Work in Progress

Magical Inventions or the Art of Discovery?

‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’*

*Arthur C. Clarke, in Profiles of the Future, 2000

Preface

We are surrounded by machines and tools that we do not understand. Can you explain the workings of your mobile phone? Does this matter?  Yes, because these are not magic. Misunderstanding the nature of machines leads to mistrust, even fear of them. This is a problem because we have created a civilization dependent on them to survive. There is no going back to simpler times; to live happily we need to extract and control far more energy from the world and sun than is available from original nature. Now our lives are changing fast in the final stages of a revolution into societies that need to know and understand how to invent machines and tools and ways of organising ourselves in adaptation to the contraints of our world.

            Complicated and bewildering machines may be but the workings of them can all be traced back, either through simpler and simpler tools, or to inventions derived from unexpected scientific discoveries. Some of these discoveries about nature remain so weird that few people can get a grasp of them. Nevertheless, there is deep simplicity at the heart of these phenomena, and often enough is understood to devise new machines. An aura of magic around machines leads to misunderstanding the process of invention. Unlike the arts, where an infinite variety is possible, invention depends on an understanding of the singular way the natural world works. From  observing how logs can be used as rollers thus inventing the wheel, through to discovering the existence of radio waves followed by understanding them sufficiently to devise that telephone.

            Sometimes necessity really is the mother of invention: an obvious demand prompts an inventor to get to work, spurred on by the fun of invention and the promise of riches. Sometimes researchers find something totally unexpected and think - can we turn this into a patent and become famous? Maybe they can, but only if a market exists or can be promoted. Other researchers study how the natural world works, justifying their expenses with claims of an imminent breakthrough to an invention that people can use. Sometimes this happens, eventually. So scientists can be inventors, and inventors are usually scientists, despite the procedures and ethos of scientific discovery and of technological invention being separate. Invention or discovery - there is no need to choose. They are both as separate and essentially together as the sexes in creative fusion.

         This book probes six modern examples of inventions representing physics, chemistry and biology. The mysterious process of their creation is revealed from original accounts of what led to what, of the blind groping in the fog of ignorance, the flashes of inspiration livening the long slog through trial after trial. It is all here in a panoply of heroes, and of those without whom there would be no heroes. Read of fishing trips and serendipity, competition with collaborators, bitter rivalries, global networks, academia versus commerce, sober hypotheses and wild flights of imagination, the exhilaration of understanding, staring into the limits of human comprehension.        

For a sample from a chapter, click below on: laser-chapter-sample.

Synopsis

of

Magical Inventions or the Art of Discovery?

Table of Contents

Preface, Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Reading from the depths of chemistry: the invention of nylon (12,000 words)

2. Something strange in serum: the vaccine against hepatitis B (13,000 words)

3. An invention from nowhere: the wandering path to synthetic insulin (16,000 words)

4. From black bodies to bar codes: lasers (15,000 words)

5. Electricity from water: struggling toward fusion power (~15,000 words, to be written)

6. Patching holes in the ozone layer (~15,000 words, to be written)

7. A message emerges [~2,000 words, to be written]

Notes for chapters 1 to 7 (one page per chapter)

References (a unified listing, approx. 12 pages)

Index

Synopses of Chapters

1. Reading from the depths of chemistry: the invention of nylon. The story of the revolution in chemistry brought about by Hermann Staudinger in Germany with his theory of macromolecules. This inspired Wallace Carothers in the USA to verify his theory whilst he was employed in the research laboratories of DuPont chemical company. He was a square peg in a round hole but he discovered how polymers are formed, and enabled the birth of effective plastics manufacture.

2. Something strange in serum: the vaccine against hepatitis B. How a group of researchers on genetic markers for disease, led by Baruch Blumberg in the USA, by pure serendipity came across a strange protein in blood. This turned out to be a part of the virus of hepatitis B and of direct value for vaccination. Competing researchers on this virus attempted to invent a vaccine but Blumberg was the first to patent it, enabling a licensing agreement for Merck pharmaceutical company to manufacture it.

3. An invention from nowhere: the wandering path to synthetic insulin. Studies on the structure of protein became a holy grail to researchers in Britain using the method of X-ray crystallography. This field was revolutionised by the lateral thinking of outsiders such as physicist Francis Crick and geneticist James Watson in Cambridge, who rapidly discovered the structure of DNA. They were theorists, dependent on the observational data of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins in London. Far harder was to discover how proteins are synthesized and that could only be done by an international collaboration that was dynamic and competitive. These discoveries lay unused until a route to synthetic proteins was incidentally discovered by a separate group of geneticists in the USA, specially Herbert Boyer.

4. From black bodies to bar codes: lasers. Max Planck started this story with his desperate solution to a classical problem known as blackbody radiation. Reluctantly he accepted the logic of his own calculations, solving the problem by inventing quantum theory. Soon Albert Einstein was finishing his studies on the nature of light. He developed Planck’s idea into the proposition of stimulated emission of radiation which should amplify light. Little did he know where that would lead. It was not light waves that were first exploited for this but microwaves which had become enormously important for the second world war. Charles Townes in New York first produced a contraption for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation — the maser. But a competitor in the same department, Gordon Gould, attempted to patent something more useful using light — the laser. Suddenly a race was on and an outsider working over on the west coast beat the big guys to it. Ted Maiman created laser light, for the first time in the natural world, using a neat little device that looked as if he bought it from a electrical goods shop.

5. Electricity from water: struggling toward fusion power. During the miracle year of Albert Einstein’s career, 1905, he derived his famous equation hinting that vast amounts of energy could be unlocked from the heart of atoms. It was Ernest Rutherford who first transmuted one element into another but he dismissed as ‘moonshine’ the possibility of generating useful power from such reactions. By the time atomic bombs were being made in the Manhattan project the idea of using fusion reactions, as found in the Sun by Hans Bethe, was taken seriously and by 1946 the first patent for a fusion power plant was obtained by George Thomson in Britain. Close on his heels was Lyman Spitzer in America and Andrei Sakharov in Russia. By the 1960s claims were made that electricity would soon be too cheap to bother metering it. Now the ambition of the projects comes up against the need to adjust to dwindling supplies of carbon fuels. A potent mix of anxiety and yearning for this seemingly magical technique buffets the politics of how it may finally be invented as a working device, and finally managed.

6. Patching holes in the ozone layer. This story starts with French discoverers of ozone in a layer in the atmosphere, carries on to Thomas Midgely the American inventor of chlorofluorocarbons, then to leads Gordon Dobson and Paul Crutzen in Europe who respectively monitored the layer and discovered the holes in it. The meaning of invention will be expanded here to include a managerial system on a global scale: the international treaties to limit the use of ozone depleting chemicals, such as refrigerator gas.

7. A message emerges. People are intrigued by mysteries and are ready to accept seeming magic as an explanation in this complex and puzzling world. Life is too short to find out how this computer works. But equally, curiosity is central to what makes us human. Is this new plant good to eat? Yes! How can we get more of it — if we plant its seeds by the river will it grow bigger fruit? Starting from there we can now fly to the Moon, with Mars next destination; taking with us an understanding that the atoms constituting our bodies were created in the stars.

Well, the fact that our atoms came from the stars may be fascinating but is it any use? Where that specific question might take us is at the moment unanswerable — a job for science fiction writers. But understanding the deep nature of how atoms behave gives us the ability to invent the storage discs and flash memories of this computer, to invent the solid-state laser for the drive readers, and whatever innovation that an electronics engineer could provide next year.

How can this creative process be understood? Talent and genius are mysterious qualities and if we want to find out more about them and how they can be encouraged it is best to start from the viewpoint of the discoverers and inventors themselves when they stared intently into the fog of unknowing.