How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  48 “After work you have to get in your car”: Heavily edited for length from Wallace, 2009.

  49 the original Chinese idea of yin-yang: In simplified Chinese: traditional Chinese: . The characters mean “sunny-side, shady-side.” There is no “and.”

  50 “an investigation into the condition”: Lowell’s comments are edited from a quotation in Sheehan, 1996, which cites Strauss, 1994. The original quotation from Sheehan is: “What Percival Lowell hoped to accomplish through this ‘speculative, highly sensational and idiosyncratic project’ is well documented in an address he gave to the Boston Scientific Society on May 22, 1894, which was printed in the Boston Commonwealth. His main object, he stated, was to study the solar system: ‘This may be put popularly as an investigation into the condition of life on other worlds, including last but not least their habitability by beings like [or] unlike man. This is not the chimerical search some may suppose. On the contrary, there is strong reason to believe that we are on the eve of pretty definite discovery in the matter.’ To Lowell, the implications of the lines that Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli figuratively called canali were self-evident: ‘Speculation has been singularly fruitful as to what these markings on our next to nearest neighbor in space may mean. Each astronomer holds a different pet theory on the subject, and pooh-poohs those of all the others. Nevertheless, the most self-evident explanation from the markings themselves is probably the true one; namely, that in them we are looking upon the result of the work of some sort of intelligent beings.… The amazing blue network on Mars hints that one planet besides our own is actually inhabited now.’ ” Sheehan’s work is available from the University of Arizona at http://​bit.​ly/​sheehanmars.

  51 Lowell inspired a century of science fiction: The word “Martian” predated Lowell—it first appeared in 1883, in a story almost certainly inspired by Schiaparelli (Lach-Szyrma, 1883) but did not become famous until 1898, after Lowell’s announcements, when H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds. Burroughs’s Under the Moons of Mars was a series of short stories first published in 1912, as a series under the pen name “Norman Bean,” and renamed A Princess of Mars when released in book form (Burroughs, 1917). The complete quotation is: “The shores of the ancient seas were dotted with just such cities, and lesser ones, in diminishing numbers, were to be found converging toward the center of the oceans, as the people had found it necessary to follow the receding waters until necessity had forced upon them their ultimate salvation, the so-called Martian canals.”

  52 One of Lowell’s opponents was Alfred Wallace: Wallace had already concluded that “the Earth is the only habitable planet in the solar system” when Lowell started publishing (Wallace, 1904).

  53 “The totally inadequate water-supply”: Edited from Wallace, 1907.

  54 The argument was resolved in Wallace’s favor: Momsen, 1996. The complete quotation is: “And then the real wonder came—picture after picture showing that the surface was dotted with craters! It appeared uncannily like that of our own Moon, deeply cratered, and unchanged over time. No water, no canals, no life.” Momsen was described as “the imaging engineer for JPL’s [Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s] Mariner series of missions” by John B. Dobbins on December 12, 2005, in a message to the NASA Spaceflight Forum at http://​bit.​ly/​nasaforum.

  55 His maps of Martian canals are mirror images: Sheehan and Dobbins, 2003. Lowell describes the “Tores” he saw on Saturn in Lowell, 1907.

  56 “Perhaps the most harmful imperfection of the eye”: See Sheehan and Dobbins, 2003; also Douglass, 1907.

  57 “I am not sure of the significance”: Warren, 2005.

  58 Ketamine, phencyclidine, and methamphetamine: Burton, 2009. Phencyclidine is also known as PCP, or angel dust. Methamphetamine is also known as “meth”; the derivatives MDMA, or ecstasy, and methamphetamine hydrochloride salt, or “crystal meth,” can also create feelings of certainty. For more on the effects of entorhinal cortex stimulation, see Bartolomei, 2004.

  59 cognitive psychologists Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch: Neisser and Harsch, 1992. Cited in Burton, 2009.

  60 Thirty-three were sure they had never been asked: This was actually thirty-three out of forty-four. The study had three parts. In part one, 106 students completed a questionnaire the day after the Challenger explosion. In part two, administered two and a half years later, forty-four of those students agreed to complete a follow-up questionnaire. In part three, forty of those students particpated in an interview where the two questionnaires were compared. Part three, the interview, took place six months after part two, the second questionnaire, had been completed. Four students dropped out between the second and third parts of the test, which is why the base size in the test is forty.

  61 This unshakable certainty was first studied in 1954: Festinger et al., 1956, in which Martin is given the pseudonym “Mrs. Marian Keech” to protect her identity.

  62 “The group began reexamining the original message”: Edited from Festinger et al., 1956. Complete quotation: “At any rate, in the next hour and a half, the group began to come to grips with the fact that no caller had arrived at midnight to take them to the saucer. The problem from here on was to reassure themselves and to find an adequate, satisfying way to reconcile the disconfirmation with their beliefs. They began by re-examining the original message which had stated that at midnight the group would be put into parked cars and taken to the saucer. In response to some of the observers’ prodding about that message during the coffee break, the Creator stated that anyone who wished might look up that message. It had been buried away among many others in a large envelope and none of the believers seemed inclined to look for it, but one of the observers volunteered. He found it and read it aloud to the group. The first attempt at reinterpretation came quickly. Daisy Armstrong pointed out that the message must, of course, be symbolic, because it said we were to be put into parked cars; but parked cars do not move and hence could not take the group anywhere. The Creator then announced that the message was indeed symbolic, but the ‘parked cars’ referred to their own physical bodies, which had obviously been there at midnight. The ‘porch’ (flying saucer), He went on, symbolized in this message the inner strength, the inner knowing, and inner light which each member of the group had. So eager was the group for an explanation of any kind that many actually began to accept this one.”

  63 “From the mouth of death have ye been delivered”: Edited from Festinger et al., 1956. Complete quotation: “And mighty is the word of God—and by his word have ye been saved—for from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room and that which has been loosed within this room now floods the entire Earth.”

  64 Leon Festinger, named this gap: The term used throughout When Prophecy Fails is “dissonance.” Later, in Festinger, 1957, the term became “cognitive dissonance.”

  65 In one experiment, he gave volunteers: Festinger, 1962.

  66 “When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it”: Festinger, 1957.

  67 Dorothy Martin had a long career: After the events described in the book, Martin moved to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, was involved with “the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays,” a group that included another purported “UFO contactee,” George Hunt Williamson, and at some point became known as “Sister Thedra.” According to another spiritualist, “Dr. Robert Ghost Wolf,” while she was in Mexico, Martin “had an experience which changed her in an instant when as it is told by her that [sic] Jesus Christ physically appeared to her and spontaneously cured her of cancer. He introduced himself to her by his true, [sic] name, ‘Sananda Kumara,’ thereby revealing his affiliation with the Venusian founders of the Great Solar Brotherhoods. By his command that [sic] Sister Thedra went to Peru. Sister Thedra eventually left Peru upon felling [sic] her experience there was complete. She then traveled t
o Mt. Shasta in California and founded the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara.” Dorothy Martin died in May 1992. She did her last “automatic writing” on May 3, 1992: “Sori Sori: Mine beloved, I am speaking unto thee for the good of all. It is now come the time that ye come out from the place wherein ye are. Ye shall shout for joy! Let it be, for many shall greet thee with glad shouts! So be it, no more pain … Amen … Sananda.” (Ellipses in original.) After Martin’s death, the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara changed its address to a location next to a pizza restaurant called “Apizza Heaven” in Sedona, Arizona. See http://​bit.​ly/​thedra and http://​bit.​ly/​sananda. Martin’s story is also mentioned (rather inaccurately) in Largo, 2010.

  68 “The psychologists determined that when people”: From “Extraordinary Intelligence,” a website created by a woman using the pseudonym “Natalina,” sometimes “Natalina EI,” who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma; http://​bit.​ly/​whenfaithistested.

  CHAPTER 5: WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

  1 Sleet like crystal tears fell on cobbles: Biographical details about Rosalind Franklin are from Maddox, 2003, and Glynn, 2012.

  2 Physicist Erwin Schrödinger captured the spirit: Schrödinger gave a series of lectures at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College in 1943 (published as a book in 1944) in which he anticipated the discovery of DNA with the statement “the most essential part of a living cell—the chromosome fibre may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal” (Schrödinger, 1944).

  3 Mendel’s work was ignored: Mendel’s work did not become widely known until the start of the twentieth century; Darwin died in 1882. Darwin proposed a “provisional 1868. “Chromosome theory” is also known as “Boveri-Sutton chromosome theory,” “the chromosome theory of inheritance,” and “the Sutton-Boveri theory.”

  4 Rosalind Franklin believed life’s messengers: It was not until the 1930s that the acids were first considered as candidate information carriers by the Canadian American scientist Oswald Avery Jr. (Maddox, 2003).

  5 a crystal is any solid with atoms or molecules arranged: A crystal can also consist of a three-dimensional, repeating arrangement of ions; I excluded that point here for clarity and simplicity.

  6 Franklin published her results at the start: Franklin published regularly on the tobacco mosaic virus between 1955 and 1958 (see works by Franklin and by Franklin with others in the bibliography, below), and her work culminated in two papers published in 1958: “The Radial Density Distribution in Some Strains of Tobacco Mosaic Virus,” coauthored with Kenneth Holmes and published before her death (Holmes and Franklin, 1958), and “The Structure of Viruses as Determined by X-ray Diffraction,” which was published posthumously (Franklin et al., 1958).

  7 “Credit does not entirely belong to her”: A letter from Charles Eliot to Marie Meloney, December 18, 1920, part of the Marie Mattingly Meloney papers, 1891–1943, Columbia University Library; http://​bit.​ly/​meloney. Quoted in Ham, 2002.

  8 Curie used the word “me” seven times: See Curie, 1911. The quotation also appears in Emling, 2013.

  9 In total, only 15 women have won: “Science” means prizes in “chemistry,” “physics,” or “physiology or medicine.” The 15 women (as of 2014) are Maria Goeppert Mayer (physics, 1963), Marie Curie (physics, 1903, and chemistry, 1911), Ada E. Yonath (chemistry, 2009), Dorothy Hodgkin (chemistry, 1964), Irène Joliot-Curie (chemistry, 1935), Elizabeth H. Blackburn (physiology or medicine, 2009), Carol W. Greider (physiology or medicine, 2009), Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (physiology or medicine, 2008), Linda B. Buck (physiology or medicine, 2004), Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (physiology or medicine, 1995), Gertrude B. Elion (physiology or medicine, 1998), Rita Levi-Montalcini (physiology or medicine, 1986), Barbara McClintock (physiology or medicine, 1983), Rosalyn Yalow (physiology or medicine, 1977), and Gerty Theresa Cori (physiology or medicine, 1947). See http://​bit.​ly/​womenlaureates.

  10 It protected DNA specimens from humidity: Pictures of Franklin’s camera are at http://​bit.​ly/​dnacamera.

  11 There are many similar stories: These examples are a selection from Byers and Williams, 2010.

  12 One reason is an imbalance first recorded: Zuckerman, 1965.

  13 “The world is peculiar in this matter”: Quotations are from Merton, 1968.

  14 Until Zuckerman, most scholars assumed: See, for example, Pareto et al., 1935, discussed in Zuckerman, 1977.

  15 “For whoever has will be given more”: New International Version. Other translations and commentaries at http://​bit.​ly/​matthew2529.

  16 Zuckerman collaborated with Merton, then married him: Merton and Zuckerman married in 1993. Merton separated from his first wife, Suzanne Carhart, in 1968, soon after Zuckerman completed her PhD (Hollander, 2003; Calhoun, 2003; and Wikipedia entry on Robert K. Merton at http://​bit.​ly/​mertonrk).

  17 Patent law is complicated: See U.S. Patent and Trademark Office web page at http://​bit.​ly/​inventorship.

  18 If the female scientist named the male scientist: See Radack, 1994, for a discussion of the risks of assigning inventorship to non-inventors.

  19 the average number of people who “contribute”: See discussion of Trajtenberg in chapter 1.

  20 part of the macroenvironment: Merton used the word “paradigm” twenty-five years before Kuhn, but, Merton says, with a less precise, “more limited,” meaning. See video of “Robert K. Merton Interviewed by Albert K. Cohen, May 15, 1997,” posted by the American Society of Criminology at http://​bit.​ly/​mertoncohen.

  21 In 1676, Isaac Newton described this problem: Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, dated “Cambridge, February 5, 1675–6,” published in Brewster, 1860.

  22 Newton got it from George Herbert: See Merton, 1993. There is an excellent summary of the life of this quotation, written by Joseph Yoon, formerly of NASA, on Aerospace Web at http://​bit.​ly/​josephyoon (although the date given for Didacus Stella’s quotation is incorrect). Bernard of Chartres may have found the idea in the work of Talmudic scholars (it appears in the writings of Talmudist Isaiah di Trani, who lived after Bernard, but Isaiah may have inherited it from other, earlier Talmudists, rather than getting it from Bernard); it could also have been inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Cedalion, who rides on the shoulders of the giant Orion.

  23 a subject of curiosity at least since the winter: There are other, earlier discussions of snowflakes, including Han Ying , 150 B.C.E.), Albertus Magnus (1250), and Olaus Magnus (1555). I start with Kepler because he was one of the first to try to explain snowflakes by connecting them to crystals—“Let the chemists, then, tell us whether there is any salt in snow, and what kind, and what shape it takes”—and crystals, not snowflakes, are the subject of the discussion.

  24 Geissler’s invention was a novelty: Shepardson, 1908.

  25 “I have seen my death”: Markel, 2012.

  26 Were they particles, like electrons: This question about X-rays was asked before Einstein proposed wave-particle duality.

  27 In 1915, at the age of twenty-five: Jenkin, 2008, and Authier, 2013.

  28 One of them was a woman named Polly Porter: Polly was not her real name. She was christened “Mary Winearls Porter” but had always been called “Polly.”

  29 While her brothers studied, Porter wandered the city: The result was a book, What Rome Was Built With. See Porter, 1907.

  30 Henry Miers, Oxford’s first professor of mineralogy: Price, 2012.

  31 “Dear Professor Goldschmidt”: Letter dated January 14, 1914, edited from Arnold, 1993. The quotation as it appears in Arnold is: “Dear Professor Goldschmidt: I have long had the purpose of writing you to interest you in Miss Porter, who is working this year in my laboratory and whom I hope you will welcome in your laboratory next year. Her heart is set upon the study of crystallography and I hope she will remain with you for more than one year. Her income is not sufficient for her to live in Bryn Mawr College without earning money. This Miss Porter is doing now, but h
er work takes too much time from her studies and besides she should go to the fountainhead of inspiration.… Miss Porter thinks she will, in Germany, be able to live upon her income. Miss Porter’s life has been unusual, for her parents (her father is corresponding editor of the London Times) have been almost constant travellers and she has never been to school or college save for a very brief period. There are therefore great gaps in her education, particularly in chemistry and mathematics, but to offset this I believe you will find that she has an unusual aptitude for crystal measurement, etc., and certainly an intense love of your subject. I want to see her have the opportunities which have so long been denied her—Miss Porter is perhaps about 26 years of age, very modest and unselfassertive but with a quiet initiative. I hope you will be interested to have her as a student and 1 think she will repay all you may do for her. She must eventually be self-supporting and I hope she will be fitted for the position of curator and crystallographer of some mineral collection. Miss Porter is spending this year only with me and if she does come to you, it will be apparent to you, I fear, that she has but made a beginning. I am, however, both ambitious for her and with faith in her ultimate success.…”

  32 She stayed at Oxford, conducting research: Haines, 2001.

  33 Bragg’s topic in 1923: The title of Bragg’s lectures was “Concerning the Nature of Things.” Bragg, 1925.

  34 Dorothy Hodgkin: Biographical details about Dorothy Hodgkin are from Ferry, 2000.

  35 That same year, Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya: Nakaya, 1954. Summarized in nontechnical terms in Libbrecht, 2001.

  36 They form around another particle: See Lee, 1995, for more. Christner et al., 2008, “examined IN [ice nucleators—particles that act as a nucleus for ice crystals that form in the atmosphere] in snowfall from mid- and high-latitude locations and found that the most active were biological in origin. Of the IN larger than 0.2 micrometer that were active at temperatures warmer than −7°C, 69 to 100% were biological, and a substantial fraction were bacteria.”