Date: April 26, 2010

Title: Mariners, Cancer and Bombs

Podcaster: Ben Lillie

Description: Part of the reason for doing fundmental research — say sending spacecraft to Mars, or building particle colliders — is that we never know what we’ll discover or what the applications will be.

Bio: Ben Lillie is a physicist who left the ivory tower for the wilds of New York’s theater district, where he hosts the monthly science storytelling show, The Story Collider. He likes to say that life is different now, largely because it is. He has also earned 27 badges as a member of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique, which is 24 more than than the number of badges he earned as a Cub Scout.

Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the Physics Department at Eastern Illinois University: “Caring faculty guiding students through teaching and research” at www.eiu.edu/~physics/

Transcript:

Hello my name is Ben Lillie, I’m the cohost of The Story Collider, a live show in New York City were we bring performers and scientists together to tell stories about the interesting, important, and hopefully absurd science moments in their lives. Check out storycollider.org for more information.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s NASA launched a series of spacecraft to explore Mars, Venus, and Mercury. Called Mariners one through ten, they returned an incredible amount information from those planets on the climate, the chemical composition, the geography; all sorts of aspects of those planets. They showed us our first pictures of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain anywhere in the solar system, and the Valles Marineris, the deepest and largest trench.

And, while those things are very cool, sometimes when you’re talking about it to people you get that annoying question that I think many of the listeners hear will have heard, which is: “Yeah, but what is it good for? What it do for us? I mean it’s not curing cancer. It’s not finding new ways to blow people up.” I think a lot of us would consider that last one a good point, but the question still stands: what does this kind of research do for us? It’s a question that, while annoying, is also worth thinking about because it’s important and the answer sometimes more subtle than we think it is.

In my own field of of high-energy physics this is something that comes up a lot and with a vengeance. In modern high-energy experiments what you do is you take a beam of protons and you shoot it at another beam of protons, and they hit each other and those protons a lot of kinetic energy and Einstein’s equals MC squared tells us we can take that kinetic energy and turn it into mass. So, what happens is that it turns into massive new particles, new exotic particles that don’t naturally exist. And we study them and they teach us things about the fundamental structure of matter in the universe, but they don’t do anything. They have no application in our daily lives.

And this leads to something that I call cancer envy, which is not being envious of having cancer, but this feeling that it would be so much easier in conversations about what we do for living to just say we’re curing cancer. I actually used to tell myself stories about why I wasn’t a biologist or studying medicine or something like that. And they’re all things about how I’m incredibly squeamish I am of killing anything or blood or anything like that. It’s like, in fifth grade we had to make an insect collection, and so I followed the instructions; I took a film canister and found an ant, trapped it in the canister; I put it in the freezer to kill it… and I just freaked out about the fact that it just killed it. I couldn’t handle it and just freaked out. So, my dad said okay instead of that go find dead bugs, so I would look in the school bus as I went to school for dead bugs and I still couldn’t handle that. So eventually I talked the teacher into letting me use cutouts from from a magazine instead of actually collecting them. Later on in high school when we were supposed to dissections in biology class — we’d been doing that the standard fetal pig dissection that everyone does — and I knew at that point I couldn’t handle it, so I actually just made up the fact that it was against my religion to do a dissection on it on a dead animal. So I was allowed to do the assignment again out of a textbook, basically. So I told myself there’s no way I’m going to be able to handle a biology lab at the college level and so may as well to study physics and study quarks and protons and things like that.

There’s another set of stories I would tell myself that are related to the counterpoint of cancer envy which is called, “Can my research be used to make a bomb?” This is a problem in physics much more than in astronomy, and is related to the fact that, for high-energy physicists, our intellectual ancestors, as it were, are a lot of the people who created and ran the Manhattan Project. And so the fear of repeating that, or even worse coming up with something bigger, would always be there in the background. I would run through this logic to myself over and over again. It goes like this: to make a bomb you need two things. First you need the bit where it explodes; that’s sort of the definition of a bomb. And these new exotic particles actually explode on their own. They release a tremendous amount of energy when they decay. the problem is that the second thing that you need to make a bomb is the bit where you doesn’t explode until you want it to. That is also very important. And these particles that we study decay very very quickly. A lifetime of 10 to the minus 12 seconds, one pico second, is a very long lifetime for an elementary particle, so there’s no way that what we do can be used to make any sort of weapon.

The problem with that though is that you never really know what you’re going to find. When you do fundamental research you are explorer and discoverer and anything could come up, and you have absolutely no idea how it could be used. For example, if you take a beam of protons and you shoot it at a target — let’s say a wall — you would expect from all the sci-fi you seen that it would damage the wall and burn a hole through it. And that’s mostly true, it does damage it but in a very weird way. It actually skips the first few centimeters; for various reasons the protons go straight through the outer layers and start burning the target from within. You could imagine trying to make some kind of weapon out of that. It would be a really strange and bizarre weapon but you could imagine it. Of course, you don’t have to shoot it a wall. You could shoot it at person, and in particular you could shoot it at a person who had an inoperable tumor. If you are careful and aimed it just right it would go straight through the healthy tissue and burn the tumor out from within. This is called proton therapy and it turns out to be incredibly useful for treating certain kinds of cancer.

This is the basic problem. All the stories, all those things I tell myself are wrong, not factually wrong, they’re true, but they’re not the reasons for anything. I didn’t do physics because I was okay with it not making a bomb and I certainly didn’t do it because I couldn’t be a biologist. I did it because I read a book on quarks and I couldn’t stop reading and I kept reading and I kept taking classes and then I had to go to grad school and then I had to keep learning it and keep reading and keep researching. Nowhere in there was there a choice; nowhere in there did I have an option to not do it. And that, I think, is why most scientists do what they do. It’s not out of any sort of calculation that this is the right thing to do, or the best thing to do. It’s an obsession. It’s a compulsion.

We do it for the same reason that people create art. I know a lot of artists now and I’ve never met, for example, a painter who thought that they had any options about whether they could paint. And that’s why we send those missions out to other planets. It’s not because we expected to find something useful or important in our daily lives. It’s because we had to explore, we had to go and see what’s out there. And because of them we now know, we now know what the surface of Mars looks like, we’ve seen Olympus Mons and the Valles Marineris, and there is nothing like them on Earth.

That kind of thing is uplifting in the same way that good art is, but the thing about science is that sometimes as were lifted up, things come with us. Unexpected cures for cancer, penicillin, computers, or even nuclear warheads, and we never know ahead of time what it’s going to be.

In the fall of 1971 mariner nine achieved orbit around Mars, and was the first spacecraft to successfully orbit another planet. It arrived in the middle of a dust storm. Mars is periodically enveloped in these global storms that can last weeks. As the storm abated scientists were fascinated to watch the global Martian temperature rise and rise and what they realized is that during the storm the sun’s energy was being blocked by the dust, and so Mars was effectively cooled into this unexpected winter. It was a tremendous effect: if there had been agriculture on Mars, if there had been people there depending on food, all of those crops would’ve failed and there would’ve been widespread famine and deaths because of it.

Fortunately storms like that just don’t happen on Earth. Except that, well… If there was a nuclear war, if somebody detonated a few thousand megatons worth of nuclear bombs, then, well, in that case the dust and the ash from the burning cities and burning forests could be lofted up into the atmosphere. And, we don’t know for sure, but that could be enough to trigger a nuclear winter and crop failures and that could kill more people than the bombs themselves. The thing is, we didn’t know. In all the planning for nuclear wars and for Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios, no one had thought to ask what the effects on the climate would be. We had to go to Mars to find that out.

And so this is what we do. We go out and explore because we have to, and when we go out there we find things we don’t expect. And sometimes those things are beautiful, sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re evil, and sometimes when we find them we just look at that and say, “Huh. We needed to know that, and now we do.”

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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