The brain is in a box. It only knows of the outside world through the senses. We used to think that reception was perception. The senses report to the brain and the brain gets the correct information. It’s not like that at all. What do you see in the following picture?

Young people tend to see a young woman and older people tend to see the older woman. Why? One of the tasks that consumes a lot of the brain’s resources – and one we take for granted – is figuring out how to get through the day. I mean literally.

Everything we do is enormously complicated. We have to gauge the distance to the staircase, how much power we will need in the legs, momentum, balance, etc. If you were to try to figure it out on paper it would take all day.

The brain is an extremely expensive piece of equipment. Pound for pound, it draws ten times more energy and resources than other systems. Therefore it is always looking for ways to cut costs. Our brains save a lot of time and computing power by seeking out patterns and filling them in. We have all these senses supplying the brain with way too much information, so the brain ignores a lot and makes assumptions about the rest. It’s not reality, but it works better. If it recognizes a pattern it will fill in the rest – not based on observation – which is hard – but from memory of previous experience – which is easy – but less accurate. This is how we finish someone’s sentences for them – or not. We see a young face, or an old one based on what we expect to see, not what is really there. Here is an example of how filling in a pattern can be wrong – over and over again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01LMFFpAWYM

Since we know that faces are convex – they stick out at us, in a two dimensional image we will interpret a face sticking out, whether it is or not. We make patterns in other ways. We associate personality traits with appearance and body type.

Heroes aren’t ugly,

and Villains are rarely good looking

unless you’re Kate Blanchett.

Real heroes are often not very attractive.

Perceptions can be influenced by other things.

Take a good close look at these lines. Which one on the right is the same length as the one on the left? Depends on the circumstances.  In a famous experiment, when most people in a room (who are in on the experiment) insist that it is A or B, 1/3 of the subjects will go along with the crowd. Some had doubts and bowed to peer pressure but some were actually convinced that their own perceptions were off. You can convince people to ignore the information from their own senses about something that is right in front of them. People will be swayed by a crowd. Can you imagine how easy it is to sway people if the evidence is NOT right in front of them.

For example, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes. Like her or not that is a fact. The count was done several times. But if enough people say that somebody else won the popular vote enough times from enough different media sources the true memory will be supplanted by the false memory in a lot of people, and they perpetuate the problem. This alternative fact (which in the trade we call a lie) will now become the truth for them. This is how false memories can be planted, unless you are very careful. Sadly, once false information is accepted it is hard to eradicate. Our reward system kicks in on our formed opinion, cherry-picking information that reinforces the opinion, and ignoring information counter to it. It is hard to keep an open mind.

We make associations (mental patterns) and go along with the crowd to save us mental work and time. Most of the time this works pretty well, but it is subject to error, and increasingly manipulation.

The best thing is thinking for yourself. This is why reading a speech is better than hearing it in a crowd. It’s one on one, and you can form your own opinion without peer pressure or the swagger of the speaker. Your brain has a better chance of determining “Does this make sense?”

This is hard to do when we are surrounded by so many distractions, both invited and not. Also, people have gotten out of the habit of thinking for themselves just as they have fallen out of the habit of doing things for themselves and for the same reason. It’s hard. Let’s find out just how hard.

Wherever you are, try writing your name with your non-dominant hand. The circuitry to write with the other side of the brain is already there. You can definitely get signals from any part of the brain to any other part, but the circuitry to make that particular series of moves in the correct sequence has never been used like that before on this side of the brain. The route exists but which one is it? The brain is going to try all kinds of random neural pathways to get the job done and most of them are going to be wrong. It will be tragic. It’s like finding a path through a forest that is totally overgrown, and this one is in three dimensions. Likely you will be using way too much force. Your dominant hand will keep edging up to help saying, “Oh please boss just let me do this already.” But every so often a random command will – just by chance – be the right one, and you’ll feel that it’s right. You’ll get that little eureka moment that you get whenever you’ve accomplished something difficult. Not only do you feel that victory, your brain releases a neurotransmitter that says “That’s it. That is the sequence of moves right there that made that letter,” and the neuron circuit that did that move is strengthened, the rest are not.

I have my students brush their teeth with the other hand. After three days, they are OK. After three weeks, they are just as good with one hand as the other. What has happened in the hand? Not much. What has happened in the brain? This:

Your neurons grow new branches. Synapses along the right path get more resources and get physically bigger and they stay that way, sort of like upgrading to high speed internet. Then you build on that. For a simple task like brushing your teeth the following day it will still be hard – awful really, but you will have a rough path to follow. The third day it will be almost acceptable. Writing is the same, but since it is more involved it will take more time.

Once the circuit (called an engram) is built it endures, hence the expression, “It’s like riding a bike.”

You shouldn’t be surprised at the random nature of building neural networks. That’s how nature does things. An oak releases thousands on thousands of acorns. Very few make it. The number of species that lived and died out is far greater than the number of species that made it to today. Nature experiments randomly, and things that stick survive. Neural networks that do the job also survive.

Due to our limited perspective, we see some amazing creation of nature and cannot understand how something so sophisticated – like the human eye – ever got created by random chance. It was random chance and the pressure of natural selection. There are examples of every phase of eye development; creatures with light sensitive cells on the surface, then ones in pits for more protection, then ones with a cornea for more protection. Over billions of years there are a lot of random changes but only the models that worked survived. If we could see all the all the experiments that failed it would make more sense, but they’re not around. It’s called survivor bias. We see what worked and are floored by it, not seeing all random trial and error that went into it.

Eyes are an expensive peripheral that are disgarded if you don’t use them. Fish and shrimp and reptiles that migrated into caves and stayed there for generations have lost the ability to see. They have vestigial eyes that don’t work. Some snakes have tiny vestigial legs on their skeleton. If you don’t use it. You lose it.

It’s not the neurons you have it’s what you do with them. When you challenge yourself to do something new (learn something), your brain makes new connections and reinforces old connections in different patterns. The brain resists this because it costs energy and the brain is already very expensive to run. Most of us seem to be preprogrammed to be a bit lazy. A good way to exercise the mind in a way that many people find enjoyable is reading.

When I was a kid, everybody used to read all the time. New York was the most literate city in the world, probably because we were all stuck on the trains and there was nothing else to do.

One of the strongest indicators of intelligence is how much a person reads, even if they are reading trash. You still have to use your imagination. Think of the word – images in motion. You also have to focus for more than a sound bite. Now you don’t have to do that. Images are supplied. Now everybody is on their phones passively watching, and doing nothing as their brains atrophy. Watching sports instead of playing sports, playing candy crush instead of doing the crossword, looking on social media to see what everybody else is doing, without doing anything ourselves.

Meanwhile all the science

and art

and inventing

and thinking

was done by a doer, not a watcher.

The choices you make influence whether you become more or less intelligent over time. If you challenge your body with exercise and your mind with exercise they both get stronger. It doesn’t come for free. Study, reading, sports participation, social interaction, teaching, learning a musical instrument, working on problems, helping people; all of these are activities which stimulate and challenge the mind. Watching images fly by without doing anything does not. Everybody needs downtime, including me, but it is a matter of balance. It is no accident that we now have binge watching to go along with binge eating and binge drinking. Netflix has it set up so that the next episode of whatever comes on in a few seconds. The next thing you know it’s nine hours later. You just spent a big chunk of your day watching other people do stuff while you have done – nothing.

I’d rather be in the room with the doers. They are far more interesting.

It was always thought that massage worked its miracles through increasing the circulation. The logic was that the cells would have more oxygen and nutrients and would be able to dispel wastes and carbon dioxide. In a better environment the cells could perform better at maintaining themselves and their matrix. It sounds good but it’s mostly wrong. Massage only increases circulation for a few hours at best. So why do we see increased rates of healing for days after a single massage? It all comes down to the cytoskeleton, the header image in this essay.

The cytoskeleton is an organelle of protein filaments and tubes which give the cell its structural integrity and serves as an intracellular transport network. In this gorgeous three minute short  on the inner life of a cell, the cytoskeleton is seen as a grid like structure where filaments and tubules can be made or destroyed at will by enzymes. Make sure your sound is on.

It also shows organelles moving along the cytoskeleton. Among these are mitochondria slinking off to the right a little like an inch worm. Dynamin molecules are also seen pulling a vesical behind them much as a tug would tow a barge. At the end of the short, the white blood cell reorients its cytoskeleton so that it can squeeze through the seams in the capillary wall to enter the body spaces (presumably to fight an infection.) The grid like pattern of the cytoskeleton is what we find in healthy cells. This makes for a very efficient transport network so the cell can move its resources and energy production organelles to where it needs it the most to do its job. This is a cell with maximum productivity and minimum energy cost. However, not all cells are like this. Cells in distress and cells at injury sites are often found with a chaotic cytoskeleton that looks more like a Jackson Pollock.

Just try getting any work done in there! A cell like this will have a hard time moving its organelles and materials around internally to do its job. Basically it will require more energy to do less. Since the cells regenerate themselves and their surrounding tissues this is bad news for healing. This is why a diabetic patient might get decubitus ulcers. Your skin is constantly breaking down but if the rate or regeneration matches the rate of degeneration the outer cells fall off and are replaced by inner cells with no appreciable change in appearance or integrity. But if the rate of degeneration exceeds the rate of regeneration eventually the patient gets a hole in their body. By applying gentle friction around the margins of such a lesion the skin grows faster and closes the wound. How?

The cells do not just sit in the matrix of the tissues. The fibers of the matrix link across the cell membrane to the filaments of the cytoskeleton. When you tug on any tissue of the body, the movement goes all the way down to the cellular level. Before and after micrographs of cells that have had friction applied to them show that the cells somehow use the energy of the massage to reorient their cytoskeleton into a more efficient grid-like pattern. With a more efficient infrastructure the cell can now do more with less for days to come, increasing the regenerative abilities of the body to the point where it can catch up to and overtake the degeneration until the wound is healed. The heavier strokes of a massage alter the client’s cells by the billions. The body is already self-repairing. Massage simply increases the regenerative abilities of the body from the cellular level up. Healthier cells do more for you, no matter what stage your own health is in.

For those of you who want to read more on the cellular effects of massage you can read some extremely thorough research papers on the topic here and here.

As the tissue matrix tugs on the cytoskeleton, so the cytoskeleton tugs on the structures within the nucleus, including the chromosomes.  It is possible that massage alters genetic expression itself, but at this time I have not found anything in the literature. If anyone has, please let me know.

We appear to be the same from day to day and month to month, but that is an illusion. Every second you are losing two million red blood cells. Every hour forty thousand skin cells fall off of you. Half the dust in your apartment is yourself. However, you are also replacing those cells, and billions of others. For every cell you lose, a new one takes its place. So every day you do pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. Different parts of your body replace at different rates. Your skin is completely replaced every month; your skeleton about every two years. The body is a marvelously self-repairing and self-regenerating machine. All of this takes energy and resources. Before the age of about forty you have resources to spare and the regeneration can keep ahead of the degeneration. The reliable and unchanging nature of the body gives one the feeling of immortality during this period. Eventually though the ability to regenerate falls behind the wear and tear, and that’s how we age.

What to do? One strategy is to decrease the wear and tear as much as possible by doing what everybody knows you are supposed to do and about one in four actually does – avoid junk food, soft drinks, chain restaurants, smoking and drinking too much. Do exercise regularly and get out into nature. It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t require a Dr. Oz diet. It does require moderation and persistence, which I guess only one out of four people have. All of these things will slow down the degeneration of the body as much as possible.

But what about the regenerative side of the equation? Is there anything you can do to increase your regenerative capabilities? Yes you can. Getting eight hours of sleep a day is a good start. Most of the rebuilding we do happens in sleep. Another useful thing is to reduce stress. When a person is stressed out much of our resources that should be going into regeneration go into being stressed out instead. Stress and regeneration compete for body resources.

One of the biggest problems with stress is its interaction with the immune system. The immune system is very expensive to run too. It defends us from infections and orchestrates the inflammatory process whenever we are injured. When a person is stressed out on a regular basis the immune system gets cheated of resources and starts making immature white blood cells. These immature WBC’s end up causing excessive inflammation and interfere with the body’s ability to regenerate itself. Diabetes, arteriosclerosis, stroke and heart attack have all been linked to too much inflammation from an overworked underpaid immune system.

Massage to the rescue. The two main hormones that mediate inflammation are epinephrine (adrenalin) and cortisol. Many, many studies have shown that massage decreases the amount of these circulating stress hormones by 50%. It also lowers blood pressure and the heart rate. It stimulates the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system that calms us down and should be running the body most of the time. These effects of massage are not permanent, but it is definitely a step toward reducing stress and putting more resources toward rebuilding the body then breaking it down. Massage on a regular basis helps the body to maintain itself.

Does regular massage increase the life span? Probably, but it would be difficult to prove. There is a large body of evidence that stress reduces the lifespan by exacerbating inflammation and making all those diseases mentioned earlier worse. That is well established. But stress also does something much more sinister – it damages the telomeres in your cells. The way you regenerate yourself is by mitosis – body cells divide to replace cells that are lost from wear and tear. So why don’t we live forever? The cells accumulate genetic damage over the years to the point where they can no longer divide. Your ability to replace lost cells is diminished and you eventually run out of cells. That’s how you get old. That’s how you die. Aren’t you glad you chose to read this essay?

One of the important parts of a chromosome is the telomere at the tip. It is responsible for orderly cell division. The telomeres get frayed at the edges and eventually don’t work anymore. While that doesn’t kill the cell the cell can’t divide anymore so other cells have to pick up the slack, wearing them out faster. Stress is known to cause degradation of the telomeres. It accelerates the aging process! However, there is an enzyme called telomerase that can repair the telomeres and give new life to an ailing cell. So the formula would be get regular massage – rebuild your telomeres – your cells divide for longer and you live longer and healthier.

Designing a research project to prove this would be difficult. You could take 1000 stressed out people and give 500 of them massages once a week for life and follow them throughout life and see who dies first. That would be an expensive study but if there are any researchers out there reading this I volunteer to be a subject getting a massage once a week – for the advancement of science of course. A faster way to go would be to use rats. They don’t live as long and you could control things more easily. Take 1000 healthy rats of the same age and stress them all out evenly, say force them to watch three hours of Fox “News” every day. Then measure their stress hormones to see if Fox is doing its job. Half of these rats also get massage a few times a week, so you would need “rat massagers” (I’m sure there is a workshop on this somewhere). Then you could follow their stress hormones. Measuring the effects on the telomeres directly would be difficult to do but you could measure it indirectly by their lifespan. I would wager the massaged rats would live longer and that would prove the theory.

Now you may say that the rats might not be stressed out by Fox. Maybe some rats are jerks and they’d actually like it. That is certainly true for adults. Some people watch it on purpose. In that case we could administer mild shocks to supply the stress.

Joking aside, rich people live longer than poor people, partly because they can afford better health care, but partially because they can afford to take better care of themselves. For example, they can afford massage once a week. If you are one of my massage students reading this, you know plenty of therapists to trade with. Would you like to live longer and healthier? If the answer is yes, set up a trade.

Another major way that massage changes the body is to alter the cellular structure. That’s in the next post.

Why do we need bones anyway? The octopus does just fine without a skeleton. In fact a skeleton would cramp its style. You don’t start with a bony skeleton. While you were floating in your mom’s womb you had a soft skeleton of cartilage, just like the fish from which we evolved. So what happened? The salt water fish started to exploit a new environment – fresh water. They swam up the rivers since fish gotta’ swim, as the old saw says, and there they encountered a problem. There was not enough calcium in the water, and whether you are a fish or a frog or a person you need calcium to live. Without it you can’t do nerve impulse transmission or muscle contraction or blood clotting. Long story short without calcium you would be dead before you hit the floor. Seawater has plenty of calcium. In the ocean you easily absorb it through the food and even from breathing through the gills so it’s never a problem. Certainly not for a pufferfish.

But in freshwater you can’t rely on a constant source. If you want to make it as a freshwater fish you’ve got to have some reliable way to store calcium for times when you can’t get any – a calcium bank as it were. So some fish adapted by storing calcium in their skeleton. They also came up with calcitonin and parathyroid hormone which keep the blood calcium levels balanced by making calcium deposits or withdrawals from the bone calcium bank. To this day, purely salt water fish like sharks have a cartilage skeleton, and freshwater fish like salmon and trout have a bony skeleton like us.

For more on this picture see “The most beautiful science book ever.” 

Another quality of a bony skeleton is rigidity. You can resist gravity. One fine day a fish hauled itself on land, and that gave rise to the amphibians, then the reptiles, then the mammals. It is ironic that in fixing a problem so they could survive in fresh water, the fish came up with a solution that allowed them to leave the water completely. In a way, we are all fish out of water. But that’s the way evolution works. There is a challenge. You find a solution or you die out. Often that solution opens up whole new possibilities that take life in a completely different direction. Dinosaurs invented feathers for insulation, and we still use feathers for that today. But feathers also allowed for flight, which gave its owners the edge they needed to survive the great extinction that knocked the other dinosaurs out. The only living dinosaurs you see today are in the sky.

There is a disadvantage to bones reinforced with stones. Calcium is heavy and it costs a lot of energy to move that bony skeleton around. If the bones were solid mineral they would be a lot stronger, and three times heavier than they are. Imagine dragging that across the planet’s surface every day. Therefore the body wants the skeleton to be strong, but only as strong as you need it to be. There are teams of osteoblasts (which increase the bone matrix) and osteoclasts (which break down the bone matrix) constantly altering the structure of bones to make them only as strong (and heavy) as is absolutely necessary. How do they know what is strong enough? Electrical fields. The bones are piezoelectric, meaning when a force it applied to them (like supporting your body) they generate electrical fields. That stimulates the osteoblasts and osteoclasts to strengthen or lighten the bones to match the forces they are generally exposed to and trim away excess mass. In the following pictures you can see the lines of force that run through a bone by the lines of reinforcement in the matrix. Those little beams of bone (called trabeculae) are not laid down randomly, they are built to resist that force. In this picture of the interior of the head of a femur I’ve drawn in lines tracing where the main force is directed. The weight comes off the pelvis and is directed to the shaft of the femur much like the weight of a cathedral roof is distributed to the walls. The bones even use little gothic arches, visable in the shaft toward the bottom of the picture. The patella, on the lower right shows no such organization becasue forces on the patella are evenly spread around.

Xrays reveal the same internal structure for the femur as it takes the weight off the pelvis.

In this picture of the calcaneus (heel bone), the lower left is almost solid bone material because that is where the heel strikes the ground. The shock is then transmitted up and to the right, indicated by the arrows. Another arrow traces lines of force from the lower right where the calcaneus attaches to the plantar fascia, supporting the arches of the foot. This line sweeps up in a big curve much like the cables on a suspension bridge. The arches are suspended by tension in the bones and fascia. The right central part of the bone is almost hollow as there is no need for strenght in an area that gets little force.

If you work out you put more force on the bones and muscles and they get heavier and stronger. Less force, less strength. On the space station there is almost no gravity and the bones suffer from severe osteoporosis.

By the time the astronauts come down they have almost no bones left and they have to be carried off the capsule. Once under the pull of gravity the bones rebuild (mostly.) Your whole skeleton – every cell, every fiber, every grain of mineral – is replaced over the course of about two years.

Bones will adapt to whatever you are doing. If you exercise they get stronger, if not they weaken. An added bonus to regular exercise is that when osteoblasts are stimulated they release hormones that create proteins that aid the hippocampus – the main engine of memory. This may be why exercise has long been linked to improving memory.

Jogging jogs your memory.

This is the famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River to launch a sneak attack against the British in New Jersey. Although a great morale booster, it wasn’t an important battle. Yorktown, four years later, was the battle that ended the war and created America. It went like this. Britain ruled the sea, and she was able to use that advantage to move her armies around in America. One of these armies had been having a successful time ravaging the South, but it was time to move on, so the army assembled at Yorktown, Virginia to get picked up by His Majesty’s Navy. George Washington heard about this (on fb?) and hatched a plan. He’d march a French Army (which they’d loaned us) and the whole Continental Army from West Point to Yorktown (not easy). Meanwhile the French fleet would blockade Yorktown so the British could not escape by sea (very not easy.) He’d surround them and force them to surrender. There were several problems with this plan. The first was logistics. In the days before texting it would take weeks – sometimes months – for a message to get from the soon-to-be US to France which was where the French fleet and the French Army were getting their orders.

Imagine making a plan with the knowledge that it would be two months at least before your partners gave a yay or nay on it. From the French point of view, they would have to commit their fleet and Army for months and get orders out to them. The French fleet was in the Caribbean guarding her possessions there. While that fleet was away helping us, it was possible the British would show up and take over the French possessions. That kind of thing happened all the time. While they did serve their own purposes by sticking it to the British, they did so at considerable risk and expense. A large part of the cause of the French Revolution was France never recovered from the expense of helping us out. So you really have to hand it to the nascent American government and the French to pull this whole thing off at all.  Moving all those ships and men across such vast expanses over such long timeframes with such slow communications was really nothing short of a miracle. The other problem was naval battles are not something the British tended to lose, and that’s where cooties come in. The commander of the British fleet on the North American station (with the amazing name of Mariot Arbuthnot) got sick and was recalled to Britain. His replacement was new on the job just when the French fleet showed up to blockade the British in the Chesapeake Bay. The two fleets slugged it out and the French Navy won, allowing George’s plan to succeed and America to be born. If the cooties had not intervened on Admiral Sir Mariot Arbuthnot, we might very well still be part of the British Empire. Between our wall and their Brexit, it’s hard to tell the difference.

All children are natural scientists and artists.  They want to explore.  They find out why things are the way they are, why things work the way they do.  Every child goes through this why stage.  I remember a glass of water cutting the sunlight into a rainbow across the kitchen table.  I stared at it.  My father explained to me that the light we see contains all those colors, but they get hidden when they blend.  I looked out into the garden with a sense of wonder, realizing that there was a whole hidden dimension out there, and now I knew about it.  It is this sense of awe in penetrating nature’s mysteries that is explored in “The Age of Wonder” by Richard Holmes.

He follows a two-hundred-year thread of reasoning, hard work and discovery that led us out of a thousand years darkness and superstition and into the amazing and terrifying world we see today. It was a fun time to study science.  We were still dealing with basics, and the basics were accessible to a curious person who worked really hard. Physicians, clergymen, naturalists and artists could unlock a deeper nature then the one we see before us.  A diligent scholar could master all the scientific fields together if he so desired. Scientists and artists are very much the same.  They are both careful observers of the world around them.  They think for themselves.  The scientist will try to figure out how the world works, and the artist will reflect that world into some new reality that will be beautiful or useful or interesting or if you are lucky, all three.  The musician /scientist who changed our view of the entire universe was William Hershel who moved to England from Germany in 1766, followed by his sister Caroline a few years later.

England was the happening place back then and if you wanted to make something of yourself, that’s where you went.  One of the things that astounds is how hard they both worked. Caroline rose at six, did “household accounts, shopping, laundry, three-hourly singing lessons, instruction in English and arithmetic, music copying, formal practice on the harpsichord, and reading out loud from English novels. By ‘way of relaxation’ she and William talked of nothing but Astronomy.” She became a successful singer, appearing as a principle solo singer in Handel’s Messiah.  He made a living composing music, putting on musical performances and tutoring musicians.  In his spare time (hard to believe they had any) he was an amateur astronomer.  Amateur has the same root as amorous, you do it because you love it.  That childlike curiosity never went away for William Hershel.  Astronomy is limited to how much you can see, and that is limited to the size of your telescope.  Owls have such big eyes because they have the same problem as astronomers, they need to see in the dark.  The telescopes of the time were limited to the size of a reflecting mirror that you could grind, about four inches.  Hershel wanted bigger eyes so with Caroline’s help he started grinding his own mirrors.   It was arduous, dangerous work, done in the cellar. Polishing the mirrors could not be stopped once begun or the mirror would be ruined. During one marathon session, he went for sixteen hours straight with Caroline feeding him as he worked.  They persevered and were rewarded. With his new telescope, he could see father out into the heavens than anyone else. He reported his findings to the Royal Society and they didn’t believe that an amateur could do that much.  But the President of the society, Sir Joseph Banks, paid him a visit just to be sure.

Sir Joseph Banks was also consumed by curiosity. He was born rich and could have lived a life of ease. Instead he wrangled a position on HM Bark Endeavor bound for Tahiti under the command of Captain Cook.  This was a wildly dangerous thing to do. A lot of those ships never came back.  The Endeavor lost half her crew, mostly to disease. While Cook surveyed Tahiti, Banks did the first field anthropology ever, studying the indigenous peoples, all before the age of 30.

This was the man who rode out to see Hershel, only to find him out on the street in front of his house with the telescope.  Banks knew enough about telescopes to be amazed when he looked through Hershel’s. The two men talked about the stars all night. At this point the story takes on an almost fairy tale quality.  Since Britain was a naval power, celestial navigation was of the greatest importance.  Whole fleets with thousands of men had been lost over the years due to navigational errors.  Better telescopes meant better star charts meant better navigation.  Sir Joseph went to King George and basically told him they had to find a way to keep Hershel in England.  George pulled a new job out of the air – Royal Telescope Maker.  Now Hershel didn’t have to struggle along, tutoring music students.  From then on, he poured his prodigious energy into making bigger and bigger telescopes until he made one forty feet long.

It was so big, aiming it was a problem.  Better to leave it and let the earth’s motion point it at a slice of the sky.  Every day it would point to a slightly different slice.  But how to keep it all straight?  He took the latitude and longitude of the earth and projected it into the sky.  This declination and right ascension is the same system we use today.  He couldn’t watch through the telescope and write down the observations and coordinates at the same time.  You need light to write and light will weaken your night vision.  Caroline to the rescue.

Caroline was a first-class mathematician.  Caroline and William formed the first astronomical team in history, with him making the observations and her writing it all down and figuring out the exact location, which turned out to be critical. They mapped the sky, night after night, month after month, year after year until they had compiled a star atlas of unprecedented accuracy.  Over the march of years, they discovered that positions of the stars were off by just a little bit from their original survey. They never would have noticed except for the care of the first set of observations.  Not only had the stars moved, they moved in different directions and at different speeds.  Hershel started to refer to the stars having “proper motion.”  The apparent motion is slight because of the truly astronomical distances involved.

It didn’t matter.  They weren’t supposed to be moving at all.  For all of time people thought of the fixed stars as something eternal, because in the short span of our lives no one would notice.  If you could live a few million years, all the constellations would fall out of joint, and new ones would appear.  Hershel wrote to the Royal Society (who were believing him now) that since the stars moved, it implied that the universe wasn’t constant, it was changing.  That implies a beginning.  That implies an end.

As William’s official assistant, Caroline was the first woman in England to have a salaried, government job. Among her discoveries were a companion galaxy to Andromeda and at least eight comets. After William died she continued their work, compiling a catalog of two and a half thousand nebulae and star clusters. This eventually grew into the New General Catalog. In 1828 she was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal for her work.

While the Hershel’s were looking up, others were looking down.

This is one of the first aerial maps. Through the clouds, you see a winding river (in red) and a village on the lower left. The adventurous and extremely dangerous first flights were under way. Everywhere in science, new inventions were allowing us to see further, better and with new perspectives. Even so, our imagination went further. Mary Shelley invented the science fiction and the Gothic horror genres at the same time with her masterpiece, “Frankenstein.” With preternatural prescience, she foresaw the dark side of man’s ambition and resourcefulness, creating things that he cannot control and all the destruction that follows. Would that she had been wrong.

These stories, and many more, fill the pages of “The Age of Wonder. ” Compliment it with “Fossils”, or maybe just lie down and look up at the changing universe.

In broadening our understanding of reality, science will often show us things that we don’t like.  Many people found the idea of a steady, eternal, unchanging universe to be comforting.  After all, to us that is what is seems to be with our limited perspective.  So, there was resistance to the idea that the universe is changing just like there was resistance to the earth being round.  Now there is resistance to evolution and global warming.  People don’t like change, and they don’t like to change their minds. It would be helpful if we could reconnect with a little humor about it instead of hurling invective.  There are over three hundred thousand species of beetles on earth.  It is a very successful design. In response to theological question, “What has your study of creation told you about the Creator?”, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane responded, “The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

“Parochiality and narrowmindedness are, alas, as much a part of normal human response as generosity and expansiveness. People wall themselves within the comforts of their own profession and hurl derisive formulae at folk in other fields. Academicians brand athletes as dull lumps of brawn, succeeding only by lucky gifts of inherited muscle; athletes, in turn, dismiss academicians as effete and inept in all but their artificial world. In fact, excellence is both precious and similar in mental construction across all fields. True, both gifts of birth and a little luck never hurt, but the only common denominator is obsessive focus, mental discipline, hard work.”

So Stephen Jay Gould opens the elegant introduction to “Fossils”, by Niles Eldredge, photography by Murray Alcosser. Since science involves a close examination of nature, it helps if the nature attracts the eye.  This is the most beautiful collection of photographed fossils that I have ever seen.  Virtually every page is a stunner. But this is far more than a gorgeous coffee table book.  It is also an exposition of the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium.

Charles Darwin visualized evolutionary change as a stately, gradual process whereby variation of offspring would occasionally confer an advantage over other creatures. These new and improved creatures would be fruitful and multiply, edging out their neighbors. Variation is obvious. We see it in our children, otherwise they would be exactly like us. Most variation is of no advantage so the offspring will be no more likely to succeed than any other so you get the status quo.  Useful variations will guide evolution. That’s how a fish eventually becomes a racehorse.  Q.E.D.

Not quite. Evolution turns out to be as lazy as we are. Things don’t evolve unless they must. The humble horseshoe crab hasn’t seen the need to evolve much for three hundred million years.  That’s a long time hanging out at the beach.  They go back before the dinosaurs, and they are still here.

Bacteria on the other hand are evolving so fast that we may be in trouble. Why the difference? If the environment changes creatures must adapt or go extinct. We are driving the adaptation of bacteria by creating a hostile environment.

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge pointed out that the fossil record shows periods of stability in whole ecosystems that can run for many millions of years, punctuated by periods of great change where many lines go extinct and others change quickly, say in one hundred thousand years.  It is often the dominant species, comfortably settled in the center of their ecosystems that die out when change comes. They are so well adapted to one environment that when it changes abruptly, they can’t make it. It is the life forms living a hardscrabble existence on the edges of an ecosystem that are more nimble and can adapt faster that survive. The dinosaurs are a large example. They dominated the earth for several hundred million years and were mostly wiped out by a planetary cataclysm. A comet crashed into the Yucatan peninsula plunging the earth into darkness and freezing temperatures that would have lasted for years. Eighty percent of the species around perished. Mammals that up to then were no more impressive then rats filled the void. Were it not for that comet, the dinosaurs would most likely still be around and we never would have gotten our moment in the sun. Mammals are dominant – for now.

“Fossils” is one of those great works that both educates and delights. Trilobites almost jump out of the pages at you. Compliment it with “The Age of Wonder.” 

The only thing it is missing is galaxies. My opening picture in this essay compares a shell to a spiral galaxy. That is not in the book. I included it here because the Golden Ratio that governs the curvature of shells also governs the curvature of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way. When nature finds a solution that serves, she uses it over and over again. Scale is not a limitation.