Electric Universe

by David Bodanis

  Lots of mysteries became clear after Loewi’s work. Caffeine has been drunk for centuries, with commentators even in the 1600s complaining that young scholars used it to excess, to stay alert when they were trying to catch up on their studies. But no one knew how it worked. Understanding electrical connections at the level of cell surfaces in the brain changed that. A common transmitter between brain cells is the bulky molecule called adenosine. When it reaches its target brain cells, it tends to slow down their rate of firing. What caffeine does is slip into adenosine’s docking sites. With those berths now full, the adenosine can’t get in. We might be exhausted, we might be craving deep rest, but with our receptor brain cells speckled with caffeine, our desperate adenosine outpourings can’t find enough free berths to latch on and so can’t get those cells to slow.

  As the years went on after Loewi’s discovery, even more precise details became clear. Nancy Ostrowski was a young American who’d once considered being a nun, and by the 1970s had switched to research. But she seems to have channeled some of the moral strictures from her previous life into her new work. In her laboratory outside Washington, D.C., she would get something like a small guillotine ready, then encourage mice to have sex, and then decapitate them while they were thus engaged. With sufficiently quick blenderizing of their brains, she found that many of their brain cells had been pouring out endorphins. These are naturally produced neurotransmitters shaped much like heroin or morphine. When they cross synaptic gaps and dock with waiting receptors, mammals experience great pleasure.

  Endorphins are temporary, but our overall moods are more long-lasting. Some people are like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, for whom cheerfulness kept on poking in. Others are the opposite, and quite happy to wring the necks of all those who constantly tell them to be more chirpy as they go through the day. The more precise our knowledge of how electrically charged molecules and ions move inside the brain, the more easily we can reach in and control our moods, and to some extent even our temperaments.

  This is the latest stage in using the understanding of electricity for a new technology. The consequences of the telegraph and computer took decades to become clear; the future that insights into neurotransmitters will create still remains to be seen. The great breakthrough in using them for detailed psychological control came at the Indianapolis labs of the Eli Lilly company in the early 1970s. Many researchers had known that the neurotransmitter called serotonin is important in setting our moods. There are many qualifications, but roughly, individuals who have low amounts of serotonin in their brains often feel depressed. Yet how to control it? Blasting the brain with a powerful chemical such as Thorazine will make us a bit better, but Thorazine, alas, has the accuracy of a flamethrower and attacks many other useful circuits in the brain. The result, when Thorazine alone was used, were mental hospitals where patients could be taken out of their straitjackets, but only because they could be trusted to sit vacantly in lawn chairs, having lost much of their personalities in the process.

  What the Eli Lilly researchers found was an ingeniously indirect way to raise the level of serotonin and nothing else. They couldn’t make more serotonin come out, but they could make the little bit that did appear stay in operation much longer. For serotonin levels are controlled not just by how much is poured out from firing nerve cells in the brain, but also by how quickly the demolition crews—the janitorial molecules—floating in the gaps between brain cells grind them apart and lug them back to the transmitting cell to be reabsorbed. If someone isn’t producing enough serotonin, or if their receptors for it aren’t working well, why not just slow down the demolition and reabsorption process? Prozac pours out small, electrically glistening molecules that latch on to several of the molecules active in the demolition process, and stop them from working at full efficiency. The result? With the demolition molecules out of commission, the small amount of serotonin that’s naturally dribbling out doesn’t get destroyed so quickly. Its levels remain steady, or even rise. We feel better.

  The Scottish philosopher David Hume used to wonder what it would be like to be the manager of a playhouse, standing backstage and watching all the different characters racing about. By those characters, he meant the different aspects of his personality. He lived around the time of the American Revolution, when Volta, who started off our story, was still a young man. So Hume had no idea that all those characters were held inside his mind as patterns of electricity shooting along the long cables of his neurons, or as electrically charged molecules floating across his synapses. But I think he would have liked the idea that in the two centuries since his life, we would create a civilization powered by electric forces, and we would learn, near the end of that period, that the machine that lets us see and understand it all—our brain—is electric at its core.

  Once again, the extremely small size of the ancient electrons we’re composed of is central to its working. Electrons are so small that the molecules they help create are still far below the size scale we can see directly. That means immense numbers can fit inside us. Our brain weighs only three pounds, but has about 100 billion active nerve cells nestled within it. This provides as many electrical signaling stations as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Signals flash through our nerves at about 100 miles an hour; they take merely a few thousandths of a second to cross the synaptic gaps and continue in the next nerve. Since the sodium pumps and neurotransmitters move faster than rocks fall or trees snap in the world outside, that’s why we can use their odd constructions to keep us intact as we dodge and stumble our way through the world.

  Electricity’s speed lets us survive, but if this were its only strength, we’d be utterly lost and without memory. For sensations, of course, are constantly pouring into us in quick succession. Great barrages of air molecules hit the taut skin of our eardrums, and when the barrage is especially intense, we experience it as a clear sound. Our nerves carry it deep into the brain, with the tiny sodium pumps boosting the signals, and bobbing neurotransmitters floating upward to carry it even further. Yet if the next barrage of sensations from outside took over those same nerve cables, the first signal would be automatically superseded, wiped out of existence by a new configuration of sodium-pump firings pouring in after it. We’d have no memory of what had just gone before.

  The ancient stability of electric charge is what saves us. For remember the auralike force fields that emerge from all the charged particles on Earth. They have existed, waiting, for billions of years. They’re very strong, and very old, and when whole systems of neurons are arranged to fire in particular patterns, those strong-pulling force fields will hold those patterns intact.

  Short-term memory flickers might disappear in just seconds or minutes, but our deeper memories, the ones that constitute our very personality—the permanent actors in David Hume’s drama—can exist, impermeable, sustained by the arrangement of electric whirling pulls within our cells, for hours and months and then decades on end. A young woman meets a wonderful man and is swept off her feet. Decades later, old and bent, with grandchildren around, she hears one of her children read aloud from his love letters. At first the words are distant, scarcely recognized. But then the sodium pumps and neurotransmitters with their glowing electricity stir into action. She looks up.

  She’s remembered.

  The universe is very old now, and the original electric charges from the Big Bang have long since dispersed. Many of the individual charges were destroyed as they traveled the galaxies, but in their place—always—new charges were created. No exception has ever been found; the sum of electric charge in the universe has never changed.

  Dawn has come over raw, molten planets, and ingeniously electric-sealed living molecules have evolved and reproduced. Assemblages of self-conscious neural cells have taken shape to become sentient brains, and electrically operating retinal cells have guided mobile beings.

  In all those lives, in all those eons, this one constant has remained. All the firestorms and cyanide apples
and telegraph messages have existed simply because of the shifting from place to place of those charges. Sometimes those electric charges have been channeled down copper wires; sometimes they’ve moved through the neurons of lovers, or students, or wild-eyed political demons; at yet another time, in the future, electric and magnetic fields from our destroyed sun will be sent barreling across the galaxy in turn, carrying unheard messages to far distant stars. We are fragile organisms, living amid these roaring, stately, powerful migrations of electrical charge.

  The dominion of electricity shapes us all.

  “I shall conclude this chapter of precepts, with advising all young electricians to be exceedingly cautious….A large shock…might affect his intellects in such a manner, as they should never be what they were before.”

  —JOSEPH PRIESTLEY, Familiar Introduction

  to the Study of Electricity, 1768

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

  JOSEPH HENRY became a friend of Abraham Lincoln and died in 1878, revered as America’s greatest scientist. He rarely spoke about Morse, but did once remark: “If I could live my life again…I might have taken out more patents.” SAMUEL MORSE nursed his vast fortune, but was dismayed when the American Civil War led to slavery’s abolition. He died in 1872 of what seems to have been a stroke, increasingly frantic that Henry might be shown to have been the telegraph’s inventor. In the mid-1990s, international authorities officially discontinued Morse Code for all military or maritime use.

  ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL retired to Canada, where he became a pioneer of research on flying vehicles and high-speed hydrofoils; he was an early proponent of women’s rights. There’s a photo of him as a very old man with a white beard, standing on a pier in Nova Scotia, watching a test run of his most advanced hydrofoil, a shiny, streamlined aluminum blur, heading toward a speed record. His wife, MABEL HUBBARD BELL, can’t be seen in the picture because she’s piloting the hydrofoil.

  THOMAS EDISON continued as an inventor, but his youthful creativity left him only a few years after his success with the lightbulb. He lost a fortune in ore-extraction ventures, and then in trying to construct a concrete boat. At one point he controlled the key patents in cinematography, but then decreed that no film longer than twenty minutes could be made, resulting in the collapse of the then-flourishing New Jersey and New York movie industry, with most directors fleeing to distant California. When he died in 1931, President Hoover asked that all lights across America be dimmed at 10 P.M. on the day of Edison’s funeral.

  The man who discovered the electron, J. J. THOMSON, never drove a car or traveled by plane in his life, yet the Cavendish Laboratory he directed became the world’s greatest center for experimental research, leading to fundamental discoveries in subatomic structure and much later to helping identify the structure of DNA. In old age he took to playing golf alone, so he could stroll over the links looking for wildflowers; he told his son that if he had his life to live over again, he would choose to be a botanist, for “so much potentiality in a tiny seed [is]…the most wonderful thing in the world.”

  The young boy who’d first scampered up the Royal Institution’s steps as a teenager, MICHAEL FARADAY, was still regularly there more than half a century later. “Next Sabbath day (the 22nd) I shall complete my 70th year. I can hardly think myself so old.” When he could no longer do research, he spent hours watching the sky from his window, especially delighted when he could see lightning.

  With the great wealth he earned from the Atlantic cable, CYRUS FIELD returned to New York for good and invested in the city’s elevated railroads. He was double-crossed by his business partners, and then his son stole nearly all of what was left. He died almost penniless. When he was very old, Field had a recurrent dream that his ships had finished laying the Atlantic cable, yet he had been left alone on the shore in Ireland. The ATLANTIC CABLE of 1866 remains on the bottom of the ocean, long since abandoned. Drifting ions in the Atlantic’s depths cause occasional faint electrical currents to eddy into existence within.

  The young swimmer and athlete WILLIAM THOMPSON ended his life as the white-bearded, wise Lord Kelvin. As a strong believer in religion, he noted that the sun couldn’t have existed long enough to allow the slow evolution that Darwin had postulated to take place—unless some energy source beyond what he or any of the other Victorians knew of was found to exist. Shortly before his death, Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity and Marie Curie’s studies with uranium ores verified his modest guess.

  HEINRICH HERTZ’S last name was adopted for the international term denoting radio frequency, and appears as the symbol “Hz” on the world’s radio dials. The little girl born to him in October 1887, JOHANNA HERTZ, had to flee Germany in the 1930s because her father had been half-Jewish. She and her younger sister spent years collecting and editing their father’s journals and letters for publication. GUGLIEMO MARCONI became a recluse, living almost entirely on his oceangoing steam yacht Elettra. He was a key financial supporter of Mussolini’s Fascist party.

  After successfully suing the postwar British government to get increased payment for his contributions to radar, ROBERT WATSON WATT left England in disgust and retired to Ontario. When he was stopped by a traffic policeman for speeding one day in the early 1950s, and it transpired that the police force used radar guns to measure automobile speeds, the event became headline news around the world, helped by Watson Watt’s enthusiastic explanations to visiting reporters. The town of SLOUGH, from which he’d escaped in 1936, survived World War II sufficiently intact to inspire successfully creative loathing in yet further generations of British citizens. When the writers of the BBC satire The Office were looking for the optimally bland town to use as a setting for their program, Slough was the natural choice.

  HUGH DOWDING was forced out of the RAF after his success in directing the Battle of Britain. In his old age, he believed that the spirits of dead Battle of Britain pilots were communicating to him through angels. COLONEL WOLFGANG MARTINI, the Nazi signal officer who told the Luftwaffe it could disregard Britain’s radar installations, became a respected NATO officer after the war. In the 1950s, at the Farnborough air show, he met Edward Fennessy, one of the British engineers responsible for the Chain Home warning system. “I asked him why they didn’t attack the radar stations,” Fennessy recalled, “and [Martini] said Well they were not operational. [I said] so how did we track the Graf Zeppelin, and he nearly shot out of his chair, You tracked us?!”

  CHARLES W. COX, inadvertent hero of the Bruneval raid, returned to Wisbech, in East Anglia, and opened a successful radio and television shop. The raid’s success ensured the continued survival of Britain’s then-experimental paratroop units, and the British Army’s Parachute Regiment has the name of Bruneval inscribed as the first battle honor on its Colours. The main French Resistance volunteer, ROGER DUMONT, whose scouring of the site made the airborne raid possible, received an exultant message from Britain immediately afterward reporting its success. The message ended up being intercepted and decoded by German officials. Dumont was identified, tortured, and murdered. An hour before his execution, he wrote his family, “All that I have done I have done as a Frenchman. I regret nothing.”

  ARTHUR HARRIS, head of RAF Bomber Command, moved to South Africa and then returned to England, where he lived to a contented old age. Kind to his grandchildren, he was a great supporter of the Boy Scout movement.

  The city of HAMBURG was rebuilt.

  A few surviving WÜRZBURG RADAR sets were taken to Britain and used in astronomical research, where they helped create one of the first radar maps of the galaxy. The chaplain who’d protested Harris’s policy at Bomber Command, JOHN COLLINS, became a critic of apartheid after the war, and went on to help found CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

  ALAN TURING’S mother wrote a privately printed biography of her son immediately after his death, but his memory soon faded from the history books, and the computer he had tried to build at Manchester was never a great commercial success. Only in
the 1970s, as his Bletchley Park work began to be declassified, was he rediscovered by biographers. Today the most honored award for achievement in computer science is called the Turing Prize. Reflecting on his life, Turing once wrote: “As I have mentioned, the isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment of other men, whose techniques he absorbs during the first twenty years of his life. He may then perhaps do a little research of his own.”

  WALTER BRATTAIN left Bell Labs to teach at the small college in Oregon where he had first been a student in 1920. He remained modest about his great achievement, though he did once suggest that rock-and-roll musicians used his transistors for more amplification than he’d intended. JOHN BARDEEN moved to the University of Illinois and earned a second Nobel Prize (for work on superconductivity), the only physicist ever to be so honored. He remained even more modest than Brattain: one long-term golfing partner at the university asked him, after years of playing together, just what was it he actually did for a living.

  After the failure of his Silicon Valley ventures, WILLIAM SHOCKLEY abandoned all science research. Shunned by his professional colleagues for his increasingly racist views—and divorced by the wife he’d deemed inferior—he began donating sperm to a foundation designed to create genetically superior white children.

  ALAN HODGKIN, the young Quaker who’d been distressed by his inability to collect squid neurons in the summer of 1939, became a leader in research into the cellular basis of vision, and crowned his career by becoming president of the Royal Society. His fellow young researcher ANDREW HUXLEY became a leader in biophysics, helping create the modern understanding of muscular contraction. At the time of this writing, he remains an active fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1938 the Jewish OTTO LOEWI was forced to leave Austria; he also was made to transfer all his Nobel Prize money to a Nazi bank. Welcomed in America, he became a U.S. citizen, and in his old age greatly enjoyed visiting the museums in his new home city of New York. He died in 1961, forty years after his great Easter Eve dream.