Lise Meitner - Denied the Nobel Prize

In December of 1938, Lise Meitner received a letter from colleagues in Germany explaining their latest experimental results and questioning what these results could mean. For almost 30 years Lise had worked with Otto Hahn, and later Fritz Strassman, performing experiments related to radioactivity. Although she had begun as Hahn’s assistant without pay, their relationship had evolved to the point where she was the recognized expert in matters related to physics; Hahn was a chemist.

Lise’s nephew Otto Frisch was visiting for the holidays and together they discussed the letter she received. Researchers working on radioactivity had known for some time that one element could change into another, such as radium to polonium in Marie Curie’s experiments. But recently several researchers, when bombarding uranium with neutrons, had been finding elements with smaller atomic weights, almost half the atomic weight of uranium. At the time no one believed that the nucleus of an atom could be split. Hahn and Strassman’s research repeated this result. Meitner realized that this was exactly what was happening and that the power that would result from a chain reaction would be immense. Together she and Frisch worked out the mathematics and she conveyed the information to Neils Bohr who was on his way to the United States for a conference. And the rest as they say is history.

I knew this basic scenario when I began to read about Lise Meitner, but as usual there is more to the story. Continue reading

Americans and Evolution

Rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. 

This is the subtitle of an article I read on Alternet, although it was first published on The Nation. The article,  What Is Wrong With Our Education System? Almost Half the Population Doesn't Accept Evolution by Katha Pollitt, has some disturbing statistics.

• 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. 
• 25 percent of Americans with graduate degrees believe dinosaurs and humans romped together before Noah’s flood. (emphasis mine)

I once had a Facebook friend tell me that climate change was just a political conspiracy to bring down American business. I responded that if it was just something being discussed or promoted by Americans, I might consider the possibility, but it was REALLY hard to buy a worldwide conspiracy. The same thing applies to evolution.
  

"Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it."

Even though we may win battles in court, that doesn't necessarily change what happens on a local level. As she points out in the article, some teachers still skirt the issue of evolution (60 percent) at best while others may teach Creationism out right (13 percent.) Parents who are aware of this and complain face a hard fight often being vilified in the process. What happened in the Dover, PA community in 2004 is good evidence of this.


It's nice to think that as a country we will consistently make progress over time, but the last 30 years or so since I left school sure seem to be taking us backward. The old aphorism "two steps forward, one step back" sure seems to be turning into one step forward, followed by many steps back.


Check out the article, it's worth the read although disturbing.

Emmy Noether - Original in More Ways Than One

“Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”  ~ Albert Einstein

If you ask anyone to name a famous woman mathematician, the names that come to mind will usually be Hypatia, Ada Lovelace, Emilie du Chatelet, or Maria Agnesi, if they can name any at all. I must admit that these women were the ones who attracted my attention as well when I started reading the history of mathematics. Each of these has something that attracts us apart from mathematics: Hypatia’s brutal death, Ada’s famous father, Emilie’s famous lover, or Maria’s piety. Yet with each of these women there are debates about how much original work they actually did and how much was primarily building on the work of others. There is no doubt that they were all brilliant and deserve to be remembered, but there is one who undoubtedly did work that was so original that it changed the way we do mathematics and is virtually unknown outside of specialist circles: Emmy Noether.

Emmy Noether made groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics and abstract algebra. She developed several formulations to support Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, in fact he wrote to David Hilbert, “You know that Frl. Noether is continually advising me in my projects and that it is really through her that I have become competent in the subject.” The principle behind Noether’s Theorem is foundational to quantum physics proving that the laws of physics are independent of time and space. And yes you can even blame her for “New Math,” her approach, just very, very, watered down. In spite of all of this, she worked almost her entire life without pay because she was a woman.
Continue Reading.

The Shallows by Nicholas G. Carr - A Book Review

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas G. Carr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. It includes a little for everyone who enjoys non-fiction. Carr goes into the history of different media and how they changed society, such as the written word, printing press, TV, etc. This sets the stage for how the internet is affecting us.

There is good news and not so good news. It seems that use of the internet is very distracting (as if we needed to be told that.) But it's not just distracting us from the rest of our lives, but distracting us while we are surfing. There are so many links, ads, banners, etc. that we are getting better at multitasking and filtering out what is important. But imagine this - You're sitting in a comfortable chair with a good cup of coffee or tea. It's raining softly, maybe a little chilly, and you're sitting there with a soft afghan and one of your favorite books. You quickly get absorbed into the book. Well apparently frequent surfing on the web can decrease our ability to think deeply about what we are reading.

Carr goes into the science of how our brains work, how memory works, and what it takes to hold knowledge in our working memory. He cites many different studies that show our ability to comprehend information that we read decreases in proportion to the number of links and distractions in our material. But this inability to concentrate carries over to reading off of the internet.

The internet is here to stay and we have to make adjustments. When reading material became easily accessible to the general public, the need to memorize knowledge was lessened. Eventually, educators began requiring less memorization which actually decreased our ability to memorize. Now with information at the touch of our fingertips, we are keeping even less information in our working memories. This is no problem for things that are not required for critical thinking, such as logarithms or functions that a calculator could perform for you. But for example, when evaluating current political events in light of historical events, you need to remember the things you've learned.

It's obviously more complicated that this, so I would recommend reading the book for yourself. It's readable and full of interesting information both historical and scientific, which of course made it perfect for me.

View all my reviews

Women in Science and Mathematics

I have an unfortunate habit of becoming distracted by the latest thing that catches my interest. Unfortunately, I began this blog during one of those times and I have failed to keep up with it. One reason, is that the arguments around evolution, climate change, and religion become very tiring. This is a reason for another post, another time, but suffice it to say that as a person who believes in God I have no problem reconciling that belief with science. In fact, the arguments against science seem irrational enough for me to have trouble taking them seriously. So, from time to time it gets my ire up, but lately it's just tiring.

The second reason that this blog has languished is that around the same time I began a blog about women in history - Saints, Sisters, and Sluts. This combined several of my interests - math, science, and history. I have written about women mathematicians and scientists, but also about religious figures in history. Lately, a friend who has spent years researching the history of Great Britain has begun writing about queens of England. This has attracted more attention than I would ever have gotten writing about women in mathematics and science - go figure! But needless to say my attention has been devoted to that blog lately.

However, for the few who may stumble upon this blog and are also interested in women's history in math and science, I invite you to join us on the other blog. Here is a list of the women I've written about so far with links to those posts. You might also find other interesting things on the blog.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi - 18th Century Mathematician

Sonya Kovalevsky - A Marriage of Convenience

 Madame Curie (This is the link to the first of two posts about Maria Curie.)

 Emilie du Chatelet - "femme savant" and paramour

Laura Bassi - Italian Physicist (1711 - 1778)

Mary Fairfax Somerville - Mathematics by Candlelight

Check it out, especially if you also like Queens of England!

Taking Action on Climate Change - A Matter of Justice

The seventeenth UN Convention on Climate Change, COP-17 is currently taking place in Durban, South Africa. It began November 28 and will run until December 9. Once again developed nations that are doing the most to accelerate global warming have a chance to commit to making a difference. "Climate Change is a matter of Justice." declared Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu of the General Council of Elders.  The nations that are most affected by climate change are the ones least able to put a stop to it. One example is the Republic of the Maldives, a small island nation in the Indian Ocean. Laura Flanders of The Nation describes a conversation she had with Dr. MohammedWaheed Hassan, the vice president of Maldives. They have seen the sea level rise 8 inches causing erosion, most of their fresh water to become brackish, and the dying of their coastal reefs. As a people they have lived on these islands for 3000 years and are looking at the possible destruction of their nation.

And they’re not alone. The small Pacific island nation of Kiribati is facing the same problems. Parts of their country are already underwater and the contamination of fresh water supplies is affecting their ability to grow crops. The president, Anote Tong, is encouraging his people in what is called merit-based relocation. They have worked out deals with Australia and New Zealand that allow young people who successfully complete training in professions that are in-demand to stay in their countries. This will hopefully give their families preferential status for migration. This is preferable to emergency evacuation on down the road, but how sad that an entire nation might have to leave their ancestral homes. And there are others. Twenty-two Pacific island nations are home to approximately 7 million people. Where will they go? Most nations in the world are not prepared to accept large numbers of environmental refugees, but that may be exactly what we are looking at within the next generation. 

Many people are still skeptical about our ability to affect global warming, even though the vast majority of scientific organizations have issued statements that support not only global warming, but that human activity is a large contributing factor. The few that disagree are at best non-committal on the involvement of human activity. Richard Muller, once a beloved scientist of the skeptics, has completed his own study and come to the same conclusions as other studies, that the earth is warming at an increasing rate.

In the mean time, there appears to be an attempt by developed countries to allow access to the Green Climate Fund by multinational companies, bypassing the governments of the developing nations it was created to help. This would allow Wall Street companies, for example, to directly access those funds. The problem is that many of the initiatives required may not be financially lucrative, but that doesn’t mean they are not still necessary. Given the recent record of some Wall Street firms with regard to their concern for people in general, I have a hard time believing that they would have the best interest of these small “insignificant” island nations at heart.

I am a skeptic, but not a skeptic about global warming, a skeptic about the ability of people who are not directly affected by global warming to care. It’s sad to say that, but there it is. I do hope I am proven wrong. During the conference in Durban, the US and other large developed nations have the chance to really make a difference. I’m hoping that this year we will finally take a stand in favor of the other people in the world who need us, not worrying about the inconvenience it might be to us, or whether or not we can profit while helping, just whether or not we can help.

Sitting can Kill You

 When I worked as a technical instructor, I had weeks when I stood all day every day teaching, and other weeks when I would sit at my computer doing course development or other forms of technical writing.  I frequently had trouble with my back during those years. It helped when I quit wearing heels to teach, go figure! But sitting all day was just as problematic. I got in the habit of getting up frequently, which did help, but it is a habit that I haven't kept up. For some reason at home I don't seem to have the same back problems when I sit for long periods. It may be because I do less writing and more reading on the computer, which allows me greater mobility. I can read in a lot of positions that I can't type in! But now it seems that I have other reasons to get up frequently. 

In the article, Prolonged Sitting Linked to Cancer , Scientific American reports on a study which connects the length of time we sit with our chances of getting cancer. The longer we sit, the more at risk we are for cancer. The study suggests that breast and colon cancer are those most closely related to sitting for prolonged periods, but it does affect other types as well. This seems to be the case regardless of how active we are during the rest of the day. The good news is that 1 – 2 minutes each hour can make a difference. 

If you’re like me, constantly sipping on water while at my computer gives me a frequent reminder that I need to get up!  I've also started using the bathroom upstairs, even though I basically live downstairs. Those few extra stairs certainly don't hurt and it keeps me away from my computer for a longer period of time. But, the big change for me is that I'm trying to spend less time on my computer. Life on the computer can certainly be addictive and in the last couple of years since I've been at home, I've spent far too much time on it. A lot of housework, yard work, and good books have been neglected. (Of course reading, since I usually sit while I do it, would have the same sitting issues.) So here's to an early new year's resolution, sitting less. Maybe I'll be a little healthier, and who knows, maybe my house will be cleaner too!

Don’t Sit Tight, an article in “Health News Daily” gives suggestions that can help you be kind to your body when sitting at a computer.