A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

  The problems of dating rocks were such that at one point almost everyone in the world had given up on them. Had it not been for a determined English professor named Arthur Holmes, the quest might well have fallen into abeyance altogether.

  Holmes was heroic as much for the obstacles he overcame as for the results he achieved. By the 1920s, when Holmes was in the prime of his career, geology had slipped out of fashion--physics was the new excitement of the age--and had become severely underfunded, particularly in Britain, its spiritual birthplace. At Durham University, Holmes was for many years the entire geology department. Often he had to borrow or patch together equipment in order to pursue his radiometric dating of rocks. At one point, his calculations were effectively held up for a year while he waited for the university to provide him with a simple adding machine. Occasionally, he had to drop out of academic life altogether to earn enough to support his family--for a time he ran a curio shop in Newcastle upon Tyne--and sometimes he could not even afford the £5 annual membership fee for the Geological Society.

  The technique Holmes used in his work was theoretically straightforward and arose directly from the process, first observed by Ernest Rutherford in 1904, in which some atoms decay from one element into another at a rate predictable enough that you can use them as clocks. If you know how long it takes for potassium-40 to become argon-40, and you measure the amounts of each in a sample, you can work out how old a material is. Holmes's contribution was to measure the decay rate of uranium into lead to calculate the age of rocks, and thus--he hoped--of the Earth.

  But there were many technical difficulties to overcome. Holmes also needed--or at least would very much have appreciated--sophisticated gadgetry of a sort that could make very fine measurements from tiny samples, and as we have seen it was all he could do to get a simple adding machine. So it was quite an achievement when in 1946 he was able to announce with some confidence that the Earth was at least three billion years old and possibly rather more. Unfortunately, he now met yet another formidable impediment to acceptance: the conservativeness of his fellow scientists. Although happy to praise his methodology, many maintained that he had found not the age of the Earth but merely the age of the materials from which the Earth had been formed.

  It was just at this time that Harrison Brown of the University of Chicago developed a new method for counting lead isotopes in igneous rocks (which is to say those that were created through heating, as opposed to the laying down of sediments). Realizing that the work would be exceedingly tedious, he assigned it to young Clair Patterson as his dissertation project. Famously he promised Patterson that determining the age of the Earth with his new method would be "duck soup." In fact, it would take years.

  Patterson began work on the project in 1948. Compared with Thomas Midgley's colorful contributions to the march of progress, Patterson's discovery of the age of the Earth feels more than a touch anticlimactic. For seven years, first at the University of Chicago and then at the California Institute of Technology (where he moved in 1952), he worked in a sterile lab, making very precise measurements of the lead/uranium ratios in carefully selected samples of old rock.

  The problem with measuring the age of the Earth was that you needed rocks that were extremely ancient, containing lead- and uranium-bearing crystals that were about as old as the planet itself--anything much younger would obviously give you misleadingly youthful dates--but really ancient rocks are only rarely found on Earth. In the late 1940s no one altogether understood why this should be. Indeed, and rather extraordinarily, we would be well into the space age before anyone could plausibly account for where all the Earth's old rocks went. (The answer was plate tectonics, which we shall of course get to.) Patterson, meantime, was left to try to make sense of things with very limited materials. Eventually, and ingeniously, it occurred to him that he could circumvent the rock shortage by using rocks from beyond Earth. He turned to meteorites.

  The assumption he made--rather a large one, but correct as it turned out--was that many meteorites are essentially leftover building materials from the early days of the solar system, and thus have managed to preserve a more or less pristine interior chemistry. Measure the age of these wandering rocks and you would have the age also (near enough) of the Earth.

  As always, however, nothing was quite as straightforward as such a breezy description makes it sound. Meteorites are not abundant and meteoritic samples not especially easy to get hold of. Moreover, Brown's measurement technique proved finicky in the extreme and needed much refinement. Above all, there was the problem that Patterson's samples were continuously and unaccountably contaminated with large doses of atmospheric lead whenever they were exposed to air. It was this that eventually led him to create a sterile laboratory--the world's first, according to at least one account.

  It took Patterson seven years of patient work just to assemble suitable samples for final testing. In the spring of 1953 he traveled to the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, where he was granted time on a late-model mass spectrograph, a machine capable of detecting and measuring the minute quantities of uranium and lead locked up in ancient crystals. When at last he had his results, Patterson was so excited that he drove straight to his boyhood home in Iowa and had his mother check him into a hospital because he thought he was having a heart attack.

  Soon afterward, at a meeting in Wisconsin, Patterson announced a definitive age for the Earth of 4,550 million years (plus or minus 70 million years)--"a figure that stands unchanged 50 years later," as McGrayne admiringly notes. After two hundred years of trying, the Earth finally had an age.

  His main work done, Patterson now turned his attention to the nagging question of all that lead in the atmosphere. He was astounded to find that what little was known about the effects of lead on humans was almost invariably wrong or misleading--and not surprisingly, he discovered, since for forty years every study of lead's effects had been funded exclusively by manufacturers of lead additives.

  In one such study, a doctor who had no specialized training in chemical pathology undertook a five-year program in which volunteers were asked to breathe in or swallow lead in elevated quantities. Then their urine and feces were tested. Unfortunately, as the doctor appears not to have known, lead is not excreted as a waste product. Rather, it accumulates in the bones and blood--that's what makes it so dangerous--and neither bone nor blood was tested. In consequence, lead was given a clean bill of health.

  Patterson quickly established that we had a lot of lead in the atmosphere--still do, in fact, since lead never goes away--and that about 90 percent of it appeared to come from automobile exhaust pipes, but he couldn't prove it. What he needed was a way to compare lead levels in the atmosphere now with the levels that existed before 1923, when tetraethyl lead was introduced. It occurred to him that ice cores could provide the answer.

  It was known that snowfall in places like Greenland accumulates into discrete annual layers (because seasonal temperature differences produce slight changes in coloration from winter to summer). By counting back through these layers and measuring the amount of lead in each, he could work out global lead concentrations at any time for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. The notion became the foundation of ice core studies, on which much modern climatological work is based.

  What Patterson found was that before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere, and that since that time its level had climbed steadily and dangerously. He now made it his life's quest to get lead taken out of gasoline. To that end, he became a constant and often vocal critic of the lead industry and its interests.

  It would prove to be a hellish campaign. Ethyl was a powerful global corporation with many friends in high places. (Among its directors have been Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society.) Patterson suddenly found research funding withdrawn or difficult to acquire. The American Petroleum Institute canceled a research contract with him, as did the United States Public Health Service,
a supposedly neutral government institution.

  As Patterson increasingly became a liability to his institution, the school trustees were repeatedly pressed by lead industry officials to shut him up or let him go. According to Jamie Lincoln Kitman, writing in The Nation in 2000, Ethyl executives allegedly offered to endow a chair at Caltech "if Patterson was sent packing." Absurdly, he was excluded from a 1971 National Research Council panel appointed to investigate the dangers of atmospheric lead poisoning even though he was by now unquestionably the leading expert on atmospheric lead.

  To his great credit, Patterson never wavered or buckled. Eventually his efforts led to the introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and finally to the removal from sale of all leaded gasoline in the United States in 1986. Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 percent. But because lead is forever, those of us alive today have about 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago. The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow, quite legally, by about a hundred thousand metric tons a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, "forty-four years after most of Europe," as McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993.

  As for the Ethyl Corporation, it's still going strong, though GM, Standard Oil, and Du Pont no longer have stakes in the company. (They sold out to a company called Albemarle Paper in 1962.) According to McGrayne, as late as February 2001 Ethyl continued to contend "that research has failed to show that leaded gasoline poses a threat to human health or the environment." On its website, a history of the company makes no mention of lead--or indeed of Thomas Midgley--but simply refers to the original product as containing "a certain combination of chemicals."

  Ethyl no longer makes leaded gasoline, although, according to its 2001 company accounts, tetraethyl lead (or TEL as it calls it) still accounted for $25.1 million in sales in 2000 (out of overall sales of $795 million), up from $24.1 million in 1999, but down from $117 million in 1998. In its report the company stated its determination to "maximize the cash generated by TEL as its usage continues to phase down around the world." Ethyl markets TEL through an agreement with Associated Octel of England.

  As for the other scourge left to us by Thomas Midgley, chlorofluorocarbons, they were banned in 1974 in the United States, but they are tenacious little devils and any that you loosed into the atmosphere before then (in your deodorants or hair sprays, for instance) will almost certainly be around and devouring ozone long after you have shuffled off. Worse, we are still introducing huge amounts of CFCs into the atmosphere every year. According to Wayne Biddle, 60 million pounds of the stuff, worth $1.5 billion, still finds its way onto the market every year. So who is making it? We are--that is to say, many of our large corporations are still making it at their plants overseas. It will not be banned in Third World countries until 2010.

  Clair Patterson died in 1995. He didn't win a Nobel Prize for his work. Geologists never do. Nor, more puzzlingly, did he gain any fame or even much attention from half a century of consistent and increasingly selfless achievement. A good case could be made that he was the most influential geologist of the twentieth century. Yet who has ever heard of Clair Patterson? Most geology textbooks don't mention him. Two recent popular books on the history of the dating of Earth actually manage to misspell his name. In early 2001, a reviewer of one of these books in the journal Nature made the additional, rather astounding error of thinking Patterson was a woman.

  At all events, thanks to the work of Clair Patterson by 1953 the Earth at last had an age everyone could agree on. The only problem now was it was older than the universe that contained it.

  11 MUSTER MARK'S QUARKS

  IN 1911, A British scientist named C. T. R. Wilson was studying cloud formations by tramping regularly to the summit of Ben Nevis, a famously damp Scottish mountain, when it occurred to him that there must be an easier way to study clouds. Back in the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge he built an artificial cloud chamber--a simple device in which he could cool and moisten the air, creating a reasonable model of a cloud in laboratory conditions.

  The device worked very well, but had an additional, unexpected benefit. When he accelerated an alpha particle through the chamber to seed his make-believe clouds, it left a visible trail--like the contrails of a passing airliner. He had just invented the particle detector. It provided convincing evidence that subatomic particles did indeed exist.

  Eventually two other Cavendish scientists invented a more powerful proton-beam device, while in California Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley produced his famous and impressive cyclotron, or atom smasher, as such devices were long excitingly known. All of these contraptions worked--and indeed still work--on more or less the same principle, the idea being to accelerate a proton or other charged particle to an extremely high speed along a track (sometimes circular, sometimes linear), then bang it into another particle and see what flies off. That's why they were called atom smashers. It wasn't science at its subtlest, but it was generally effective.

  As physicists built bigger and more ambitious machines, they began to find or postulate particles or particle families seemingly without number: muons, pions, hyperons, mesons, K-mesons, Higgs bosons, intermediate vector bosons, baryons, tachyons. Even physicists began to grow a little uncomfortable. "Young man," Enrico Fermi replied when a student asked him the name of a particular particle, "if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist."

  Today accelerators have names that sound like something Flash Gordon would use in battle: the Super Proton Synchrotron, the Large Electron-Positron Collider, the Large Hadron Collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Using huge amounts of energy (some operate only at night so that people in neighboring towns don't have to witness their lights fading when the apparatus is fired up), they can whip particles into such a state of liveliness that a single electron can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel in a second. Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called "strange quarks," which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn't happened.

  Finding particles takes a certain amount of concentration. They are not just tiny and swift but also often tantalizingly evanescent. Particles can come into being and be gone again in as little as 0.000000000000000000000001 second (10 - 24 ). Even the most sluggish of unstable particles hang around for no more than 0.0000001 second (10 -7 ).

  Some particles are almost ludicrously slippery. Every second the Earth is visited by 10,000 trillion trillion tiny, all but massless neutrinos (mostly shot out by the nuclear broilings of the Sun), and virtually all of them pass right through the planet and everything that is on it, including you and me, as if it weren't there. To trap just a few of them, scientists need tanks holding up to 12.5 million gallons of heavy water (that is, water with a relative abundance of deuterium in it) in underground chambers (old mines usually) where they can't be interfered with by other types of radiation.

  Very occasionally, a passing neutrino will bang into one of the atomic nuclei in the water and produce a little puff of energy. Scientists count the puffs and by such means take us very slightly closer to understanding the fundamental properties of the universe. In 1998, Japanese observers reported that neutrinos do have mass, but not a great deal--about one ten-millionth that of an electron.

  What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of facilities required to do the searching. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is like a little city. Straddling the border of France and Switzerland, it employs three thousand people and occupies a site that is measured in square miles. CERN boasts a stri
ng of magnets that weigh more than the Eiffel Tower and an underground tunnel over sixteen miles around.

  Breaking up atoms, as James Trefil has noted, is easy; you do it each time you switch on a fluorescent light. Breaking up atomic nuclei, however, requires quite a lot of money and a generous supply of electricity. Getting down to the level of quarks--the particles that make up particles--requires still more: trillions of volts of electricity and the budget of a small Central American nation. CERN's new Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin operations in 2005, will achieve fourteen trillion volts of energy and cost something over $1.5 billion to construct. * 25

  But these numbers are as nothing compared with what could have been achieved by, and spent upon, the vast and now unfortunately never-to-be Superconducting Supercollider, which began being constructed near Waxahachie, Texas, in the 1980s, before experiencing a supercollision of its own with the United States Congress. The intention of the collider was to let scientists probe "the ultimate nature of matter," as it is always put, by re-creating as nearly as possible the conditions in the universe during its first ten thousand billionths of a second. The plan was to fling particles through a tunnel fifty-two miles long, achieving a truly staggering ninety-nine trillion volts of energy. It was a grand scheme, but would also have cost $8 billion to build (a figure that eventually rose to $10 billion) and hundreds of millions of dollars a year to run.

  In perhaps the finest example in history of pouring money into a hole in the ground, Congress spent $2 billion on the project, then canceled it in 1993 after fourteen miles of tunnel had been dug. So Texas now boasts the most expensive hole in the universe. The site is, I am told by my friend Jeff Guinn of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram , "essentially a vast, cleared field dotted along the circumference by a series of disappointed small towns."