Vol. 24, No. 9 - Access to Energy Newsletter

Near the end of his life, Isaac Newton wrote: "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, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.''

Even though Isaac Newton's pebbles and shells formed the basis for the scientific and industrial revolutions which created our civilization and Newton was undoubtedly able to foresee at least some of their implications and potential, he never lost the humility with which he placed himself and his discoveries in universal perspective.

During the subsequent 300 years, many remarkable things have been accomplished in science and technology. Still, when one looks outward at those parts of the incredible vastness of the universe or inward at those parts of extraordinary microscopic, submicroscopic and subatomic universe that we can now see, it is self-evident that the minds of men have still just barely started to understand or comprehend the physical world.

This is a perspective that is shared by most real scientists and was once ingrained in the general ethics governing their publications. Until recently, for example, it was not acceptable to include assertions in elementary science text books that had not been rigorously proved. Professional research publications made a clear distinction between hypotheses, theories, and facts. Equation-embodied laws, such as those of thermodynamics, were applied only within the frameworks of the boundary conditions inherent in their derivations.

During the past 50 years, tax-financed science has steadily diminished these standards. The number of people calling themselves "scientists'' has markedly increased in order to spend the enormous tax-financed bonanza, and the ethics of science have concomitantly decreased to that level desired by those who control this money.

Objective review of, for example, current scientific work on the origins of life and of the universe leads to the conclusion that there are various hypotheses and numerous experimental observations, but these studies are barely in their infancy and will probably require centuries if not millennia of work before they are reliably understood - if they are indeed understandable at all by the mind of man.

Yet, science textbooks and popular publications are filled with assertions that leave their readers with the impression that these problems have been largely solved. (The work, however, is not quite finished, so be sure to keep the money flowing.) The advertised solutions are, of course, those that enhance the standing of the secular government institutions that collect tax money and forward a part to the scientists. Hypotheses that favor institutions that the government perceives as competitors are much less popular.

Environmental science now has an especially virulent case of this disease. Global weather is a very complex problem. Science is not at all close to ab initio understanding of weather phenomena, and the great amount of experimental data required for even an empirical understanding is just beginning to be collected. Yet, primitive computer models based on woefully inadequate data and theory are being touted as weather predictors capable of reliable forecasting centuries into the future. Similarly, the global sources and sinks of carbonaceous compounds have been largely identified, but are not yet well understood qualitatively and certainly not quantitatively. Nevertheless, our government is pushing ahead with global controls on carbon usage under the claim that all of this is so definitively understood by scientists that literally trillions of dollars in restrictive economic changes in the world economy should be based upon it.

Scientists are, of course, ordinary people with all of the usual human faults and foibles. It is unsurprising that some of them, especially those whose abilities are below average, would pander to the wishes of those who pay their bills. It is also not surprising that confiscatory government would parade those particular scientists before the public while ignoring those who are not so easily manipulated.

There is, however, also something deeper and more pervasive taking place. Scientists and technologists are losing an essential anchor to reality - humility. This is not justified by their accomplishments.

As human knowledge has increased over the past 300 years, the observable frontiers of the universe have also increased. As we have begun to understand more fully the things close to us, the extent of things we can see has expanded so much that we are no closer to comprehending our observable universe than we were in Newton's day. Why then are we justified in discarding the humility that he expressed? The answer is that we are not justified in doing so.

Moreover, this failure cannot be simplified by dividing "scientists'' into those who have been bought and those who are intellectually honest. Each person carries within him the potential for both.

For example, Linus Pauling carried personal aggrandizement and pseudoscientific assertions not justified by experimental evidence to a high art, yet simultaneously he performed outstanding work on the nature of the chemical bond. Eventually his nonscientific claims reached absurd levels, but still, right up to the time of his death at age 93, he was publishing excellent valence bond calculations.

Paul (population bomb) Ehrlich and Steven (global cooling and global warming) Schneider continue to publish ridiculous claims about global resources and climate regardless of the complete and spectacular failures of their earlier predictions. Somewhere, however, in their personnel files at Stanford there must be at least some evidence of acceptable scientific work justifying their professorships.

Science and technology require rationalism and intellectual rigor, while scientists and technologists are ordinary humans whose minds and lives are also affected by many irrational, self-serving digressions. The ethics that provide an essential barrier between these two characteristics of human beings have required several centuries for development. These ethics are endangered today by formidable forces within human nature and power-hungry human institutions -the same enemies that they have battled for hundreds of years.

It is obvious that, to protect science and technology, we must preserve honesty, integrity, objective experimental observation, rational thought, and the general scientific method. One very important and essential part of that protection is humility. Without humility, our egos tend to lead us to discard the ethics essential to our science.

A useful problem to add to your 10-year-old home-schooled student's math lesson is: "How long will it take a turtle to walk to Mexico City?'' (You can ask a public school student, too, but the answer is likely to be, "the teacher didn't show us how to do that problem.'')

Sometimes, the student will reply by asking how far it is to Mexico City and how fast a turtle walks and by saying that the problem cannot be worked without this information. In fact, a surprisingly good answer can be calculated if the student comprehends orders of magnitude.

First, how far is it to Mexico City (from, for example, Oregon)? Well, it is less than 10,000 miles (about half-way around the earth) and more than 500 miles (still in the United States). Already we have

narrowed the distance to within about an order of magnitude. Mexico City is at the far end of Mexico, approximately twice the distance to the California-Mexico border, so 2,000 miles is a reasonable estimate.

Now, consider the turtle. A man comfortably walks about four miles per hour. (A world-class four-minute-mile athlete manages to run 15 miles per hour for a total of four minutes, so this upper limit keeps us within the right order of magnitude.) Obviously a turtle walks more slowly than a man.

An ordinary land turtle (perhaps your student's pet turtle providing he is willing to risk imprisonment from some, as yet obscure, federal law) can, however, escape from his captor if left alone in the back yard for an hour. If it is 50 feet to the yard's edge, this would be about 0.01 miles per hour. Allowing the man and the turtle to rest, eat, and enjoy the scenery during their trip, the turtle's speed is, therefore between two and three orders of magnitude slower than the man.

To ask the turtle to go the 300 foot length of a football field in one hour is clearly too much. This sets an upper limit much closer to the escape from the yard. Let's allow our turtle to average 20 feet per hour.

So, (2,000)(5,000) / 20 = 500,000 hours. (Notice that we use 5,000 rather than 5,280 for the feet per mile. This is close enough for our purposes and easier to calculate, since the student is expected to solve this problem mentally, without use of pencil and paper.) Dividing 500,000 by (24)(365) or about 10,000 equals approximately 50 years.

Do we now need to know how long a turtle lives? Not really, our answer is probably correct to within about a factor of two and certainly within one order of magnitude, which overlaps with a reasonable distribution of turtle longevities. A turtle can probably walk from Oregon to Mexico City providing he devotes most of his life to the effort.

Since we have not specified a particular turtle, this estimate of about 50 years is certainly a good order-of-magnitude estimate and much better than might have been expected from a first glance at the vagaries of the formally stated problem.

For convenience, every third order of magnitude in the decimal system has been given a common prefix: 10¹² is tera, 10⁹ is giga, 10⁶ is mega, 10³ is kilo, 10^-3 is milli, 10^-6 is micro, 10^-9 is nano, 10^-12 is pico, and 10^-15 is femto. The most common range is further enhanced by 10 ^-1 which is deci and 10^-2 which is centi.

Most people comprehend only the few orders of magnitude within their common experience. Except for specialized scientists and technologists, this is usually between 10⁶ or mega and 10^-6 or micro. The remarkable advance in computer technology is, however, causing a bulge in this range at the high end, since gigabyte disk drives are now being delivered at low cost to the general public.

Facility with orders of magnitude and mental arithmetic is more common among scientists and engineers in the older generations because they did not have calculators and personal computers. Each slide rule calculation required simultaneous mental calculation of the order of magnitude of the answer, since a slide rule does not preserve the position of the decimal point. This is, however, not an obsolete skill.

Everyone, regardless of his ultimate occupation, should be taught to perform mental arithmetic, calculate in orders of magnitude, and think quantitatively. Since a calculator cannot be inserted into a student's brain, his ability to think quantitatively depends upon his ability to perform mental arithmetic. Access to calculators during the early years of training tends to diminish the development of mental arithmetic.

Many of the pseudoscientific hoaxes that are perpetrated on the general public depend upon the widespread inability to comprehend problems in quantitative terms. A thing is classed as "bad'' or "good'' or "higher'' or "lower'' without asking "how much?'' As the tax-financed socialist schools have degraded the teaching of mathematics, they have substituted the claim that they are teaching students "concepts'' and "the ability to see the big picture'' rather than drilling on mere problem solving and boring calculations that are easily done by computers. In fact, without a good education in mental arithmetic and quantitative thought, which requires years of individual problem solving, a student is unable to evaluate concepts or pictures. This leaves him at the mercy of the canned opinions in media propaganda - opinions that are often quite different from the truth.

The most accurate time pieces available today are based upon an electronic transition between two energy levels in the cesium atom. With appropriate electronic tools, this transition is utilized to produce clocks that are accurate to 3 parts in 10¹⁵ - or three femtoseconds per second. Clock precision is especially important in navigation, astronomy, and various studies in theoretical and experimental physics.

"Time to Trap an Ytterbium Ion'' by Pauline Rigby, Nature 386, p 225 (1997), reports that a new electronic transition has been measured in atoms of the element ytterbium that will make possible the construction of clocks that are three orders of magnitude (1000 times) more accurate than cesium clocks.

These clocks depend upon fluorescence, the tendency for some of the excited states of atoms to have long lifetimes before decaying into lower energy states. Electrons in these atoms become temporarily trapped in higher energy levels. A result of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is that the longer the lifetime of an electronic transition, the more precisely its energy can be measured. Molecular clock precision depends upon this measurement. The newly observed transition in ytterbium has a lifetime of about ten years, making it difficult to detect but also ideal for high precision time measurement.

Scientists are excited about this development because, after the necessary engineering has been completed, it may extend their ability to measure a fundamental parameter by three orders of magnitude - a very great improvement.

Radon is causing intellectual earthquakes within the health physics community as a result of Cohen's work showing decreasing lung cancer incidence with increasing radon exposure. There is also increasing evidence that radon is useful in the prediction of actual earthquakes.

"Anomaly in Atmospheric Radon Concentration: Possible Precursor to the 1995 Kobe, Japan, Earthquake'' by Y. Yasuoka and M. Shi-nogi, Health Physics 72, No. 5, pp 759-761 (1997), reports that the concentration of radon 222 (which has a half-life of 4 days) in air sampled 16 feet above the ground became markedly higher two months before the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that devastated Kobe Japan on 17 January 1995. These air samples were continuously measured between 1984 and 1996 at a site near a major fault and 12 miles from the earthquake center. Figures 1 and 2 are from the Yasuoka and Shinogi paper.

During the 10 years preceding the earthquake, a careful record was made of diurnal and seasonal variations in atmospheric radon 222 levels. These measurements were used to calculate the smoothed mean radon concentration and the standard deviations of that mean. These deviations were those caused by all variables that occurred during that ten year period. Figure 2 summarizes these calculations and actual measurements during a two-year period that included the earthquake.

The difference between the smoothed radon concentration and the smoothed mean radon concentration is plotted as the "residual value'' in Figure 2. The UCL and LCL lines represent the 95% and 99% confidence levels for expected fluctuation from line FIT which is the predicted line.

Based upon the ten-year historical record, there is only one chance in one hundred that the residual radon concentration will drift outside of the UCL 99 or the LCL 99 range during the time interval of this graph. Yet, the figure shows that this value drifted above UCL99 at the end of November 1994 and remained higher than UCL99 until the earthquake took place two months later.

Moreover, H. Wakita et al, Science 269, pp 60-61 (1995), reported that radon concentration in ground water increased for several months prior to this earthquake. The ground water samples were taken three miles east of the air sampling station.

Earthquakes are especially dangerous to human life because they strike quickly before emergency action can be taken. People are trapped under falling structures without having an opportunity to escape. With warning, most earthquake deaths, like most deaths from hurricanes and floods, could be avoided. These experiments indicate that ground release of radon 222 can provide warning.

A continuing source of national embarrassment in the United States should be our inability to produce politicians, bureaucrats, and news commentators who are capable of truthfully reading simple graphs of temperature vs. time. Instead, the country is rushing headlong toward global warming treaties that will sharply reduce hydrocarbon use and thereby cause trillions of dollars in economic dislocations and great concomitant human suffering and death.

Figure 3, republished in "Global Warming Costs for the U.S.'' Brief No. 213 (September 1996) by the National Center for Policy Analysis, 12655 N. Central Expy., Suite 720, Dallas, TX 75243-1739, from a 1990 Oak Ridge National Laboratory report, shows the range of average annual temperatures in the U. S. during the past century. The range from high to low is approximately 2.4° C. Omitting extremes, most of these averages lie in a range of about 1.5° C. The global warmers claim that temperatures during the past decade may have been warmer by 0.1° C. The evidence for even that change is questionable.

"Spurious Trends in Satellite MSU Temperatures from Merging Different Satellite Records'' by J. W. Hurrell and K. E. Trenberth in Nature 386, pp 164-167 (1997), shows the current state of this debate.

Satellite measurements since 1979 have shown a gradual decrease in atmospheric temperature of - 0.11° C per decade, while surface temperatures are claimed to have increased by 0.10° C per decade. The satellite data is more reliable, since ground measurements are susceptible to the local effects of human activity.

Ordinary variations in temperature are, however, so much greater than either of these measurements that the only sensible conclusion is that no significant temperature change has been detected. Even though the "dreaded'' atmospheric carbon dioxide level has already risen substantially, the only apparent effect of this rise has been increased growth rate of trees and other plants - surely not an undesirable result.

Hurrell and Trenberth suggest that the discrepancy between atmospheric and ground measurements can be attributed to satellite calibration errors during transitions between satellites. Specifically, they conclude that a + 0.23° C adjustment in the atmospheric record should be made before July 1981 and a - 0.12° C adjustment should be made after August 1991. This would give an atmospheric temperature change of (0.35 - 0.18) / 1.6 = + 0.10° C per decade. (The authors state that these changes produce a "small positive trend'' in atmospheric temperature, but they do not give a value for this trend. We have assumed that the signs of their suggested adjustments should be thusly interpreted, although they seem to suggest an opposite result.)< /FONT >

Comparison with the U. S. temperature fluctuations in Figure 3 shows that this value of 0.1° C is so low as to probably be irrelevant to human affairs and environmental quality. Moreover, it has not been shown that this tiny change is any more than an ordinary natural variation that is unrelated to human activities.

It is reasonable to suggest that rising carbon dioxide levels might cause an increase in temperature and that a few one-hundredths of a degree rise may already have taken place as a result. It is unreasonable, however, to assume that this is true without experimental verification and to claim that any such rise will be harmful to the environment. If 0.10° C were added to the graph in Figure 3 between the years 1990 and 2000, would you consider that alarming?

"France Distributes Iodine Near Reactors'' by M. Balter, Science 275, pp 1871-1872 (1997), reports that the French government has decided to distribute potassium iodide to 600,000 citizens who live within six miles of France's 59 nuclear reactors or four other nuclear installations. This will enable them to protect themselves from thyroid cancer caused by increased ingestion of radioactive iodide in case of accident. As described in detail, including dosages and methods of administration, in Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearny, pp 111-116 and 152-154, published by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, 2251 Dick George Road, Cave Junction, OR 97523, saturating the thyroid gland with oral doses of potassium iodide prevents the further uptake of iodide by that gland. This is particularly important to children, since they are especially susceptible to thyroid cancer induced by radioactive iodide.

The only significant long-term radiation-induced disease documented to date from the Chernobyl accident has been an increased incidence of thyroid cancer in children living in the Ukraine. Few deaths have resulted because treatment is usually successful, but this is certainly a condition that can and should be avoided. M. Balter states, erroneously, that the increase in thyroid cancer after Chernobyl was "many times higher than had been predicted.'' The 70 extra thyroid cancer cases (see Access to Energy 22, No. 11, p 3 (1995)) seven years after the accident (probably more by now) was not unexpected.

Civil defense experts have warned for decades that potassium iodide and suitable instructions for its use should be stored for the protection of the American people in case of nuclear accident, terrorism, or war, but this has not been done. Instead, under the Clinton Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, has now completely ended all of its programs for nuclear preparedness.

At the present time, as a result of Clinton Administration actions, even the approximately 200,000 radiation survey meters and two million radiation dosimeters that have been maintained for radiation measurement by Americans in case of nuclear emergency are being sent to landfills - with the exception of those few that are being saved by private civil defense groups and some state government workers.

Speaking to the June 13-15, 1997 meeting in San Diego will be Sallie Baliunas, Bernard Cohen, Jeff Cooper, Donald Derr, Michael Dowe, Gordon Edwards, Lou Guzzo, Robert Jastrow, Martin Kamen, Cresson Kearny, Bruce Kimball, Jane Orient, Stanford Penner, Myron Pollycove, Art Robinson, Michael Sanera, Fredrick Seitz, Hans Sennholz, Edward Teller, and Robert Zubrin. See the past two issues of Access to Energy for more information about these presentations.

If this remarkable group of speakers is not inducement enough, San Diego in June is an extraordinary place. Meeting registration including two lunches and the banquet dinner is a total of $95. Telephone DDP at (520) 325-2680 for registration and information concerning rooms at the Bahia Hotel on Mission Bay where this conference is being held.

"Showdown at Gender Gap'' by Diane Ravitch, Forbes, p 68, April 7, 1997, reports that the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington, DC, has called for the College Board to eliminate all questions from the college entrance Scholastic Aptitude Math Test on which boys regularly do better than girls. Math scores for boys, even after the tests were dumbed down two years ago, are still averaging 35 points higher than for girls. A majority of students entering and graduating from college are, however, girls.

An example of a "gender-biased'' question that should be eliminated according to CWPS (Forbes gives several examples): "Pat made a total of 48 pottery plates and cups. If she made twice as many plates as cups, how many plates did she make?'' On average, 12% more boys than girls gave the correct answer.

As Ravitch suggests, "Why stop at dumbing down the SAT? Why not eliminate math altogether? Then we can be sure of equal results.''
Perhaps it is the boys who should complain. The Wall Street Journal, p A16, January 30, 1997, quotes Nicholas von Hoffman, in the New York Observer as saying that while "between 1980 and 1995, four-year college tuition rose 256 percent - three times the rate of inflation .... academic standards continued to slip. In terms of equivalencies, a bachelor of arts degree in 1997 may not even be the equal of a graduation certificate from an academic high school in 1947.''

In a course required for university graduation with a BS in chemistry, my son Zachary Robinson is currently being "taught'' that farming is an environmental scourge because it allows too many people to live and pushes out the tribes of hunter-gatherers.
The "Commentary'' page of the journal Nature has come out in support of the Oakland, California tax-financed school program for ebonics. (See Nature 386, p 321, 27 March 1997.) The Nature article by G. K. Pullum prefers "African American English, AAE'' to the term "ebonics.'' Pullum treats us to a language lesson illustrating that the sentences "You ain't goin' to no heaven'' and "Couldn't nobody say what colour he is'' are grammatically perfect in AAE.

Nature is published in England, home of Oxford and Cambridge and setting for the musical My Fair Lady (which was derived from Pygmalion by Shaw). Poor Liza apparently had her grammar right. She was just unable to teach it to Professor Higgins.

Whether it is called ebonics or AAE, this new fad effectively promotes racist efforts to put black Americans in positions of ridicule and keep professional agitators permanently in business.

"The Low Pressure Paradigm'' by George Gilder, Gilder Technology Report, April 1997, available from P. O. Box 660, Housatonic, MA 01236, or by telephone at (888) 484-2727. Our individual worlds are all going to be changed dramatically by essentially free information transfer. This will be especially traumatic for schools and universities that depend upon an information monopoly which is rapidly disappearing. It could not happen to a more deserving group.

"Our Radiation Policy is a Hazard to Public Health'' by Theodore Rockwell, The Scientist, p 9, March 3, 1997 and "Atomic Split: Data Recharge Debate on Low-Level Radiation Risk'' by Joby Warrick, Washington Post, p A3, April 14, 1997. Low level radiation research including the rise of hormesis and the death of the no-threshold linear hypothesis is finally making its way into the popular press. When we see these facts discussed in the Reader's Digest, the 50-year-old antinuclear industry will be finished.

"Media Wars: SSI Tactics'' by Jane Orient in Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter 14, No. 2, pp 1-2 , March 1997, available from 2509 N. Campbell Ave., Box 272, Tucson, AZ 85719. This is a revealing look at a media manipulation update from the propaganda group that calls itself Union of Concerned Scientists. For example, they advise, "Don't confuse them [reporters] with doubt. In other words, don't talk like a scientist with caveats and error bars. Emphasize the word 'consensus,''' and "rehearse your sound bites.''

SOG. The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam by John L. Plaster, Simon & Schuster (1997). This is a remarkable true account of American soldiers who operated entirely behind enemy lines in Vietnam and provided crucial intelligence about enemy activities beneath the jungle canopy - even though most of of their operations for eight years were compromised by spies in Saigon.

"Another Sure Bet on Earth Day'' by Julian Simon in The Wall Street Journal, p A22, April 22, 1997. Technology just keeps lowering the real cost of natural resources, thereby turning Simon's opponents Stephen Schneider and Paul Ehrlich into perpetual losers.