PDF files available

These pdf files are the most up-to-date version of the matter of this site. A pdf file of the complete site is quite large, so I have broken it up into four parts:

Other miscellaneous stuff, overview, some of it rather math-heavy:

And on quite another subject (why not?)




I love science!

Especially, I love various explanations that science offers of things. I realized this the day I first read about the electron transport chain (or ETC), or oxidative phosphorylation. That’s a mouthful, but the basic principals are simple as 2+2=4.

If you want to know already, the ETC is an fairly complex series of reactions which take place in the inner membrane of organelles (thingies inside cells) called mitochondria. Among other things, what these reactions do is pump positively-charged protons across the membrane to set up an electric potential — a battery! And when the battery is sufficiently charged, it discharges to power a kind of mill. Unlike a mill which is driven by water to power a device for grinding up grain, this mill is driven by the electric potential to power a machine which puts things together – phosphate and something called ADP (the “D” is for “di”, meaning two, in this case, phosphates) – into a similar thing with three phosphates and called ATP (where the “T” is for “tri”, of course). And ATP is a miniature battery1 in itself which can be shuttled around and used to power other processes, such as contraction of muscles. Simple, n’est-ce pas?

The discovery – at least, I saw it that way personally – was for me a moment of illumination and surprise and even jubilation. It was so simple, so practical. And it’s all physics! Well, almost.

(I will admit here that I started my career as a physicist and have always loved that subject. But a lot has happened since I left the field in 1972!)

There have been other such “eureka” moments in my science reading:

  • the gorgeous, lacy filament structure of the distribution of galaxies on an unimaginably large scale;
  • the regulation of protein expression by transcription factors – in plain English, how a cell’s environment tells it which DNA recipes to use to make proteins, so a heart does not manufacture liver proteins, for instance;
  • the fact that what we see out there – cats and beautiful landscapes and cabbages – ain’t what is really there, as well as the way our brain constructs that impression (or illusion?);
  • the mechanism of plate tectonics and the movement of the plates around the Earth since their formation, including the formation at least once of one single giant continent, Pangea;
  • the way stars are formed and maintain themselves as an equilibrium (balance) between outward pressure from the “burning” interior and the inward gravitational pull of the huge amount of matter composing the star;
  • the sodium-potassium pump, a thingy in the membrane of cells, which pumps sodium ions out from and potassium ions into the cell in differing numbers so as to set up another electric potential across the cell wall, and how this can lead to a burst of electricity (an “action potential”) which can travel down a neuron and initiate the release of chemical substances which tell another neuron to do the same thing, and so on in series until a circuit sends a message to, say, a muscle or maybe commits something to memory (and whatever that may mean is also fascinating);
  • the ingenious way retinal cells massage light signals to limit traffic over the optic nerves;
  • and lots more.

I also love the way science works. What with peer-reviewing and repeating of key experiments, we can be pretty damn sure about what we have learned. Even if another theory one day supplants the current one in some field, it will have to start by explaining the same things the current one does, so we really will not have lost anything – except some ignorance.

And the things science is not yet sure of could fill books, things like:

  • how to make the physics of the infinitesimally small (quantum mechanics) cohabit with the physics of almost-infinitely big (general relativity);
  • the possible existence of other factors influencing evolution aside from the four classics – natural selection, mutation, genetic drift and gene flow;
  • just how old life is on Earth, currently thought to be around 3.5 billion
    years, but maybe more; and how did it start;
  • and much more.

In order to share my enthusiasm, as well as to provide myself with an aide-mémoire, I have put together this site which will discuss and hopefully illuminate all the above subjects and others. Granted, it’s pickings of what I find most interesting, but I hope you will too.

So let’s get started. There is some more bla-bla here or you can go straight to the table of contents or to the first page of science.




Hello universe!

Should “universe” be singular or plural? Maybe there is a multiverse and our universe is just one of its constituent parts. That subject is at the bleeding edge of cosmological physics and can’t be answered right now — may never be — but some prominent cosmologists think it might be true.

It is natural for us to wonder about what the stuff around us is. In fact, we should wonder about it. Is the world we see really composed of four-dimensional space-time, with the space part curved and expanding and maybe infinite; of particles scattered sparsely about; of fields of energy? And where did it all come from; how did the Earth get to be this incredibly beautiful place we live in (and are doing our best to destroy) and how did the astonishingly diverse forms of life come to be? How do we perceive all this and comprehend it — and what “perceive”, anyway?

Why should we care? Well, our lives depend more every day on science. Technological gadgetry abounds in our pockets and even under our skin. We may well be at risk from the way we are (not) dealing with climate change, genetically-modified foods and other substances, pollution, nanotechnology, energy sources and all sorts of other things. We should be discussing these issues and deciding about them together. But that requires knowing about these topics. So we are allowing those who make money off them to decide for us.[ref]We will avoid political discussions from here on.[/ref] In order even to begin to understand these things and take appropriate measures for the preservation and improvement of our lives and those of coming generations, we need to know something about science and what these things represent for us.

All that (yup!) is the point of this site– to get ready to assess these subjects for ourselves. In order to get through it all, we will firmly and resolutely stick to the point of view that our best — and most certainly only — means of learning about the universe(s) is through science, by which we mean a specific method developed to help us apprehend “reality” without kidding ourselves. That method is based on incessant questioning and constant testing.

For millenia, men have devised superstitious explanations of things. One far-out one tells how the Hindu god Vishnu was asleep on his coiled-up snake Ananta on the calm cosmic waters, when a lotus plant sprouted from his navel.

Vishnu napping on the serpent Ananta

Vishnu napping on the serpent Ananta. Note the lotus stem and Brahma[ref]Carving on a rock along the Tungabhadra River in Hampi, Karnataka, India. Photo by author.[/ref].

When the lotus flower opened, the god Brahma was revealed sitting on it. Brahma created male and female by splitting off parts of himself. In this way, he went on to create all living things, restoring himself after each split. When Brahma went to sleep at night, everything was destroyed, but Brahma recreated it anew the next morning. Since a day of Brahma’s time is billions of years of human time, no one notices. But even Brahma lived out his life and then the god Shiva Nataraja, the King of the Dance, performed his cosmic dance and everything was completely destroyed.

Shiva Nataraja

Shiva Nataraja doing his dance of destruction in front of a kitsch cosmic backdrop[ref]Statue in the Government Museum, Chennai, India. Photo by author.[/ref].

Until Vishnu yawned and stretched and another lotus started to grow out of his navel…

Isn’t that great? But that will be the only such story.

So what does science have to say about the world we live in and about us ourselves?

Many popular books talk about the history of science and scientists, even though their titles may suggest differently. As interesting as such topics may be, it seems to me it ought to be possible to grasp the basic scientific world-view without plowing through all those false starts and errors, tests and experiments, names and dates. Why not simply present current scientific notions without going into the gritty details of why and how we have come to accept them as valid? A simple description. Afterwards, there are lots of books for those who want to know more. (See bibliography.)

That is what we propose to do: Take a look at what we are, where we are and how it works, and all that from the point of view of science. We will try to make it simple and will not go into the math, although one or two formulas may pop up. You will certainly recognize one of them — you might even have it on a T-shirt.

But now we are already into the material of the introductory chapter, so let’s go there.

P.S. There is one more thing. In a month (August 2015), I will have been retired for ten years. Maybe this will convince me (if no one else) that I have been doing something all this time. And a project like this one can go on forever, though I am unlikely to do so myself. Entropy will get me in the end too. (If you don’t understand that, read the little essay on Entropy.)

P.P.S. Actually, the title I wanted for this site was “The universe and I”[ref]As in the name of an old movie, “The egg and I”, or a very interesting anthropology book called “The headman and I”.[/ref], but that was taken. I tried several others — to no avail. The maddening  part was that when I visited the sites with the beautiful name I had thought of, most had not been touched for years. So there is a fair amount of garbage collection to be done by the wordpress.com folks…So I settled for the french version, “L’univers et moi”, except that in french you use the objective “moi”  (“me”) rather than the subjective “je” (“I”). I don’t know, maybe I should have called it “The universe and me”…




Banner photo

The beautiful banner photo on every page is from NASA. Here it is in all its glory.

Andromeda galaxy, NASA

Andromeda galaxy, NASA

It is the M31 galaxy, better known as  Andromeda. NASA calls it “the galaxy next door”, as it is the Milky Way’s largest galactic neighbor, about 2.5 million light years away. It was taken not by the Hubble Space Telescope, but by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, an orbiting ultraviolet space telescope. Sadly, funding for the telescope, which should nevertheless remain in orbit for another 65 years, was cut off, as NASA considered other projects to be more important. In other words, for lack of money. It is hoped that CalTech will be able to find funds to continue using the telescope.[ref]See Wikipedia.[/ref]