Bernie Madoff and the Origins of Life
Bernie Madoff and the Origins of Life
Three years into his 150 year sentence, Madoff has time to ponder his inadvertent contribution to thinking about the origins of life.
I remember clearly the moment at which ‘a billion’ made sense to me not as a fuzzy concept, but a concrete amount. I was reading a New York Times article about New York pyramid scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff. He personally bilked investors out of about 18 billion dollars.
Reading about Madoff’s kleptomaniacal rip-off I was struck by the fact that it was possible to actually individually steal and spend billions of dollars. Prior to this moment, I’d thought of billions with regard to the unimaginably large, remote and invisible, as in billions of stars or countless bacteria. I can accept both of these as true – and am indeed grateful to the billions of bacteria with whom I share myself. This said, these billions felt more fantasy than fact.
For some reason, though, I could relate to Madoff’s billions, and this made all the difference. A billion became a number I could work with.
This came to mind recently when a scientist I was interviewing dropped the number 10 to the 40th, or as it’s written 1040, one followed by forty zeros. Ten to the 40th laughs at a billion, which is a puny 109th. Even Madoff, I believe, would throw-up his hands in disbelief at1040. It’s not a googol, one with a hundred zeros, but lets be straightforward here: once you’ve got one with 40 zeros, who’s really counting anymore?
Well, origins of life researchers, that’s who. Because when it comes to the origin of life on Earth, it turns out that some see 1040 as the problem, while others see it as the answer.
Here’s the problem part: if you think of the cosmos as a chaotic place, the chance of life getting itself organized amidst this vast atomic jumble seems impossible. (Just as I imagine those who lost their life savings to Madoff felt the day before the news hit – unimaginable). The prophet of this view of what’s termed irreducible complexity is Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the fathers of the Stardust Revolution.
In the decades following his brilliant work figuring out how stars are the philosopher’s stone – transforming simple hydrogen and helium into all the other elements of the Periodic Table – Hoyle turned to thinking about the next steps in cosmic complexification, from cosmic dust to the molecules of life.
When it comes to complex organic molecules, such as proteins, Hoyle argued that their complexity pointed to a deity, or intelligent designer. His reasoning was in large part based on 1040 . Proteins are made LEGO-like from amino acids. Life on Earth involves 20 different amino acids, from alanine to tryptophan. Based solely on chance, there are 1020 possible pair combinations of amino acids for any ten amino acid-long protein. Imagine a pair of interacting ten-amino acid proteins and you have a probability of 1040 . You can continue this exercise to produce an effectively endless string of zeros.
Most proteins are built from hundreds of amino acids. To Hoyle, the enormity of this numerical complexity defies a natural origin of life’s chemical complexity. A master of metaphor and analogy, Hoyle suggested a comparison that’s become part of the creed of the intelligent design movement: “The situation would be akin to a tornado sweeping through a junk yard which just happened to fling together a strand of bits of metal in such a way as to form a brand new Boeing 747.”
However, the astrophysicist’s reasoning misses a key factor at work in the cosmic process of complexification: selection. Where Hoyle pointed to the impossibly long odds of random chance, others such as Carnegie Institute origins of life researcher Robert (Bob) Hazen see the numbers at the core of an evolutionary process.
Dr. Hazen believes that the handedness - the left and right 'hands' or faces - of minerals such as the calcite he's holding, could explain the handedness of the amino acid molecules that form all proteins on Earth.
On the nascent Earth there were billions of square kilometres of reactive mineral surfaces on which chemical reactions were taking place. Each reaction was a natural experiment – and some were more successful than others. Some reaction products survived to change their environment and thus catalyze other reactions.
“Even if a particular juxtaposition of molecules is incredibly unlikely, over a hundred million years, over a billion years…these reactions are happening in seconds, you can have literally ten to the 50th or ten to the 60th different experiments going on over the course of an Earth-like planet,” says Hazen. “So things that are very improbable, but not impossible, become deterministic.”
Just as the Madoff scheme’s forty year run and $18 billion fraud was improbable, it clearly wasn’t impossible. Given the right conditions, the improbable became the possible. As with all great financial events, what we learn from the Madoff affair is about more than money. Yes, it provides fascinating grist for reflection on greed and self-delusion, but also on the nature of a billion, and even the numbers behind the origin of life.
The Science of Being Wrong
Jacob Berkowitz
Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
Francis Bacon quoted in Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
For all its mythos about Eureka moments and breakthroughs, science is equally framed by scientists being wrong. By failure and error. About a third of all papers published in Nature turn-out to be plain, well, wrong. How scientists deal with their public pratfalls says a lot about the person and the scientific process.
The pivotal discovery of the Stardust Revolution – that the elements are forged in stars – owes its origin to Sir Fred Hoyle’s willingness to be wrong.
The brilliant Hoyle isn’t a household name today, in part because of his largest error. Sixty-one years ago, Hoyle was locked in a debate about the origins of the universe. Edwin Hubble’s observations of rapidly receding galaxies led many to envision an expanding universe with a long-ago beginning in singular event. Hogwash, thought Hoyle. He saw evidence for what he called continuous creation – that matter is continually emerging in interstellar space causing the universe to expand analogously to the way lava emerging at mid-oceanic rifts pushes continents apart.
In the winter of 1950, Hoyle gave a series of legendary BBC Radio broadcasts called The Nature of the Universe. In one, searching for a way to describe his opponents’ viewpoint of time and space beginning as a finite huge explosion, he dubbed it “the big bang idea”. The name stuck.
Hoyle, however it appears, was wrong. Even after the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, a cosmic relic that the vast majority of cosmologists interpret as solid evidence of the Big Bang, Hoyle didn’t change his opinion. When he died in 2001, Hoyle still believed the Big Bang was more alliteration than truth.
In coining the ‘Big Bang’ and arguing eloquently and specifically against it, Hoyle proved an enormously valuable adversary. He gave others something to push against. In doing this he contributed as much to Big Bang cosmology as any other 20th century scientist.
Unlike most others, Hoyle wasn’t afraid of being wrong. Once during lunch at the California Institute of Technology Hoyle was talking astronomy with his friends and colleagues including Richard Feynman, and Geoff and Margaret Burbidge. At one point Hoyle said “Geoff and I reckon that we’re doing well if we bat 500”. One of the tablemates, looked aghast and asked Hoyle “Do you mean to tell me that you and Geoff are prepared to be wrong half the time?” The answer, of course, was yes. (See Jane Gregory’s biography of Hoyle, Fred Hoyle’s Universe, p. 341)
In this, Hoyle took a page from the scientist on whose shoulders he metaphorically stood to get a better view of the heavens, Arthur Eddington.
In what some consider one of the greatest scientific papers of all time, Eddington – the Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, the position Hoyle inherited from him – made the case for the scientific and larger social value of being wrong, even when it results in catastrophic personal failure.
At the end of his 1920 paper on “The Internal Constitution of the Stars”, Eddington asks us to reconsider the legend of Icarus.
“In ancient days two aviators procured to themselves wings. Daedalus flew safely through the middle air across the sea, and was duly honoured on his landing. Young Icarus soared upwards towards the Sun till the wax melted which bound his wings, and his flight ended in fiasco.
In weighing their achievements perhaps there is something to be said for Icarus. The classic authorities tell us that he was only ‘doing a stunt,’ but I prefer to think of him as the man who certainly brought to light a constructional defect in the flying-machines of his day. So too in science.
Cautious Daedalus will apply his theories where be feels most confident they will safely go; but by his excess of caution their hidden weaknesses cannot be brought to light. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking-point till the weak joints gape. For a spectacular stunt? Perhaps partly; he is often very human.
But if he is not yet destined to reach the Sun and solve for all time the riddle of its constitution, yet he may hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine.”
Science is about what’s unknown. It requires pushing the boundaries. Sometimes scientists are deeply wrong. They crash and burn. But Eddington tells us, that’s the cost, of actually reaching the stars.
To read Eddington’s “The Internal Constitution of the Stars”: http://cosmos.colorado.edu/stem/courses/common/documents/eddington.html
The Story of Darkness
To most of us, if the winter solstice means anything it’s: turn on the lights. On the longest night of the year, the only thing most people want to celebrate is that the days are finally getting longer. There’s the promise of no longer schlepping to and from work in darkness. We look to our bright, colourful Christmas lights – and maybe even the inflatable Santas – as signs of hope in the proverbial and real darkness.
Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn captures the spirit of the season best in his line: Got to kick at the darkness ‘till it bleeds daylight.
Yet, here’s the rub – in only thinking about the light, we miss the great gift celestial darkness holds. This year is the 400th anniversary of the realization that the winter solstice is the best night for connecting with our cosmic origins in the Big Bang.
It’s only natural that astronomers and poets have always focused on the stars, held by the beauty and wonder of their twinkling light. But in 1610, the famous priest-astronomer Johannes Kepler pointed out a rather sticky aspect of the then current view of the heavens. If all of the stars existed in an eternal, static cosmos, there’d be no night. More to the point, the sky should be as bright as if we lived on the surface of the Sun. (See a cool visualization of this here)
Here’s why: in an infinite, static cosmos the Earth would be surrounded by endless stars, and even if many of these were far away, their light would eventually reach Earth. The accumulated light from all these stars would be the equivalent of you being suspended over a stage in the glare of an uncountable number of spotlights shining on you from every conceivable angle. Our corner, and every corner of the universe would be hellishly hot and bright. Don’t even think of life.
However, one thing was certain: it does get dark. For about 350 years astronomers occupied themselves with more pressing and tractable problems, though in 1823 the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers took-up the question again, and thus it became renamed Oblers’ Paradox – why is there darkness in a seemingly eternal, static universe?
The case of the mystery of night wasn’t cracked until the past fifty years with the discovery of the Big Bang and the expanding nature of the universe. We now know that when we enter into night, we’re immersed into evidence of the greatest event in cosmic history – the universe’s birth. And it’s because of this birth, 13.75 billion years ago that we have both darkness and light.
The first stars weren’t formed until about 400 million years after the Big Bang – an era known as cosmic dawn, currently one of the hottest areas of astrophysical research. This means that when the cosmic lights turned on, what’s called the event horizon, the universe had already expanded significantly. Thus light from regions of the universe beyond this event horizon has yet to reach us.
Similarly, distant starlight that does reach us is red shifted. Due to the Doppler effect – experienced routinely as the change in the pitch of an ambulance siren as the vehicle approaches and then recedes from us – starlight is red shifted to lower energy, non-visible frequencies. Thus we experience the long-ago and distant energy from the early universe as the famous cosmic microwave background radiation, aka the universe’s birthing sounds.
As a result of this cosmic birth and ongoing expansion, rather than a blindingly bright cosmos in which there could be no life, we live in one that offers the twin joys of darkness and light. We owe our existence as much to the stars as the darkness. We are creatures of both.
So on the winter solstice, before turning on the Christmas lights, if the sky’s clear, take a moment to behold the wonder of the story told in the darkness between the stars.
What’s the Stardust Revolution?
December 14, 2010
What’s the Stardust Revolution?
What are the two most disparate realms of science, the ones that have the least to do with one another? Until about 20 years ago the answer was hands-down astronomy and biology. There are clear connections between mathematics and physics (think E=mc2); between physics and chemistry (think quantum mechanics) and between chemistry and biology (think of you).
Mixing stars, cells, DNA and amphibians is like a Sesame Street episode of One of these things is not like the others…(Yes, the correct answer appears to be stars). As a result your chance of finding a biologist at an astronomy conference, or visa versa, was about the same as finding a chocolate chip cookie in a bag of shortbreads – possible only due to the vast vagaries of chance. With enough biologists in the world, one is eventually going to walk into the wrong scientific meeting.
Which is what makes the new field of astrobiology so amazing. Any astrobiology conference is an amalgam of biologists and astronomers not by chance, but by necessity.
Why do biologists and astronomers need to talk to one another? Because they’re each holding disparate pieces of a vast cosmic puzzle. Formally, astrobiologists consider the origins, evolution and distribution of life. What makes them distinct from previous folks who’ve discussed the origins, evolution and distribution of life is that astrobiologists aren’t just talking about life on Earth, but in the universe.
Now at this point you might say, but there we don’t know of life anywhere else in the universe. Not in any way besmirching Star Trek and Star Wars, but Klingons and Hoths aside, when it comes to living planets that we know about, it’s a very short list. About as short as a list can be: one. Earth.
This is what’s revolutionary about the Stardust Revolution. Astrobiology describes the science of the merging of astronomy and evolutionary biology. The Stardust Revolution is a term I’ve coined to describe the combination of the scientific and broader sociological phenomenon of astrobiology. You won’t hear scientists talking about the Stardust Revolution (at least not until my book comes out in 2012!)
I’ve used the term “stardust” because it captures a profound shift in our understanding of the word. Most dictionaries still define stardust as does Merriam Webster as “a feeling or impression of romance, magic, or ethereality”. For most of us, stardust is the equivalent of fairy dust – the stuff of fantasy.
Yet, in 2006, NASA’s Stardust Mission became the first sample-return mission to a comet, Wild II. The Stardust robotic probe returned to Earth with microscopic dust from the comet’s tail. These tiny grains are literal stardust. Wild II was formed from a cosmic cloud of dust and gas that gravitationally collapsed to form the Sun, the planets and the countless asteroids, comets and meteorites that compose our Solar System – and ultimately you and me. Stardust is now not the stuff of fantasy, but of fact and science.
This in itself is revolutionary. But the revolutionary part of the Stardust Revolution goes deeper.
I coined the term Stardust Revolution because I believe we’re in the midst of the third in a five-century long series of scientific revolutions that have shaped our understanding of our origins and relationship with the cosmos.
The first was the Copernican revolution. In the 16th and 17th centuries the Copernican revolution body-checked Earth as the pivot-point of creation, and joined us with the rest of the cosmos as one planet among many orbiting the Sun.
Three centuries later, came the second great scientific revolution, the Darwinian revolution. It removed us from a distinct, divine biological status to place us wholly in the ebb and flow of all terrestrial life.
Now we’re in the midst of a third great scientific revolution, the Stardust Revolution. It is the merging of the once disparate realms of astronomy and evolutionary biology, and of the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, placing life in a cosmic context.
This blog, and my upcoming book, tell the story of this scientific revolution in the making.
Check-out the latest Stardust Mission results here: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
Make a virtual visit to the 2010 Astrobiology Science Conference.
See Jacob Berkowitz in New Brunswick in May
Jacob’s touring New Brunswick, Canada in May 2011 as part of the Hackamatack awards.