Science Musings Blog

Twice in the past week I have seen the green flash.

The flash is a brief (blink and you'll miss it) ray of emerald green light that can sometimes be seen just at the top of the Sun's disk as the Sun sinks below the western horizon or rises in the east. It is caused by a combination of refraction and scattering in the Earth's atmosphere. To see it one needs a clear, flat horizon and atmospheric conditions have to be just right.

I started looking for the flash when I read an article about it in a 1965 issue of Scientific American, with a photo on the cover. For decades I pursued it, on three continents, at sunrise and sunset, fruitlessly. I told the story of the long search in Globe columns and Honey From Stone.

I might have been forgiven for thinking the flash was mythical, but, no, readers kept sending me photographs from all over the world, even inviting me to visit exotic locations where "we see the green flash all the time." (Today, photos and videos are all over the web.)

Then we came to Exuma, with a splendid sunrise horizon. I now see the green flash several times each winter. I never miss a sunrise.

Having spent so much of my life in a vain pursuit of the flash, it has become a kind of benediction -- if I may use a sacred term for a natural phenomenon -- a communication between whatever is deepest and most mysterious in the world and -- and me.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, I would often go late at night to the replica of the Lourdes grotto to pray. I would focus my vision intently on just one random votive candle in the racks of flickering lights and whisper, "God, if you exist, let this candle go out now."

No candle was extinguished, but nevertheless my faith tottered on for some years more. Soon enough, as a student of the experimental method, I learned to distinguish coincidence from causality -- a confusion that is seemingly endemic in the human psyche.

I know the physical causes of the green flash, but it is rare and extraordinary enough to be the answer to a prayer: "God, if you exist, let the Sun rise in a blaze of green." And it is an answer to a kind of prayer, if prayer consists of silent attention to whatever is most beautiful and ephemeral in the world.

An article in the NYT Business section last Sunday on the potential fate of Barnes & Noble, the county's only remaining big paper-inventory bookseller. B&N's main rival, Borders, went down the tube last year, a victim, like Dalton, Crown and the other mall chains, of the tech revolution in how we read. Not to mention the small independents that have fallen by the wayside, a fifth of them in the last decade.

Of course, B&N has tried to grab its own share of the e-book business, by quickly developing the Nook e-reader and taking about a third of the market from Kindle. The question is: Will the big B&N stores survive? CEO William Lynch says "Yes." I'll bet no.

It's not just e-books. It's how we buy books. Even if you want paper, it's easy to order online from Amazon or B&N. It's not at all clear to me how the megastores will make it.

You'll still see paper books for sell in airports and Walmarts, but the books on offer will be only mass-market blockbusters, the trendiest bestsellers, and young adult genres.

And here is my prediction: The small independent, community bookstores will have a rebound. When B&N bookstores go under, with their huge selection of titles and espresso cafes, resourceful independents will reappear, especially in places like New England, the Northeast Corridor, the Northwest, and the Bay Area with sizable serious reading audiences. It will be a niche market, as it always was, places for book aficionados to buy and sell. Places where you can "talk books."

Paper backlists will pretty much disappear, except for the classics, which means you won't find my books on the shelves, but the stores will have capability for print-on-demand -- that big machine sitting in the corner. Ask for Honey From Stone, say, and in ten minutes you'll have a bound paperback in your hand.

If a publisher does not keep a book available in e-format, there will be plenty of entrepreneurs who will make a book e-ready at the request of an author, requests that will be driven (like the vanity presses now) more by ego than economics.

All of which is irrelevant to me. I enjoyed the last of the glory days -- the book tours, the readings, the autograph sessions -- even a mid-list author like me got some modest attention from the publishers. All that's gone now, and son Dan has stepped into the breach to see about negotiating the new landscape. I'll do whatever I can to help, and I wish him well.

A memory of my walk around Malta.

I was walking a cliff path on the back side of the island (away from Valletta), which for a short way ran by the side of a road. A man driving a 4x4 ahead of me screeched to a stop, jumped out with his gun, and blasted away at a flying bird I took to be a swallow. The bird fell into the sea where it was irretrievable. The man jumped back in his vehicle and sped away.

I sat down at the pathside and wept. Not for the bird. Or for myself. But for the human species. If a swallow can be killed with such conscienceless nonchalance, what other atrocities are we capable of?

Well, we know the answer to that.

No, Carmen, I have no proof that this fellow's satisfaction at shooting the bird out of the sky has a genetic component, and you are right to be agnostic. But is it an unreasonable supposition?

European songbirds are born with the instinct to fly over Malta on their annual migrations to and from Northern Africa, a rather remarkable navigational feat when you think about it, something they probably "learned" long before the Maltese acquired firearms (or the island acquired Maltese). And humans, who spent most of our species' history and protohistory hunting and gathering -- might not we carry some of that as a genetic residue?

Then there's the whole psychosexual thing, the gun as phallus. Now I'm really on speculative ground. Genetic? Cultural? Mr. Bingley? Perhaps Jane Austen, or you, could help us out here.

When I was in Malta, there was still talk of an incident that occurred earlier that year. Hunters in a speedboat -- all male of course -- in front of horrified onlookers, killed eight out of 10 mute swans that were swimming in the island's St. Thomas Bay.

In the spring of 2002, I spent a couple of weeks solo walking in Malta, an island in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia. I based myself in the marvelous fortified city of Valletta, and each day took a bus to walk a stretch of the coast, eventually circling the island. The island was a paradise of spring wildflowers and burgeoning gardens, stirring coastal paths, picturesque villages, antiquities of every age, and friendly people.

And the ever-present pop, pop of shotguns.

Malta is smack on the middle of a north-south flyway for European songbirds, and a sizable proportion of the male Maltese population seems intent on blasting every bird out of the sky. Every cliff face, every field, every open stretch of land is chockablock with the paraphernalia of massacre. Netting grounds for trapping songbirds. Hides (blinds) for hunters. Traylike stands for holding live decoys in cages. And along every path and lane expended shotgun shells, the ubiquitous, and only, litter.

The walking was splendid -- and profoundly depressing.

When I returned to the States I wrote a column for the Boston Globe decrying the killing. A day later I got an email from my host at the tiny Valletta hotel where I stayed; he linked me to the website of the Malta Times, the island's main newspaper, that had picked up and reprinted the story.

A year or so ago, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, an avid birdwatcher, had a long essay in the New Yorker on the same topic -- the slaughter of songbirds on the Mediterranean flyways. He called Malta "the most savagely bird-hostile place in Europe." He traced, in rather more detail than I had been able to do eight years earlier, the escalating clash between an ancient tradition and conservation efforts by the European Union.

In the Globe I opined that the Maltese slaughter might be partly genetic: Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, boys gotta shoot birds out of the sky. But surely cultural too, a phallic enterprise, a way of asserting macho masculinity by making a big bang with a loaded gun. Certainly, in Malta the killing is strictly a male affair.

Franzen ends his piece in Assisi, at the shrine where Saint Francis is said to have given his Sermon to the Birds. Franzen is right that our relationship with other creatures has a religious component. Nobody since Jesus has lived a life more radically in keeping with the gospel than Saint Francis did, wrote Franzen: "Francis, unburdened by the weight of being the Messiah, went Jesus one better and extended his gospel to all of creation."

(Franzen's essay is reprinted in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2011.)

After almost twenty years on the island, it is not often than we see something new. You will have heard about many of our regulars here. The hummingbirds. The geckoes. The boas. The bat moths. The free-toed frogs. The ospreys that patrol the beach each afternoon. The termites. And you will have heard too about a few one-time visitors. The giant stick insect. The hummingbird nest. The pod of dolphins.

It helps to go walking with my neighbor Dwight, who has almost preternatural powers of observation. There's not much, if anything, he misses.

And so it was that he was the first to see the pelican, cruising low off shore, settling onto the swell, cocking its head, flashing its cocky grin.

Then, rising, effortlessly, it swings our way, graciously nods, that tote-bag beak, that streamlined neck of white and chestnut brown.

And off he goes.

Yes, I know, brown pelicans are not uncommon. They teem in Florida, and surely in places in the Bahamas too. But here, on our beach, this was a first. A gift. One of those epiphanies that lift each day out of the rolling swell of time.

I always admired Audubon's brown pelican. (My spouse gave me the big two-volume collection from the New York Historical Society for our tenth anniversary.) Painted in the Florida Keys in 1832. Sitting on a mangrove branch. Its beak as big as its belly (as every rhymester knows). Blue-vested. Yellow-crowned. Pterodactylian.

Audubon no doubt shot the bird to paint it, as was his practice.

Their footless dance
Is the beautiful liability of their nature.

Their eyes are round, boldly convex, bright as a jewel,
And merciless. They do not know

Compassion, and if they did,
We should not be worthy of it. They fly
In air that glitters like fluent crystal
And is hard as perfectly transparent iron, they cleave it
With no effort. they cry
In a tongue mulititudinous, often like music.



He slew them, at surprising distances, with his gun.

Over a body held in his hand, his head bowed low,
But not in grief.



He put them where they are, and there we see them:

In our imagination.



What is love?



One name for it is knowledge.


From Robert Penn Warren's wonderful extended poem Audubon: A Vision, as is the title of this post.

Click, and then again, to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

(It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey. Welty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of stories and novels who lived all her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house in which she was born, the beloved spinster aunt of American letters. Abbey was a hard-drinking, butt-kicking nature writer and conservationist best known for his books on the American Southwest. Both writers are favorites of mine. Both were great champions of place. I always wondered what it would have been like if they got together.

As far as I know, that never happened. But let's imagine a conversation. I have taken extracts from Welty's essay "Some Notes on River Country" (1944) and from Abbey's essay "The Great American Desert (1977) and interleaved them. This post originally appeared in June 2006.)

"This little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez."

"This desert, all deserts, any deserts."

"On the shady stream banks hang lady's eardrops, fruits and flowers dangling pale jade. The passionflower puts its tendrils where it can, its strange flowers of lilac rays with their little white towers shining out, or its fruit, the maypop, hanging."

""Oily growths like the poison ivy -- oh yes, indeed -- that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons."

"All creepers with trumpets and panicles of scarlet and yellow cling to the treetops. There is a vine that grows to great heights, with heart-shaped leaves as big and soft as summer hats."

""Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals."

"Too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias."

""Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity."

"The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use. The river has gone away and left the landings. But life does not forsake any place."

""In the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix will get you if the sun, snakes, bugs, and arthropods don't. In the Mojave Desert, it's Las Vegas. Up north in the Great Basin Desert, your heart will break, seeing the strip mines open up and the power plants rise..."

"The Negro Baptist church, weathered black with a snow-white door, has red hens in the yard. The old galleried stores are boarded up. The missing houses were burned -- they were empty, and the little row of Negro inhabitants have carried them off for firewood."

""...the highway builders, land developers, weapons testers, power producers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers, subdividers."

"Eventually you see people, of course. Women have little errands, and the old men play checkers at a table in the front of the one open store. And the people's faces are good."

""Californicating."

"To go there, you start west from Port Gibson. Postmen would arrive here blowing their horns like Gabriel, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee."

""Why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes. Why go there?"

"I have felt many times there is a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen."

""Why the desert, when you could be camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water. We have centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Gila monsters, the deadly poisonous coral snakes, and the giant hairy desert scorpions. Plus an immense variety of near-infinite number of ants, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies, and blood-guzzling mosquitoes."

"Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the night there are no mansions, no celebrations. Wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking."

""In the American Southwest, only the wilderness is worth saving."

"There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame."

""A friend and I took a walk up beyond Coconino County, Arizona. I found an arrow sign, pointed to the north. Nothing of any unusual interest that I could see -- only the familiar sun-blasted sandstone, a few scrubby clumps of blackbush and prickly pear, a few acres of nothing where only a lizard could graze. I studied the scene with care. But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world."

"Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure."

""In my case, it was love at first sight. The kind of love that makes a man selfish, possessive, irritable..."

"New life will be built upon these things."

""...an unrequited and excessive love."

"It is this."

""That's why."

I'm sure I have written here before about Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm -- about the size of this letter i (without the dot) -- that has become one of the most thoroughly studied animals in biology. Its habits are humble. It is nonpathogenic, noninfectious. It breeds prodigiously. It is transparent. It can be frozen and thawed alive. And heaven knows what else makes it the darling of the wormologists..

More than anything else, it is about a simple an organism as you can find with a nervous system. C. elegans (of the dominant hermaphrodite variety; there are also a few males to enliven the mix) has just 959 cells, which have been individually mapped, exactly the same from worm to worm. Think of that! Less than a thousand cells and it eats, defecates, wiggles from place to place, lays eggs, and otherwise lives a rather full and robust life. Contrast that with the tens of trillions of cells in the human body.

More. C. elegan's genome programs not 959 cells, but 1090. Of these, 131 are slated in advance to die, rather like the cells that die between the webbed digits of a human embryo to give us our useful fingers. Apoptosis, it's called. Programmed cell death. The 2002 Nobel Prize in physiology went to Sydney Brenner, Robert Horvitz and John Sulston for their work on programmed cell death in C. elegans. Tens of billions of cells in our own bodies die each day by apoptosis. We are dying all the time, in bits and pieces. Death is always with us, holding hands with life, hitchhiking in our genome. Whispering in our ear: "I'm here." Nibble, nibble. Waiting, waiting, for the full feast, the final meal.

Last week's New York Times Book review highlighted the ten bestselling non-fiction books of 2011. Here, I thought, is a good snapshot of America.

Let's start with #10: Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, the story of the presidential assassination and its aftermath. Sounds like the kind of story I'd like to read, except the primary author puts me off. Unfair? Maybe. But I prefer my history from historians without a political ax to grind.

#9: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Read it and wrote about it here. A smart, honest book by an unbiased historian. Three cheers for Jobs; three cheers for America.

#8: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Don't know why I haven't read any of Gladwell's books; he seems to define a genre all by himself. I suppose I should slip one or two on the bottom of the pile, just to be au courant.

#7: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Seems like I read this book a decade ago, and here it is still on the best-seller list. As an author, of course, I'm madly jealous. Give this to Walls; it's a compelling read.

#6: A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard, the girl who was kidnapped at age 11 and held prisoner for 18 years. I'll skip this one, but I'm glad she's getting something to compensate for her lost youth.

#5: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, the story of the US ambassador to Germany and his daughter during the run-up to World War II. Read this on the recommendation of my spouse, and because I'd read and enjoyed Larson's previous outings. A smart book that fumbles to a close.

#4: Bossypants by Tina Fey. I'd probably like it. If Tina had been McCain's running mate last time around, I might have voted Republican. (Just kidding.)

#3: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Blogged this here. A generous, big-hearted book that recounts the history of cell research during the past half-century, along with the story of Henrietta. Amazing, and heartening, to see it here, #3, two years later.

#2: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, "an Olympic runner's story of survival as a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II." I know nothing about this book, but like the others above, it suggests that the American reading public has nothing to be ashamed of.

And then, after 50 weeks on the bestseller list, we come to #1: Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent, "a boy's encounter with Jesus and the angels." I've taken note of this book before. Where's Tina Fey when we need her?

Visitors here will know that I'm an early riser, and the first thing I do -- after coffee and sunrise -- is post a musing. You will also have noted that a few times since I arrived on the island the posts have appeared late in the day. This is a small island, in an unwealthy country, and my connection to cyberspace is not always ready and waiting. If anything goes amiss during the evening or night, it's not likely to be fixed until someone arrives at work the next morning.

Other utilities are equally dicey. One memorable day last week, the internet, telephone, water and electricity all went out separately during the same 24-hour period.

I'm not complaining. That's why we are here. And things are infinitely better than when we first arrived nearly 20 years ago. What attracted us to this place was precisely its tenuous hold on modernity. Here were a cheerful people not yet caught up in the rat race, who still preferred an extra hour of leisure to an extra hundred bucks, who knew how to relax, make do, improvise, grow a cabbage, sip their coffee and watch the sunrise. When the electricity went off, well, you just stopped what you were doing and waited till it came back on. If the water slowed to a dribble, you probably didn't need that shower anyway. If there was no fresh milk at the market, you opened a packet of Parmalat and waited till the weekly mail boat arrived.

I don't want to sound like a happy-go-lucky Robinson Crusoe, or a condescending affluent American. I am grateful for the privilege of being here, and I am glad to see the island catching up with the times, especially as we get older and less resilient. But I know too that something is being lost, not least because of the homogenizing influence of American cable television. The kids at the high school are losing the gracious courtesy that used to astonish us when we picked them up along the road. They didn't have cell phones, but they had impeccable manners.

Why are the ancient stories so resilient in the face of the overwhelming practical success of science?

An obvious answer: Because the ancient stories promise that death is not final.

Then there's the possibility of habituation: We adhere to the traditions we grew up in. The overwhelming number of Christians, for example, would almost certainly be Muslims had they been born and raised in Qom, Iran. Once a story of "how things are" gets tangled in the neurons of the brain, it's a devil of a time to shake it free.

Add to this the solace of believing that the creator of 100 billion galaxies has me -- yes, me personally -- in mind. It's like getting a birthday card from President Obama ("Good luck, Chet. I'm thinking of you on your special day."), except in spades.

And so on. All of this against a one-size-fits-all scientific story of how things are that is hard to understand in its details and sets us adrift in an (effectively) infinite universe with no one to man the oars but ourselves.

But let me put a more congenial spin on it. We are curious creatures by nature. We want answers to the Big Questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is the universe the way it is and not some other way? (That is to say, why are the laws of physics what they are?) How did life begin? What is consciousness? These are fair questions. They are among the biggest questions we can ask. The fact that we ask them is a defining characteristic of our species.

The ancient stories of how things are provide answers -- anthropomorphic, animistic, artificialist -- stories that are satisfyingly easy to understand because they mirror our sense of self.

The scientific story doesn't provide answers, at least not yet and maybe never.

Which brings me back to Ursula Goodenough; "The realization that I needn't have answers to the Big Questions, needn't seek answers to the Big Questions, has served as an epiphany," she writes. It is, in fact, a kind of liberation -- freedom from thrall to the Big Questions -- liberation to revel in the pure "is-ness" of creation, the inexhaustible miracle of the here and now. But "is-ness," in all of it depths and dimensions, requires attention, study, and a certain poetic openness to particulars -- the flower in the crannied wall, the grain of sand. Which is why the scientific story of how things are will not replace religious myths that are there for the effortless taking.

Any global tradition needs to begin with a shared worldview -- a culture-independent, globally accepted consensus as to how things are. From my perspective, this part is easy. How things are is, well, how things are: our scientific account of Nature, an account that can be called The Epic of Evolution. The Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures -- this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true.

I quote from the Introduction of Ursula Goodenough's wonderful book The Sacred Depths of Nature. Readers will know of my admiration for Ursula and her book (if you want a concise introduction to biology, you can't do better). However, I would take gentle exception to one statement in the above passage: "because it happens to be true." I would have said: "because it is the most reliable story we have at the moment."

Actually, I think Ursula would agree. Science is not an infallible body of doctrine. It is an always evolving approximation of "the way things are" based on the widest possible consensus among scientists at any given time. Is it true? It is as true as you can get until it isn't.

Scientists are constantly holding the scientific story of how things are against the refining fire of experience. Generally this means tinkering here and there on the edges of "truth." Occasionally it means a wholesale revamp of fundamental ideas. One could write a book on the confirming characteristics of scientific "truth": empirical consistency, economy, beauty, parsimony, and so on. But if you want the most impressive confirmation of the reliability of the scientific story of how things are, look around you. Science is a truth system that has given us the entirety of modern technology and medical science. As the old Rheingold beer commercial used to say, "We must be doing something right."

It's a story that has the potential to unite us, as Goodenough says, and in practice it does (we all fly airplanes, use the internet, and rely on penicillin). But only in practice. I fear Ursula is too optimistic if she thinks the scientific story of how things are is about to replace any of the other stories of how things are that dominate the lives of the vast majority of humans -- and set us at each other's throats, story against story.

Why are the ancient stories so resilient, in the face of the overwhelming practical success of science? A suggested answer tomorrow.

Click, and then again, to enlarge Anne's Sunday illumination.

A few words of appreciation for English-born artist Rackstraw Downes. (Click pic to enlarge.)

I am not generally a fan of photorealism in painting, preferring some element of abstraction in my landscapes, such as in the work of Wayne Thiebaud. But there is something compelling about Downes' meticulous renderings of urban, industrial and scrubby country environments. He has been called "a bard of weeds." He might equally be called a bard of rust, or crumbling concrete, or dirt.

But no. That is to ignore a delicacy of light and shadow, of water and air, of stainless steel and glistening glass.

You can visit some of his work here.

There is more going on in these paintings than composition, color, and technique, more than disquisitions on the visual perception of three-dimensional space and its representation on two-dimensional surface. Downes wants us to see something that is so commonplace that we seldom see it al all, something that is all around us on every side -- the human-made environment. A world made willy-nilly by human artifice. A world that in some eerie sense overwhelms its makers, ignores us even, mocks us with its own disturbing inorganicity.

But beauty too.

Very little of what Downes chooses to paint was contrived to be beautiful. Its purpose is almost exclusively utilitarian -- a vast untenanted space in the World Trade Center, for example, redeemed from total artifice only by shafts of winter sunlight. But there is a beauty in these paintings that the artist's eye discovers. Or does the artist's eye impose the beauty?

One has to look carefully at Downes' paintings to find the occasional human presence, diminutive doll-like figures going about their business. But there is one human presence that can't be ignored -- that of the artist, the eye that beholds, and through his "being there", we are there too.

Because these images were made brush stroke by brush stroke over an extended timespan, and not by the click of a camera's shutter, we stand there with Downes, watching, watching, watching as he painstakingly applies paint to canvas, forced dab by dab to see the world we have made, a world in which utilitarian artifice has squeezed the organic into graceless nooks and corners. What is required, the artist seems to be saying, is a new esthetic, one that -- for better or worse -- makes room for the patently artificial.