Thanks for going on this trip with me. I really enjoyed relaying stories as I was reading and will probably continue this trend. That doesn’t mean all the other books I’ve read have gone to waste. No doubt there will be slow days, dry periods and I will rock your world with some Paracelsusian goodness. Going to switch from science to math next and then pop back over to history before circling around to science again.
For now, we’re going to talk about sushi. Deadly, deadly sushi.
Remember last time I mentioned Marie Curie named a newly discovered element ‘polonium’ after her native Poland? That ended up not being an awesome choice, mostly because polonium is not only basically useless ni most cases, but actually downright deadly for humans. It was a great favor of the Kremlin, so when ex-KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko ate sushi laced with polonium, there wasn’t a lot of ambiguity over who had called the hit.
The final ironic and tragic blow came from Marie’s own child. Irene Joliot-Curie was a great scientist in her own right (in fact, she almost discovered nuclear fission, but didn’t trust herself enough to follow through on it, leaving it to another female scientist named Meitner). She died, slowly, though without the public humiliation Litvinenko went through, after a capsule of polonium blew up in her lab and she breathed in the toxic fumes. Lukemia claimed her just as it had her mother, broughto n the wings of her mother’s precious element.
Not all stories regarding radioactive elements have sad engings. There was once a Hungarian aristocrat named Gyorg Hevesy who was studying radioactivity. Unused as he was to English food, he was pretty sure his landlady was ‘recycling’ old meat in his meals, instead of getting it fresh daily as she promised. In order to test this hypothesis, and at the same time, learn a bit more about radioactivity itself, he waited until her back was turned and then sprinkled ‘hot’ (that is, radioactive) lead over it. When she took the leftovers away, he just had to wait. Borrowing a piece of lab equipment from his lab buddy Hans Geiger, the next day he checked his food. Sure enough, it was chalk full of clickclickclick inducing lead. When he confronted his landlady over this, she wasn’t so much upset as tickled over being caught using THE FUTURE.
Because we can’t leave this subject without talking about the Nazis one more time:
There was concern that the Nazis would plunder Nobel prizes in Germany. Because Hitler didn’t like or approve of the Nobel committee (what with their unforgivable sins or giving Nobel prizes to journalists that criticize the Nazi government and even worse JEWISH SCIENTISTS), he actually made it illegal for a German to accept a Nobel prize. The concern was strong enough that a German Jew and a Jewish sympathizer (Franch and Laue) sent their medals to Niels Bohr for safekeeping. However, Hitler had also made it illegal to export gold. He was like that. So there was serious danger when the Nazis came knocking on Niels’ institute in Denmark. Like, ‘head cut off’/’firing range’ danger if the medals were found. Quick thinking Niels suggested they dissolve the medals with aqua regia. When the Nazis tore through the institute, they left the beakers with the strange orange liquid on the shelf, and it was still there when the scientists came back. They pulled the gold back out and the Swedish Academy recast them into their medallions.
Bohr had all sorts of clever ideas and a quick wit. After Einstein made his famous I-don’t-like-quantam-physics line about God not playing dice, Bohr responded with, “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do!”
Now we move on to a slightly touchier subject.
Have you ever known an artist? Maybe (in fact, probably) not a professional one per se, but an artistic person? A painter, a musician, etc. Were they kind of crazy? Flaky, not great at practical matters but you forgave them a lot because they seemed to tap into a part of the brain you just didn’t have access to? I figure we all know those people. Or are those people.
Robert Lowell was definitely one of those people. He was a poet in the 1960’s and 70’s. When he was at prep school, mates called him Cal, short for Caliban (a la The Tempest although ‘Caligula’ is also possible). He was an artist like Van Gogh or Edgar Allan Poe. By that, I mean, he was bonkers.
Like…turn up at a friend’s house convinced he was the Virgin Mary bonkers. Or think he could stop traffic by holding his arms out like Jesus bonkers. Or my personal favorite: Leave a fiance to spontaneously drive from Boston to Tennessee in order to ask a poet there to mentor him. With the assumption the man would just put him up. Cuz. So when the poet joked that he could stay camped on the lawn, Robert nodded and promptly went to Sears to buy a tent.
Though for a long time (and continuing to this day) bipolar or manic-depressive disorder is/was a fashionable dysfunction to claim, which undermined its credibility as a phenomenon, it is a very real thing. And Robert Lowell could have been its poster child. He would write amazing stuff on the upper and utterly ruin himself on the way down. His swings were so bad that at one point, while committed to a psychiatric facility where he wasn’t allowed belts or shoelaces, he was offered a still-not-awesomely-understood drug based on a rocky sounding element called ‘lithium.’ Anything seemed better than how he was, so he agreed. Despite not coming to the US until 1967, scientists had at least been aware of the effects of lithium since at least 1886, they just didn’t understand the chemical causes. They knew it could stabilize mood-swings but couldn’t tell you how. As with most things, the interaction is nuanced, varied and multifaceted, but much of it has to do with what is called the ‘circadian rhythm.’ That’s that thing that makes you get sleepy after the sun goes down (or if you’re a nightowl, makes you conk out at 3pm). In individuals with manic-depressive disorder, this rhythm isn’t on a 24 hour cycle like most people. The average person’s cycle is influenced by ambient/environmental factors like whether the sun is up. That sunlight encourages neurostimulants. People with MD have a cycle independent of such factors. It’s like it is daytime all the time, which makes them feel bouyant and confident. Lithium regulates the proteins which regulate the internal clock, turning off the ‘inner sun,’ when the actual sun goes down.
In Lowell’s case, in a pattern which would be repeated many times, the medication made him healthier and steadier. It cost his art though because he seemed less able to tap into that part of his brain where genius and madness dwell. He began to do things like quote other people’s letters to him in his poems without citing them. At the time, he was described as looking like an animal locked in a zoo. Now, we usually use the term ‘zombie.’
Our last stop for this trip, the last individual we will be checking in with is one Ernest Rutheford. An ogre and a genius, he was the guy who was so enamored of physics that he said that was all there was, everything else (specifically chemistry) was stamp-collecting. I imagine that soured somewhat when he accepted the Nobel prize for Chemistry. He used crazy euphemisms, being a religious man, but sometimes, you just can’t hold back. To balance out his blue-streaking tirades, he woudl also sing ‘Onward Christian Soldier’ a lot…and loudly…and offkey.
Oh and he looked like this.
That’s a mustache made for swears.
He tutored 11 future Nobel prize winners, making him the Genghis Khan of science. He discovered radon. Among his many (many) accomplishments was working out with Frederick Soddy that elements sometimes turn into each other.
Soddy: Rutheford, this is transmutation!
Rutheford: For Mike’s sakes, Soddy, don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists!
That conversation actually happened, including ‘For Mike’s sakes.’ He also worked out a better way of working out the age of the earth.
For decades, the accepted number had come from Lord Kelvin, a mental giant in his day, but during Rutheford’s time, a tired, crabby old man whose mind was getting foggy but who still weilded a great deal of political power within the university. Like old people everywhere, he had difficulty ‘getting’ or accepting new ideas. Like radioactivity. Marie Curie had a fondness for pulling men into her closet to see her glow in the dark elements as evidence of such phenomenon (which, given her reputation made their wives quite nervous) and Lord Kelvin was one of the ones she had tried to convert.
So here was Rutheford, about to present evidence about the age of the world, utterly demolishing Kelvin’s theory…with Kelvin right there in the first row. Ernest was panicking until he remembered a throw away line in one of the Lord’s papers about how his calculations were correct unless there were other heat sources within the earth (which of course, we now know there are). So on some level, Rutheford argued, Lord Kelvin had actually predicted these findings! Kelvin thought it was all bollocks, but he wasn’t going to turn down a compliment to argue.
That’s all I have for today. Thanks again for being awesome. ~Shard out
Let Me Ruin That For You 