Review of A Brief History of Time 1988

This is the manuscript copy of my review (see scanned pages below). I'm not sure if I ever got a copy of the printed version. It was published sometime in late 1988, in Spectrum, in Little Rock, Arkansas.  I was living in Austin, Texas at the time. Maybe I'd let my subscription to Spectrum expire, since money was difficult to come by after I got fired from my technical writing job in September of '88.  See other posts below for more info on Spectrum and some of my other articles that appeared in it. 

Update, July 2014:

In my review, I mention an error I found on page 21 of A Brief History of Time.  (See pages 3 and 4 of my manuscript.)  I checked the Pine Bluff library's copy of A Brief History of Time and the error had been corrected in it, although it isn't a newer edition than my copy or even a later printing, as far as I can tell.  But in the process of comparing the two copies, I noticed mine is a Book-of-the-Month club printing, given to me in April 1988 by Karen Jo (we were married at the time). So it was probably printed even earlier than the normal first printing and thus had that uncorrected error (and others too, probably) in it. The book can now be read in its entirety on the Web.  Here's the uncorrected sentence from page 21 in my copy of the book:  "The time it has taken is, after all, just the light's speed--which the observers agree on--multiplied by the distance the light has traveled--which they do not agree on." The problem: time is equal to distance divided by speed, no matter what speed you're talking about.  Here's the corrected sentence, as it appears on page 12 of the link I provided above:  "The time taken is the distance the light has traveled--which the observers do not agree on--divided by the light's speed--which they do agree on."  Hawking, as is his way, likes to joke about the publication date of the book being April 1st 1988, which I guess was his choice.  "Black Holes Ain't So Black" is chapter 7 of the book, not chapter 4 as I say in my review.  Hey, we all make mistakes.  The big question is will they be discovered, or admitted to, and corrected?

 

"The Power of Crystals"

By Elizabeth F. Shores and David Trulock

Shamaan Ochaum is a dream therapist from Austin, Texas who brings groups of clients to Mt. Ida. Together, they sleep outside on Fisher Mountain, where Ochaum says the underground veins of quartz crystals emanate powers which enable them to "increase the dream experience." The place has "a very intense life charge," which fosters a sense of peace and well-being, she said.

Ochaum claims to be the daughter of a Shoshoni medicine man, and said she is carrying on the tradition of using quartz crystal as a tool in healing.

Quartz crystal is unique, she believes, because it emanates electromagnetic energy in an unchanging pulse. This energy has a healing effect on physical ailments, Ochaum believes, as when she carefully moves a crystal upward along a person's spine. It can also be used to gain a "vision" of the interior of the human body, she said, in order to locate and identify illnesses such as ovarian cysts, and can even help a person move into an altered state of consciousness.

Whether or not one believes in quartz crystals as sources of supernatural power, there is no question that the stones do possess scientifically proven natural powers, governed by the laws of physics.

Many crystals, including quartz, are piezoelectric, and it is this property that makes them so useful. 'Piezo" means pressure, so piezoelectricity means "pressure-electricity." Putting pressure on a piezoelectric crystal generates a voltage; conversely, applying a voltage generates internal pressure, causing the crystal to change its physical shape very slightly.

Because sound is a variation in air pressure, piezoelectric crystals have been used for many years in the recording and reproduction of music. Microphones, phonograph cartridges and high-frequency "tweeters" in loudspeakers are examples of devices that have exploited the piezoelectric effect.  Improved magnets or magnetic fluids have replaced piezo crystals in some applications, however, since the dynamic range and frequency response of crystals are not ideally suited to audio.

It is, in part, this physical quality of crystals that prompts some to believe that they possess special powers. Ochaum described these benefits of quartz while attending the Fourth Annual Quartz Crystal Festival at Mt. Ida October 24. Crystal dealers came from around the country, and the festival offered $1,000 in cash prizes for big crystals in a Championship Quartz Crystal Dig competition. There was also a quilt show.

Ochaum grants that these mystical effects of crystals are not empirically measurable.

"Science is skittish about doing research because it is so subjective," she said of crystals' alleged powers. And understanding their power is something of a balancing act, because some of the power may come from the stone itself, while some may come from the person's faith in it.

Don Owens, a geologist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, does not reject the claims of quartz's mystical powers, but, he added, "I disbelieve more than I believe."

"There are obviously some people who have an inner power, such as clairvoyants," he said. "I don't totally disbelieve it."

But others are more skeptical. "I'm a Christian. I put my faith and trust in the Lord. I don't need a durn rock," said Jimmy Reynolds of the National Forest Service. "I think they're kooks."

Mike Howard, a geologist with the Arkansas Geological Commission, has heard "a never-ending series of wild claims" about the powers of quartz. "I don't believe it, but that's neither here nor there.... A placebo in any form can get results."

But apart from faith-healing and audio reproduction, there are other uses for crystals as well. Quartz in particular is suited for very high-frequency applications, in the range of millions of vibrations per second. The ubiquitous "quartz watch" is one such application. A tiny sliver of quartz, with its high degree of geometric order, has certain natural vibrational frequencies called resonant frequencies. When an electrical frequency corresponding to a resonant frequency is applied to a piece of quartz, the vibrations are extremely stable over long periods of time and are relatively unaffected by changes in temperature.

The stability of the quartz time-base is used in computer circuits, providing the clock signal that determines how fast the computer operates and how well all the operations are synchronized. Quartz resonant frequencies are used by radio and TV stations to maintain their assigned frequencies, and constitute the basic tuning standard in most newer radios and televisions.

Also, the high-frequency vibrational modes of some piezoelectric crystals are ideal for generating and detecting ultrasonic underwater sound, an activity that has become more important in this age of ultra-quiet, nuclear-armed submarines that can avoid conventional sonar.

Although large single crystals are rare and valued for their beauty, microscopic crystalline structure itself is quite common. All rocks and metals exhibit a microscopic crystal structure. Salt, sand, snow and ice are examples of different forms of crystalline structure. The silicon computer chips produced and designed in California's Silicon Valley provide an example of the practical importance of artificially grown crystals, and modern electronics at its most fundamental level is nothing more than the study of how electrons behave in crystals.

(2014 notes:  I had recently moved to Austin when this article was published in December 1987 in Little Rock (in the weekly alternative newspaper Spectrum).  I wrote only the physics-related parts, at the request of the editor. I had never heard of Shaaman Ochaum, and still haven't. In the summer of 1997 I made copies of this article and gave them to students in a second semester conceptual physics class I was teaching at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, which is now called Texas State University-San Marcos.  Several students asked me after class if I knew how to get in touch with Shaaman Ochaum.  They were disappointed when I told them I didn't. This article was a side-bar to a larger, front-page article by Elizabeth Shores on crystal hunting and mining in the Ouachita National Forest near Hot Springs.)

Tickling the Dragon's Tail at Los Alamos

Nuel Pharr Davis describes Slotin's job: 

Slotin sat at his desk amid a clutter of radiation counters. He laid the bomb-metal pieces on his desktop far enough apart to be out of range of each others' neutrons. Then, with a screwdriver, he slowly pushed them together. As he did so, each piece responded to neutrons from the other by emitting more neutrons. The effect was a progressive multiplication of neutrons that, if charted, would appear as an ascending curve. Slotin did not push the pieces all the way together. He stopped as soon as in his mind's eye he could extrapolate the ascending curve into the vertical straight line that would stand for neutron multiplication in a detonating bomb.

 

Interested only in Dragon

Davis describes Slotin as "A thin, short, blue-bristled man who usually looked in need of a shave, [who] at age thirty-one had dark circles under his eyes, which contrasted oddly with the heavy tan of his sunken cheeks. He seldom spoke with much animation except about the Dragon and about his other interest, the extrapolation of blast and radiation casualties."

The extrapolation of radiation casualties apparently was something that not many of the men or women at Los Alamos thought about very much. They knew there would be radiation casualties, but they severely underestimated the extent of the casualties, according to some recent reports.

Perhaps some insight can be gained from Davis' book, although one must tread lightly: the book was criticized by two knowledgeable reviewers because of some wrongly-credited and other possibly-invented quotations.

Davis writes that most of the scientists at Los Alamos, the weapons lab several hundred miles north of the Jornada del Muerto, let Robert Oppenheimer, their leader, take "protective custody of their emotions." Others may have had no emotions that needed custody. At any rate, before the Hiroshima born was dropped, only a few Los Alamos scientists showed any emotional reaction to the consequences of the use of the bomb. Slotin was one who showed emotion,  but not much in the way of sympathy.

In The Uranium People, a sort of anecdotal history of the beginning of the nuclear age, published in 1979, Leona Marshall Libby, a Manhattan Project scientist, wrote about Slotin. She had known him from their days together at the University of Chicago:

He and I were laboratory assistants in a second year physics course that went on several hours two afternoons a week.  There were hours at a time with nothing for us to do except be there, so we spent the time talking, leaning against the warm steam radiators looking out at the snowy campus or watching the tiny spring leaves growing.

He had spent several years in Spain as member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade [in the Spanish Civil War].  It had been for him a marvelous adventure as well as a crusade.

 

Slotin Angered Fermi  

Davis contrasts Slotin with Enrico Fermi, who sometimes took breaks from his theoretical calculations by working on a different experiment in the same building with Slotin. "Fermi had a hard, clear mind," David writes, "which liked to wrestle with only limited questions, such as the behavior of slow and fast neutrons and high-energy particles. Slotin's behavior angered him by raising questions of a different order."

Fermi, who died of cancer in 1954 at the age of 53, seemed to be one whose emotions needed no protective custody. Slotin, on the other hand, might have benefitted from some emotional assistance, but would not have accepted such an abrogation of responsibility, if Davis is correct.

Nonetheless, Oppenheimer seemed to understand Slotin, perhaps because he felt much the same way. The following paragraph from Lawrence and Oppenheimer offers a vignette of Slotin and also some insight into the reason for Oppenheimer's success with the atomic bomb:

In its frustration at having become the physicists' test animal, the human race should find a certain comfort in the thought that Slotin knew what he was doing. He could not have passed the most elementary personality-profile test of the kind now routinely used in government and industry. By giving Slotin responsibility and by going to relax in spiritual rapport with him in Omega [the building where the Dragon test was performed], Oppenheimer too outraged present-day administrative standards. His reason, of course, was that he wanted to build the bomb. If he had employed only sound, wholesome organization men for his project, Los Alamos would still be designing impressive remote- control machines with which to check its first implosion assembly.

Cursed Already

After the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, things did not go well at Los Alamos. On October 16, 1945, Oppenheimer's last day as director of the laboratory, he accepted an award from the Army for the laboratory's contribution to ending the war and said, in a speech reproduced in Weapons and Hope (see previous post below), "If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima."

Davis takes his cue from Oppenheimer and writes:  

The men in Omega showed they knew they were cursed already. Early in August, one low-grade Omega technician died in a chemical explosion and two were blinded. No further uranium bombs could be made for months, but a third plutonium bomb had been readied for the Dragon check. Slotin, sulking because Oppenheimer would not let him go see Japanese casualties at first hand, took a holiday, leaving his chief assistant Harry Daghlian, to undertake it. Daghlian, also thin, dark and morose, got an overdose of radiation and died on September 15. Slotin performed the check and several others, then next spring on May 21 gained what he seemed to long for. Poking the segments of the Bikini test bomb a little too close together, he set up a blue ionization glow in the room. Lunging from his chair, he covered the segments with his body until a half dozen observers could file out.

By that time it was too late for Slotin, but the most talented woman physicist on the Mesa, Elizabeth Graves, was asked by telephone to compute the chances [for survival] of a man who had watched with his hand on Slotin's shoulder ... Elizabeth Graves was a no-nonsense type -- Hiroshima, she used to say, was no worse than napalm. Methodically she began punching a calculator, then learned from another telephone call that the subject was her husband. 'My mind went blank,' she said. 'I couldn't do the simplest sums in arithmetic.' Graves survived with cataracts. Something like superstitious terror halted further necessary Dragon checks until entirely different methods could be devised from those Oppenheimer had kept going with complete safety during the war.

Slotin died within days of acute radiation sickness.

Notes: The caption on the photo should say the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test of 1946, not 1948. Slotin made up the story about fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Info about Slotin, Daghlian, radiation sickness, and the "demon core" that killed both Daghlian and Slotin can be found at Wikipedia's Louis Slotin webpage.

Review of "Weapons and Hope" from August '85

War Stories, Weapons Talks, and the Legacy of World Wars



"THE DEVIL:  And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. . . . There is nothing in man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons."

--from Man and Superman, by George Bernard Shaw (1903).

"Our lives are fairly good, fairly peaceful. We seem to go on almost untouched except as the arms race gives employment to many. Overt hysteria has declined since the fifties. Perhaps people will have time to think. No one should say there is no hope."
 
--J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in the final paragraph of Lawrence and Oppenheimer, by Nuel Pharr Davis (1968).



WEAPONS AND HOPE by Freeman Dyson; Harper Colophon Books, Harper and Row; $6.95.

 

By David Trulock

“I was sitting at home eating a quiet breakfast with my mother, when the morning paper arrived with the news of Hiroshima,” writes Freeman Dyson in Weapons and Hope.  “I understood at once what it meant.  ‘Thank God for that,’ I said.  I knew that Tiger Force would not fly, and I would never have to kill anybody again.”

Tiger Force was a fleet of 300 bombers that Winston Churchill planned to use to help the United States defeat Japan.  The bombers were to be based in Okinawa, and in early August 1945, when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, Dyson was awaiting orders to leave.  However, he was not expected to fly with the bombers over Japan.  He would have stayed in Okinawa, as he had stayed in England during the bombing of Germany, “calculating how to murder people more efficiently,” as he puts it.

In more technical but less accurate terms, Dyson did operations research for the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command.  He was assigned to the job in July 1943, when he was 19 years old and had completed two years of college mathematics.

Dyson is now a physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Although he is also a consultant to the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the Department of Defense, he no longer calculates how to kill people more efficiently.  His hope is that the ideas in Weapons and Hope could bring civilians and military people together in a way that might prevent the extremely efficient form of killing that would occur in a nuclear war.

Cultural Patterns More Durable

Dyson’s straightforward style of writing is, in itself, enough to make one hopeful.  “I chose the title Weapons and Hope for this book,” he explains, “because I want to discuss the gravest problem now facing mankind, the problem of nuclear weapons, from a human rather than a technical point of view.”

He continues by saying, “Central to my approach is a belief that human cultural patterns are more durable than either the technology of weapons of the political arrangements in which the weapons have become embedded.”

The nuclear weapons problem is exacerbated by the difference in the worlds inhabited by the people Dyson refers to as the victims of current weaponeering plans and the warriors who make those plans.  The victims deplore the strategies of the warriors and the warriors ignore the moral indignation of the victims.  It is Dyson’s hope that the two groups will start listening to each other.

In the first chapter of the book, “Agenda for a Meeting of the Minds,” Dyson discusses why the victims and warriors don’t now listen to each other:                          

    

If it is difficult to translate their [the peace movement’s] message effectively into the language of the generals, it is even more difficult to translate the legitimate concerns of the generals into a language which pays some respect to ordinary human values and feelings. … The military establishment looks on the peace movement as a collection of ignorant people meddling in a business they do not understand, while the peace movement looks on the military establishment as a collection of misguided people protected by bureaucratic formality from all contact with human realities.  Both these preconceptions create barriers to understanding.  Both preconceptions are to some extent true.

One point of contention existing now between victims and warriors is the question of how many people would survive a nuclear war.  The question is usually answered in quantitative terms by both sides.  The victims, often quoting Jonathan Schell or Carl Sagan, say the answer is zero—nobody would survive a nuclear war.  The warriors produce various quantitative answers quite different from zero, using calculations based partially on civil defense measures.  Dyson proposes to “break the deadlock” by dogmatically adopting a third position:

My dogma is that the question of survival is undecidable … .   It says, since survival may be possible, it makes sense to try to save lives.  It says, since survival may be impossible, it makes no sense to count the lives saved.

Dysons proposal is simple—possibly too simple for some people to understand—and far-reaching.  Accepting it would mean that peace activists, arms controllers, and military people could no longer engage each other in a war of numbers.  And, since all are interested in saving lives—although the military view of saving lives is rather one-sided—there is common ground, Dyson says, for a debate that would not be a “dialogue of the deaf.”

Targeting Policies Clash

Perhaps an even more important product of Dyson’s proposal is that it could provide a better foundation for Soviet and American nuclear weapons limitation treaties.  The current nuclear weapons policies of the Soviet Union and the United States are basically incompatible.  American strategic nuclear policy forbids a first strike of intercontinental missiles against the Soviet Union, but permits a first use of tactical nuclear weapons in the defense of Europe.  Soviet policy is just the reverse.  It forbids a first use in Europe, but allows a first strike against the U.S. in defense of Soviet troops already under tactical nuclear attack.  Dyson says the world would be a safer place if both nations adopted the same policy.

In addition to being an important tool for arms control and an eloquent statement of the nuclear weapons problem, Dyson's book offers also some illuminating and entertaining "war stories," as he calls them. One of the stories begins with Dyson as a high school student, walking home from a music lesson after school. On his daily walks home, Dyson passed through a World War I monument known as the War Cloister. It was dedicated to the soldiers from his small school who’d died in what was then referred to simply as The War.  The 600 names are carved on the outside wall of the monument.

On the day Dyson writes about, it is almost dark as he passes through one of the three openings in the War Cloister's wall. In the near darkness, he sees clearly, he says, "a young man in the uniform of The War." Dyson looks again, and the young man is not there. He tells his friends later and they do not find his story hard to believe. "We were agnostics," Dyson explains, "not quite believing in ghosts and not quite disbelieving."

Dyson and his friends were also ardent pacifists, no doubt in large part due to the stories they had heard their parents tell about The War. Dyson and his pacifist friends had trouble identifying with any of the politicians or movements of the time.  "Feeling ourselves doomed, we were comforted by the thought that the whole society in which we lived was doomed equally," he writes.  "We saw no hope that any acceptable future would emerge from the coming war. We had made up our minds that we would not be led like sheep to the slaughter as the class of 1915 had been."

But pacifism lost its moral luster for Dyson with the establishment of the Vichy government in France in 1940. The Vichy government was in a sense pacifist, having abandoned violent resistance to Hitler in favor of collaboration with the Nazis. Dyson writes that pacifism was destroyed as a moral force once it became impossible to distinguish the sincere pacifists from opportunists and collaborators.

War Stories as Parables

Soon after the capitulation of France, Dyson re-enlisted in the Officers Training Corps. In less than three years, he worked his way into the very headquarters of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, where he found himself recommending flight patterns that would decrease the losses of Allied bombers to German fighters while at the same time increasing the number of bomber collisions.

"After the war ended," he writes, "I read reports of the trials of men who had been high up in the Eichmann organization. They had sat in their offices, writing memoranda and calculating how to murder people more efficiently, just like me. The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, while I went free. I felt a certain sympathy for these men. Probably many of them loathed the SS as much as I loathed Bomber Command, but they, too, had not had the courage to speak out. Probably many of them. like me, lived through the whole six years of the war without ever seeing a dead human being."

Throughout the book there are other stories that may better be described as parables. Dyson describes the importance of parables in the final paragraph of the first chapter of Weapons and Hope:

 When I look back into the past, I find in the two world wars the richest source of parables to help us see where we are going. That is why this book is filled with war stories. The most important lessons come from World War I.  World War I, taken as a whole, is a gigantic parable of the war we are trying to avoid. It was a war of peculiar ugliness, fought with exceptional stupidity and brutality. It destroyed permanently a great part of European civilization. It was started for reasons which in retrospect seem almost trivial. The damage and loss suffered by all parties were utterly out of proportion to the initial quarrel between Serbia and Austria.  In all these respects, the history of World War I holds up a mirror to us, showing us how small follies lead to great disasters, how ordinarily intelligent people walk open-eyed into hell.