On Reading American Prometheus

In truth it was last summer^* when I read the book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York : Vintage Books, 2005; 721 pages). It’s only today, however, when I finally got around to assembling my notes into the requisite book note.

It’s a magnificent, informative, and very readable book about a central figure of the last century, the contradictory J. Robert Oppenheimer. Knowing what went on with the Manhattan Project and then the persecution of Oppenheimer may well be required knowledge for good American citizenship; reading this book would be a terrific way to get up to speed on that. (Coupled with Richard Rhodes’The Making of the Atomic Bomb, you can learn virtually all you need to know from two excellent books.)

Guess what? I had some left-over quotations I wanted to excerpt, so there they are.

As Harry Truman moved into the White House, the war in Europe was nearly won. But the war in the Pacific was coming to its bloodiest climax. On the evening of March9–10, 1945, 334 B-29 aircraft dropped tons of jellied gasoline–napalm–and high explosives on Tokyo. The resulting firestorm killed an estimated 100,000 people and completely burned out 15.8 square miles of the city. The fire-bombing raids continued and by July 1945, all but five of Japan’s major cities had been razed and hundreds of 1945, all but five of Japan’s major cities had been razed and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians had been killed. This was total warfare, an attack aimed at the destruction of a nation, not just its military targets.

The fire bombings were no secret. Ordinary Americans read about the raids in their newspapers. Thoughtful people understood that strategic bombing of cities raised profound ethical questions. “I remember Mr. Stimson [the secretary of war] saying to me,” Oppenheimer later remarked, “that he thought it appalling that there should be no protest over the air raids which we were conducting against Japan, which in the case of Tokyo led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. He didn’t say that the air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he did think there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that….”

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and eight days later Germany surrendered. When Emilio Segrè heard the news, his first reaction was, “We have been too late.” Like almost everyone at Los Alamos, Segrè thought that defeating Hitler was the sole justification for working on the “gadget.” “How that the bomb could not be used against the Nazis, doubts arose,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Those doubts, even if they do not appear in official reports, were discussed in many private discussions.” [p. 291]

One of the big reasons for developing the Bomb, at least in the minds of the scientists, was to do it before Hitler’s scientists did, lest the world suffer the consequences. The military and the US Government, on the other hand, had a different agenda and insisted on using the bomb on an actual target even thought the Japanese were close to surrender, perhaps as a demonstration to the Soviet Union. The atomic-project scientists felt betrayed and suddenly conflicted as that realization dawned. The whole affair is murky and filled with intrigue.

There was much that Oppenheimer did not know. As he later recalled, “We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan. We didn’t know whether they could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the invasion was really inevitable. But in the backs of our minds was the notion that the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that.” Among other things, he was unaware that military intelligence in Washington had intercepted and decoded messages from Japan indicating that the Japanese government understood the war was lost and was seeking acceptable surrender terms.

On May 28, for instance, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy urged Stimson to recommend that the term “unconditional surrender” be dropped from America’s demands on the Japanese. Based on their reading of intercepted Japanese cable traffic (code-named “Magic’). McCloy and many other ranking officials could see that key members of the Tokyo government were trying to find a way to terminate the war, largely on Washington’s terms. On the same day, Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew had a long meeting with President Truman an told him the very same thing. Whatever their other objectives, Japanese government officials had one immutable condition, as Allen Dulles, then an OSS agent in Switzerland, reported to McCloy: “They wanted to keep their emperor and the constitution, fearing that otherwise a military surrender would only mean the collapse of all order and of all discipline.”

On June 18, Truman’s chief of staff, Adm. William D. Leahy, wrote in his diary: “It is my opinion at the present time that a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan….” The same day, McCloy told President Truman that he believed the Japanese military position to be so dire as to raise the “question of whether we needed to get Russia in to help us defeat Japan.” He went on to tell Truman that before a final decision was taken to invade the Japanese home islands, or to use the atomic bomb, political steps should be taken that might well secure a full Japanese surrender. The Japanese, he said, should be told that they “would be permitted to retain the Emperor and a form of government of their own choosing.” In addition, he said, “the Japs should be told, furthermore, that we had another and terrifyingly destructive weapon which we would have to use if they did not surrender.”

According to McCloy, Truman seemed receptive to these suggestions. American military superiority was such that by July 17 McCloy was writing in his diary: “The delivery of a warning now would hit them at the moment. It would probably bring what we are after–the successful termination of the war.”

According to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was informed of the existence of the bomb at the Potsdam Conference in July, he told Stimson he thought an atomic bombing was unnecessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Finally, President Truman himself seemed to think that the Japanese were very close to capitulation. Writing in his private, handwritten diary on July 18, 1945, the president referred to a recently intercepted cable quoting the emperor to the Japanese envoy in Moscow as a “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” The cable said: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace….” Truman had extracted a promise from Stalin that he and many of his military planners thought would be decisive. “He’ll [Stalin] be in the Jap war on August 15,” Truman wrote in his diary on July 17. “Fini Japs when that comes about.”

Truman and the men around him knew that the initial invasion of the Japanese home islands was not scheduled to take place until November 1, 1945–at the earliest. And nearly all the president’s advisers believed the war would be over prior to that date. It would surely end with the shock of a Soviet declaration of war–or it might end with the kind of political overture to the Japanese that Grew, McCloy, Leahy and many others envisioned: a clarification of the terms of surrender to specify that the Japanese could keep their emperor. But Truman–and his closest adviser, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes–had decided that the advent of the atomic bomb gave them yet another option. As Byrnes later explained, “…it was ever present in my mind that it was important that we should have an end to the war before the Russians came in.”

Short of a clarification of the terms of surrender–a move Byrnes opposed on domestic political grounds–the war could end prior to August 15 only with the use of the new weapon. Thus, on July 18, Truman noted in his diary, “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in.” Finally, on August 3, Walter Brown, a special assistant to Secretary Byrnes, wrote in his diary: “President, Leahy, JFB [Byrnes] agreed Japs looking for peace. (Leahy had another report from the Pacific.) President afraid they will sue for peace through Russia instead of some country like Sweden.” [pp. 3000--301]

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^* In fact it was the book I took with me on our trip in July 2007 to Tuscany. I have fond memories of lying in bed in our hotel room in Pisa reading about Oppenheimer.

On Satellite Dishes Looking in the Same Direction

I recently finished reading Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable (New York : W.W.Norton & Company, 1996, 340 pages). It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t his best by any means. All of the little things that irritate me about Dawkins’ writing seemed emphasized in this book. There’s more in my book note, of course.

Dawkins is usually such a careful writer so I was surprised by the brief lapse of analytical perspicacity he exhibits in this passage. He is describing the fascinating compass termites that build tall and surprisingly flat mounds, like thin gravestones.

They are called compass termites because their mounds are always lined up north-south–they can be used as compasses by lost travellers (as can satellite dishes, by the way: in Britain they seem all to face south). [p. 17]

Well, of course they seem to face south–the satellite dishes, I mean–and there’s a very good reason. I can’t believe Dawkins would say something this…well, I can’t think of just the right word to combine unthinking lapses with scientific naiveté, specially since he’s the Charles Simony Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. Tsk.

Satellite dishes are reflectors for radio waves transmitted by satellites; the dishes are curved the way they are so that they focus the radio signal at the point in front of the dish where the actual receiver electronics reside, usually at the top of a tripod arrangement of struts. In order to do this effectively the satellite dish must point very precisely towards the satellite whose radio transmitter it is listening to.

If the satellite-radio dish is stationary, as most are, that means that the satellite itself appears stationary. In other words, the satellite of interest always appears at the same, unmoving point in the sky relative to the satellite dish, fixed angle up, fixed angle on the compass.

Such satellites are called “geostationary” for the obvious reason that they appear at stationary spots above the Earth. In order to appear stationary, the satellites must rotate at the same angular velocity as the Earth, and they must appear not to move in northerly or southerly directions.

In order not to appear to move north or south, and to have a stable orbit, the satellites must be positioned directly above the Earth’s equator (i.e., in the plane that passes through the Earth’s equator). In order to have the necessary angular velocity they must be at an altitude of about 35,786 km, but that detail isn’t terribly important for this purpose.

Armed with these facts, we may now consider two simple questions, the answers to which apparently eluded Mr. Dawkins:

1. For an observer in Great Britain, in what direction is the equator?
2. If a satellite dish in Great Britain wishes to listen to a geostationary satellite, in which direction will it point?

The answers: 1) south; and 2) southerly.^* Now it’s no surprise that (virtually) all satellite dishes in Britain do point south.
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^* Yes, there are slight complications having to do with the longitude of the particular satellite, but most of interest to Great Britain will be parked near enough to 0° longitude not to affect the general conclusion.

Notes to The Map that Changed the World

I recently finished reading Simon Winchester’s excellent book, The Map that Changed the World : William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (New York : HarperCollins, 2001, 329 pages). It’s the fascinating story of William Smith (1769—1839) and how he came to draw the first geological map of England (the first in the world, actually), how he came to be mistreated by the Geological Society of London, largely because of his class, the profound influence he had on the just forming science of geology, and how he finally got the recognition he deserved. It’s quite a human and intellectual adventure. My book note is here.

At least my four regular readers will be aware that I have a fascination for footnotes. The author of this book, Simon Winchester, seemed to be a man after my own heart. Here are two charming and informative footnotes from the book.

^*A guinea, equivalent to a pound and a shilling, is a classically British and very informal unit of currency–with neither a coin nor a bill to formalize it–that is still used today (despite Britain’s having adopted decimal currency in 1971) in some circles, such as the buying and selling of racehorses and sheep. There used to be a one-guinea coin, struck from gold from the eponymous nation, but only its name and worth survive, and today the word is only a vague and ephemeral throwback to more casual financial times. [first footnote on page 61]

^†This appears to be the first time that William Smith uses a term deriving from the word strata, the study of which would so dominate his life as to become his nickname: To all nineteenth-century England he would be simply Strata Smite. The OED suggests that the words stratum and strata, meaning a layer or layers of sedimentary rock, became current in England at the end of the seventeenth century; Smith himself was the first to use stratigraphical in 1817; stratification made its first appearance in 1795. [footnote on page 65]

On Not Reading Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma

For a few days recently I was reading Simon Singh’s book, Fermat’s Enigma : The Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem (New York : Walker and Company, 1997, 315 pages). However, I stopped reading after about 80 pages.

The reason had nothing to do with the subject, which was interesting and developing reasonably well. Finding out more about Fermat, his work and his life and his time, and learning some about the man who has apparently proved Fermat’s notorious “last theorem” (Wikipedia on Fermat’s Last Theorem can fill you in on those details if you want) was all to my liking.

What was not to my liking was Singh’s writing. It was writing that was too loose, too flabby when dealing with subjects that I feel require more precision in their presentation. Writing a popular treatment about a mathematical or scientific subject is no time for technically sloppy or carelessly inaccurate prose. Writing for the scientifically or technically unsophisticated reader demands care. I’m sure you’re aware by now that this is an idée fixe for me, and for Ars Hermeneutica.

There were no major transgressions but a pile-up of minor infractions to the point that it was irritating. Let’s look at a few examples.

Mathematical theorems rely on this logical process [of proof] and once proven are true until the end of time. Mathematical proofs are absolute. To appreciate the value of such proofs they should be compared with their poor relation, the scientific proof. [p.21]

In one sense you could say that once proven mathematical theorems are true, in the sense that once proven they stayed proved. However, the sentence is sloppy and ambiguous as a result, suggesting that perhaps the theorem was not true before it was proven.

That is not the way mathematicians look at theorems and proofs, however. Theorems are seen more as emergent truths of a mathematical system, statements that have always existentially true but unknown to be true before they are discovered and their truth established by means of proof.

It’s akin to finding a rock and saying “I recognize this as a sedimentary rock, so it will henceforth be a sedimentary rock.” Most of us would look askance at such a statement with the obvious reaction: “Wasn’t it always a sedimentary rock, even before anyone saw it?”

Arguing in the author’s favor, I suspect that he didn’t mean his sentence this way; rather, he wanted to make the point that once the truth of a theorem is established by proof, that proof remains valid unless an error is discovered in the proof or some problem is discovered in the mathematical system in which the theorem and proof is embedded. However, that’s not what he wrote.

As for that bit about “their poor relation, the scientific proof”–it will take at least another entire essay for me to deal with the issues raised by that “poor relation” jibe (it doesn’t upset me that much) and the lack of understanding surrounding the reference to “scientific proof” (that does upset me quite a bit).

Together Fermat and Pascal would discover the first proofs and cast-iron certainties in probability theory, a subject that is inherently uncertain. [p. 40]

Yikes! According to the book-jacket, Mr. Singh has an advanced degree in particle physics. A great deal of experimental particle physics means looking at decay products of high-energy nuclear interactions, processes that are governed by probabilities. Exact probabilities in many cases. He should know better than to write that probability theory is “inherently uncertain.” Probability theory is a mathematical discipline with exact results, and those exact results describe processes that are inherently uncertain. To ascribe “inherent uncertainty” to a discipline whose subject is “inherent uncertainty” is naive and/or thoughtless, and does nothing here to keep the unsophisticated reader from getting confused.

Fermat’s panoply of theorems ranged from the fundamental to the simply amusing. Mathematicians rank the importance of theorems according to their impact on the rest of mathematics. [p. 66]

I simply found this statement bizarre, suggesting as it does that there are mathematicians someplace whose job it is to rank the importance of theorems to the world of mathematics. Do they have a list they check against? Where do they publish their list of theorems, ordered by importance?

Of course Mr. Singh is talking figuratively, looking for an “objective” way to describe the importance of Fermat’s theorem, but he does it again with sloppy writing that suggests something quite other than what he intended.

Instances like these kept cropping up and their irritation overwhelmed me by around page 80. I knew by then that I wouldn’t enjoy reading the book and it didn’t even seem worth the bother of finishing so that I could write a negative book note–I much prefer guiding potential readers towards good books rather than away from bad books.

Part of my professional mission, though, is to consider how we (the big “we” of those who write science for general consumption) communicate science, and how we can communicate it better. Sometimes that means looking at examples of miscommunication so that we can improve. Think of is as an engineering approach (as Henry Petroski does in his excellent books) in which failure has much to tell us about how to succeed.

Park on EMF Non-Dangers

Just in case you came in late, or you don’t remember the events of the time, and never realized the terror that could be induced by toasters, Robert Park updates us on the utter lack of danger associated with electromagnetic fields (EMF).

HYBRIPHOBIA: REMEMBER WHEN POWER LINES CAUSED CANCER?
EMF stopped causing cancer in 1997, but no one bothered to tell Jim Motavalli, who wrote an Automobile column in the Sunday New York Times about the risks of EMF in hybrids. According to Motavalli the National Cancer Institute studied the cancer risks associated with electromagnetic fields. And so it did – but it couldn’t find any. You might think Motavalli would at least check the Archives of the New York Times. On July 3, 1997, the day the massive four-year NCI study of power lines and cancer appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Gina Kolata reported in the Times that the study was unambiguous and found no health effects associated with electromagnetic fields. An editorial in the same issue of the Journal put it in perspective: “Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into studies that never had much promise of finding a way to prevent the tragedy of cancer in children. It is time to stop wasting our research resources.” It all began in 1979 when Nancy Wertheimer, an unemployed epidemiologist, and her friend Ed Leeper, drove around Denver looking for common environmental factors in the homes of childhood victims of leukemia. It practically jumped out at them – every home had electricity. Their study was so flawed it would have been laughed off but for Paul Brodeur, a scientifically-ignorant writer for The New Yorker. He wrote a series of terrifying articles about power lines and cancer that were collected in a 1989 book, Currents of Death.

[Robert Park, What's New, 2 May 2008.]

Fast-Tack Evolution

The story, as it’s told online in National Geographic News,^* goes like this.

n 1971, scientists transplanted five adult pairs of [Italian wall lizards] from their original island home in Pod Kopiste to the tiny neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru, both in the south Adriatic Sea[, off the coast of Croatia].

Genetic testing on the Pod Mrcaru lizards confirmed that the modern population of more than 5,000 Italian wall lizards are all descendants of the original ten lizards left behind in the 1970s.

However, the Pod Mrcaru/Italian wall lizards of today are no longer much like the original pair. It seems that the population has evolved some new digestive strategies–and parts!–along with a different head with a stronger jaw to go along with the new strategy. All this they managed to do in only 30 generations on the island.

As the report says, all of the current lizards have been tested genetically and are known to be descended from the original pair. It also turns out that the new lizards have displaced the aboriginal lizards on the island when the first pair were transplanted. There is no determination mentioned about whether the new lizard is a different species from the original pair.

Isn’t that interesting! Evolution in action, and on a surprisingly short time scale. How can this be possible though? Doesn’t evolution take ages and ages to accomplish change?

Yes and no. As our understanding of evolution (and natural selection) improves and deepens, it seems that evolution is anything but uniformly slow and uniformly steady.^# Indeed, the more modern understanding is coming to terms with how genetic information is prepared, as it were, to make rapid changes when the occasion arises. Some of this is touched on in Sean Carroll’s book Endless Forms Most Beautiful.

Of course there is a political aspect to this report of scientific findings. Some evolution deniers will continue to deny that speciation is possible through evolution, but they will be seen to be wrong, probably sooner rather than later, too.
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^*Kimberly Johnson, “Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island“, National Geographic News, 21 April 2008.

^#Although I don’t really see the need to turn to the concept of Punctuated Equilibrium, as promoted by Eldredge & Gould to incorporate the nonuniformity. Doing so seems to me to caricature any realistic understanding of gradualism.