Scientists Stew*

There is a saying that you cannot become a good scientist, or a writer or philosopher or anyone of the history making kind unless you burn the midnight lamp.

   The story goes that Aristotle carried a book in one hand and a large stone in the other, while in bed. If he felt sleepy, the stone would drop from his hand into a bowl making a crashing sound that would awaken him. Today’s psychologists would greatly differ in this kind of theory. They would say that you couldn’t make a positive contribution of any reckoning unless your belly was full and you had a good full night’s rest.

   And then there is a species of scientists who have been tried for heresy. Galileo was made to admit in open court that the solar system is geocentric and not heliocentric, much against his wishes. Had he traveled to India, people would have welcomed him with open arms since the Indians have always believed the sun to be the most supreme thing in this universe, and the Rishis and Sadhus have begun their day for thousands of years by doing obeisance to Him and chanting the Gayatri mantra, while looking towards him through the water falling out of a jar or a kamandalu, since they knew that direct exposure to sun rays was positively detrimental to the eyes. Well, Socrates too had to drink hemlock for his heretic ideas. Charles Darwin faced tremendous opposition from the clergy when he wrote The Origin of the Species and stated that the human beings have evolved from apes. The church thought that crazy, since it was widely believed that God created the entire world and all the animals in it, on September 21, 2004 BC at 9 A.M.

   And then there have been geniuses. The greatly shriveled and dried up apple tree, still an attraction for tourists visiting the University of Cambridge, is “kept alive”, as it were, to commemorate that unmatched genius, Sir Isaac Newton, who first explained, why things fall, after all. It may be interesting for the geologists to know that Newton first hinted at Continental drift, a good 150 years before Wegner did. He found that the gravitational constant varied greatly over the mountains and oceans and suggested that at the beginning, all land must have been on one side and water on the other to make for the isostatic balance, and the continents may have later drifted.

     And then, there have been classic ends of scientists. Clough, one of the five authors of the Peach Memoir, a great structural geologist (whose estimation of displacement along the Moine thrust in the Scottish highlands made a hundred years ago, closely matches the measurements made by most modern methods), was so much engrossed in looking at the structure in an outcrop that he was run over by a train. Linus Pauling, the winner of Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of ascorbic acid (vitamin C), argued that if you took large doses of vitamin C every day, you would never be afflicted by cancer. He and his wife took large doses of ascorbic acid every day. Most unfortunately, Mrs. Pauling died of cancer. Dr. A. M. Heron, who worked all his life in the Aravalli Mountains, had walked and climbed so much that he became a hunchback at the end of his life. He died of cardiac arrest at Nagpur rail station on way to Delhi in 1964 to attend the International Geological Congress. Alfred Wegner, the German meteorologist and the acknowledged exponent of continental drift (he had got the idea of the drift when he looked at the ice sheets breaking and drifting away very slowly and they looked like the torn pieces of a newspaper as do the coastlines either side of the Atlantic) died under an avalanche. He was actually buried under an ice cap on his third and last expedition to Greenland in 1930.

     Some discoveries were born over a drink. The classic theory of sea floor spreading was born in a bar on the Columbia University campus. Harry Hess found that since the geophysical evidence suggested that the continents had deep roots and they cannot be moved over the Mohorovicic discontinuity. The Lithosphere-asthenosphere concept in place of crust-mantle was thought over by Hess, over a glass of Manhattan, and Plate Tectonics was born.

     And then there have been chance discoveries. Everybody knows that Christopher Columbus discovered America by chance. While growing a tissue culture, Alexander Flaming found that  “lysis” of the culture had set in on account something that was external, and lo, most potential drug of the last century, penicillin was discovered. While in his eighties, Dr Flaming was asked to inaugurate a modern lab, with facilities such as temperature control, humidity control, pollution control and so on. One of the scientists on that occasion remarked to Dr. Alexander Flaming: “Oh, Dr Flaming, what you couldn’t have discovered with such great facilities in your days!” Dr Flaming simply answered, “Penicillin!” since penicillin was discovered by chance because of pollution. While flying a kite on a rainy and stormy day, Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity when he felt a terrible and excruciating tingling in his hand, which was holding not only the kite thread but a key bunch as well, when a cloudburst and lightening occurred, and the electric current traveled right to his fingers via the wet kite thread and the key bunch.

    Some scientists are born out of a genuine sympathy for a race. Hitler exterminated six million Jews, and he had 1.5 million of them finished in just 24 hours in gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1945 only weeks before he committed suicide. The American part of the allied forces then proclaimed that the Jews, though quite fanatic, are super humans and the most intelligent of all human races. Sir Albert Einstein’s popularity lies mostly in this sympathy rather than the theory of relativity. The theory of relativity is best explained in a nice limerick (Limericks are the dirtiest 5 line poems, usually composed by street hooligans, you can hear a lot of these at any soccer ground in England) that goes:

There was a lady named Bright;

Whose speed was faster than light

She went out one day;

In relative way;

And returned the previous night.

(To be continued)

*A mixture of various vegetables, lamb pieces simmered in cooking wine and water like sambhar of South India. Literally. Something hotchpotch.   Hindi Tr. Verbatim: Khichri