a Nobel laureate, you get to go all over the world, and I always bring very expensive cameras with me. So this is a picture of Hong Kong Harbor at night, from Victoria Peak. It’s kind of interesting, because I took this picture, and then almost a year later I went back up there and took the daytime picture of it. It can be kind of fun. Anyway, this is Hong Kong.
This is Iguazu. This is basically at the border between Paraguay and Brazil. This is actually only a small piece of the Iguazu Falls, which is a really incredible thing. In Paraguay there was a fine arts school, and they wanted me to talk there. And so I quickly Googled and found the really interesting stuff that was within a five hours’ drive. And so I said, okay, if you take me to Iguazu Falls, I’ll give you guys two lectures. I was being generous.
This is, of course—we don’t have to go very far to see the Big Sur coastline here, but it’s one of the more spectacular sights.
This is Dunhuang, in western China. This is a very complicated story. I was giving a talk in Beijing, and there was a delay, and I said, well, what can we do about that? And they said, well, okay, we’ll just fly you to Dunhuang. So they knew what I liked. Anyway, that’s kind of fun.
This is sort of a sad story. This is the Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina. Of course, virtually every other glacier is in the process of melting. It’s very sad. This is spectacular, so I recommend you go down there before it’s all gone.
And this is, finally—this is kind of an interesting story. This is Mount Fitz Roy, and it’s named after the captain of the Beagle. I don’t understand exactly how that happened, but in fact that’s the case.
And I think that’s about the end of it. Thank you for your time.
Transcribed from the video and lightly edited.
