The Disappearing Spoon Part 6

The story, two thousand words long, starts shortly after a hypothetical crash of steel shares around 1904. The narrator, sick of scrabbling for money, decides to sell his immortal soul to Mephistopheles. To hammer out a deal, he and Satan meet in a dark, unnamed lair at midnight, drink some hot toddies, and discuss the depressingly modest going price for souls. Pretty soon, though, they're sidetracked by an unusual feature of Satan's anatomy-he's made entirely of radium.

Six years before Twain's story, Marie Curie had astounded the scientific world with her tales of radioactive elements. It was genuine news, but Twain must have been pretty plugged into the scientific scene to incorporate all the cheeky details he did into "Sold to Satan." Radium's radioactivity charges the air around it electrically, so Satan glows a luminescent green, to the narrator's delight. Also, like a warm-blooded rock, radium is always hotter than its surroundings, because its radioactivity heats it up. This heat grows exponentially as more radium is concentrated together. As a result, Twain's six-foot-one, "nine-hundred-odd"-pound Satan is hot enough to light a cigar with his fingertip. (He quickly puts it out, though, to "save it for Voltaire." Hearing this, the narrator makes Satan take fifty more cigars for, among others, Goethe.) Later, the story goes into some detail about refining radioactive metals. It's far from Twain's sharpest material. But like the best science fiction, it's prescient. To avoid incinerating people he comes across, radium-bodied Satan wears a protective coat of polonium, another new element discovered by Curie. Scientifically, this is rubbish: a "transparent" sh.e.l.l of polonium, "thin as a gelatine film," could never withhold the heat of a critical ma.s.s of radium. But we'll forgive Twain, since the polonium serves a larger dramatic purpose. It gives Satan a reason to threaten, "If I should strip off my skin the world would vanish away in a flash of flame and a puff of smoke, and the remnants of the extinguished moon would sift down through s.p.a.ce a mere snow-shower of gray ashes!"

Twain being Twain, he could not let the Devil end the story in a position of power. The trapped radium heat is so intense that Satan soon admits, with unintended irony, "I burn. I suffer within." But jokes aside, Twain was already trembling about the awesome power of nuclear energy in 1904. Had he lived forty years more, he surely would have shaken his head-dispirited, yet hardly surprised-to see people l.u.s.ting after nuclear missiles instead of plentiful atomic energy. Unlike Goethe's forays into hard science, Twain's stories about science can still be read today with instruction.

Twain surveyed the lower realm of the periodic table with despair. But of all the tales of artists and elements, none seems sadder or harsher, or more Faustian, than poet Robert Lowell's adventures with one of the primordial elements, lithium, at the very top of the table.

When they were all youngsters at a prep school in the early 1930s, friends nicknamed Lowell "Cal" after Caliban, the howling man-beast in The Tempest The Tempest. Others swear Caligula inspired the epithet. Either way, the name fit the confessional poet, who exemplified the mad artist-someone like van Gogh or Poe, whose genius stems from parts of the psyche most of us cannot access, much less harness for artistic purposes. Unfortunately, Lowell couldn't rein in his madness outside the margins of his poems, and his lunacy bled all over his real life. He once turned up sputtering on a friend's doorstep, convinced that he (Lowell) was the Virgin Mary. Another time, in Bloomington, Indiana, he convinced himself he could stop cars on the highway by spreading his arms wide like Jesus. In cla.s.ses he taught, he wasted hours babbling and rewriting the poems of nonplussed students in the obsolete style of Tennyson or Milton. When nineteen, he abandoned a fiancee and drove from Boston to the country house of a Tennessee poet who Lowell hoped would mentor him. He just a.s.sumed that the man would put him up. The poet graciously explained there was no room at the inn, so to speak, and joked that Lowell would have to camp on the lawn if he wanted to stay. Lowell nodded and left-for Sears. He bought a pup tent and returned to rough it on the gra.s.s.

The literary public delighted in these stories, and during the 1950s and 1960s, Lowell was the preeminent poet in the United States, winning prizes and selling thousands of books. Everyone a.s.sumed Lowell's aberrations were the touch of some madly divine muse. Pharmaceutical psychology, a field coming into its own in that era, had a different explanation: Cal had a chemical imbalance, which rendered him manic-depressive. The public saw only the wild man, not his incapacitating black moods-moods that left him broken spiritually and increasingly broke financially. Luckily, the first real mood stabilizer, lithium, came to the United States in 1967. A desperate Lowell-who'd just been incarcerated in a psychiatric ward, where doctors had confiscated his belt and shoelaces-agreed to be medicated.

Curiously, for all its potency as a drug, lithium has no normal biological role. It's not an essential mineral like iron or magnesium, or even a trace nutrient like chromium. In fact, pure lithium is a scarily reactive metal. People's linty pockets have reportedly caught fire when keys or coins short-circuited portable lithium batteries as they jangled down the street. Nor does lithium (which in its drug form is a salt, lithium carbonate) work the way we expect drugs to. We take antibiotics at the height of an infection to knock the microbes out. But taking lithium at the height of mania or in the canyon of depression won't fix the episode. Lithium only prevents the next episode from starting. And although scientists knew about lithium's efficacy back in 1886, until recently they had no clue why it worked.

Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body's circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They're on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run. When they're feeling good, their brains flood them with suns.h.i.+ny neurostimulants, and a lack of suns.h.i.+ne does not turn the spigot off. Some call it "pathological enthusiasm": such people barely need sleep, and their self-confidence swells to the point that a Bostonian male in the twentieth century can believe that the Holy Spirit has chosen him as the vessel of Jesus Christ. Eventually, those surges deplete the brain, and people crash. Severe manic-depressives, when the "black dogs" have them, sometimes take to bed for weeks.

Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body's inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people's DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls-at which point the brain should "notice" the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don't realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it's only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being suns.h.i.+ne in a pill, then, lithium acts as "anti-sunlight." Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours-preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.

Lowell responded immediately to lithium. His personal life grew steadier (though by no means steady), and at one point he p.r.o.nounced himself cured. From his new, stable perspective, he could see how his old life-full of fights, drinking binges, and divorces-had laid waste to so many people. For all his frank and moving lines within his poems, nothing Lowell ever wrote was as poignant-and nothing about the fragile chemistry of human beings was as moving-as a simple plaint to his publisher, Robert Giroux, after doctors started him on lithium.

"It's terrible, Bob," he said, "to think that all I've suffered, and all the suffering I've caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain."

Lowell felt that his life improved on lithium, yet the effect of lithium on his art was debatable. As Lowell did, most artists feel that trading a manic-depressive cycle for a muted, prosaic circadian rhythm allows them to work productively without being distracted by mania or sedated by depression. There's always been debate, though, about whether their work suffers after their "cure," after they've lost access to that part of the psyche most of us never glimpse.

Many artists report feeling flatlined or tranquilized on lithium. One of Lowell's friends reported that he looked like something transported around in a zoo. And his poetry undoubtedly changed after 1967, growing rougher and purposely less polished. He also, instead of inventing lines from his wild mind, began poaching lines from private letters, which outraged the people he quoted. Such work won Lowell a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, but it hasn't weathered well. Especially compared with his vivacious younger work, it's barely read today. For all that the periodic table inspired Goethe, Twain, and others, Lowell's lithium may be a case where it provided health but subdued art, and made a mad genius merely human.

An Element of Madness

Robert Lowell typified the mad artist, but there's another psychological deviant in our collective cultural psyche: the mad scientist. The mad scientists of the periodic table tended to have fewer public outbursts than mad artists, and they generally didn't lead notorious private lives either. Their psychological lapses were subtler, and their mistakes were typical of a peculiar kind of madness known as pathological science.* And what's fascinating is how that pathology, that madness, could exist side by side in the same mind with brilliance. And what's fascinating is how that pathology, that madness, could exist side by side in the same mind with brilliance.

Unlike virtually every other scientist in this book, William Crookes, born to a tailor in London in 1832, never worked at a university. The first of sixteen children, he later fathered ten of his own, and he supported his enormous family by writing a popular book on diamonds and editing a b.u.mptious, gossipy journal of science goings-on, Chemical News Chemical News. Nevertheless, Crookes-a bespectacled man with a beard and pointy mustache-did enough world-cla.s.s science on elements such as selenium and thallium to get elected to England's premier scientific club, the Royal Society, at just thirty-one years of age. A decade later, he was almost kicked out.

His fall began in 1867, when his brother Philip died at sea.* Despite, or perhaps because of, their abundance of family, William and the other Crookeses nearly went mad with grief. At the time, spiritualism, a movement imported from America, had overrun the houses of aristocrats and shopkeeps alike all over England. Even someone like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented the hyperrationalist detective Sherlock Holmes, could find room in his capacious mind to accept spiritualism as genuine. Products of their time, the Crookes clan-mostly tradesmen with neither scientific training nor instinct-began attending seances en ma.s.se to comfort themselves and to chat with poor departed Philip. Despite, or perhaps because of, their abundance of family, William and the other Crookeses nearly went mad with grief. At the time, spiritualism, a movement imported from America, had overrun the houses of aristocrats and shopkeeps alike all over England. Even someone like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented the hyperrationalist detective Sherlock Holmes, could find room in his capacious mind to accept spiritualism as genuine. Products of their time, the Crookes clan-mostly tradesmen with neither scientific training nor instinct-began attending seances en ma.s.se to comfort themselves and to chat with poor departed Philip.

It's not clear why William tagged along one night. Perhaps solidarity. Perhaps because another brother was stage manager for the medium. Perhaps to dissuade everyone from going back-privately, in his diary, he had dismissed such spiritual "contact" as fraudulent pageantry. Yet watching the medium play the accordion with no hands and write "automatic messages," Ouija boardstyle, with a stylus and plank impressed the skeptic despite himself. His defenses were lowered, and when the medium began relaying babbled messages from Philip in the great beyond, William began bawling. He went to more sessions, and even invented a scientific device to monitor the susurrus of wandering spirits in the candlelit rooms. It's not clear if his new radiometer-an evacuated gla.s.s bulb with a very sensitive weather vane inside-actually detected Philip. (We can hazard a guess.) But William couldn't dismiss what he felt holding hands with family members at the meetings. His attendance became regular.

Such sympathies put Crookes in the minority among his fellow rationalists in the Royal Society-probably a minority of one. Mindful of this, Crookes concealed his biases in 1870 when he announced that he had drawn up a scientific study of spiritualism, and most fellows of the Royal Society were delighted, a.s.suming he would demolish the whole scene in his rowdy journal. Things did not turn out so neatly. After three years of chanting and summoning, Crookes published "Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena Called Spiritual" in 1874 in a journal he owned called the Quarterly Journal of Science Quarterly Journal of Science. He compared himself to a traveler in exotic lands, a Marco Polo of the paranormal. But instead of attacking all the spiritualist mischief-"levitation," "phantoms," "percussive sounds," "luminous appearances," "the rising of tables and chairs off the ground"-he concluded that neither charlatanism nor ma.s.s hypnosis could explain (or at least not wholly wholly explain) all he'd seen. It wasn't an uncritical endors.e.m.e.nt, but Crookes did claim to find a "residual" of legitimate supernatural forces. explain) all he'd seen. It wasn't an uncritical endors.e.m.e.nt, but Crookes did claim to find a "residual" of legitimate supernatural forces.*

Coming from Crookes, even such tepid support shocked everyone in England, including spiritualists. Recovering quickly, they began shouting hosannas about Crookes from the mountaintops. Even today, a few ghost hunters haul out his creaky paper as "proof" that smart people will come around to spiritualism if they approach it with an open mind. Crookes's fellows in the Royal Society were equally surprised but rather more aghast. They argued that Crookes had been blinded by parlor tricks, swept up in crowd dynamics, and charmed by charismatic gurus. They also tore into the dubious scientific veneer he'd given his report. Crookes had recorded irrelevant "data" about the temperature and barometric pressure inside the medium's lair, for instance, as if immaterial beings wouldn't poke their heads out in inclement weather. More uncomfortably, former friends attacked Crookes's character, calling him a rube, a s.h.i.+ll. If spiritualists sometimes cite Crookes today, a few scientists still cannot forgive him for enabling 135 years of New Age-y BS. They even cite his work on the elements as proof he went crazy.

When young, you see, Crookes had pioneered the study of selenium. Though an essential trace nutrient in all animals (in humans, the depletion of selenium in the bloodstream of AIDS patients is a fatally accurate harbinger of death), selenium is toxic in large doses. Ranchers know this well. If not watched carefully, their cattle will root out a prairie plant of the pea family known as locoweed, some varieties of which sponge up selenium from the soil. Cattle that munch on locoweed begin to stagger and stumble and develop fevers, sores, and anorexia-a suite of symptoms known as the blind staggers. Yet they enjoy the high. In the surest sign that selenium actually makes them go mad, cattle grow addicted to locoweed despite its awful side effects and eat it to the exclusion of anything else. It's animal meth. Some imaginative historians even pin Custer's loss at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on his horses' taking hits of loco before the battle. Overall, it's fitting that "selenium" comes from selene, selene, Greek for "moon," which has links-through Greek for "moon," which has links-through luna, luna, Latin for "moon"-to "lunatic" and "lunacy." Latin for "moon"-to "lunatic" and "lunacy."

Given that toxicity, it might make sense to retroactively blame Crookes's delusions on selenium. Some inconvenient facts undermine that diagnosis, though. Selenium often attacks within a week; Crookes got goofy in early middle age, long after he'd stopped working with selenium. Plus, after decades of ranchers' cursing out element thirty-four every time a cow stumbled, many biochemists now think that other chemicals in locoweed contribute just as much to the craziness and intoxication. Finally, in a clinching clue, Crookes's beard never fell out, a cla.s.sic symptom of selenosis.

A full beard also argues against his being driven mad, as some have suggested, by another depilatory on the periodic table-the poisoner's poison, thallium. Crookes discovered thallium at age twenty-six (a finding that almost ensured his election to the Royal Society) and continued to play with it in his lab for a decade. But he apparently never inhaled enough even to lose his whiskers. Besides, would someone ravished by thallium (or selenium) retain such a sharp mind into old age? Crookes actually withdrew from spiritualist circles after 1874, rededicating himself to science, and major discoveries lay ahead. He was the first to suggest the existence of isotopes. He built vital new scientific equipment and confirmed the presence of helium in rocks, its first detection on earth. In 1897, the newly knighted Sir William dove into radioactivity, even discovering (though without realizing it) the element protactinium in 1900.

No, the best explanation for Crookes's lapse into spiritualism is psychological: ruined by grief for his brother, he succ.u.mbed, avant la lettre, to pathological science.

In explaining what pathological science is, it's best to clear up any misconceptions about that loaded word, "pathological," and explain up front what pathological science is not not. It's not fraud, since the adherents of a pathological science believe they're right-if only everyone else could see it. It's not pseudoscience, like Freudianism and Marxism, fields that poach on the imprimatur of science yet shun the rigors of the scientific method. It's also not politicized science, like Lysenkoism, where people swear allegiance to a false science because of threats or a skewed ideology. Finally, it's not general clinical madness or merely deranged belief. It's a particular madness, a meticulous and scientifically informed delusion. Pathological scientists pick out a marginal and unlikely phenomenon that appeals to them for whatever reason and bring all their scientific ac.u.men to proving its existence. But the game is rigged from the start: their science serves only the deeper emotional need to believe in something. Spiritualism per se isn't a pathological science, but it became so in Crookes's hands because of his careful "experiments" and the scientific tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs he gave the experiments.

And actually, pathological science doesn't always spring from fringe fields. It also thrives in legitimate but speculative fields, where data and evidence are scarce and hard to interpret. For example, the branch of paleontology concerned with reconstructing dinosaurs and other extinct creatures provides another great case study in pathological science.

At some level, of course, we don't know squat about extinct creatures: a whole skeleton is a rare find, and soft tissue impressions are vanis.h.i.+ngly rare. A joke among people who reconstruct paleofauna is that if elephants had gone extinct way back when, anyone who dug up a mammoth skeleton today would conjure up a giant hamster with tusks, not a woolly pachyderm with a trunk. We'd know just as little about the glories of other animals as well-stripes, waddles, lips, potbellies, belly b.u.t.tons, snouts, gizzards, four-chambered stomachs, and humps, not to mention their eyebrows, b.u.t.tocks, toenails, cheeks, tongues, and nipples. Nevertheless, by comparing the grooves and depressions on fossilized bones with modern creatures' bones, a trained eye can figure out the musculature, enervation, size, gait, dent.i.tion, and even mating habits of extinct species. Paleontologists just have to be careful about extrapolating too far.

A pathological science takes advantage of that caution. Basically, its believers use the ambiguity about evidence as as evidence-claiming that scientists don't know everything and therefore there's room for my pet theory, too. That's exactly what happened with manganese and the megalodon. evidence-claiming that scientists don't know everything and therefore there's room for my pet theory, too. That's exactly what happened with manganese and the megalodon.*

This story starts in 1873, when the research vessel HMS Challenger Challenger set out from England to explore the Pacific Ocean. In a wonderfully low-tech setup, the crew dropped overboard huge buckets tied to ropes three miles long and dredged the ocean floor. In addition to fantastical fish and other critters, they hauled up dozens upon dozens of spherical rocks shaped like fossilized potatoes and also fat, solid, mineralized ice cream cones. These hunks, mostly manganese, appeared all over the seabed in every part of the ocean, meaning there had to be untold billions of them scattered around the world. set out from England to explore the Pacific Ocean. In a wonderfully low-tech setup, the crew dropped overboard huge buckets tied to ropes three miles long and dredged the ocean floor. In addition to fantastical fish and other critters, they hauled up dozens upon dozens of spherical rocks shaped like fossilized potatoes and also fat, solid, mineralized ice cream cones. These hunks, mostly manganese, appeared all over the seabed in every part of the ocean, meaning there had to be untold billions of them scattered around the world.

That was the first surprise. The second took place when the crew cracked open the cones: the manganese had formed itself around giant shark teeth. The biggest, most pituitarily freakish shark teeth today run about two and a half inches max. The manganese-covered teeth stretched five or more inches-mouth talons capable of shattering bone like an ax. Using the same basic techniques as with dinosaur fossils, paleontologists determined (just from the teeth!) that this Jaws3, dubbed the megalodon, grew to approximately fifty feet, weighed approximately fifty tons, and could swim approximately fifty miles per hour. It could probably close its mouth of 250 teeth with a megaton force, and it fed mostly on primitive whales in shallow, tropical waters. It probably died out as its prey migrated permanently to colder, deeper waters, an environment that didn't suit its high metabolism and ravenous appet.i.te.

All fine science so far. The pathology started with the manganese.* Shark teeth litter the ocean floor because they're about the hardest biological substance known, the only part of shark carca.s.ses that survive the crush of the deep ocean (most sharks have cartilaginous skeletons). It's not clear why manganese, of all the dissolved metals in the ocean, galvanizes shark teeth, but scientists know roughly how quickly it acc.u.mulates: between one-half and one and a half millimeters per millennium. From that rate they have determined that the vast majority of recovered teeth date from at least 1.5 million years ago, meaning the megalodons probably died out around then. Shark teeth litter the ocean floor because they're about the hardest biological substance known, the only part of shark carca.s.ses that survive the crush of the deep ocean (most sharks have cartilaginous skeletons). It's not clear why manganese, of all the dissolved metals in the ocean, galvanizes shark teeth, but scientists know roughly how quickly it acc.u.mulates: between one-half and one and a half millimeters per millennium. From that rate they have determined that the vast majority of recovered teeth date from at least 1.5 million years ago, meaning the megalodons probably died out around then.

But-and here was the gap into which some people rushed-some megalodon teeth had mysteriously thin manganese plaque, about eleven thousand years' worth. Evolutionarily, that's an awfully short time. And really, what's to say scientists won't soon find one from ten thousand years ago? Or eight thousand years ago? Or later?

You can see where this thinking leads. In the 1960s, a few enthusiasts with Jura.s.sic Park Jura.s.sic Park imaginations grew convinced that rogue megalodons still lurk in the oceans. "Megalodon lives!" they cried. And like rumors about Area 51 or the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination, the legend has never quite died. The most common tale is that megalodons have evolved to become deep-sea divers and now spend their days fighting krakens in the black depths. Reminiscent of Crookes's phantoms, megalodons are imaginations grew convinced that rogue megalodons still lurk in the oceans. "Megalodon lives!" they cried. And like rumors about Area 51 or the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination, the legend has never quite died. The most common tale is that megalodons have evolved to become deep-sea divers and now spend their days fighting krakens in the black depths. Reminiscent of Crookes's phantoms, megalodons are supposed supposed to be elusive, which gives people a convenient escape when pressed on why the giant sharks are so scarce nowadays. to be elusive, which gives people a convenient escape when pressed on why the giant sharks are so scarce nowadays.

There's probably not a person alive who, deep down, doesn't hope that megalodons still haunt the seas. Unfortunately, the idea crumbles under scrutiny. Among other things, the teeth with thin layers of manganese were almost certainly torn up from old bedrock beneath the ocean floor (where they acc.u.mulated no manganese) and exposed to water only recently. They're probably much older than eleven thousand years. And although there have been eyewitness accounts of the beasts, they're all from sailors, notorious storytellers, and the megalodons in their stories vary manically in size and shape. One all-white Moby d.i.c.k shark stretched up to three hundred feet long! (Funny, though, no one thought to snap a picture.) Overall, such stories, as with Crookes's testimony about supernatural beings, depend on subjective interpretations, and without objective evidence, it's not plausible to conclude that megalodons, even a few of them, slipped through evolution's snares.

But what really makes the ongoing hunt for megalodons pathological is that doubt from the establishment only deepens people's convictions. Instead of refuting the manganese findings, they counterattack with heroic tales of rebels, rogues who proved squaresville scientists wrong in the past. They invariably bring up the coelacanth, a primitive deep-sea fish once thought to have gone extinct eighty million years ago, until it turned up in a fish market in South Africa in 1938. According to this logic, because scientists were wrong about the coelacanth, they might be wrong about the megalodon, too. And "might" is all the megalodon lovers need. For their theories about its survival aren't based on a preponderance of evidence, but on an emotional attachment: the hope, the need, for something fantastic to be true.

There's probably no better example of such emotion than in the next case study-that all-time-great pathological science, that Alamo for true believers, that seductress of futurists, that scientific hydra: cold fusion.

Pons and Fleischmann. Fleischmann and Pons. It was supposed to be the greatest scientific duo since Watson and Crick, perhaps stretching back to Marie and Pierre Curie. Instead, their fame rotted into infamy. Now the names B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann evoke only, however unfairly, thoughts of impostors, swindlers, and cheats.

The experiment that made and unmade Pons and Fleischmann was, so to speak, deceptively simple. The two chemists, headquartered at the University of Utah in 1989, placed a palladium electrode in a chamber of heavy water and turned on a current. Running a current through regular water will shock the H2O and produce hydrogen and oxygen gas. Something similar happened in the heavy water, except the hydrogen in heavy water has an extra neutron. So instead of normal hydrogen gas (H2) with two protons total, Pons and Fleischmann created molecules of hydrogen gas with two protons and two neutrons.

What made the experiment special was the combination of heavy hydrogen with palladium, a whitish metal with one flabbergasting property: it can swallow nine hundred times its own volume of hydrogen gas. That's roughly equivalent to a 250-pound man swallowing a dozen African bull elephants* and not gaining an inch on his waistline. And as the palladium electrode in the heavy water started to pack in hydrogen, Pons and Fleischmann's thermometers and other instruments spiked. The water got far warmer than it should have, than it and not gaining an inch on his waistline. And as the palladium electrode in the heavy water started to pack in hydrogen, Pons and Fleischmann's thermometers and other instruments spiked. The water got far warmer than it should have, than it could could have, given the meager energy of the incoming current. Pons reported that during one really good spike, his superheated H have, given the meager energy of the incoming current. Pons reported that during one really good spike, his superheated H2O burned a hole in a beaker, the lab bench beneath it, and the concrete floor beneath that.

Or at least they got spikes sometimes. Overall, the experiment was erratic, and the same setup and trial runs didn't always produce the same results. But rather than nail down what was happening with the palladium, the two men let their fancies convince them they had discovered cold fusion-fusion that didn't require the incredible temperatures and pressures of stars, but took place at room temperature. Because palladium could cram so much heavy hydrogen inside it, they guessed it somehow fused its protons and neutrons into helium, releasing gobs of energy in the process.

Rather imprudently, Pons and Fleischmann called a press conference to announce their results, basically implying that the world's energy problems were over, cheaply and without pollution. And somewhat like palladium itself, the media swallowed the grandiose claim. (It soon came out that another Utahan, physicist Steven Jones, had pursued similar fusion experiments. Jones fell into the background, however, since he made more modest claims.) Pons and Fleischmann became instant celebrities, and the momentum of public opinion appeared to sway even scientists. At an American Chemical Society meeting shortly after the announcement, the duo received a standing ovation.

But there's some important context here. In applauding Fleischmann and Pons, many scientists were probably really thinking about superconductors. Until 1986, superconductors were thought to be flat-out impossible above 400F. Suddenly, two German researchers-who would win the n.o.bel Prize in record time, a year later-discovered superconductors that worked above that temperature. Other teams jumped in and within a few months had discovered "high-temperature" yttrium superconductors that worked at 280F. (The record today stands at 218F.) The point is that many scientists who'd predicted the impossibility of such superconductors felt like a.s.ses. It was the physics equivalent of finding the coelacanth. And like megalodon romantics, cold-fusion lovers in 1989 could point to the recent superconductor craziness and force normally dismissive scientists to suspend judgment. Indeed, cold-fusion fanatics seemed giddy at the chance to overthrow old dogma, a delirium typical of pathological science.

Still, a few skeptics, especially at Cal Tech, seethed. Cold fusion upset these men's scientific sensibilities, and Pons and Fleischmann's arrogance upset their modesty. The two had bypa.s.sed the normal peer-review process in announcing results, and some considered them charlatans intent on enriching themselves, especially after they appealed directly to President George H. W. Bush for $25 million in immediate research funds. Pons and Fleischmann didn't help matters by refusing to answer-as if such inquiries were insulting-questions about their palladium apparatus and experimental protocol. They claimed they didn't want their ideas to be stolen, but it sure looked as if they were hiding something.

Despite withering dismissals from nearly every other scientist on earth, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed they had produced cold fusion at room temperature. Their apparatus consisted of a heavy-water bath with electrodes made of the superabsorbent element palladium. (Special Collections Department, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah) Nevertheless, increasingly doubtful scientists across the world (except in Italy, where yet another cold-fusion claim popped up) learned enough from what the two men said to rig up their own palladium and heavy-hydrogen experiments, and they began pummeling the Utah scientists with null results. A few weeks later, after perhaps the most concerted effort since Galileo to discredit, even disgrace, scientists, hundreds of chemists and physicists held what amounted to an antiPons and Fleischmann rally in Baltimore. They showed, embarra.s.singly, that the duo had overlooked experimental errors and used faulty measuring techniques. One scientist suggested that the two had let the hydrogen gas build up and that their biggest "fusion" spikes were chemical explosions, a la the Hindenburg. Hindenburg. (The supposed fusion spike that burned holes in the table and bench happened overnight, when no one was around.) Usually it takes years to root out a scientific error, or at least to resolve a controversial question, but cold fusion was cold and dead within forty days of the initial announcement. One wag who attended the conference summed up the brouhaha in biting, if unrhythmical, verse: (The supposed fusion spike that burned holes in the table and bench happened overnight, when no one was around.) Usually it takes years to root out a scientific error, or at least to resolve a controversial question, but cold fusion was cold and dead within forty days of the initial announcement. One wag who attended the conference summed up the brouhaha in biting, if unrhythmical, verse: Tens of millions of dollars at stake, Dear Brother Tens of millions of dollars at stake, Dear BrotherBecause some scientists put a thermometerAt one place and not another.

But the psychologically interesting parts of the affair were still to come. The need to believe in clean, cheap energy for the whole world proved tenacious, and people could not still their heartstrings so quickly. At this point, the science mutated into something pathological. As with investigations into the paranormal, only a guru (the medium, or Fleischmann and Pons) had the power to produce the key results, and only under contrived circ.u.mstances, never in the open. That didn't give pause to and in fact only encouraged cold-fusion enthusiasts. For their part, Pons and Fleischmann never backed down, and their followers defended the two (not to mention themselves) as important rebels, the only people who got it got it. Some critics countered with their own experiments for a while after 1989, but cold fusionists always explained away any d.a.m.ning results, sometimes with more ingenuity than they showed in their original scientific work. So the critics eventually gave up. David Goodstein, a Cal Tech physicist, summed things up in an excellent essay on cold fusion: "Because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circ.u.mstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here." It's hard to imagine a better, more concise description of pathological science.*

The most charitable explanation of what happened to Pons and Fleischmann is this. It seems unlikely they were charlatans who knew that cold fusion was bunk.u.m but wanted a quick score. It wasn't 1789, where they could have just skedaddled and scammed the rubes in the next town over. They were going to get caught. Maybe they had doubts but were blinded by ambition and wanted to see what it felt like to be brilliant in the world's eyes, even for a moment. Probably, though, these two men were just misled by a queer property of palladium. Even today, no one knows how palladium guzzles so much hydrogen. In a slight slight rehabilitation of Pons and Fleischmann's work (though not their interpretation of it), some scientists do think that something funny is going on in palladiumheavy water experiments. Strange bubbles appear in the metal, and its atoms rearrange themselves in novel ways. Perhaps even some weak nuclear forces are involved. To their credit, Pons and Fleischmann pioneered this work. It's just not what they wanted to, or will, go down in science history for. rehabilitation of Pons and Fleischmann's work (though not their interpretation of it), some scientists do think that something funny is going on in palladiumheavy water experiments. Strange bubbles appear in the metal, and its atoms rearrange themselves in novel ways. Perhaps even some weak nuclear forces are involved. To their credit, Pons and Fleischmann pioneered this work. It's just not what they wanted to, or will, go down in science history for.

Not every scientist with a touch of madness ends up drowning in pathological science, of course. Some, like Crookes, escape and go on to do great work. And then there are the rare cases where what seems like pathological science at the outset turns out to be legitimate. Wilhelm Rontgen tried his d.a.m.nedest to prove himself wrong while pursuing a radical discovery about invisible rays, but couldn't. And because of his persistence and insistence on the scientific method, this mentally fragile scientist really did rewrite history.

In November 1895, Rontgen was playing around in his laboratory in central Germany with a Crookes tube, an important new tool for studying subatomic phenomena. Named after its inventor, you know who, the Crookes tube consisted of an evacuated gla.s.s bulb with two metal plates inside at either end. Running a current between the plates caused a beam to leap across the vacuum, a crackle of light like something from a special effects lab. Scientists now know it's a beam of electrons, but in 1895 Rontgen and others were trying to figure that out.

A colleague of Rontgen's had found that when he made a Crookes tube with a small aluminium foil window (reminiscent of the t.i.tanium window Per-Ingvar Brnemark later welded onto rabbit bones), the beam would tunnel through the foil into the air. It died pretty quickly-air was like poison to the beam-but it could light up a phosph.o.r.escent screen a few inches distant. A little neurotically, Rontgen insisted on repeating all his colleagues' experiments no matter how minor, so he built this setup himself in 1895, but with some alterations. Instead of leaving his Crookes tube naked, he covered it with black paper, so that the beam would escape only through the foil. And instead of the phosph.o.r.escing chemicals his colleague had used, he painted his plates with a luminescent barium compound.

Accounts of what happened next vary. As Rontgen was running some tests, making sure his beam jumped between the plates properly, something caught his attention. Most accounts say it was a piece of cardboard coated with barium, which he'd propped on a nearby table. Other contemporary accounts say it was a piece of paper that a student had finger-painted with barium, playfully drawing the letter A A or or S. S. Regardless, Rontgen, who was color-blind, would have seen just a dance of white on the edge of his vision at first. But every time he turned the current on, the barium plate (or the letter) glowed. Regardless, Rontgen, who was color-blind, would have seen just a dance of white on the edge of his vision at first. But every time he turned the current on, the barium plate (or the letter) glowed.

Rontgen confirmed that no light was escaping from the blackened Crookes tube. He'd been sitting in a dark lab, so suns.h.i.+ne couldn't have caused the sparkle either. But he also knew the Crookes beams couldn't survive long enough in air to jump over to the plate or letter. He later admitted he thought he was hallucinating-the tube was clearly the cause, but he knew of nothing that could warp through opaque black paper.

So he propped up a barium-coated screen and put the nearest objects at hand, like a book, near the tube to block the beam. To his horrified amazement, an outline of a key he used as a bookmark appeared on the screen. He could somehow see through things see through things. He tried objects in closed wooden boxes and saw through those, too. But the truly creepy, truly black-magic moment came when he held up a plug of metal-and saw the bones of his own hand. At this point, Rontgen ruled out mere hallucination. He a.s.sumed he'd gone stark mad.

We can laugh today at his getting so worked up over discovering X-rays. But notice his remarkable att.i.tude here. Instead of leaping to the convenient conclusion that he'd discovered something radically new, Rontgen a.s.sumed he'd made a mistake somewhere. Embarra.s.sed, and determined to prove himself wrong, he locked himself in his lab, isolating himself for seven unrelenting weeks in his cave. He dismissed his a.s.sistants and took his meals grudgingly, gulping down food and grunting more than talking to his family. Unlike Crookes, or the megalodon hunters, or Pons and Fleischmann, Rontgen labored heroically to fit his findings in with known physics. He didn't want to be revolutionary.

Ironically, though he did everything to skirt pathological science, Rontgen's papers show that he couldn't shake the thought he had gone mad. Moreover, his muttering and his uncharacteristic temper made other people question his sanity. He jokingly said to his wife, Bertha, "I'm doing work that will make people say, 'Old Rontgen has gone crazy!' " He was fifty then, and she must have wondered.

Still, the Crookes tube lit up the barium plates every time, no matter how much he disbelieved. So Rontgen began doc.u.menting the phenomenon. Again, unlike the three pathological cases above, he dismissed any fleeting or erratic effects, anything that might be considered subjective. He sought only objective results, like developed photographic plates. At last, slightly more confident, he brought Bertha into the lab one afternoon and exposed her hand to the X-rays. Upon seeing her bones, she freaked out, thinking it a premonition of her death. She refused to go back into his haunted lab after that, but her reaction brought immeasurable relief to Rontgen. Possibly the most loving thing Bertha ever did for him, it proved he hadn't imagined everything.

At that point, Rontgen emerged, haggard, from his laboratory and informed his colleagues across Europe about "rontgen rays." Naturally, they doubted him, just as they'd scorned Crookes and later scientists would scorn the megalodon and cold fusion. But Rontgen had been patient and modest, and every time someone objected, he countered by saying he'd already investigated that possibility, until his colleagues had no more objections. And herein lies the uplifting side to the normally severe tales of pathological science.

This early X-ray revealed the bones and impressive ring of Bertha Rontgen, wife of Wilhelm Rontgen. Wilhelm, who feared he'd gone mad, was relieved when his wife also saw the bones of her hand on a barium-coated plate. She, less sanguine, thought it an omen of death.

Scientists can be cruel to new ideas. One can imagine them asking, "What sort of 'mystery beams' can fly invisibly through black paper, Wilhelm, and light up the bones in your body? Bah Bah." But when he fought back with solid proof, with repeatable experiments, most overthrew their old ideas to embrace his. Though a middling professor his whole life, Rontgen became every scientist's hero. In 1901, he won the inaugural n.o.bel Prize in Physics. Two decades later, a physicist named Henry Moseley used the same basic X-ray setup to revolutionize the study of the periodic table. And people were still so smitten a century later that in 2004, the largest official element on the periodic table at the time, number 111, long called unununium, became roentgenium.

Part V

ELEMENT SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW.

Chemistry Way, Way Below Zero

Rontgen not only provided an example of brilliantly meticulous science; he also reminded scientists that the periodic table is never empty of surprises. There's always something novel to discover about the elements, even today. But with most of the easy pickings already plucked by Rontgen's time, making new discoveries required drastic measures. Scientists had to interrogate the elements under increasingly severe conditions-especially extreme cold, which hypnotizes them into strange behaviors. Extreme cold doesn't always portend well for the humans making the discoveries either. While the latter-day heirs of Lewis and Clark had explored much of Antarctica by 1911, no human being had ever reached the South Pole. Inevitably, this led to an epic race among explorers to get there first-which led just as inevitably to a grim cautionary tale about what can go wrong with chemistry at extreme temperatures.

That year was chilly even by Antarctic standards, but a band of pale Englishmen led by Robert Falcon Scott nonetheless determined that they would be the first to reach ninety degrees south lat.i.tude. They organized their dogs and supplies, and a caravan set off in November. Much of the caravan was a support team, which cleverly dropped caches of food and fuel on the way out so that the small final team that would dash to the pole could retrieve them on the way back.

Little by little, more of the caravan peeled off, and finally, after slogging along for months on foot, five men, led by Scott, arrived at the pole in January 1912-only to find a brown pup tent, a Norwegian flag, and an annoyingly friendly letter. Scott had lost out to Roald Amundsen, whose team had arrived a month earlier. Scott recorded the moment curtly in his diary: "The worst has happened. All the daydreams must go." And shortly afterward: "Great G.o.d! This is an awful place. Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it."

Dejected as Scott's men were, their return trip would have been difficult anyway, but Antarctica threw up everything it could to punish and hara.s.s them. They were marooned for weeks in a monsoon of snow flurries, and their journals (discovered later) showed that they faced starvation, scurvy, dehydration, hypothermia, and gangrene. Most devastating was the lack of heating fuel. Scott had trekked through the Arctic the year before and had found that the leather seals on his canisters of kerosene leaked badly. He'd routinely lost half of his fuel. For the South Pole run, his team had experimented with tin-enriched and pure tin solders. But when his bedraggled men reached the canisters awaiting them on the return trip, they found many of them empty. In a double blow, the fuel had often leaked onto foodstuffs.

Without kerosene, the men couldn't cook food or melt ice to drink. One of them took ill and died; another went insane in the cold and wandered off. The last three, including Scott, pushed on. They officially died of exposure in late March 1912, eleven miles wide of the British base, unable to get through the last nights.

In his day, Scott had been as popular as Neil Armstrong-Britons received news of his plight with gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth, and one church even installed stained-gla.s.s windows in his honor in 1915. As a result, people have always sought an excuse to absolve him of blame, and the periodic table provided a convenient villain. Tin, which Scott used as solder, has been a prized metal since biblical times because it's so easy to shape. Ironically, the better metallurgists got at refining tin and purifying it, the worse it became for everyday use. Whenever pure tin tools or tin coins or tin toys got cold, a whitish rust began to creep over them like h.o.a.rfrost on a window in winter. The white rust would break out into pustules, then weaken and corrode the tin, until it crumbled and eroded away.

Unlike iron rust, this was not a chemical reaction. As scientists now know, this happens because tin atoms can arrange themselves inside a solid in two different ways, and when they get cold, they s.h.i.+ft from their strong "beta" form to the crumbly, powdery "alpha" form. To visualize the difference, imagine stacking atoms in a huge crate like oranges. The bottom of the crate is lined with a single layer of spheres touching only tangentially. To fill the second, third, and fourth layers, you might balance each atom right on top of one in the first layer. That's one form, or crystal structure. Or you might nestle the second layer of atoms into the s.p.a.ces between the atoms in the first layer, then the third layer into the s.p.a.ces between the atoms in the second layer, and so on. That makes a second crystal structure with a different density and different properties. These are just two of the many ways to pack atoms together.

What Scott's men (perhaps) found out the hard way is that an element's atoms can spontaneously s.h.i.+ft from a weak crystal to a strong one, or vice versa. Usually it takes extreme conditions to promote rearrangement, like the subterranean heat and pressure that turn carbon from graphite into diamonds. Tin becomes protean at 56F. Even a sweater evening in October can start the pustules rising and the h.o.a.rfrost creeping, and colder temperatures accelerate the process. Any abusive treatment or deformation (such as dents from canisters being tossed onto hard-packed ice) can catalyze the reaction, too, even in tin that is otherwise immune. Nor is this merely a topical defect, a surface scar. The condition is sometimes called tin leprosy because it burrows deep inside like a disease. The alphabeta s.h.i.+ft can even release enough energy to cause audible groaning-vividly called tin scream, although it sounds more like stereo static.

The alphabeta s.h.i.+ft of tin has been a convenient chemical scapegoat throughout history. Various European cities with harsh winters (e.g., St. Petersburg) have legends about expensive tin pipes on new church organs exploding into ash the instant the organist blasted his first chord. (Some pious citizens were more apt to blame the Devil.) Of more world historical consequence, when Napoleon stupidly attacked Russia during the winter of 1812, the tin clasps on his men's jackets reportedly (many historians dispute this) cracked apart and left the Frenchmen's inner garments exposed every time the wind kicked up. As with the horrible circ.u.mstances faced by Scott's little band, the French army faced long odds in Russia anyway. But element fifty's changeling ways perhaps made things tougher, and impartial chemistry proved an easier thing to blame* than a hero's bad judgment. than a hero's bad judgment.

There's no doubt Scott's men found empty canisters-that's in his diary-but whether the disintegration of the tin solder caused the leaks is disputed. Tin leprosy makes so much sense, yet canisters from other teams discovered decades later retained their solder seals. Scott did use purer tin-although it would have to have been extremely pure for leprosy to take hold. Yet no other good explanation besides sabotage exists, and there's no evidence of foul play. Regardless, Scott's little band perished on the ice, victims at least in part of the periodic table.

Quirky things happen when matter gets very cold and s.h.i.+fts from one state to another. Schoolchildren learn about just three interchangeable states of matter-solid, liquid, and gas. High school teachers often toss in a fourth state, plasma, a superheated condition in stars in which electrons detach from their nucleic moorings and go roaming.* In college, students get exposed to superconductors and superfluid helium. In graduate school, professors sometimes challenge students with states such as quark-gluon plasma or degenerate matter. And along the way, a few wiseacres always ask why Jell-O doesn't count as its own special state. (The answer? Colloids like Jell-O are blends of two states. In college, students get exposed to superconductors and superfluid helium. In graduate school, professors sometimes challenge students with states such as quark-gluon plasma or degenerate matter. And along the way, a few wiseacres always ask why Jell-O doesn't count as its own special state. (The answer? Colloids like Jell-O are blends of two states.* The water and gelatin mixture can either be thought of as a highly flexible solid or a very sluggish liquid.) The water and gelatin mixture can either be thought of as a highly flexible solid or a very sluggish liquid.) The point is that the universe can accommodate far more states of matter-different micro-arrangements of particles-than are dreamed of in our provincial categories of solid, liquid, and gas. And these new states aren't hybrids like Jell-O. In some cases, the very distinction between ma.s.s and energy breaks down. Albert Einstein uncovered one such state while fiddling around with a few quantum mechanics equations in 1924-then dismissed his calculations and disavowed his theoretical discovery as too bizarre to ever exist. It remained impossible, in fact, until someone made it in 1995.

In some ways, solids are the most basic state of matter. (To be scrupulous, the vast majority of every atom sits empty, but the ultra-quick hurry of electrons gives atoms, to our dull senses, the persistent illusion of solidity.) In solids, atoms line up in a repet.i.tive, three-dimensional array, though even the most blase solids can usually form more than one type of crystal. Scientists can now coax ice into forming fourteen distinctly shaped crystals by using high-pressure chambers. Some ices sink rather than float in water, and others form not six-sided snowflakes, but shapes like palm leaves or heads of cauliflower. One alien ice, Ice X, doesn't melt until it reaches 3,700F. Even chemicals as impure and complicated as chocolate form quasi-crystals that can s.h.i.+ft shapes. Ever opened an old Hershey's Kiss and found it an unappetizing tan? We might call that chocolate leprosy, caused by the same alphabeta s.h.i.+fts that doomed Scott in Antarctica.

Crystalline solids form most readily at low temperatures, and depending on how low the temperature gets, elements you thought you knew can become almost unrecognizable. Even the aloof n.o.ble gases, when forced into solid form, decide that huddling together with other elements isn't such a bad idea. Violating decades of dogma, Canadian-based chemist Neil Bartlett created the first n.o.ble gas compound, a solid orange crystal, with xenon in 1962.* Admittedly, this took place at room temperature, but only with platinum hexafluoride, a chemical about as caustic as a superacid. Plus xenon, the largest stable inert gas, reacts far more easily than the others because its electrons are only loosely bound to its nucleus. To get smaller, closed-rank n.o.ble gases to react, chemists had to drastically screw down the temperature and basically anesthetize them. Krypton put up a good fight until about 240F, at which point super-reactive fluorine can latch onto it. Admittedly, this took place at room temperature, but only with platinum hexafluoride, a chemical about as caustic as a superacid. Plus xenon, the largest stable inert gas, reacts far more easily than the others because its electrons are only loosely bound to its nucleus. To get smaller, closed-rank n.o.ble gases to react, chemists had to drastically screw down the temperature and basically anesthetize them. Krypton put up a good fight until about 240F, at which point super-reactive fluorine can latch onto it.

Getting krypton to react, though, was like mixing baking soda and vinegar compared with the struggle to graft something onto argon. After Bartlett's xenon solid in 1962 and the first krypton solid in 1963, it took thirty-seven frustrating years until Finnish scientists finally pieced together the right procedure for argon in 2000. It was an experiment of Faberge delicacy, requiring solid argon; hydrogen gas; fluorine gas; a highly reactive starter compound, cesium iodide, to get the reaction going; and well-timed bursts of ultraviolet light, all set to bake at a frigid 445F. When things got a little warmer, the argon compound collapsed.

Nevertheless, below that temperature argon fluorohydride was a durable crystal. The Finnish scientists announced the feat in a paper with a refres.h.i.+ngly accessible t.i.tle for a scientific work, "A Stable Argon Compound." Simply announcing what they'd done was bragging enough. Scientists are confident that even in the coldest regions of s.p.a.ce, tiny helium and neon have never bonded with another element. So for now, argon wears the t.i.tle belt for the single hardest element humans have forced into a compound.

Given argon's reluctance to change its habits, forming an argon compound was a major feat. Still, scientists don't consider n.o.ble gas compounds, or even alphabeta s.h.i.+fts in tin, truly different states of matter. Different states require appreciably different energies, in which atoms interact in appreciably different ways. That's why solids, where atoms are (mostly) fixed in place; liquids, where particles can flow around each other; and gases, where particles have the freedom to carom about, are are distinct states of matter. distinct states of matter.

Still, solids, liquids, and gases have lots in common. For one, their particles are well-defined and discrete. But that sovereignty gives way to anarchy when you heat things up to the plasma state and atoms start to disintegrate, or when you cool things down enough and collectivist states of matter emerge, where the particles begin to overlap and combine in fascinating ways.

Take superconductors. Electricity consists of an easy flow of electrons in a circuit. Inside a copper wire, the electrons flow between and around the copper atoms, and the wire loses energy as heat when the electrons crash into the atoms. Obviously, something suppresses that process in superconductors, since the electrons flowing through them never flag. In fact, the current can flow forever as long as the superconductor remains chilled, a property first detected in mercury at 450F in 1911. For decades, most scientists a.s.sumed that superconducting electrons simply had more s.p.a.ce to maneuver: atoms in superconductors have much less energy to vibrate back and forth, giving electrons a wider shoulder to slip by and avoid crashes. That explanation's true as far as it goes. But really, as three scientists figured out in 1957, it's electrons themselves that metamorphose at low temperatures.

When zooming past atoms in a superconductor, electrons tug at the atoms' nuclei. The positive nuclei drift slightly toward the electrons, and this leaves a wake of higher-density positive charge. The higher-density charge attracts other electrons, which in a sense become paired with the first. It's not a strong coupling between electrons, more like the weak bond between argon and fluorine; that's why the coupling emerges only at low temperatures, when atoms aren't vibrating too much and knocking the electrons apart. At those low temperatures, you cannot think of electrons as isolated; they're stuck together and work in teams. And during their circuit, if one electron gets gummed up or knocks into an atom, its partners yank it through before it slows down. It's like that old illegal football formation where helmetless players locked arms and stormed down the field-a flying electron wedge. This microscopic state translates to superconductivity when billions of billions of pairs all do the same thing.

Incidentally, this explanation is known as the BCS theory of superconductivity, after the last names of the men who developed it: John Bardeen, Leon Cooper (the electron partners are called Cooper pairs), and Robert Schrieffer.* That's the same John Bardeen who coinvented the germanium transistor, won a n.o.bel Prize for it, and dropped his scrambled eggs on the floor when he heard the news. Bardeen dedicated himself to superconductivity after leaving Bell Labs for Illinois in 1951, and the BCS trio came up with the full theory six years on. It proved so good, so accurate, they shared the 1972 n.o.bel Prize in Physics for their work. This time, Bardeen commemorated the occasion by missing a press conference at his university because he couldn't figure out how to get his new (transistor-powered) electric garage door open. But when he visited Stockholm for the second time, he presented his two adult sons to the king of Sweden, just as he'd promised he would back in the fifties. That's the same John Bardeen who coinvented the germanium transistor, won a n.o.bel Prize for it, and dropped his scrambled eggs on the floor when he heard the news. Bardeen dedicated himself to superconductivity after leaving Bell Labs for Illinois in 1951, and the BCS trio came up with the full theory six years on. It proved so good, so accurate, they shared the 1972 n.o.bel Prize in Physics for their work. This time, Bardeen commemorated the occasion by missing a press conference at his university because he couldn't figure out how to get his new (transistor-powered) electric garage door open. But when he visited Stockholm for the second time, he presented his two adult sons to the king of Sweden, just as he'd promised he would back in the fifties.

If elements are cooled below even superconducting temperatures, the atoms grow so loopy that they overlap and swallow each other up, a state called coherence. Coherence is crucial to understanding that impossible Einsteinian state of matter promised earlier in this chapter. Understanding coherence requires a short but thankfully element-rich detour into the nature of light and another once impossible innovation, lasers.

Few things delight the odd aesthetic sense of a physicist as much as the ambiguity, the two-in-oneness, of light. We normally think of light as waves. In fact, Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity in part by thinking about how the universe would appear to him-what s.p.a.ce would look like, how time would (or wouldn't) pa.s.s-if he rode sidesaddle on one of those waves. (Don't ask me how he imagined this.) At the same time, Einstein proved (he's ubiquitous in this arena) that light sometimes acts like particle BBs called photons. Combining the wave and particle views (called wave-particle duality), he correctly deduced that light is not only the fastest thing in the universe, it's the fastest possible thing, at 186,000 miles per second, in a vacuum. Whether you detect light as a wave or photons depends on how you measure it, since light is neither wholly one nor the other.

Despite its austere beauty in a vacuum, light gets corrupted when it interacts with some elements. Sodium and praseodymium can slow light down to 6 miles per second, slower than sound. Those elements can even catch light, hold on to it for a few seconds like a baseball, then toss it in a different direction.

Lasers manipulate light in subtler ways. Remember that electrons are like elevators: they never rise from level 1 to level 3.5 or drop