Bruce Sterling

Essays. FSF Columns

OUTER CYBERSPACE

Dreaming of space-flight, and predicting its future, have

always been favorite pastimes of science fiction. In my first science

column for F&SF, I can't resist the urge to contribute a bit to this

grand tradition.

A science-fiction writer in 1991 has a profound advantage over

the genre's pioneers. Nowadays, space-exploration has a past as

well as a future. "The conquest of space" can be judged today, not

just by dreams, but by a real-life track record.

Some people sincerely believe that humanity's destiny lies in the

stars, and that humankind evolved from the primordial slime in order

to people the galaxy. These are interesting notions: mystical and

powerful ideas with an almost religious appeal. They also smack a

little of Marxist historical determinism, which is one reason why the

Soviets found them particularly attractive.

Americans can appreciate mystical blue-sky rhetoric as well as

anybody, but the philosophical glamor of "storming the cosmos"

wasn't enough to motivate an American space program all by itself.

Instead, the Space Race was a creation of the Cold War -- its course

was firmly set in the late '50s and early '60s. Americans went into

space *because* the Soviets had gone into space, and because the

Soviets were using Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin to make a case that

their way of life was superior to capitalism.

The Space Race was a symbolic tournament for the newfangled

intercontinental rockets whose primary purpose (up to that point) had

been as instruments of war. The Space Race was the harmless,

symbolic, touch-football version of World War III. For this reason

alone: that it did no harm, and helped avert a worse clash -- in my

opinion, the Space Race was worth every cent. But the fact that it was

a political competition had certain strange implications.

Because of this political aspect, NASA's primary product was

never actual "space exploration." Instead, NASA produced public-

relations spectaculars. The Apollo project was the premiere example.

The astonishing feat of landing men on the moon was a tremendous

public-relations achievement, and it pretty much crushed the Soviet

opposition, at least as far as "space-racing" went.

On the other hand, like most "spectaculars," Apollo delivered

rather little in the way of permanent achievement. There was flag-

waving, speeches, and plaque-laying; a lot of wonderful TV coverage;

and then the works went into mothballs. We no longer have the

capacity to fly human beings to the moon. No one else seems

particularly interested in repeating this feat, either; even though the

Europeans, Indians, Chinese and Japanese all have their own space

programs today. (Even the Arabs, Canadians, Australians and

Indonesians have their own satellites now.)

In 1991, NASA remains firmly in the grip of the "Apollo

Paradigm." The assumption was (and is) that only large, spectacular

missions with human crews aboard can secure political support for

NASA, and deliver the necessary funding to support its eleven-billion-

dollar-a-year bureaucracy. "No Buck Rogers, no bucks."

The march of science -- the urge to actually find things out

about our solar system and our universe -- has never been the driving

force for NASA. NASA has been a very political animal; the space-

science community has fed on its scraps.

Unfortunately for NASA, a few historical home truths are

catching up with the high-tech white-knights.

First and foremost, the Space Race is over. There is no more

need for this particular tournament in 1992, because the Soviet

opposition is in abject ruins. The Americans won the Cold War. In

1992, everyone in the world knows this. And yet NASA is still running

space-race victory laps.

What's worse, the Space Shuttle, one of which blew up in 1986,

is clearly a white elephant. The Shuttle is overly complex, over-

designed, the creature of bureaucratic decision-making which tried to

provide all things for all constituents, and ended-up with an

unworkable monster. The Shuttle was grotesquely over-promoted,

and it will never fulfill the outrageous promises made for it in the '70s.

It's not and never will be a "space truck." It's rather more like a Ming

vase.

Space Station Freedom has very similar difficulties. It costs far

too much, and is destroying other and more useful possibilities for

space activity. Since the Shuttle takes up half NASA's current budget,

the Shuttle and the Space Station together will devour most *all* of

NASA's budget for *years to come* -- barring unlikely large-scale

increases in funding.

Even as a political stage-show, the Space Station is a bad bet,

because the Space Station cannot capture the public imagination.

Very few people are honestly excited about this prospect. The Soviets

*already have* a space station. They've had a space station for years

now. Nobody cares about it. It never gets headlines. It inspires not

awe but tepid public indifference. Rumor has it that the Soviets (or

rather, the *former* Soviets) are willing to sell their "Space Station

Peace" to any bidder for eight hundred million dollars, about one

fortieth of what "Space Station Freedom" will cost -- and nobody can

be bothered to buy it!

Manned space exploration itself has been oversold. Space-

flight is simply not like other forms of "exploring." "Exploring"

generally implies that you're going to venture out someplace, and

tangle hand-to-hand with wonderful stuff you know nothing about.

Manned space flight, on the other hand, is one of the most closely

regimented of human activities. Most everything that is to happen on

a manned space flight is already known far in advance. (Anything not

predicted, not carefully calculated beforehand, is very likely to be a

lethal catastrophe.)

Reading the personal accounts of astronauts does not reveal

much in the way of "adventure" as that idea has been generally

understood. On the contrary, the historical and personal record

reveals that astronauts are highly trained technicians whose primary

motivation is not to "boldly go where no one has gone before," but

rather to do *exactly what is necessary* and above all *not to mess up

the hardware.*

Astronauts are not like Lewis and Clark. Astronauts are the

tiny peak of a vast human pyramid of earth-bound technicians and

mission micro-managers. They are kept on a very tight

(*necessarily* tight) electronic leash by Ground Control. And they

are separated from the environments they explore by a thick chrysalis

of space-suits and space vehicles. They don't tackle the challenges of

alien environments, hand-to-hand -- instead, they mostly tackle the

challenges of their own complex and expensive life-support

machinery.

The years of manned space-flight have provided us with the

interesting discovery that life in free-fall is not very good for people.

People in free-fall lose calcium from their bones -- about half a percent

of it per month. Having calcium leach out of one's bones is the same

grim phenomenon that causes osteoporosis in the elderly --

"dowager's hump." It makes one's bones brittle. No one knows quite

how bad this syndrome can get, since no one has been in orbit much

longer than a year; but after a year, the loss of calcium shows no

particular sign of slowing down. The human heart shrinks in free-

fall, along with a general loss of muscle tone and muscle mass. This

loss of muscle, over a period of months in orbit, causes astronauts and

cosmonauts to feel generally run-down and feeble.

There are other syndromes as well. Lack of gravity causes

blood to pool in the head and upper chest, producing the pumpkin-

faced look familiar from Shuttle videos. Eventually, the body reacts

to this congestion by reducing the volume of blood. The long-term

effects of this are poorly understood. About this time, red blood cell

production falls off in the bone marrow. Those red blood cells which

are produced in free-fall tend to be interestingly malformed.

And then, of course, there's the radiation hazard. No one in

space has been severely nuked yet, but if a solar flare caught a crew in

deep space, the results could be lethal.

These are not insurmountable medical challenges, but they

*are* real problems in real-life space experience. Actually, it's rather

surprising that an organism that evolved for billions of years in

gravity can survive *at all* in free-fall. It's a tribute to human

strength and plasticity that we can survive and thrive for quite a

while without any gravity. However, we now know what it would be

like to settle in space for long periods. It's neither easy nor pleasant.

And yet, NASA is still committed to putting people in space.

They're not quite sure why people should go there, nor what people

will do in space once they're there, but they are bound and determined

to do this despite all obstacles.

If there were big money to be made from settling people in

space, that would be a different prospect. A commercial career in

free-fall would probably be safer, happier, and more rewarding than,

say, bomb-disposal, or test-pilot work, or maybe even coal-mining.

But the only real moneymaker in space commerce (to date, at least) is

the communications satellite industry. The comsat industry wants

nothing to do with people in orbit.

Consider this: it costs $200 million to make one shuttle flight.

For $200 million you can start your own communications satellite

business, just like GE, AT&T, GTE and Hughes Aircraft. You can join

the global Intelsat consortium and make a hefty 14% regulated profit

in the telecommunications business, year after year. You can do quite

well by "space commerce," thank you very much, and thousands of

people thrive today by commercializing space. But the Space Shuttle,

with humans aboard, costs $30 million a day! There's nothing you can

make or do on the Shuttle that will remotely repay that investment.

After years of Shuttle flights, there is still not one single serious

commercial industry anywhere whose business it is to rent workspace

or make products or services on the Shuttle.

The era of manned spectaculars is visibly dying by inches. It's

interesting to note that a quarter of the top and middle management

of NASA, the heroes of Apollo and its stalwarts of tradition, are

currently eligible for retirement. By the turn of the century, more than

three-quarters of the old guard will be gone.

This grim and rather cynical recital may seem a dismal prospect

for space enthusiasts, but the situation's not actually all that dismal at

all. In the meantime, unmanned space development has quietly

continued apace. It's a little known fact that America's *military*

space budget today is *twice the size* of NASA's entire budget! This

is the poorly publicized, hush-hush, national security budget for

militarily vital technologies like America's "national technical means

of verification," i.e. spy satellites. And then there are military

navigational aids like Navstar, a relatively obscure but very

impressive national asset. The much-promoted Strategic Defence

Initiative is a Cold War boondoggle, and SDI is almost surely not long

for this world, in either budgets or rhetoric -- but both Navstar and

spy satellites have very promising futures, in and/or out of the

military. They promise and deliver solid and useful achievements,

and are in no danger of being abandoned.

And communications satellites have come a very long way since

Telstar; the Intelsat 6 model, for instance, can carry thirty thousand

simultaneous phone calls plus three channels of cable television.

There is enormous room for technical improvement in comsat

technologies; they have a well-established market, much pent-up

demand, and are likely to improve drastically in the future. (The

satellite launch business is no longer a superpower monopoly; comsats

are being launched by Chinese and Europeans. Newly independent

Kazakhstan, home of the Soviet launching facilities at Baikonur, is

anxious to enter the business.)

Weather satellites have proven vital to public safety and

commercial prosperity. NASA or no NASA, money will be found to

keep weather satellites in orbit and improve them technically -- not

for reasons of national prestige or flag-waving status, but because it

makes a lot of common sense and it really pays.

But a look at the budget decisions for 1992 shows that the

Apollo Paradigm still rules at NASA. NASA is still utterly determined

to put human beings in space, and actual space science gravely suffers

for this decision. Planetary exploration, life science missions, and

astronomical surveys (all unmanned) have been cancelled, or

curtailed, or delayed in the1992 budget. All this, in the hope of

continuing the big-ticket manned 50-billion-dollar Space Shuttle, and

of building the manned 30-billion-dollar Space Station Freedom.

The dire list of NASA's sacrifices for 1992 includes an asteroid

probe; an advanced x-ray astronomy facility; a space infrared

telescope; and an orbital unmanned solar laboratory. We would have

learned a very great deal from these projects (assuming that they

would have actually worked). The Shuttle and the Station, in stark

contrast, will show us very little that we haven't already seen.

There is nothing inevitable about these decisions, about this

strategy. With imagination, with a change of emphasis, the

exploration of space could take a very different course.

In 1951, when writing his seminal non-fiction work THE

EXPLORATION OF SPACE, Arthur C. Clarke created a fine

imaginative scenario of unmanned spaceflight.

"Let us imagine that such a vehicle is circling Mars," Clarke

speculated. "Under the guidance of a tiny yet extremely complex

electronic brain, the missile is now surveying the planet at close

quarters. A camera is photographing the landscape below, and the

resulting pictures are being transmitted to the distant Earth along a

narrow radio beam. It is unlikely that true television will be possible,

with an apparatus as small as this, over such ranges. The best that

could be expected is that still pictures could be transmitted at intervals

of a few minutes, which would be quite adequate for most purposes."

This is probably as close as a science fiction writer can come to

true prescience. It's astonishingly close to the true-life facts of the

early Mars probes. Mr. Clarke well understood the principles and

possibilities of interplanetary rocketry, but like the rest of mankind in

1951, he somewhat underestimated the long-term potentials of that

"tiny but extremely complex electronic brain" -- as well as that of

"true television." In the 1990s, the technologies of rocketry have

effectively stalled; but the technologies of "electronic brains" and

electronic media are exploding exponentially.

Advances in computers and communications now make it

possible to speculate on the future of "space exploration" along

entirely novel lines. Let us now imagine that Mars is under thorough

exploration, sometime in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

However, there is no "Martian colony." There are no three-stage

rockets, no pressure-domes, no tractor-trailers, no human settlers.

Instead, there are hundreds of insect-sized robots, every one of

them equipped not merely with "true television," but something much

more advanced. They are equipped for *telepresence.* A human

operator can see what they see, hear what they hear, even guide them

about at will (granted, of course, that there is a steep transmission

lag). These micro-rovers, crammed with cheap microchips and laser

photo-optics, are so exquisitely monitored that one can actually *feel*

the Martian grit beneath their little scuttling claws. Piloting one of

these babies down the Valles Marineris, or perhaps some unknown

cranny of the Moon -- now *that* really feels like "exploration." If

they were cheap enough, you could dune-buggy them.

No one lives in space stations, in this scenario. Instead, our

entire solar system is saturated with cheap monitoring devices. There

are no "rockets" any more. Most of these robot surrogates weigh less

than a kilogram. They are fired into orbit by small rail-guns mounted

on high-flying aircraft. Or perhaps they're launched by laser-ignition:

ground-based heat-beams that focus on small reaction-chambers and

provide their thrust. They might even be literally shot into orbit by

Jules Vernian "space guns" that use the intriguing, dirt-cheap

technology of Gerald Bull's Iraqi "super-cannon." This wacky but

promising technique would be utterly impractical for launching human

beings, since the acceleration g-load would shatter every bone in their

bodies; but these little machines are *tough.*

And small robots have many other advantages. Unlike manned

craft, robots can go into harm's way: into Jupiter's radiation belts, or

into the shrapnel-heavy rings of Saturn, or onto the acid-bitten

smoldering surface of Venus. They stay on their missions,

operational, not for mere days or weeks, but for decades. They are

extensions, not of human population, but of human senses.

And because they are small and numerous, they should be

cheap. The entire point of this scenario is to create a new kind of

space-probe that is cheap, small, disposable, and numerous: as cheap

and disposable as their parent technologies, microchips and video,

while taking advantage of new materials like carbon-fiber, fiber-

optics, ceramic, and artificial diamond.

The core idea of this particular vision is "fast, cheap, and out of

control." Instead of gigantic, costly, ultra-high-tech, one-shot efforts

like NASA's Hubble Telescope (crippled by bad optics) or NASA's

Galileo (currently crippled by a flaw in its communications antenna)

these micro-rovers are cheap, and legion, and everywhere. They get

crippled every day; but it doesn't matter much; there are hundreds

more, and no one's life is at stake. People, even quite ordinary people,

*rent time on them* in much the same way that you would pay for

satellite cable-TV service. If you want to know what Neptune looks

like today, you just call up a data center and *have a look for

yourself.*

This is a concept that would truly involve "the public" in space

exploration, rather than the necessarily tiny elite of astronauts. This

is a potential benefit that we might derive from abandoning the

expensive practice of launching actual human bodies into space. We

might find a useful analogy in the computer revolution: "mainframe"

space exploration, run by a NASA elite in labcoats, is replaced by a

"personal" space exploration run by grad students and even hobbyists.

In this scenario, "space exploration" becomes similar to other

digitized, computer-assisted media environments: scientific

visualization, computer graphics, virtual reality, telepresence. The

solar system is saturated, not by people, but by *media coverage.

Outer space becomes *outer cyberspace.*

Whether this scenario is "realistic" isn't clear as yet. It's just a

science-fictional dream, a vision for the exploration of space:

*circumsolar telepresence.* As always, much depends on

circumstance, lucky accidents, and imponderables like political will.

What does seem clear, however, is that NASA's own current plans are

terribly far-fetched: they have outlived all contact with the political,

economic, social and even technical realities of the 1990s. There is no

longer any real point in shipping human beings into space in order to

wave flags.

"Exploring space" is not an "unrealistic" idea. That much, at

least, has already been proven. The struggle now is over why and

how and to what end. True, "exploring space" is not as "important"

as was the life-and-death Space Race struggle for Cold War pre-

eminence. Space science cannot realistically expect to command the

huge sums that NASA commanded in the service of American political

prestige. That era is simply gone; it's history now.

However: astronomy does count. There is a very deep and

genuine interest in these topics. An interest in the stars and planets is

not a fluke, it's not freakish. Astronomy is the most ancient of human

sciences. It's deeply rooted in the human psyche, has great historical

continuity, and is spread all over the world. It has its own

constituency, and if its plans were modest and workable, and played

to visible strengths, they might well succeed brilliantly.

The world doesn't actually need NASA's billions to learn about

our solar system. Real, honest-to-goodness "space exploration"

never got more than a fraction of NASA's budget in the first place.

Projects of this sort would no longer be created by gigantic

federal military-industrial bureaucracies. Micro-rover projects could

be carried out by universities, astronomy departments, and small-

scale research consortia. It would play from the impressive strengths

of the thriving communications and computer tech of the nineties,

rather than the dying, centralized, militarized, politicized rocket-tech

of the sixties.

The task at hand is to create a change in the climate of opinion

about the true potentials of "space exploration." Space exploration,

like the rest of us, grew up in the Cold War; like the rest of us, it must

now find a new way to live. And, as history has proven, science fiction

has a very real and influential role in space exploration. History

shows that true space exploration is not about budgets. It's about

vision. At its heart it has always been about vision.

Let's create the vision.

BUCKYMANIA

Carbon, like every other element on this planet, came to us from

outer space. Carbon and its compounds are well-known in galactic

gas-clouds, and in the atmosphere and core of stars, which burn

helium to produce carbon. Carbon is the sixth element in the periodic

table, and forms about two-tenths of one percent of Earth's crust.

Earth's biosphere (most everything that grows, moves, breathes,

photosynthesizes, or reads F&SF) is constructed mostly of

waterlogged carbon, with a little nitrogen, phosphorus and such for

leavening.

There are over a million known and catalogued compounds of

carbon: the study of these compounds, and their profuse and intricate

behavior, forms the major field of science known as organic

chemistry.

Since prehistory, "pure" carbon has been known to humankind

in three basic flavors. First, there's smut (lampblack or "amorphous

carbon"). Then there's graphite: soft, grayish-black, shiny stuff --

(pencil "lead" and lubricant). And third is that surpassing anomaly,

"diamond," which comes in extremely hard translucent crystals.

Smut is carbon atoms that are poorly linked. Graphite is carbon

atoms neatly linked in flat sheets. Diamond is carbon linked in strong,

regular, three-dimensional lattices: tetrahedra, that form ultrasolid

little carbon pyramids.

Today, however, humanity rejoices in possession of a fourth

and historically unprecedented form of carbon. Researchers have

created an entire class of these simon-pure carbon molecules, now

collectively known as the "fullerenes." They were named in August

1985, in Houston, Texas, in honor of the American engineer, inventor,

and delphically visionary philosopher, R. Buckminster Fuller.

"Buckminsterfullerene," or C60, is the best-known fullerene.

It's very round, the roundest molecule known to science. Sporting

what is technically known as "truncated icosahedral structure," C60 is

the most symmetric molecule possible in three-dimensional Euclidean

space. Each and every molecule of "Buckminsterfullerene" is a

hollow, geodesic sphere of sixty carbon atoms, all identically linked in

a spherical framework of twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons.

This molecule looks exactly like a common soccerball, and was

therefore nicknamed a "buckyball" by delighted chemists.

A free buckyball rotates merrily through space at one hundred

million revolutions per second. It's just over one nanometer across.

Buckminsterfullerene by the gross forms a solid crystal, is stable at

room temperature, and is an attractive mustard-yellow color. A heap

of crystallized buckyballs stack very much like pool balls, and are as

soft as graphite. It's thought that buckyballs will make good

lubricants -- something like molecular ball bearings.

When compressed, crystallized buckyballs squash and flatten

readily, down to about seventy percent of their volume. They then

refused to move any further and become extremely hard. Just *how*

hard is not yet established, but according to chemical theory,

compressed buckyballs may be considerably harder than diamond.

They may make good shock absorbers, or good armor.

But this is only the beginning of carbon's multifarious oddities in

the playful buckyball field. Because buckyballs are hollow, their

carbon framework can be wrapped around other, entirely different

atoms, forming neat molecular cages. This has already been

successfully done with certain metals, creating the intriguing new

class of "metallofullerites." Then there are buckyballs with a carbon or

two knocked out of the framework, and replaced with metal atoms.

This "doping" process yields a galaxy of so-called "dopeyballs." Some

of these dopeyballs show great promise as superconductors. Other

altered buckyballs seem to be organic ferromagnets.

A thin film of buckyballs can double the frequency of laser light

passing through it. Twisted or deformed buckyballs might act as

optical switches for future fiber-optic networks. Buckyballs with

dangling branches of nickel, palladium, or platinum may serve as new

industrial catalysts.

The electrical properties of buckyballs and their associated

compounds are very unusual, and therefore very promising. Pure C60

is an insulator. Add three potassium atoms, and it becomes a low-

temperature superconductor. Add three more potassium atoms, and it

becomes an insulator again! There's already excited talk in industry of

making electrical batteries out of buckyballs.

Then there are the "buckybabies:" C28, C32, C44, and C52. The

lumpy, angular buckybabies have received very little study to date,

and heaven only knows what they're capable of, especially when

doped, bleached, twisted, frozen or magnetized. And then there are

the *big* buckyballs: C240, C540, C960. Molecular models of these

monster buckyballs look like giant chickenwire beachballs.

There doesn't seem to be any limit to the upper size of a

buckyball. If wrapped around one another for internal support,

buckyballs can (at least theoretically) accrete like pearls. A truly

titanic buckyball might be big enough to see with the naked eye.

Conceivably, it might even be big enough to kick around on a playing

field, if you didn't mind kicking an anomalous entity with unknown

physical properties.

Carbon-fiber is a high-tech construction material which has

been seeing a lot of use lately in tennis rackets, bicycles, and high-

performance aircraft. It's already the strongest fiber known. This

makes the discovery of "buckytubes" even more striking. A buckytube

is carbon-fiber with a difference: it's a buckyball extruded into a long

continuous cylinder comprised of one single superstrong molecule.

C70, a buckyball cousin shaped like a rugby ball, seems to be

useful in producing high-tech films of artificial diamond. Then there

are "fuzzyballs" with sixty strands of hydrogen hair, "bunnyballs"

with twin ears of butylpyridine, flourinated "teflonballs" that may be

the slipperiest molecules ever produced.

This sudden wealth of new high-tech slang indicates the

potential riches of this new and multidisciplinary field of study, where

physics, electronics, chemistry and materials-science are all

overlapping, right now, in an exhilirating microsoccerball

scrimmage.

Today there are more than fifty different teams of scientists

investigating buckyballs and their relations, including industrial

heavy-hitters from AT&T, IBM and Exxon. SCIENCE magazine

voted buckminsterfullerene "Molecule of the Year" in 1991. Buckyball

papers have also appeared in NATURE, NEW SCIENTIST,

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, even FORTUNE and BUSINESS WEEK.

Buckyball breakthroughs are coming well-nigh every week, while the

fax machines sizzle in labs around the world. Buckyballs are strange,

elegant, beautiful, very intellectually sexy, and will soon be

commercially hot.

In chemical terms, the discovery of buckminsterfullerene -- a

carbon sphere -- may well rank with the discovery of the benzene ring

-- a carbon ring -- in the 19th century. The benzene ring (C6H6)

brought the huge field of aromatic chemistry into being, and with it a

enormous number of industrial applications.

But what was this "discovery," and how did it come about?

In a sense, like carbon itself, buckyballs also came to us from

outer space. Donald Huffman and Wolfgang Kratschmer were

astrophysicists studying interstellar soot. Huffman worked for the

University of Arizona in Tucson, Kratschmer for the Max Planck

Institute in Heidelberg. In 1982, these two gentlemen were

superheating graphite rods in a low-pressure helium atmosphere,

trying to replicate possible soot-making conditions in the atmosphere

of red-giant stars. Their experiment was run in a modest bell-jar

zapping apparatus about the size and shape of a washing-machine.

Among a great deal of black gunk, they actually manufactured

miniscule traces of buckminsterfullerene, which behaved oddly in their

spectrometer. At the time, however, they didn't realize what they

had.

In 1985, buckministerfullerene surfaced again, this time in a

high-tech laser-vaporization cluster-beam apparatus. Robert Curl

and Richard Smalley, two professors of chemistry at Rice University

in Houston, knew that a round carbon molecule was theoretically

possible. They even knew that it was likely to be yellow in color. And

in August 1985, they made a few nanograms of it, detected it with

mass spectrometers, and had the honor of naming it, along with their

colleagues Harry Kroto, Jim Heath and Sean O'Brien.

In 1985, however, there wasn't enough buckminsterfullerene

around to do much more than theorize about. It was "discovered,"

and named, and argued about in scientific journals, and was an

intriguing intellectual curiosity. But this exotic substance remained

little more than a lab freak.

And there the situation languished. But in 1988, Huffman and

Kratschmer, the astrophysicists, suddenly caught on: this "C60" from

the chemists in Houston, was probably the very same stuff they'd

made by a different process, back in 1982. Harry Kroto, who had

moved to the University of Sussex in the meantime, replicated their

results in his own machine in England, and was soon producing

enough buckminsterfullerene to actually weigh on a scale, and

measure, and purify!

The Huffman/Kratschmer process made buckminsterfullerene

by whole milligrams. Wow! Now the entire arsenal of modern

chemistry could be brought to bear: X-ray diffraction,

crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance, chromatography. And

results came swiftly, and were published. Not only were buckyballs

real, they were weird and wonderful.

In 1990, the Rice team discovered a yet simpler method to make

buckyballs, the so-called "fullerene factory." In a thin helium

atmosphere inside a metal tank, a graphite rod is placed near a

graphite disk. Enough simple, brute electrical power is blasted

through the graphite to generate an electrical arc between the disk

and the tip of the rod. When the end of the rod boils off, you just crank

the stub a little closer and turn up the juice. The resultant exotic soot,

which collects on the metal walls of the chamber, is up to 45 percent

buckyballs.

In 1990, the buckyball field flung open its stadium doors for

anybody with a few gas-valves and enough credit for a big electric

bill. These buckyball "factories" sprang up all over the world in 1990

and '91. The "discovery" of buckminsterfullerene was not the big kick-

off in this particular endeavour. What really counted was the budget,

the simplicity of manufacturing. It wasn't the intellectual

breakthrough that made buckyballs a sport -- it was the cheap ticket in

through the gates. With cheap and easy buckyballs available, the

research scene exploded.

Sometimes Science, like other overglamorized forms of human

endeavor, marches on its stomach.

As I write this, pure buckyballs are sold commercially for about

$2000 a gram, but the market price is in free-fall. Chemists suggest

that buckmisterfullerene will be as cheap as aluminum some day soon

-- a few bucks a pound. Buckyballs will be a bulk commodity, like

oatmeal. You may even *eat* them some day -- they're not

poisonous, and they seem to offer a handy way to package certain

drugs.

Buckminsterfullerene may have been "born" in an interstellar

star-lab, but it'll become a part of everyday life, your life and my life,

like nylon, or latex, or polyester. It may become more famous, and

will almost certainly have far more social impact, than Buckminster

Fuller's own geodesic domes, those glamorously high-tech structures

of the 60s that were the prophetic vision for their molecule-size

counterparts.

This whole exciting buckyball scrimmage will almost certainly

bring us amazing products yet undreamt-of, everything from grease

to superhard steels. And, inevitably, it will bring a concomitant set of

new problems -- buckyball junk, perhaps, or bizarre new forms of

pollution, or sinister military applications. This is the way of the

world.

But maybe the most remarkable thing about this peculiar and

elaborate process of scientific development is that buckyballs never

were really "exotic" in the first place. Now that sustained attention

has been brought to bear on the phenomenon, it appears that

buckyballs are naturally present -- in tiny amounts, that is -- in almost

any sooty, smoky flame. Buckyballs fly when you light a candle, they

flew when Bogie lit a cigarette in "Casablanca," they flew when

Neanderthals roasted mammoth fat over the cave fire. Soot we knew

about, diamonds we prized -- but all this time, carbon, good ol'

Element Six, has had a shocking clandestine existence. The "secret"

was always there, right in the air, all around all of us.

But when you come right down to it, it doesn't really matter

how we found out about buckyballs. Accidents are not only fun, but

crucial to the so-called march of science, a march that often moves

fastest when it's stumbling down some strange gully that no one knew

existed. Scientists are human beings, and human beings are flexible:

not a hard, rigidly locked crystal like diamond, but a resilient network.

It's a legitimate and vital part of science to recognize the truth -- not

merely when looking for it with brows furrowed and teeth clenched,

but when tripping over it headlong.

Thanks to science, we did find out the truth. And now it's all

different. Because now we know!

THINK OF THE PRESTIGE

The science of rocketry, and the science of weaponry, are sister

sciences. It's been cynically said of German rocket scientist Wernher

von Braun that "he aimed at the stars, and hit London."

After 1945, Wernher von Braun made a successful transition to

American patronage and, eventually, to civilian space exploration.

But another ambitious space pioneer -- an American citizen -- was

not so lucky as von Braun, though his equal in scientific talent. His

story, by comparison, is little known.

Gerald Vincent Bull was born in March 9, 1928, in Ontario,

Canada. He died in 1990. Dr. Bull was the most brilliant artillery

scientist of the twentieth century. Bull was a prodigiously gifted

student, and earned a Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering at the age of

24.

Bull spent the 1950s researching supersonic aerodynamics in

Canada, personally handcrafting some of the most advanced wind-

tunnels in the world.

Bull's work, like that of his predecessor von Braun, had military

applications. Bull found patronage with the Canadian Armament

Research and Development Establishment (CARDE) and the

Canadian Defence Research Board.

However, Canada's military-industrial complex lacked the

panache, and the funding, of that of the United States. Bull, a

visionary and energetic man, grew impatient with what he considered

the pedestrian pace and limited imagination of the Canadians. As an

aerodynamics scientist for CARDE, Bull's salary in 1959 was only

$17,000. In comparison, in 1961 Bull earned $100,000 by consulting for

the Pentagon on nose-cone research. It was small wonder that by the

early 1960s, Bull had established lively professional relationships with

the US Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory (as well as the Army's

Redstone Arsenal, Wernher von Braun's own postwar stomping

grounds).

It was the great dream of Bull's life to fire cannon projectiles

from the earth's surface directly into outer space. Amazingly, Dr.

Bull enjoyed considerable success in this endeavor. In 1961, Bull

established Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project). HARP

was an academic, nonmilitary research program, funded by McGill

University in Montreal, where Bull had become a professor in the

mechanical engineering department. The US Army's Ballistic

Research Lab was a quiet but very useful co-sponsor of HARP; the US

Army was especially generous in supplying Bull with obsolete military

equipment, including cannon barrels and radar.

Project HARP found a home on the island of Barbados,

downrange of its much better-known (and vastly better-financed)

rival, Cape Canaveral. In Barbados, Bull's gigantic space-cannon

fired its projectiles out to an ocean splashdown, with little risk of

public harm. Its terrific boom was audible all over Barbados, but the

locals were much pleased at their glamorous link to the dawning

Space Age.

Bull designed a series of new supersonic shells known as the

"Martlets." The Mark II Martlets were cylindrical finned projectiles,

about eight inches wide and five feet six inches long. They weighed

475 pounds. Inside the barrel of the space-cannon, a Martlet was

surrounded by a precisely machined wooden casing known as a

"sabot." The sabot soaked up combustive energy as the projectile

flew up the space-cannon's sixteen-inch, 118-ft long barrel. As it

cleared the barrel, the sabot split and the precisely streamlined

Martlet was off at over a mile per second. Each shot produced a huge

explosion and a plume of fire gushing hundreds of feet into the sky.

The Martlets were scientific research craft. They were

designed to carry payloads of metallic chaff, chemical smoke, or

meteorological balloons. They sported telemetry antennas for tracing

the flight.

By the end of 1965, the HARP project had fired over a hundred

such missiles over fifty miles high, into the ionosphere -- the airless

fringes of space. In November 19, 1966, the US Army's Ballistics

Research Lab, using a HARP gun designed by Bull, fired a 185-lb

Martlet missile one hundred and eleven miles high. This was, and

remains, a world altitude record for any fired projectile. Bull now

entertained ambitious plans for a Martlet Mark IV, a rocket-assisted

projectile that would ignite in flight and drive itself into actual orbit.

Ballistically speaking, space cannon offer distinct advantages

over rockets. Rockets must lift, not only their own weight, but the

weight of their fuel and oxidizer. Cannon "fuel," which is contained

within the gunbarrel, offers far more explosive bang for the buck than

rocket fuel. Cannon projectiles are very accurate, thanks to the fixed

geometry of the gun-barrel. And cannon are far simpler and cheaper

than rockets.

There are grave disadvantages, of course. First, the payload

must be slender enough to fit into a gun-barrel. The most severe

drawback is the huge acceleration force of a cannon blast, which in the

case of Bull's exotic arsenal could top 10,000 Gs. This rules out

manned flights from the mouth of space-cannon. Jules Verne

overlooked this unpoetic detail when he wrote his prescient tale of

space artillery, FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON (1865). (Dr Bull

was fascinated by Verne, and often spoke of Verne's science fiction as

one of the foremost inspirations of his youth.)

Bull was determined to put a cannon-round into orbit. This

burning desire of his was something greater than any merely

pragmatic or rational motive. The collapse of the HARP project in

1967 left Bull in command of his own fortunes. He reassembled the

wreckage of his odd academic/military career, and started a

commercial operation, "Space Research Corporation." In the years

to follow, Bull would try hard to sell his space-cannon vision to a

number of sponsors, including NATO, the Pentagon, Canada, China,

Israel, and finally, Iraq.

In the meantime, the Vietnam War was raging. Bull's

researches on projectile aerodynamics had made him, and his

company Space Reseach Corporation, into a hot military-industrial

property. In pursuit of space research, Bull had invented techniques

that lent much greater range and accuracy to conventional artillery

rounds. With Bull's ammunition, for instance, US Naval destroyers

would be able to cruise miles off the shore of North Vietnam,

destroying the best Russian-made shore batteries without any fear of

artillery retaliation. Bull's Space Research Corporation was

manufacturing the necessary long-range shells in Canada, but his lack

of American citizenship was a hindrance in the Pentagon arms trade.

Such was Dr. Bull's perceived strategic importance that this

hindrance was neatly avoided; with the sponsorship of Senator Barry

Goldwater, Bull became an American citizen by act of Congress. This

procedure was a rare honor, previously reserved only for Winston

Churchill and the Marquis de Lafayette.

Despite this Senatorial fiat, however, the Navy arms deal

eventually fell through. But although the US Navy scorned Dr. Bull's

wares, others were not so short-sighted. Bull's extended-range

ammunition, and the murderously brilliant cannon that he designed to

fire it, found ready markets in Egypt, Israel, Holland, Italy, Britain,

Canada, Venezuela, Chile, Thailand, Iran, South Africa, Austria and

Somalia.

Dr. Bull created a strange private reserve on the Canadian-

American border; a private arms manufactury with its own US and

Canadian customs units. This arrangement was very useful, since the

arms-export laws of the two countries differed, and SRC's military

products could be shipped-out over either national border at will. In

this distant enclave on the rural northern border of Vermont, the

arms genius built his own artillery range, his own telemetry towers

and launch-control buildings, his own radar tracking station,

workshops, and machine shops. At its height, the Space Research

Corporation employed over three hundred people at this site, and

boasted some $15 million worth of advanced equipment.

The downfall of HARP had left Bull disgusted with the

government-supported military-scientific establishment. He referred

to government researchers as "clowns" and "cocktail scientists," and

decided that his own future must lay in the vigorous world of free

enterprise. Instead of exploring the upper atmosphere, Bull

dedicated his ready intelligence to the refining of lethal munitions.

Bull would not sell to the Soviets or their client states, whom he

loathed; but he would sell to most anyone else. Bull's cannon are

credited with being of great help to Jonas Savimbi's UNITA war in

Angola; they were also extensively used by both sides in the Iran-Iraq

war.

Dr. Gerald V. Bull, Space Researcher, had become a

professional arms dealer. Dr. Bull was not a stellar success as an

arms dealer, because by all accounts he had no real head for business.

Like many engineers, Bull was obsessed not by entrepreneurial drive,

but by the exhilirating lure of technical achievement. The

atmosphere at Space Research Corporation was, by all accounts, very

collegial; Bull as professor, employees as cherished grad-students.

Bull's employees were fiercely loyal to him and felt that he was

brilliantly gifted and could accomplish anything.

SRC was never as great a commercial success as Bull's

technical genius merited. Bull stumbled badly in 1980. The Carter

Administration, annoyed by Bull's extensive deals with the South

African military, put Bull in prison for customs violation. This

punishment, rather than bringing Bull "to his senses," affected him

traumatically. He felt strongly that he had been singled out as a

political scapegoat to satisfy the hypocritical, left-leaning, anti-

apartheid bureaucrats in Washington. Bull spent seven months in an

American prison, reading extensively, and, incidentally, successfully

re-designing the prison's heating-plant. Nevertheless, the prison

experience left Bull embittered and cynical. While still in prison, Bull

was already accepting commercial approaches from the Communist

Chinese, who proved to be among his most avid customers.

After his American prison sentence ended, Bull abandoned his

strange enclave in the US-Canadian border to work full-time in

Brussels, Belgium. Space Research Corporation was welcomed there,

in Europe's foremost nexus of the global arms trade, a city where

almost anything goes in the way of merchandising war.

In November 1987, Bull was politely contacted in Brussels by the

Iraqi Embassy, and offered an all-expenses paid trip to Bagdad.

From 1980 to 1989, during their prolonged, lethal, and highly

inconclusive war with Iran, Saddam Hussein's regime had spent some

eighty billion dollars on weapons and weapons systems. Saddam

Hussein was especially fond of his Soviet-supplied "Scud" missiles,

which had shaken Iranian morale severely when fired into civilian

centers during the so-called "War of the Cities." To Saddam's mind,

the major trouble with his Scuds was their limited range and accuracy,

and he had invested great effort in gathering the tools and manpower

to improve the Iraqi art of rocketry.

The Iraqis had already bought many of Bull's 155-millimeter

cannon from the South Africans and the Austrians, and they were

most impressed. Thanks to Bull's design genius, the Iraqis actually

owned better, more accurate, and longer-range artillery than the

United States Army did.

Bull did not want to go to jail again, and was reluctant to break

the official embargo on arms shipments to Iraq. He told his would-be

sponsors so, in Bagdad, and the Iraqis were considerate of their

guest's qualms. To Bull's great joy, they took his idea of a peaceful

space cannon very seriously. "Think of the prestige," Bull suggested to

the Iraqi Minister of Industry, and the thought clearly intrigued the

Iraqi official.

The Israelis, in September 1988, had successfully launched their

own Shavit rocket into orbit, an event that had much impressed, and

depressed, the Arab League. Bull promised the Iraqis a launch system

that could place dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Arab satellites into

orbit. *Small* satellites, granted, and unmanned ones; but their

launches would cost as little as five thousand dollars each. Iraq

would become a genuine space power; a minor one by superpower

standards, but the only Arab space power.

And even small satellites were not just for show. Even a minor

space satellite could successfully perform certain surveillance

activities. The American military had proved the usefulness of spy

satellites to Saddam Hussein by passing him spysat intelligence during

worst heat of the Iran-Iraq war.

The Iraqis felt they would gain a great deal of widely

applicable, widely useful scientific knowledge from their association

with Bull, whether his work was "peaceful" or not. After all, it was

through peaceful research on Project HARP that Bull himself had

learned techniques that he had later sold for profit on the arms

market. The design of a civilian nose-cone, aiming for the stars, is

very little different from that of one descending with a supersonic

screech upon sleeping civilians in London.

For the first time in his life, Bull found himself the respected

client of a generous patron with vast resources -- and with an

imagination of a grandeur to match his own. By 1989, the Iraqis were

paying Bull and his company five million dollars a year to redesign

their field artillery, with much greater sums in the wings for "Project

Babylon" -- the Iraqi space-cannon. Bull had the run of ominous

weapons bunkers like the "Saad 16" missile-testing complex in north

Iraq, built under contract by Germans, and stuffed with gray-market

high-tech equipment from Tektronix, Scientific Atlanta and Hewlett-

Packard.

Project Babylon was Bull's grandest vision, now almost within

his grasp. The Iraqi space-launcher was to have a barrel five hundred

feet long, and would weigh 2,100 tons. It would be supported by a

gigantic concrete tower with four recoil mechanisms, these shock-

absorbers weighing sixty tons each. The vast, segmented cannon

would fire rocket-assisted projectiles the size of a phone booth, into

orbit around the Earth.

In August 1989, a smaller prototype, the so-called "Baby

Babylon," was constructed at a secret site in Jabal Hamrayn, in central

Iraq. "Baby Babylon" could not have put payloads into orbit, but it

would have had an international, perhaps intercontinental range.

The prototype blew up on its first test-firing.

The Iraqis continued undaunted on another prototype super-

gun, but their smuggling attempts were clumsy. Bull himself had little

luck in maintaining the proper discretion for a professional arms

dealer, as his own jailing had proved. When flattered, Bull talked;

and when he talked, he boasted.

Word began to leak out within the so-called "intelligence

community" that Bull was involved in something big; something to do

with Iraq and with missiles. Word also reached the Israelis, who were

very aware of Bull's scientific gifts, having dealt with him themselves,

extensively.

The Iraqi space cannon would have been nearly useless as a

conventional weapon. Five hundred feet long and completely

immobile, it would have been easy prey for any Israeli F-15. It would

have been impossible to hide, for any launch would thrown a column

of flame hundreds of feet into the air, a blazing signal for any spy

satellite or surveillance aircraft. The Babylon space cannon, faced

with determined enemies, could have been destroyed after a single

launch.

However, that single launch might well have served to dump a

load of nerve gas, or a nuclear bomb, onto any capital in the world.

Bull wanted Project Babylon to be entirely peaceful; despite his

rationalizations, he was never entirely at ease with military projects.

What Bull truly wanted from his Project Babylon was *prestige.* He

wanted the entire world to know that he, Jerry Bull, had created a

working space program, more or less all by himself. He had never

forgotten what it meant to world opinion to hear the Sputnik beeping

overhead.

For Saddam Hussein, Project Babylon was more than any

merely military weapon: it was a *political* weapon. The prestige

Iraq might gain from the success of such a visionary leap was worth

any number of mere cannon-fodder batallions. It was Hussein's

ambition to lead the Arab world; Bull's cannon was to be a symbol of

Iraqi national potency, a symbol that the long war with the Shi'ite

mullahs had not destroyed Saddam's ambitions for transcendant

greatness.

The Israelis, however, had already proven their willingness to

thwart Saddam Hussein's ambitions by whatever means necessary.

In 1981, they had bombed his Osirak nuclear reactor into rubble. In

1980, a Mossad hit-team had cut the throat of Iraqi nuclear scientist

Yayha El Meshad, in a Paris hotel room.

On March 22, 1990, Dr. Bull was surprised at the door of his

Brussels apartment. He was shot five times, in the neck and in the

back of the head, with a silenced 7.65 millimeter automatic pistol.

His assassin has never been found.

FOR FURTHER READING:

ARMS AND THE MAN: Dr. Gerald Bull, Iraq, and the Supergun by

William Lowther (McClelland- Bantam, Inc., Toronto, 1991)

BULL'S EYE: The Assassination and Life of Supergun Inventor

Gerald Bull by James Adams (Times Books, New York, 1992)

ARTIFICIAL LIFE

The new scientific field of study called "Artificial Life" can be

defined as "the attempt to abstract the logical form of life from its

material manifestation."

So far, so good. But what is life?

The basic thesis of "Artificial Life" is that "life" is best

understood as a complex systematic process. "Life" consists of

relationships and rules and interactions. "Life" as a property is

potentially separate from actual living creatures.

Living creatures (as we know them today, that is) are basically

made of wet organic substances: blood and bone, sap and cellulose,

chitin and ichor. A living creature -- a kitten, for instance -- is a

physical object that is made of molecules and occupies space and has

mass.

A kitten is indisputably "alive" -- but not because it has the

"breath of life" or the "vital impulse" somehow lodged inside its body.

We may think and talk and act as if the kitten "lives" because it has a

mysterious "cat spirit" animating its physical cat flesh. If we were

superstitious, we might even imagine that a healthy young cat had

*nine* lives. People have talked and acted just this way for millennia.

But from the point-of-view of Artificial Life studies, this is a

very halting and primitive way of conceptualizing what's actually

going on with a living cat. A kitten's "life" is a *process, * with

properties like reproduction, genetic variation, heredity, behavior,

learning, the possession of a genetic program, the expression of that

program through a physical body. "Life" is a thing that *does,* not a

thing that *is* -- life extracts energy from the environment, grows,

repairs damage, reproduces.

And this network of processes called "Life" can be picked apart,

and studied, and mathematically modelled, and simulated with

computers, and experimented upon -- outside of any creature's living

body.

"Artificial Life" is a very young field of study. The use of this

term dates back only to 1987, when it was used to describe a

conference in Los Alamos New Mexico on "the synthesis and

simulation of living systems." Artificial Life as a discipline is

saturated by computer-modelling, computer-science, and cybernetics.

It's conceptually similar to the earlier field of study called "Artificial

Intelligence." Artificial Intelligence hoped to extract the basic logical

structure of intelligence, to make computers "think." Artificial Life, by

contrast, hopes to make computers only about as "smart" as an ant --

but as "alive" as a swarming anthill.

Artificial Life as a discipline uses the computer as its primary

scientific instrument. Like telescopes and microscopes before them,

computers are making previously invisible aspects of the world

apparent to the human eye. Computers today are shedding light on

the activity of complex systems, on new physical principles such as

"emergent behavior," "chaos," and "self-organization."

For millennia, "Life" has been one of the greatest of

metaphysical and scientific mysteries, but now a few novel and

tentative computerized probes have been stuck into the fog. The

results have already proved highly intriguing.

Can a computer or a robot be alive? Can an entity which only

exists as a digital simulation be "alive"? If it looks like a duck, quacks

like a duck, waddles like a duck, but it in fact takes the form of pixels

on a supercomputer screen -- is it a duck? And if it's not a duck, then

what on earth is it? What exactly does a thing have to do and be

before we say it's "alive"?

It's surprisingly difficult to decide when something is "alive."

There's never been a definition of "life," whether scientific,

metaphysical, or theological, that has ever really worked. Life is not

a clean either/or proposition. Life comes on a kind of scale,

apparently, a kind of continuum -- maybe even, potentially, *several

different kinds of continuum.*

One might take a pragmatic, laundry-list approach to defining

life. To be "living," a thing must grow. Move. Reproduce. React to

its environment. Take in energy, excrete waste. Nourish itself, die,

and decay. Have a genetic code, perhaps, or be the result of a process

of evolution. But there are grave problems with all of these concepts.

All these things can be done today by machines or programs. And the

concepts themselves are weak and subject to contradiction and

paradox.

Are viruses "alive"? Viruses can thrive and reproduce, but not

by themselves -- they have to use a victim cell in order to manufacture

copies of themselves. Some dormant viruses can crystallize into a

kind of organic slag that's dead for all practical purposes, and can stay

that way indefinitely -- until the virus gets another chance at

infection, and then the virus comes seething back.

How about a frozen human embryo? It can be just as dormant

as a dormant virus, and certainly can't survive without a host, but it

can become a living human being. Some people who were once

frozen embryos may be reading this magazine right now! Is a frozen

embryo "alive" -- or is it just the *potential* for life, a genetic life-

program halted in mid-execution?

Bacteria are simple, as living things go. Most people however

would agree that germs are "alive." But there are many other entities

in our world today that act in lifelike fashion and are easily as

complex as germs, and yet we don't call them "alive" -- except

"metaphorically" (whatever *that* means).

How about a national government, for instance? A

government can grow and adapt and evolve. It's certainly a very

powerful entity that consumes resources and affects its environment

and uses enormous amounts of information. When people say "Long

Live France," what do they mean by that? Is the Soviet Union now

"dead"?

Amoebas aren't "mortal" and don't age -- they just go right on

splitting in half indefinitely. Does that mean that all amoebas are

actually pieces of one super-amoeba that's three billion years old?

And where's the "life" in an ant-swarm? Most ants in a swarm

never reproduce; they're sterile workers -- tools, peripherals,

hardware. All the individual ants in a nest, even the queen, can die

off one by one, but as long as new ants and new queens take their

place, the swarm itself can go on "living" for years without a hitch or a

stutter.

Questioning "life" in this way may seem so much nit-picking

and verbal sophistry. After all, one may think, people can easily tell

the difference between something living and dead just by having a

good long look at it. And in point of fact, this seems to be the single

strongest suit of "Artificial Life." It is very hard to look at a good

Artificial Life program in action without perceiving it as, somehow,

"alive."

Only living creatures perform the behavior known as

"flocking." A gigantic wheeling flock of cranes or flamingos is one of

the most impressive sights that the living world has to offer.

But the "logical form" of flocking can be abstracted from its

"material manifestation" in a flocking group of actual living birds.

"Flocking" can be turned into rules implemented on a computer. The

rules look like this:

1. Stay with the flock -- try to move toward where it seems

thickest.

2. Try to move at the same speed as the other local birds.

3. Don't bump into things, especially the ground or other birds.

In 1987, Craig Reynolds, who works for a computer-graphics

company called Symbolics, implemented these rules for abstract

graphic entities called "bird-oids" or "boids." After a bit of fine-

tuning, the result was, and is, uncannily realistic. The darn things

*flock!*

They meander around in an unmistakeably lifelike, lively,

organic fashion. There's nothing "mechanical" or "programmed-

looking" about their actions. They bumble and swarm. The boids in

the middle shimmy along contentedly, and the ones on the fringes tag

along anxiously jockeying for position, and the whole squadron hangs

together, and wheels and swoops and maneuvers, with amazing

grace. (Actually they're neither "anxious" nor "contented," but when

you see the boids behaving in this lifelike fashion, you can scarcely help

but project lifelike motives and intentions onto them.)

You might say that the boids simulate flocking perfectly -- but

according to the hard-dogma position of A-Life enthusiasts, it's not

"simulation" at all. This is real "flocking" pure and simple -- this is

exactly what birds actually do. Flocking is flocking -- it doesn't

matter if it's done by a whooping crane or a little computer-sprite.

Clearly the birdoids themselves aren't "alive" -- but it can be

argued, and is argued, that they're actually doing something that is a

genuine piece of the life process. In the words of scientist Christopher

Langton, perhaps the premier guru of A-Life: "The most important

thing to remember about A-Life is that the part that is artificial is not

the life, but the materials. Real things happen. We observe real

phenomena. It is real life in an artificial medium."

The great thing about studying flocking with boids, as opposed

to say whooping cranes, is that the Artificial Life version can be

experimented upon, in controlled and repeatable conditions. Instead

of just *observing* flocking, a life-scientist can now *do* flocking.

And not just flocks -- with a change in the parameters, you can study

"schooling" and "herding" as well.

The great hope of Artificial Life studies is that Artificial Life will

reveal previously unknown principles that directly govern life itself --

the principles that give life its mysterious complexity and power, its

seeming ability to defy probability and entropy. Some of these

principles, while still tentative, are hotly discussed in the field.

For instance: the principle of *bottom-up* initiative rather

than *top-down* orders. Flocking demonstrates this principle well.

Flamingos do not have blueprints. There is no squadron-leader

flamingo barking orders to all the other flamingos. Each flamingo

makes up its own mind. The extremely complex motion of a flock of

flamingos arises naturally from the interactions of hundreds of

independent birds. "Flocking" consists of many thousands of simple

actions and simple decisions, all repeated again and again, each

action and decision affecting the next in sequence, in an endless

systematic feedback.

This involves a second A-Life principle: *local* control rather

than *global* control. Each flamingo has only a vague notion of the

behavior of the flock as a whole. A flamingo simply isn't smart

enough to keep track of the entire "big picture," and in fact this isn't

even necessary. It's only necessary to avoid bumping the guys right

at your wingtips; you can safely ignore the rest.

Another principle: *simple* rules rather than *complex* ones.

The complexity of flocking, while real, takes place entirely outside of

the flamingo's brain. The individual flamingo has no mental

conception of the vast impressive aerial ballet in which it happens to

be taking part. The flamingo makes only simple decisions; it is never

required to make complex decisions requiring a lot of memory or

planning. *Simple* rules allow creatures as downright stupid as fish

to get on with the job at hand -- not only successfully, but swiftly and

gracefully.

And then there is the most important A-Life principle, also

perhaps the foggiest and most scientifically controversial:

*emergent* rather than *prespecified* behavior. Flamingos fly

from their roosts to their feeding grounds, day after day, year in year

out. But they will never fly there exactly the same way twice. They'll

get there all right, predictable as gravity; but the actual shape and

structure of the flock will be whipped up from scratch every time.

Their flying order is not memorized, they don't have numbered places

in line, or appointed posts, or maneuver orders. Their orderly

behavior simply *emerges,* different each time, in a ceaselessly

varying shuffle.

Ants don't have blueprints either. Ants have become the totem

animals of Artificial Life. Ants are so 'smart' that they have vastly

complex societies with actual *institutions* like slavery and and

agriculture and aphid husbandry. But an individual ant is a

profoundly stupid creature. Entomologists estimate that individual

ants have only fifteen to forty things that they can actually "do." But

if they do these things at the right time, to the right stimulus, and

change from doing one thing to another when the proper trigger

comes along, then ants as a group can work wonders.

There are anthills all over the world. They all work, but they're

all different; no two anthills are identical. That's because they're built

bottom-up and emergently. Anthills are built without any spark of

planning or intelligence. An ant may feel the vague instinctive need to

wall out the sunlight. It begins picking up bits of dirt and laying them

down at random. Other ants see the first ant at work and join in; this

is the A-Life principle known as "allelomimesis," imitating the others

(or rather not so much "imitating" them as falling mechanically into

the same instinctive pattern of behavior).

Sooner or later, a few bits of dirt happen to pile up together.

Now there's a wall. The ant wall-building sub-program kicks into

action. When the wall gets high enough, it's roofed over with dirt and

spit. Now there's a tunnel. Do it again and again and again, and the

structure can grow seven feet high, and be of such fantastic

complexity that to draw it on an architect's table would take years.

This emergent structure, "order out of chaos," "something out of

nothing" -- appears to be one of the basic "secrets of life."

These principles crop up again and again in the practice of life-

simulation. Predator-prey interactions. The effects of parasites and

viruses. Dynamics of population and evolution. These principles even

seem to apply to internal living processes, like plant growth and the

way a bug learns to walk. The list of applications for these principles

has gone on and on.

It's not hard to understand that many simple creatures, doing

simple actions that affect one another, can easily create a really big

mess. The thing that's *hard* to understand is that those same,

bottom-up, unplanned, "chaotic" actions can and do create living,

working, functional order and system and pattern. The process really

must be seen to be believed. And computers are the instruments that

have made us see it.

Most any computer will do. Oxford zoologist Richard

Dawkins has created a simple, popular Artificial Life program for

personal computers. It's called "The Blind Watchmaker," and

demonstrates the inherent power of Darwinian evolution to create

elaborate pattern and structure. The program accompanies Dr.

Dawkins' 1986 book of the same title (quite an interesting book, by the

way), but it's also available independently.

The Blind Watchmaker program creates patterns from little

black-and-white branching sticks, which develop according to very

simple rules. The first time you see them, the little branching sticks

seem anything but impressive. They look like this:

Fig 1. Ancestral A-Life Stick-Creature

After a pleasant hour with Blind Watchmaker, I myself produced

these very complex forms -- what Dawkins calls "Biomorphs."

Fig. 2 -- Six Dawkins Biomorphs

It's very difficult to look at such biomorphs without interpreting

them as critters -- *something* alive-ish, anyway. It seems that the

human eye is *trained by nature* to interpret the output of such a

process as "life-like." That doesn't mean it *is* life, but there's

definitely something *going on there.*

*What* is going on is the subject of much dispute. Is a

computer-simulation actually an abstracted part of life? Or is it

technological mimicry, or mechanical metaphor, or clever illusion?

We can model thermodynamic equations very well also, but an

equation isn't hot, it can't warm us or burn us. A perfect model of

heat isn't heat. We know how to model the flow of air on an

airplane's wings, but no matter how perfect our simulations are, they

don't actually make us fly. A model of motion isn't motion. Maybe

"Life" doesn't exist either, without that real-world carbon-and-water

incarnation. A-Life people have a term for these carbon-and-water

chauvinists. They call them "carbaquists."

Artificial Life maven Rodney Brooks designs insect-like robots

at MIT. Using A-Life bottom-up principles -- "fast, cheap, and out of

control" -- he is trying to make small multi-legged robots that can

behave as deftly as an ant. He and his busy crew of graduate students

are having quite a bit of success at it. And Brooks finds the struggle

over definitions beside the real point. He envisions a world in which

robots as dumb as insects are everywhere; dumb, yes, but agile and

successful and pragmatically useful. Brooks says: "If you want to

argue if it's living or not, fine. But if it's sitting there existing twenty-

four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days of the year, doing

stuff which is tricky to do and doing it well, then I'm going to be

happy. And who cares what you call it, right?"

Ontological and epistemological arguments are never easily

settled. However, "Artificial Life," whether it fully deserves that term

or not, is at least easy to see, and rather easy to get your hands on.

"Blind Watchmaker" is the A-Life equivalent of using one's computer

as a home microscope and examining pondwater. Best of all, the

program costs only twelve bucks! It's cheap and easy to become an

amateur A-Life naturalist.

Because of the ubiquity of powerful computers, A-Life is

"garage-band science." The technology's out there for almost anyone

interested -- it's hacker-science. Much of A-Life practice basically

consists of picking up computers, pointing them at something

promising, and twiddling with the focus knobs until you see something

really gnarly. *Figuring out what you've seen* is the tough part, the

"real science"; this is where actual science, reproducible, falsifiable,

formal, and rigorous, parts company from the intoxicating glamor of

the intellectually sexy. But in the meantime, you have the contagious

joy and wonder of just *gazing at the unknown* the primal thrill of

discovery and exploration.

A lot has been written already on the subject of Artificial Life.

The best and most complete journalistic summary to date is Steven

Levy's brand-new book, ARTIFICIAL LIFE: THE QUEST FOR A NEW

CREATION (Pantheon Books 1992).

The easiest way for an interested outsider to keep up with this

fast-breaking field is to order books, videos, and software from an

invaluable catalog: "Computers In Science and Art," from Media

Magic. Here you can find the Proceedings of the first and second

Artificial Life Conferences, where the field's most influential papers,

discussions, speculations and manifestos have seen print.

But learned papers are only part of the A-Life experience. If

you can see Artificial Life actually demonstrated, you should seize the

opportunity. Computer simulation of such power and sophistication

is a truly remarkable historical advent. No previous generation had

the opportunity to see such a thing, much less ponder its significance.

Media Magic offers videos about cellular automata, virtual ants,

flocking, and other A-Life constructs, as well as personal software

"pocket worlds" like CA Lab, Sim Ant, and Sim Earth. This very

striking catalog is available free from Media Magic, P.O Box 507,

Nicasio CA 94946.

"INTERNET" [aka "A Short History of the Internet"]

Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's

foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How

could the US authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear

war?

Postnuclear America would need a command-and-control

network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. But no

matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its

switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of

atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would reduce any

conceivable network to tatters.

And how would the network itself be commanded and

controlled? Any central authority, any network central citadel, would

be an obvious and immediate target for an enemy missile. The

center of the network would be the very first place to go.

RAND mulled over this grim puzzle in deep military secrecy,

and arrived at a daring solution. The RAND proposal (the brainchild

of RAND staffer Paul Baran) was made public in 1964. In the first

place, the network would *have no central authority.* Furthermore,

it would be *designed from the beginning to operate while

in tatters.*

The principles were simple. The network itself would be

assumed to be unreliable at all times. It would be designed from the

get-go to transcend its own unreliability. All the nodes in the network

would be equal in status to all other nodes, each node with its own

authority to originate, pass, and receive messages. The

messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet

separately addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified

source node, and end at some other specified destination node. Each

packet would wind its way through the network on an individual

basis.

The particular route that the packet took would be unimportant.

Only final results would count. Basically, the packet would be tossed

like a hot potato from node to node to node, more or less in the

direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If

big pieces of the network had been blown away, that simply

wouldn't matter; the packets would still stay airborne, lateralled

wildly across the field by whatever nodes happened to survive. This

rather haphazard delivery system might be "inefficient" in the usual

sense (especially compared to, say, the telephone system) -- but it

would be extremely rugged.

During the 60s, this intriguing concept of a decentralized,

blastproof, packet-switching network was kicked around by RAND,

MIT and UCLA. The National Physical Laboratory in Great Britain set

up the first test network on these principles in 1968. Shortly

afterward, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency decided

to fund a larger, more ambitious project in the USA. The nodes of the

network were to be high-speed supercomputers (or what passed for

supercomputers at the time). These were rare and valuable machines

which were in real need of good solid networking, for the sake of

national research-and-development projects.

In fall 1969, the first such node was installed in UCLA. By

December 1969, there were four nodes on the infant network, which

was named ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor.

The four computers could transfer data on dedicated high-

speed transmission lines. They could even be programmed remotely

from the other nodes. Thanks to ARPANET, scientists and researchers

could share one another's computer facilities by long-distance. This

was a very handy service, for computer-time was precious in the

early '70s. In 1971 there were fifteen nodes in ARPANET; by 1972,

thirty-seven nodes. And it was good.

By the second year of operation, however, an odd fact became

clear. ARPANET's users had warped the computer-sharing network

into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post-

office. The main traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing.

Instead, it was news and personal messages. Researchers were using

ARPANET to collaborate on projects, to trade notes on work,

and eventually, to downright gossip and schmooze. People had their

own personal user accounts on the ARPANET computers, and their

own personal addresses for electronic mail. Not only were they using

ARPANET for person-to-person communication, but they were very

enthusiastic about this particular service -- far more enthusiastic than

they were about long-distance computation.

It wasn't long before the invention of the mailing-list, an

ARPANET broadcasting technique in which an identical message could

be sent automatically to large numbers of network subscribers.

Interestingly, one of the first really big mailing-lists was "SF-

LOVERS," for science fiction fans. Discussing science fiction on

the network was not work-related and was frowned upon by many

ARPANET computer administrators, but this didn't stop it from

happening.

Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew. Its decentralized

structure made expansion easy. Unlike standard corporate computer

networks, the ARPA network could accommodate many different

kinds of machine. As long as individual machines could speak the

packet-switching lingua franca of the new, anarchic network, their

brand-names, and their content, and even their ownership, were

irrelevant.

The ARPA's original standard for communication was known as

NCP, "Network Control Protocol," but as time passed and the technique

advanced, NCP was superceded by a higher-level, more sophisticated

standard known as TCP/IP. TCP, or "Transmission Control Protocol,"

converts messages into streams of packets at the source, then

reassembles them back into messages at the destination. IP, or

"Internet Protocol," handles the addressing, seeing to it that packets

are routed across multiple nodes and even across multiple networks

with multiple standards -- not only ARPA's pioneering NCP standard,

but others like Ethernet, FDDI, and X.25.

As early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to

link to ARPANET. ARPANET itself remained fairly tightly controlled,

at least until 1983, when its military segment broke off and became

MILNET. But TCP/IP linked them all. And ARPANET itself, though it

was growing, became a smaller and smaller neighborhood amid the

vastly growing galaxy of other linked machines.

As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different social

groups found themselves in possession of powerful computers. It was

fairly easy to link these computers to the growing network-of-

networks. As the use of TCP/IP became more common, entire other

networks fell into the digital embrace of the Internet, and

messily adhered. Since the software called TCP/IP was public-domain,

and the basic technology was decentralized and rather anarchic by its

very nature, it was difficult to stop people from barging in and

linking up somewhere-or-other. In point of fact, nobody *wanted* to

stop them from joining this branching complex of networks, which

came to be known as the "Internet."

Connecting to the Internet cost the taxpayer little or nothing,

since each node was independent, and had to handle its own financing

and its own technical requirements. The more, the merrier. Like the

phone network, the computer network became steadily more valuable

as it embraced larger and larger territories of people and resources.

A fax machine is only valuable if *everybody else* has a fax

machine. Until they do, a fax machine is just a curiosity. ARPANET,

too, was a curiosity for a while. Then computer-networking became

an utter necessity.

In 1984 the National Science Foundation got into the act,

through its Office of Advanced Scientific Computing. The new NSFNET

set a blistering pace for technical advancement, linking newer, faster,

shinier supercomputers, through thicker, faster links, upgraded and

expanded, again and again, in 1986, 1988, 1990. And other

government agencies leapt in: NASA, the National Institutes of Health,

the Department of Energy, each of them maintaining a digital satrapy

in the Internet confederation.

The nodes in this growing network-of-networks were divvied

up into basic varieties. Foreign computers, and a few American ones,

chose to be denoted by their geographical locations. The others were

grouped by the six basic Internet "domains": gov, mil, edu, com, org

and net. (Graceless abbreviations such as this are a standard

feature of the TCP/IP protocols.) Gov, Mil, and Edu denoted

governmental, military and educational institutions, which were, of

course, the pioneers, since ARPANET had begun as a high-tech

research exercise in national security. Com, however, stood

for "commercial" institutions, which were soon bursting into the

network like rodeo bulls, surrounded by a dust-cloud of eager

nonprofit "orgs." (The "net" computers served as gateways between

networks.)

ARPANET itself formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its

own overwhelming success. Its users scarcely noticed, for ARPANET's

functions not only continued but steadily improved. The use of

TCP/IP standards for computer networking is now global. In 1971, a

mere twenty-one years ago, there were only four nodes in the

ARPANET network. Today there are tens of thousands of nodes in

the Internet, scattered over forty-two countries, with more coming

on-line every day. Three million, possibly four million people use

this gigantic mother-of-all-computer-networks.

The Internet is especially popular among scientists, and is

probably the most important scientific instrument of the late

twentieth century. The powerful, sophisticated access that it

provides to specialized data and personal communication

has sped up the pace of scientific research enormously.

The Internet's pace of growth in the early 1990s is spectacular,

almost ferocious. It is spreading faster than cellular phones, faster

than fax machines. Last year the Internet was growing at a rate of

twenty percent a *month.* The number of "host" machines with direct

connection to TCP/IP has been doubling every year since

1988. The Internet is moving out of its original base in military and

research institutions, into elementary and high schools, as well as into

public libraries and the commercial sector.

Why do people want to be "on the Internet?" One of the main

reasons is simple freedom. The Internet is a rare example of a true,

modern, functional anarchy. There is no "Internet Inc." There are

no official censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders.

In principle, any node can speak as a peer to any other node, as long

as it obeys the rules of the TCP/IP protocols, which are strictly

technical, not social or political. (There has been some struggle over

commercial use of the Internet, but that situation is changing as

businesses supply their own links).

The Internet is also a bargain. The Internet as a whole, unlike

the phone system, doesn't charge for long-distance service. And

unlike most commercial computer networks, it doesn't charge for

access time, either. In fact the "Internet" itself, which doesn't even

officially exist as an entity, never "charges" for anything. Each group

of people accessing the Internet is responsible for their own machine

and their own section of line.

The Internet's "anarchy" may seem strange or even unnatural,

but it makes a certain deep and basic sense. It's rather like the

"anarchy" of the English language. Nobody rents English, and nobody

owns English. As an English-speaking person, it's up to you to learn

how to speak English properly and make whatever use you please

of it (though the government provides certain subsidies to help you

learn to read and write a bit). Otherwise, everybody just sort of

pitches in, and somehow the thing evolves on its own, and somehow

turns out workable. And interesting. Fascinating, even. Though a lot

of people earn their living from using and exploiting and teaching

English, "English" as an institution is public property, a public good.

Much the same goes for the Internet. Would English be improved if

the "The English Language, Inc." had a board of directors and a chief

executive officer, or a President and a Congress? There'd probably be

a lot fewer new words in English, and a lot fewer new ideas.

People on the Internet feel much the same way about their own

institution. It's an institution that resists institutionalization. The

Internet belongs to everyone and no one.

Still, its various interest groups all have a claim. Business

people want the Internet put on a sounder financial footing.

Government people want the Internet more fully regulated.

Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research.

Military people want it spy-proof and secure. And so on and so on.

All these sources of conflict remain in a stumbling balance

today, and the Internet, so far, remains in a thrivingly anarchical

condition. Once upon a time, the NSFnet's high-speed, high-capacity

lines were known as the "Internet Backbone," and their owners could

rather lord it over the rest of the Internet; but today there are

"backbones" in Canada, Japan, and Europe, and even privately owned

commercial Internet backbones specially created for carrying business

traffic. Today, even privately owned desktop computers can become

Internet nodes. You can carry one under your arm. Soon, perhaps, on

your wrist.

But what does one *do* with the Internet? Four things,

basically: mail, discussion groups, long-distance computing, and file

transfers.

Internet mail is "e-mail," electronic mail, faster by several

orders of magnitude than the US Mail, which is scornfully known by

Internet regulars as "snailmail." Internet mail is somewhat like fax.

It's electronic text. But you don't have to pay for it (at least not

directly), and it's global in scope. E-mail can also send software and

certain forms of compressed digital imagery. New forms of mail are in

the works.

The discussion groups, or "newsgroups," are a world of their

own. This world of news, debate and argument is generally known as

"USENET. " USENET is, in point of fact, quite different from the

Internet. USENET is rather like an enormous billowing crowd of

gossipy, news-hungry people, wandering in and through the

Internet on their way to various private backyard barbecues.

USENET is not so much a physical network as a set of social

conventions. In any case, at the moment there are some 2,500

separate newsgroups on USENET, and their discussions generate about

7 million words of typed commentary every single day. Naturally

there is a vast amount of talk about computers on USENET, but the

variety of subjects discussed is enormous, and it's growing larger all

the time. USENET also distributes various free electronic journals and

publications.

Both netnews and e-mail are very widely available, even

outside the high-speed core of the Internet itself. News and e-mail

are easily available over common phone-lines, from Internet fringe-

realms like BITnet, UUCP and Fidonet. The last two Internet services,

long-distance computing and file transfer, require what is known as

"direct Internet access" -- using TCP/IP.

Long-distance computing was an original inspiration for

ARPANET and is still a very useful service, at least for some.

Programmers can maintain accounts on distant, powerful computers,

run programs there or write their own. Scientists can make use of

powerful supercomputers a continent away. Libraries offer their

electronic card catalogs for free search. Enormous CD-ROM catalogs

are increasingly available through this service. And there are

fantastic amounts of free software available.

File transfers allow Internet users to access remote machines

and retrieve programs or text. Many Internet computers -- some

two thousand of them, so far -- allow any person to access them

anonymously, and to simply copy their public files, free of charge.

This is no small deal, since entire books can be transferred through

direct Internet access in a matter of minutes. Today, in 1992, there

are over a million such public files available to anyone who asks for

them (and many more millions of files are available to people with

accounts). Internet file-transfers are becoming a new form of

publishing, in which the reader simply electronically copies the work

on demand, in any quantity he or she wants, for free. New Internet

programs, such as "archie," "gopher," and "WAIS," have been

developed to catalog and explore these enormous archives of

material.

The headless, anarchic, million-limbed Internet is spreading like

bread-mold. Any computer of sufficient power is a potential spore

for the Internet, and today such computers sell for less than $2,000

and are in the hands of people all over the world. ARPA's network,

designed to assure control of a ravaged society after a nuclear

holocaust, has been superceded by its mutant child the Internet,

which is thoroughly out of control, and spreading exponentially

through the post-Cold War electronic global village. The spread of

the Internet in the 90s resembles the spread of personal

computing in the 1970s, though it is even faster and perhaps more

important. More important, perhaps, because it may give those

personal computers a means of cheap, easy storage and access that is

truly planetary in scale.

The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and

exponentially faster. Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot

topic today, with every manner of wild new commercial information-

service promised. The federal government, pleased with an unsought

success, is also still very much in the act. NREN, the National Research

and Education Network, was approved by the US Congress in fall

1991, as a five-year, $2 billion project to upgrade the Internet

"backbone." NREN will be some fifty times faster than the fastest

network available today, allowing the electronic transfer of the entire

Encyclopedia Britannica in one hot second. Computer networks

worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular

phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high-

definition television. A multimedia global circus!

Or so it's hoped -- and planned. The real Internet of the

future may bear very little resemblance to today's plans. Planning

has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal

development of the Internet. After all, today's Internet bears

little resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND's post-

holocaust command grid. It's a fine and happy irony.

How does one get access to the Internet? Well -- if you don't

have a computer and a modem, get one. Your computer can act as a

terminal, and you can use an ordinary telephone line to connect to an

Internet-linked machine. These slower and simpler adjuncts to the

Internet can provide you with the netnews discussion groups and

your own e-mail address. These are services worth having -- though

if you only have mail and news, you're not actually "on the Internet"

proper.

If you're on a campus, your university may have direct

"dedicated access" to high-speed Internet TCP/IP lines. Apply for an

Internet account on a dedicated campus machine, and you may be

able to get those hot-dog long-distance computing and file-transfer

functions. Some cities, such as Cleveland, supply "freenet"

community access. Businesses increasingly have Internet access, and

are willing to sell it to subscribers. The standard fee is about $40 a

month -- about the same as TV cable service.

As the Nineties proceed, finding a link to the Internet will

become much cheaper and easier. Its ease of use will also improve,

which is fine news, for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves

plenty of room for advancements in user-friendliness. Learning the

Internet now, or at least learning about it, is wise. By the

turn of the century, "network literacy," like "computer literacy"

before it, will be forcing itself into the very texture of your life.

For Further Reading:

The Whole Internet Catalog & User's Guide by Ed Krol. (1992) O'Reilly

and Associates, Inc. A clear, non-jargonized introduction to the

intimidating business of network literacy. Many computer-

documentation manuals attempt to be funny. Mr. Krol's book is

*actually* funny.

The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide.

by John Quarterman. Digital Press: Bedford, MA. (1990) Massive and

highly technical compendium detailing the mind-boggling scope and

complexity of our newly networked planet.

The Internet Companion by Tracy LaQuey with Jeanne C. Ryer (1992)

Addison Wesley. Evangelical etiquette guide to the Internet featuring

anecdotal tales of life-changing Internet experiences. Foreword by

Senator Al Gore.

Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide by Brendan P.

Kehoe (1992) Prentice Hall. Brief but useful Internet guide with

plenty of good advice on useful machines to paw over for data. Mr

Kehoe's guide bears the singularly wonderful distinction of being

available in electronic form free of charge. I'm doing the same

with all my F&SF Science articles, including, of course, this one. My

own Internet address is bruces@well.sf.ca.us.

"Magnetic Vision"

Here on my desk I have something that can only be described as

miraculous. It's a big cardboard envelope with nine thick sheets of

black plastic inside, and on these sheets are pictures of my own brain.

These images are "MRI scans" -- magnetic resonance imagery from

a medical scanner.

These are magnetic windows into the lightless realm inside my

skull. The meat, bone, and various gristles within my head glow gently

in crisp black-and-white detail. There's little of the foggy ghostliness

one sees with, say, dental x-rays. Held up against a bright light, or

placed on a diagnostic light table, the dark plastic sheets reveal veins,

arteries, various odd fluid-stuffed ventricles, and the spongey wrinkles

of my cerebellum. In various shots, I can see the pulp within my own

teeth, the roots of my tongue, the boney caverns of my sinuses, and the

nicely spherical jellies that are my two eyeballs. I can see that the

human brain really does come in two lobes and in three sections, and

that it has gray matter and white matter. The brain is a big whopping

gland, basically, and it fills my skull just like the meat of a walnut.

It's an odd experience to look long and hard at one's own brain.

Though it's quite a privilege to witness this, it's also a form of

narcissism without much historical parallel. Frankly, I don't think I

ever really believed in my own brain until I saw these images. At least,

I never truly comprehended my brain as a tangible physical organ, like

a knuckle or a kneecap. And yet here is the evidence, laid out

irrefutably before me, pixel by monochrome pixel, in a large variety of

angles and in exquisite detail. And I'm told that my brain is quite

healthy and perfectly normal -- anatomically at least. (For a science

fiction writer this news is something of a letdown.)

The discovery of X-rays in 1895, by Wilhelm Roentgen, led to the

first technology that made human flesh transparent. Nowadays, X-rays

can pierce the body through many different angles to produce a

graphic three-dimensional image. This 3-D technique, "Computerized

Axial Tomography" or the CAT-scan, won a Nobel Prize in 1979 for its

originators, Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack.

Sonography uses ultrasound to study human tissue through its

reflection of high-frequency vibration: sonography is a sonic window.

Magnetic resonance imaging, however, is a more sophisticated

window yet. It is rivalled only by the lesser-known and still rather

experimental PET-scan, or Positron Emission Tomography. PET-

scanning requires an injection of radioactive isotopes into the body so

that their decay can be tracked within human tissues. Magnetic

resonance, though it is sometimes known as Nuclear Magnetic

Resonance, does not involve radioactivity.

The phenomenon of "nuclear magnetic resonance" was

discovered in 1946 by Edward Purcell of Harvard, and Felix Block of

Stanford. Purcell and Block were working separately, but published

their findings within a month of one another. In 1952, Purcell and

Block won a joint Nobel Prize for their discovery.

If an atom has an odd number of protons and neutrons, it will

have what is known as a "magnetic moment:" it will spin, and its axis

will tilt in a certain direction. When that tilted nucleus is put into a

magnetic field, the axis of the tilt will change, and the nucleus will also

wobble at a certain speed. If radio waves are then beamed at the

wobbling nucleus at just the proper wavelength, they will cause the

wobbling to intensify -- this is the "magnetic resonance" phenomenon.

The resonant frequency is known as the Larmor frequency, and the

Larmor frequencies vary for different atoms.

Hydrogen, for instance, has a Larmor frequency of 42.58

megahertz. Hydrogen, which is a major constituent of water and of

carbohydrates such as fat, is very common in the human body. If radio

waves at this Larmor frequency are beamed into magnetized hydrogen

atoms, the hydrogen nuclei will absorb the resonant energy until they

reach a state of excitation. When the beam goes off, the hydrogen

nuclei will relax again, each nucleus emitting a tiny burst of radio

energy as it returns to its original state. The nuclei will also relax at

slightly different rates, depending on the chemical circumstances

around the hydrogen atom. Hydrogen behaves differently in different

kinds of human tissue. Those relaxation bursts can be detected, and

timed, and mapped.

The enormously powerful magnetic field within an MRI machine

can permeate the human body; but the resonant Larmor frequency is

beamed through the body in thin, precise slices. The resulting images

are neat cross-sections through the body. Unlike X-rays, magnetic

resonance doesn't ionize and possibly damage human cells. Instead, it

gently coaxes information from many different types of tissue, causing

them to emit tell-tale signals about their chemical makeup. Blood, fat,

bones, tendons, all emit their own characteristics, which a computer

then reassembles as a graphic image on a computer screen, or prints

out on emulsion-coated plastic sheets.

An X-ray is a marvelous technology, and a CAT-scan more

marvelous yet. But an X-ray does have limits. Bones cast shadows in X-

radiation, making certain body areas opaque or difficult to read. And X-

ray images are rather stark and anatomical; an X-ray image cannot

even show if the patient is alive or dead. An MRI scan, on the other

hand, will reveal a great deal about the composition and the health of

living tissue. For instance, tumor cells handle their fluids differently

than normal tissue, giving rise to a slightly different set of signals. The

MRI machine itself was originally invented as a cancer detector.

After the 1946 discovery of magnetic resonance, MRI techniques

were used for thirty years to study small chemical samples. However, a

cancer researcher, Dr. Raymond Damadian, was the first to build an MRI

machine large enough and sophisticated enough to scan an entire

human body, and then produce images from that scan. Many scientists,

most of them even, believed and said that such a technology was decades

away, or even technically impossible. Damadian had a tough,

prolonged struggle to find funding for for his visionary technique, and

he was often dismissed as a zealot, a crackpot, or worse. Damadian's

struggle and eventual triumph is entertainingly detailed in his 1985

biography, A MACHINE CALLED INDOMITABLE.

Damadian was not much helped by his bitter and public rivalry

with his foremost competitor in the field, Paul Lauterbur. Lauterbur,

an industrial chemist, was the first to produce an actual magnetic-

resonance image, in 1973. But Damadian was the more technologically

ambitious of the two. His machine, "Indomitable," (now in the

Smithsonian Museum) produced the first scan of a human torso, in 1977.

(As it happens, it was Damadian's own torso.) Once this proof-of-

concept had been thrust before a doubting world, Damadian founded a

production company, and became the father of the MRI scanner

industry.

By the end of the 1980s, medical MRI scanning had become a

major enterprise, and Damadian had won the National Medal of

Technology, along with many other honors. As MRI machines spread

worldwide, the market for CAT-scanning began to slump in comparison.

Today, MRI is a two-billion dollar industry, and Dr Damadian and his

company, Fonar Corporation, have reaped the fruits of success. (Some

of those fruits are less sweet than others: today Damadian and Fonar

Corp. are suing Hitachi and General Electric in federal court, for

alleged infringement of Damadian's patents.)

MRIs are marvelous machines -- perhaps, according to critics, a

little too marvelous. The magnetic fields emitted by MRIs are extremely

strong, strong enough to tug wheelchairs across the hospital floor, to

wipe the data off the magnetic strips in credit cards, and to whip a

wrench or screwdriver out of one's grip and send it hurtling across the

room. If the patient has any metal imbedded in his skin -- welders and

machinists, in particular, often do have tiny painless particles of

shrapnel in them -- then these bits of metal will be wrenched out of the

patient's flesh, producing a sharp bee-sting sensation. And in the

invisible grip of giant magnets, heart pacemakers can simply stop.

MRI machines can weigh ten, twenty, even one hundred tons.

And they're big -- the scanning cavity, in which the patient is inserted,

is about the size and shape of a sewer pipe, but the huge plastic hull

surrounding that cavity is taller than a man and longer than a plush

limo. A machine of that enormous size and weight cannot be moved

through hospital doors; instead, it has to be delivered by crane, and its

shelter constructed around it. That shelter must not have any iron

construction rods in it or beneath its floor, for obvious reasons. And yet

that floor had better be very solid indeed.

Superconductive MRIs present their own unique hazards. The

superconductive coils are supercooled with liquid helium.

Unfortunately there's an odd phenomenon known as "quenching," in

which a superconductive magnet, for reasons rather poorly understood,

will suddenly become merely-conductive. When a "quench" occurs, an

enormous amount of electrical energy suddenly flashes into heat,

which makes the liquid helium boil violently. The MRI's technicians

might be smothered or frozen by boiling helium, so it has to be vented

out the roof, requiring the installation of specialized vent-stacks.

Helium leaks, too, so it must be resupplied frequently, at considerable

expense.

The MRI complex also requires expensive graphic-processing

computers, CRT screens, and photographic hard-copy devices. Some

scanners feature elaborate telecommunications equipment. Like the

giant scanners themselves, all these associated machines require

power-surge protectors, line conditioners, and backup power supplies.

Fluorescent lights, which produce radio-frequency noise pollution, are

forbidden around MRIs. MRIs are also very bothered by passing CB

radios, paging systems, and ambulance transmissions. It is generally

considered a good idea to sheathe the entire MRI cubicle (especially the

doors, windows, electrical wiring, and plumbing) in expensive, well-

grounded sheet-copper.

Despite all these drawbacks, the United States today rejoices in

possession of some two thousand MRI machines. (There are hundreds in

other countries as well.) The cheaper models cost a solid million dollars

each; the top-of-the-line models, two million. Five million MRI scans

were performed in the United States last year, at prices ranging from

six hundred dollars, to twice that price and more.

In other words, in 1991 alone, Americans sank some five billion

dollars in health care costs into the miraculous MRI technology.

Today America's hospitals and diagnostic clinics are in an MRI

arms race. Manufacturers constantly push new and improved machines

into the market, and other hospitals feel a dire need to stay with the

state-of-the-art. They have little choice in any case, for the balky,

temperamental MRI scanners wear out in six years or less, even when

treated with the best of care.

Patients have little reason to refuse an MRI test, since insurance

will generally cover the cost. MRIs are especially good for testing for

neurological conditions, and since a lot of complaints, even quite minor

ones, might conceivably be neurological, a great many MRI scans are

performed. The tests aren't painful, and they're not considered risky.

Having one's tissues briefly magnetized is considered far less risky than

the fairly gross ionization damage caused by X-rays. The most common

form of MRI discomfort is simple claustrophobia. MRIs are as narrow as

the grave, and also very loud, with sharp mechanical clacking and

buzzing.

But the results are marvels to behold, and MRIs have clearly

saved many lives. And the tests will eliminate some potential risks to

the patient, and put the physician on surer ground with his diagnosis.

So why not just go ahead and take the test?

MRIs have gone ahead boldly. Unfortunately, miracles rarely

come cheap. Today the United States spends thirteen percent of its Gross

National Product on health care, and health insurance costs are

drastically outstripping the rate of inflation.

High-tech, high-cost resources such as MRIs generally go to to

the well-to-do and the well-insured. This practice has sad

repercussions. While some lives are saved by technological miracles --

and this is a fine thing -- other lives are lost, that might have been

rescued by fairly cheap and common public-health measures, such as

better nutrition, better sanitation, or better prenatal care. As advanced

nations go, the United States a rather low general life expectancy, and a

quite bad infant-death rate; conspicuously worse, for instance, than

Italy, Japan, Germany, France, and Canada.

MRI may be a true example of a technology genuinely ahead of

its time. It may be that the genius, grit, and determination of Raymond

Damadian brought into the 1980s a machine that might have been better

suited to the technical milieu of the 2010s. What MRI really requires for

everyday workability is some cheap, simple, durable, powerful

superconductors. Those are simply not available today, though they

would seem to be just over the technological horizon. In the meantime,

we have built thousands of magnetic windows into the body that will do

more or less what CAT-scan x-rays can do already. And though they do

it better, more safely, and more gently than x-rays can, they also do it

at a vastly higher price.

Damadian himself envisioned MRIs as a cheap mass-produced

technology. "In ten to fifteen years," he is quoted as saying in 1985,

"we'll be able to step into a booth -- they'll be in shopping malls or

department stores -- put a quarter in it, and in a minute it'll say you

need some Vitamin A, you have some bone disease over here, your blood

pressure is a touch high, and keep a watch on that cholesterol." A

thorough medical checkup for twenty-five cents in 1995! If one needed

proof that Raymond Damadian was a true visionary, one could find it

here.

Damadian even envisioned a truly advanced MRI machine

capable of not only detecting cancer, but of killing cancerous cells

outright. These machines would excite not hydrogen atoms, but

phosphorus atoms, common in cancer-damaged DNA. Damadian

speculated that certain Larmor frequencies in phosphorus might be

specific to cancerous tissue; if that were the case, then it might be

possible to pump enough energy into those phosphorus nuclei so that

they actually shivered loose from the cancer cell's DNA, destroying the

cancer cell's ability to function, and eventually killing it.

That's an amazing thought -- a science-fictional vision right out

of the Gernback Continuum. Step inside the booth -- drop a quarter --

and have your incipient cancer not only diagnosed, but painlessly

obliterated by invisible Magnetic Healing Rays.

Who the heck could believe a visionary scenario like that?

Some things are unbelievable until you see them with your own

eyes. Until the vision is sitting right there in front of you. Where it

can no longer be denied that they're possible.

A vision like the inside of your own brain, for instance.

SUPERGLUE

This is the Golden Age of Glue.

For thousands of years, humanity got by with natural glues like

pitch, resin, wax, and blood; products of hoof and hide and treesap

and tar. But during the past century, and especially during the past

thirty years, there has been a silent revolution in adhesion.

This stealthy yet steady technological improvement has been

difficult to fully comprehend, for glue is a humble stuff, and the

better it works, the harder it is to notice. Nevertheless, much of the

basic character of our everyday environment is now due to advanced

adhesion chemistry.

Many popular artifacts from the pre-glue epoch look clunky

and almost Victorian today. These creations relied on bolts, nuts,

rivets, pins, staples, nails, screws, stitches, straps, bevels, knobs, and

bent flaps of tin. No more. The popular demand for consumer

objects ever lighter, smaller, cheaper, faster and sleeker has led to

great changes in the design of everyday things.

Glue determines much of the difference between our

grandparent's shoes, with their sturdy leather soles, elaborate

stitching, and cobbler's nails, and the eerie-looking modern jogging-

shoe with its laminated plastic soles, fabric uppers and sleek foam

inlays. Glue also makes much of the difference between the big

family radio cabinet of the 1940s and the sleek black hand-sized

clamshell of a modern Sony Walkman.

Glue holds this very magazine together. And if you happen to

be reading this article off a computer (as you well may), then you

are even more indebted to glue; modern microelectronic assembly

would be impossible without it.

Glue dominates the modern packaging industry. Glue also has

a strong presence in automobiles, aerospace, electronics, dentistry,

medicine, and household appliances of all kinds. Glue infiltrates

grocery bags, envelopes, books, magazines, labels, paper cups, and

cardboard boxes; there are five different kinds of glue in a common

filtered cigarette. Glue lurks invisibly in the structure of our

shelters, in ceramic tiling, carpets, counter tops, gutters, wall siding,

ceiling panels and floor linoleum. It's in furniture, cooking utensils,

and cosmetics. This galaxy of applications doesn't even count the

vast modern spooling mileage of adhesive tapes: package tape,

industrial tape, surgical tape, masking tape, electrical tape, duct tape,

plumbing tape, and much, much more.

Glue is a major industrial industry and has been growing at

twice the rate of GNP for many years, as adhesives leak and stick

into areas formerly dominated by other fasteners. Glues also create

new markets all their own, such as Post-it Notes (first premiered in

April 1980, and now omnipresent in over 350 varieties).

The global glue industry is estimated to produce about twelve

billion pounds of adhesives every year. Adhesion is a $13 billion

market in which every major national economy has a stake. The

adhesives industry has its own specialty magazines, such as

Adhesives Age andSAMPE Journal; its own trade groups, like the

Adhesives Manufacturers Association, The Adhesion Society, and the

Adhesives and Sealant Council; and its own seminars, workshops and

technical conferences. Adhesives corporations like 3M, National

Starch, Eastman Kodak, Sumitomo, and Henkel are among the world's

most potent technical industries.

Given all this, it's amazing how little is definitively known

about how glue actually works -- the actual science of adhesion.

There are quite good industrial rules-of-thumb for creating glues;

industrial technicians can now combine all kinds of arcane

ingredients to design glues with well-defined specifications:

qualities such as shear strength, green strength, tack, electrical

conductivity, transparency, and impact resistance. But when it

comes to actually describing why glue is sticky, it's a different

matter, and a far from simple one.

A good glue has low surface tension; it spreads rapidly and

thoroughly, so that it will wet the entire surface of the substrate.

Good wetting is a key to strong adhesive bonds; bad wetting leads

to problems like "starved joints," and crannies full of trapped air,

moisture, or other atmospheric contaminants, which can weaken the

bond.

But it is not enough just to wet a surface thoroughly; if that

were the case, then water would be a glue. Liquid glue changes

form; it cures, creating a solid interface between surfaces that

becomes a permanent bond.

The exact nature of that bond is pretty much anybody's guess.

There are no less than four major physico-chemical theories about

what makes things stick: mechanical theory, adsorption theory,

electrostatic theory and diffusion theory. Perhaps molecular strands

of glue become physically tangled and hooked around irregularities

in the surface, seeping into microscopic pores and cracks. Or, glue

molecules may be attracted by covalent bonds, or acid-base

interactions, or exotic van der Waals forces and London dispersion

forces, which have to do with arcane dipolar resonances between

magnetically imbalanced molecules. Diffusion theorists favor the

idea that glue actually blends into the top few hundred molecules of

the contact surface.

Different glues and different substrates have very different

chemical constituents. It's likely that all of these processes may have

something to do with the nature of what we call "stickiness" -- that

everybody's right, only in different ways and under different

circumstances.

In 1989 the National Science Foundation formally established

the Center for Polymeric Adhesives and Composites. This Center's

charter is to establish "a coherent philosophy and systematic

methodology for the creation of new and advanced polymeric

adhesives" -- in other words, to bring genuine detailed scientific

understanding to a process hitherto dominated by industrial rules of

thumb. The Center has been inventing new adhesion test methods

involving vacuum ovens, interferometers, and infrared microscopes,

and is establishing computer models of the adhesion process. The

Center's corporate sponsors -- Amoco, Boeing, DuPont, Exxon,

Hoechst Celanese, IBM, Monsanto, Philips, and Shell, to name a few of

them -- are wishing them all the best.

We can study the basics of glue through examining one typical

candidate. Let's examine one well-known superstar of modern

adhesion: that wondrous and well-nigh legendary substance known

as "superglue." Superglue, which also travels under the aliases of

SuperBonder, Permabond, Pronto, Black Max, Alpha Ace, Krazy Glue

and (in Mexico) Kola Loka, is known to chemists as cyanoacrylate

(C5H5NO2).

Cyanoacrylate was first discovered in 1942 in a search for

materials to make clear plastic gunsights for the second world war.

The American researchers quickly rejected cyanoacrylate because

the wretched stuff stuck to everything and made a horrible mess. In

1951, cyanoacrylate was rediscovered by Eastman Kodak researchers

Harry Coover and Fred Joyner, who ruined a perfectly useful

refractometer with it -- and then recognized its true potential.

Cyanoacrylate became known as Eastman compound #910. Eastman

910 first captured the popular imagination in 1958, when Dr Coover

appeared on the "I've Got a Secret" TV game show and lifted host

Gary Moore off the floor with a single drop of the stuff.

This stunt still makes very good television and cyanoacrylate

now has a yearly commercial market of $325 million.

Cyanoacrylate is an especially lovely and appealing glue,

because it is (relatively) nontoxic, very fast-acting, extremely strong,

needs no other mixer or catalyst, sticks with a gentle touch, and does

not require any fancy industrial gizmos such as ovens, presses, vices,

clamps, or autoclaves. Actually, cyanoacrylate does require a

chemical trigger to cause it to set, but with amazing convenience, that

trigger is the hydroxyl ions in common water. And under natural

atmospheric conditions, a thin layer of water is naturally present on

almost any surface one might want to glue.

Cyanoacrylate is a "thermosetting adhesive," which means that

(unlike sealing wax, pitch, and other "hot melt" adhesives) it cannot

be heated and softened repeatedly. As it cures and sets,

cyanoacrylate becomes permanently crosslinked, forming a tough

and permanent polymer plastic.

In its natural state in its native Superglue tube from the

convenience store, a molecule of cyanoacrylate looks something like

this:

CN

/

CH2=C

\

COOR

The R is a variable (an "alkyl group") which slightly changes

the character of the molecule; cyanoacrylate is commercially

available in ethyl, methyl, isopropyl, allyl, butyl, isobutyl,

methoxyethyl, and ethoxyethyl cyanoacrylate esters. These

chemical variants have slightly different setting properties and

degrees of gooiness.

After setting or "ionic polymerization," however, Superglue

looks something like this:

CN CN CN

| | |

- CH2C -(CH2C)-(CH2C)- (etc. etc. etc)

| | |

COOR COOR COOR

The single cyanoacrylate "monomer" joins up like a series of

plastic popper-beads, becoming a long chain. Within the thickening

liquid glue, these growing chains whip about through Brownian

motion, a process technically known as "reptation," named after the

crawling of snakes. As the reptating molecules thrash, then wriggle,

then finally merely twitch, the once- thin and viscous liquid becomes

a tough mass of fossilized, interpenetrating plastic molecular

spaghetti.

And it is strong. Even pure cyanoacrylate can lift a ton with a

single square-inch bond, and one advanced elastomer-modified '80s

mix, "Black Max" from Loctite Corporation, can go up to 3,100 pounds.

This is enough strength to rip the surface right off most substrates.

Unless it's made of chrome steel, the object you're gluing will likely

give up the ghost well before a properly anchored layer of Superglue

will.

Superglue quickly found industrial uses in automotive trim,

phonograph needle cartridges, video cassettes, transformer

laminations, circuit boards, and sporting goods. But early superglues

had definite drawbacks. The stuff dispersed so easily that it

sometimes precipitated as vapor, forming a white film on surfaces

where it wasn't needed; this is known as "blooming." Though

extremely strong under tension, superglue was not very good at

sudden lateral shocks or "shear forces," which could cause the glue-

bond to snap. Moisture weakened it, especially on metal-to-metal

bonds, and prolonged exposure to heat would cook all the strength

out of it.

The stuff also coagulated inside the tube with annoying speed,

turning into a useless and frustrating plastic lump that no amount of

squeezing of pinpoking could budge -- until the tube burst and and

the thin slippery gush cemented one's fingers, hair, and desk in a

mummified membrane that only acetone could cut.

Today, however, through a quiet process of incremental

improvement, superglue has become more potent and more useful

than ever. Modern superglues are packaged with stabilizers and

thickeners and catalysts and gels, improving heat capacity, reducing

brittleness, improving resistance to damp and acids and alkalis.

Today the wicked stuff is basically getting into everything.

Including people. In Europe, superglue is routinely used in

surgery, actually gluing human flesh and viscera to replace sutures

and hemostats. And Superglue is quite an old hand at attaching fake

fingernails -- a practice that has sometimes had grisly consequences

when the tiny clear superglue bottle is mistaken for a bottle of

eyedrops. (I haven't the heart to detail the consequences of this

mishap, but if you're not squeamish you might try consulting The

Journal of the American Medical Association, May 2, 1990 v263 n17

p2301).

Superglue is potent and almost magical stuff, the champion of

popular glues and, in its own quiet way, something of an historical

advent. There is something pleasantly marvelous, almost Arabian

Nights-like, about a drop of liquid that can lift a ton; and yet one can

buy the stuff anywhere today, and it's cheap. There are many urban

legends about terrible things done with superglue; car-doors locked

forever, parking meters welded into useless lumps, and various tales

of sexual vengeance that are little better than elaborate dirty jokes.

There are also persistent rumors of real-life superglue muggings, in

which victims are attached spreadeagled to cars or plate-glass

windows, while their glue-wielding assailants rifle their pockets at

leisure and then stroll off, leaving the victim helplessly immobilized.

While superglue crime is hard to document, there is no

question about its real-life use for law enforcement. The detection

of fingerprints has been revolutionized with special kits of fuming

ethyl-gel cyanoacrylate. The fumes from a ripped-open foil packet of

chemically smoking superglue will settle and cure on the skin oils

left in human fingerprints, turning the smear into a visible solid

object. Thanks to superglue, the lightest touch on a weapon can

become a lump of plastic guilt, cementing the perpetrator to his

crime in a permanent bond.

And surely it would be simple justice if the world's first

convicted superglue mugger were apprehended in just this way.

"Creation Science"

In the beginning, all geologists and biologists were creationists.

This was only natural. In the early days of the Western scientific

tradition, the Bible was by far the most impressive and potent source

of historical and scientific knowledge.

The very first Book of the Bible, Genesis, directly treated

matters of deep geological import. Genesis presented a detailed

account of God's creation of the natural world, including the sea, the

sky, land, plants, animals and mankind, from utter nothingness.

Genesis also supplied a detailed account of a second event of

enormous import to geologists: a universal Deluge.

Theology was queen of sciences, and geology was one humble

aspect of "natural theology." The investigation of rocks and the

structure of the landscape was a pious act, meant to reveal the full

glory and intricacy of God's design. Many of the foremost geologists

of the 18th and 19th century were theologians: William Buckland,

John Pye Smith, John Fleming, Adam Sedgewick. Charles Darwin

himself was a one-time divinity student.

Eventually the study of rocks and fossils, meant to complement

the Biblical record, began to contradict it. There were published

rumblings of discontent with the Genesis account as early as the

1730s, but real trouble began with the formidable and direct

challenges of Lyell's uniformitarian theory of geology and his disciple

Darwin's evolution theory in biology. The painstaking evidence

heaped in Lyell's *Principles of Geology* and Darwin's *Origin of

Species* caused enormous controversy, but eventually carried the

day in the scientific community.

But convincing the scientific community was far from the end

of the matter. For "creation science," this was only the beginning.

Most Americans today are "creationists" in the strict sense of

that term. Polls indicate that over 90 percent of Americans believe

that the universe exists because God created it. A Gallup poll in

1991 established that a full 47 percent of the American populace

further believes that God directly created humankind, in the present

human form, less than ten thousand years ago.

So "creationism" is not the view of an extremist minority in our

society -- quite the contrary. The real minority are the fewer than

five percent of Americans who are strictly non-creationist. Rejecting

divine intervention entirely leaves one with few solid or comforting

answers, which perhaps accounts for this view's unpopularity.

Science offers no explanation whatever as to why the universe exists.

It would appear that something went bang in a major fashion about

fifteen billion years ago, but the scientific evidence for that -- the

three-degree background radiation, the Hubble constant and so forth

-- does not at all suggest *why* such an event should have happened

in the first place.

One doesn't necessarily have to invoke divine will to explain

the origin of the universe. One might speculate, for instance, that

the reason there is Something instead of Nothing is because "Nothing

is inherently unstable" and Nothingness simply exploded. There's

little scientific evidence to support such a speculation, however, and

few people in our society are that radically anti-theistic. The

commonest view of the origin of the cosmos is "theistic creationism,"

the belief that the Cosmos is the product of a divine supernatural

action at the beginning of time.

The creationist debate, therefore, has not generally been

between strictly natural processes and strictly supernatural ones, but

over *how much* supernaturalism or naturalism one is willing to

admit into one's worldview.

How does one deal successfully with the dissonance between

the word of God and the evidence in the physical world? Or the

struggle, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, between the Rock of Ages and

the age of rocks?

Let us assume, as a given, that the Bible as we know it today is

divinely inspired and that there are no mistranslations, errors,

ellipses, or deceptions within the text. Let us further assume that

the account in Genesis is entirely factual and not metaphorical, poetic

or mythical.

Genesis says that the universe was created in six days. This

divine process followed a well-defined schedule.

Day 1. God created a dark, formless void of deep waters, then

created light and separated light from darkness.

Day 2. God established the vault of Heaven over the formless watery

void.

Day 3. God created dry land amidst the waters and established

vegetation on the land.

Day 4. God created the sun, the moon, and the stars, and set them

into the vault of heaven.

Day 5. God created the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air.

Day 6. God created the beasts of the earth and created one male and

one female human being.

On Day 7, God rested.

Humanity thus began on the sixth day of creation. Mankind is

one day younger than birds, two days younger than plants, and

slightly younger than mammals. How are we to reconcile this with

scientific evidence suggesting that the earth is over 4 billion years

old and that life started as a single-celled ooze some three billion

years ago?

The first method of reconciliation is known as "gap theory."

The very first verse of Genesis declares that God created the heaven

and the earth, but God did not establish "Day" and "Night" until the

fifth verse. This suggests that there may have been an immense

span of time, perhaps eons, between the creation of matter and life,

and the beginning of the day-night cycle. Perhaps there were

multiple creations and cataclysms during this period, accounting for

the presence of oddities such as trilobites and dinosaurs, before a

standard six-day Edenic "restoration" around 4,000 BC.

"Gap theory" was favored by Biblical scholar Charles Scofield,

prominent '30s barnstorming evangelist Harry Rimmer, and well-

known modern televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, among others.

The second method of reconciliation is "day-age theory." In

this interpretation, the individual "days" of the Bible are considered

not modern twenty-four hour days, but enormous spans of time.

Day-age theorists point out that the sun was not created until Day 4,

more than halfway through the process. It's difficult to understand

how or why the Earth would have a contemporary 24-hour "day"

without a Sun. The Beginning, therefore, likely took place eons ago,

with matter created on the first "day," life emerging on the third

"day," the fossil record forming during the eons of "days" four five

and six. Humanity, however, was created directly by divine fiat and

did not "evolve" from lesser animals.

Perhaps the best-known "day-age" theorist was William

Jennings Bryan, three-times US presidential candidate and a

prominent figure in the Scopes evolution trial in 1925.

In modern creation-science, however, both gap theory and

day-age theory are in eclipse, supplanted and dominated by "flood

geology." The most vigorous and influential creation-scientists

today are flood geologists, and their views (though not the only

views in creationist doctrine), have become synonymous with the

terms "creation science" and "scientific creationism."

"Flood geology" suggests that this planet is somewhere between

6,000 and 15,000 years old. The Earth was entirely lifeless until the

six literal 24-hour days that created Eden and Adam and Eve. Adam

and Eve were the direct ancestors of all human beings. All fossils,

including so-called pre-human fossils, were created about 3,000 BC

during Noah's Flood, which submerged the entire surface of the Earth

and destroyed all air-breathing life that was not in the Ark (with the

possible exception of air-breathing mammalian sea life). Dinosaurs,

which did exist but are probably badly misinterpreted by geologists,

are only slightly older than the human race and were co-existent

with the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Actually, the Biblical

patriarchs were contemporaries with all the creatures in the fossil

record, including trilobites, pterosaurs, giant ferns, nine-foot sea

scorpions, dragonflies two feet across, tyrannosaurs, and so forth.

The world before the Deluge had a very rich ecology.

Modern flood geology creation-science is a stern and radical

school. Its advocates have not hesitated to carry the war to their

theological rivals. The best known creation-science text (among

hundreds) is probably *The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and

its Scientific Implications* by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M.

Morris (1961). Much of this book's argumentative energy is devoted

to demolishing gap theory, and especially, the more popular and

therefore more pernicious day-age theory.

Whitcomb and Morris point out with devastating logic that

plants, created on Day Three, could hardly have been expected to

survive for "eons" without any daylight from the Sun, created on Day

Four. Nor could plants pollinate without bees, moths and butterflies

-- winged creatures that were products of Day Five.

Whitcomb and Morris marshal a great deal of internal Biblical

testimony for the everyday, non-metaphorical, entirely real-life

existence of Adam, Eve, Eden, and Noah's Flood. Jesus Christ Himself

refers to the reality of the Flood in Luke 17, and to the reality of

Adam, Eve, and Eden in Matthew 19.

Creationists have pointed out that without Adam, there is no

Fall; with no Fall, there is no Atonement for original sin; without

Atonement, there can be no Savior. To lack faith in the historical

existence and the crucial role of Adam, therefore, is necessarily to

lack faith in the historical existence and the crucial role of Jesus.

Taken on its own terms, this is a difficult piece of reasoning to refute,

and is typical of Creation-Science analysis.

To these creation-scientists, the Bible is very much all of a

piece. To begin pridefully picking and choosing within God's Word

about what one may or may not choose to believe is to risk an utter

collapse of faith that can only result in apostasy -- "going to the

apes." These scholars are utterly and soberly determined to believe

every word of the Bible, and to use their considerable intelligence to

prove that it is the literal truth about our world and our history as a

species.

Cynics might wonder if this activity were some kind of

elaborate joke, or perhaps a wicked attempt by clever men to garner

money and fame at the expense of gullible fundamentalist

supporters. Any serious study of the lives of prominent Creationists

establishes that this is simply not so. Creation scientists are not

poseurs or hypocrites. Many have spent many patient decades in

quite humble circumstances, often enduring public ridicule, yet still

working selflessly and doggedly in the service of their beliefs.

When they state, for instance, that evolution is inspired by Satan and

leads to pornography, homosexuality, and abortion, they are entirely

in earnest. They are describing what they consider to be clear and

evident facts of life.

Creation-science is not standard, orthodox, respectable science.

There is, and always has been, a lot of debate about what qualities an

orthodox and respectable scientific effort should possess. It can be

stated though that science should have at least two basic

requirements: (A) the scientist should be willing to follow the data

where it leads, rather than bending the evidence to fit some

preconceived rationale, and (B) explanations of phenomena should

not depend on unique or nonmaterial factors. It also helps a lot if

one's theories are falsifiable, reproducible by other researchers,

openly published and openly testable, and free of obvious internal

contradictions.

Creation-science does not fit that description at all. Creation-

science considers it sheer boneheaded prejudice to eliminate

miraculous, unique explanations of world events. After all, God, a

living and omnipotent Supreme Being, is perfectly capable of

directing mere human affairs into any direction He might please. To

simply eliminate divine intervention as an explanation for

phenomena, merely in order to suit the intellectual convenience of

mortal human beings, is not only arrogant and arbitrary, but absurd.

Science has accomplished great triumphs through the use of

purely naturalistic explanations. Over many centuries, hundreds of

scientists have realized that some questions can be successfully

investigated using naturalistic techniques. Questions that cannot be

answered in this way are not science, but instead are philosophy, art,

or theology. Scientists assume as a given that we live in a natural

universe that obeys natural laws.

It's conceivable that this assumption might not be the case.

The entire cognitive structure of science hinges on this assumption of

natural law, but it might not actually be true. It's interesting to

imagine the consequences for science if there were to be an obvious,

public, irrefutable violation of natural law.

Imagine that such a violation took place in the realm of

evolutionary biology. Suppose, for instance, that tonight at midnight

Eastern Standard Time every human being on this planet suddenly

had, not ten fingers, but twelve. Suppose that all our children were

henceforth born with twelve fingers also and we now found

ourselves a twelve-fingered species. This bizarre advent would

violate Neo-Darwinian evolution, many laws of human metabolism,

the physical laws of conservation of mass and energy, and quite a

few other such. If such a thing were to actually happen, we would

simply be wrong about the basic nature of our universe. We

thought we were living in a world where evolution occurred through

slow natural processes of genetic drift, mutation, and survival of the

fittest; but we were mistaken. Where the time had come for our

species to evolve to a twelve-fingered status, we simply did it in an

instant all at once, and that was that.

This would be a shock to the scientific worldview equivalent to

the terrible shock that the Christian worldview has sustained

through geology and Darwinism. If a shock of this sort were to strike

the scientific establishment, it would not be surprising to see

scientists clinging, quite irrationally, to their naturalist principles --

despite the fact that genuine supernaturalism was literally right at

hand. Bizarre rationalizations would surely flourish -- queer

"explanations" that the sixth fingers had somehow grown there

naturally without our noticing, or perhaps that the fingers were mere

illusions and we really had only ten after all, or that we had always

had twelve fingers and that all former evidence that we had once

had ten fingers were evil lies spread by wicked people to confuse us.

The only alternative would be to fully face the terrifying fact that a

parochial notion of "reality" had been conclusively toppled, thereby

robbing all meaning from the lives and careers of scientists.

This metaphor may be helpful in understanding why it is that

Whitcomb and Morris's *Genesis Flood* can talk quite soberly about

Noah storing dinosaurs in the Ark. They would have had to be

*young* dinosaurs, of course.... If we assume that one Biblical cubit

equals 17.5 inches, a standard measure, then the Ark had a volume

of 1,396,000 cubic feet, a carrying capacity equal to that of 522

standard railroad stock cars. Plenty of room!

Many other possible objections to the Ark story are met head-

on, in similar meticulous detail. Noah did not have to search the

earth for wombats, pangolins, polar bears and so on; all animals,

including the exotic and distant ones, were brought through divine

instinct to the site of the Ark for Noah's convenience. It seems

plausible that this divine intervention was, in fact, the beginning of

the migratory instinct in the animal kingdom. Similarly, hibernation

may have been created by God at this time, to keep the thousands of

animals quiet inside the Ark and also reduce the need for gigantic

animal larders that would have overtaxed Noah's crew of eight.

Evidence in the Biblical geneologies shows that pre-Deluge

patriarchs lived far longer than those after the Deluge, suggesting a

radical change in climate, and not for the better. Whitcomb and

Morris make the extent of that change clear by establishing that

before the Deluge it never rained. There had been no rainbows

before the Flood -- Genesis states clearly that the rainbow came into

existence as a sign of God's covenant with Noah. If we assume that

normal diffraction of sunlight by water droplets was still working in

pre-Deluge time (as seems reasonable), then this can only mean that

rainfall did not exist before Noah. Instead, the dry earth was

replenished with a kind of ground-hugging mist (Genesis 2:6).

The waters of the Flood came from two sources: the "fountains

of the great deep" and "the windows of heaven." Flood geologists

interpret this to mean that the Flood waters were subterranean and

also present high in the atmosphere. Before they fell to Earth by

divine fiat, the Flood's waters once surrounded the entire planet in a

"vapor canopy." When the time came to destroy his Creation, God

caused the vapor canopy to fall from outer space until the entire

planet was submerged. That water is still here today; the Earth in

Noah's time was not nearly so watery as it is today, and Noah's seas

were probably much shallower than ours. The vapor canopy may

have shielded the Biblical patriarchs from harmful cosmic radiation

that has since reduced human lifespan well below Methuselah's 969

years.

The laws of physics were far different in Eden. The Second

Law of Thermodynamics likely began with Adam's Fall. The Second

Law of Thermodynamics is strong evidence that the entire Universe

has been in decline since Adam's sin. The Second Law of

Thermodynamics may well end with the return of Jesus Christ.

Noah was a markedly heterozygous individual whose genes had

the entire complement of modern racial characteristics. It is a

fallacy to say that human embryos recapitulate our evolution as a

species. The bumps on human embryos are not actually relic gills,

nor is the "tail" on an embryo an actual tail -- it only resembles one.

Creatures cannot evolve to become more complex because this would

violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In our corrupt world,

creatures can only degenerate. The sedimentary rock record was

deposited by the Flood and it is all essentially the same age. The

reason the fossil record appears to show a course of evolution is

because the simpler and cruder organisms drowned first, and were

the first to sift out in the layers of rubble and mud.

Related so baldly and directly, flood geology may seem

laughable, but *The Genesis Flood* is not a silly or comic work. It is

five hundred pages long, and is every bit as sober, straightforward

and serious as, say, a college text on mechanical engineering.

*The Genesis Flood* has sold over 200,000 copies and gone

through 29 printings. It is famous all over the world. Today Henry

M. Morris, its co-author, is the head of the world's most influential

creationist body, the Institute for Creation Research in Santee,

California.

It is the business of the I.C.R. to carry out scientific research on

the physical evidence for creation. Members of the I.C.R. are

accredited scientists, with degrees from reputable mainstream

institutions. Dr. Morris himself has a Ph.D. in engineering and has

written a mainstream textbook on hydraulics. The I.C.R.'s monthly

newsletter, *Acts and Facts,* is distributed to over 100,000 people.

The Institute is supported by private donations and by income from

its frequent seminars and numerous well-received publications.

In February 1993, I called the Institute by telephone and had

an interesting chat with its public relations officer, Mr. Bill Hoesch.

Mr. Hoesch told me about two recent I.C.R. efforts in field research.

The first involves an attempt to demonstrate that lava flows at the

top and the bottom of Arizona's Grand Canyon yield incongruent

ages. If this were proved factual, it would strongly imply that the

thousands of layers of sedimentary rock in this world-famous mile-

deep canyon were in fact all deposited at the same time and that

conventional radiometric methods are, to say the least, gravely

flawed. A second I.C.R. effort should demonstrate that certain ice-

cores from Greenland, which purport to show 160 thousand years of

undisturbed annual snow layers, are in fact only two thousand years

old and have been misinterpreted by mainstream scientists.

Mr. Hoesch expressed some amazement that his Institute's

efforts are poorly and privately funded, while mainstream geologists

and biologists often receive comparatively enormous federal funding.

In his opinion, if the Institute for Creation Research were to receive

equivalent funding with their rivals in uniformitarian and

evolutionary so-called science, then creation-scientists would soon be

making valuable contributions to the nation's research effort.

Other creation scientists have held that the search for oil, gas,

and mineral deposits has been confounded for years by mistaken

scientific orthodoxies. They have suggested that successful flood-

geology study would revolutionize our search for mineral resources

of all kinds.

Orthodox scientists are blinded by their naturalistic prejudices.

Carl Sagan, whom Mr. Hoesch described as a "great hypocrite," is a

case in point. Carl Sagan is helping to carry out a well-funded

search for extraterrestrial life in outer space, despite the fact that

there is no scientific evidence whatsoever for extraterrestrial

intelligence, and there is certainly no mention in the Bible of any

rival covenant with another intelligent species. Worse yet, Sagan

boasts that he could detect an ordered, intelligent signal from space

from the noise and static of mere cosmic debris. But here on earth

we have the massively ordered and intelligently designed "signal"

called DNA, and yet Sagan publicly pretends that DNA is the result of

random processes! If Sagan used the same criteria to distinguish

intelligence from chance in the study of Earth life, as he does in his

search for extraterrestrial life, then he would have to become a

Creationist!

I asked Mr Hoesch what he considered the single most

important argument that his group had to make about scientific

creationism.

"Creation versus evolution is not science versus religion," he

told me. "It's the science of one religion versus the science of

another religion."

The first religion is Christianity; the second, the so-called

religion of Secular Humanism. Creation scientists consider this

message the single most important point they can make; far more

important than so-called physical evidence or the so-called scientific

facts. Creation scientists consider themselves soldiers and moral

entrepreneurs in a battle of world-views. It is no accident, to their

mind, that American schools teach "scientific" doctrines that are

inimical to fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity. It is not a

question of value-neutral facts that all citizens in our society should

quietly accept; it is a question of good versus evil, of faith versus

nihilism, of decency versus animal self-indulgence, and of discipline

versus anarchy. Evolution degrades human beings from immortal

souls created in God's Image to bipedal mammals of no more moral

consequence than other apes. People who do not properly value

themselves or others will soon lose their dignity, and then their

freedom.

Science education, for its part, degrades the American school

system from a localized, community-responsible, democratic

institution teaching community values, to an amoral indoctrination-

machine run by remote and uncaring elitist mandarins from Big

Government and Big Science.

Most people in America today are creationists of a sort. Most

people in America today care little if at all about the issue of creation

and evolution. Most people don't really care much if the world is six

billion years old, or six thousand years old, because it doesn't

impinge on their daily lives. Even radical creation-scientists have

done very little to combat the teaching of evolution in higher

education -- university level or above. They are willing to let Big

Science entertain its own arcane nonsense -- as long as they and

their children are left in peace.

But when world-views collide directly, there is no peace. The

first genuine counter-attack against evolution came in the 1920s,

when high-school education suddenly became far more widely

spread. Christian parents were shocked to hear their children

openly contradicting God's Word and they felt they were losing

control of the values taught their youth. Many state legislatures in

the USA outlawed the teaching of evolution in the 1920s.

In 1925, a Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher named John

Scopes deliberately disobeyed the law and taught evolution to his

science class. Scopes was accused of a crime and tried for it, and his

case became a national cause celebre. Many people think the

"Scopes Monkey Trial" was a triumph for science education, and it

was a moral victory in a sense, for the pro-evolution side

successfully made their opponents into objects of national ridicule.

Scopes was found guilty, however, and fined. The teaching of

evolution was soft-pedalled in high-school biology and geology texts

for decades thereafter.

A second resurgence of creationist sentiment took place in the

1960s, when the advent of Sputnik forced a reassessment of

American science education. Fearful of falling behind the Soviets in

science and technology, the federal National Science Foundation

commissioned the production of state-of-the-art biology texts in

1963. These texts were fiercely resisted by local religious groups

who considered them tantamount to state-supported promotion of

atheism.

The early 1980s saw a change of tactics as fundamentalist

activists sought equal time in the classroom for creation-science -- in

other words, a formal acknowledgement from the government that

their world-view was as legitimate as that of "secular humanism."

Fierce legal struggles in 1982, 1985 and 1987 saw the defeat of this

tactic in state courts and the Supreme Court.

This legal defeat has by no means put an end to creation-

science. Creation advocates have merely gone underground, no

longer challenging the scientific authorities directly on their own

ground, or the legal ground of the courts, but concentrating on grass-

roots organization. Creation scientists find their messages received

with attention and gratitude all over the Christian world.

Creation-science may seem bizarre, but it is no more irrational

than many other brands of cult archeology that find ready adherents

everywhere. All over the USA, people believe in ancient astronauts,

the lost continents of Mu, Lemuria or Atlantis, the shroud of Turin,

the curse of King Tut. They believe in pyramid power, Velikovskian

catastrophism, psychic archeology, and dowsing for relics. They

believe that America was the cradle of the human race, and that

PreColumbian America was visited by Celts, Phoenicians, Egyptians,

Romans, and various lost tribes of Israel. In the high-tech 1990s, in

the midst of headlong scientific advance, people believe in all sorts of

odd things. People believe in crystals and telepathy and astrology

and reincarnation, in ouija boards and the evil eye and UFOs.

People don't believe these things because they are reasonable.

They believe them because these beliefs make them feel better.

They believe them because they are sick of believing in conventional

modernism with its vast corporate institutions, its secularism, its

ruthless consumerism and its unrelenting reliance on the cold

intelligence of technical expertise and instrumental rationality.

They believe these odd things because they don't trust what they are

told by their society's authority figures. They don't believe that

what is happening to our society is good for them, or in their

interests as human beings.

The clash of world views inherent in creation-science has

mostly taken place in the United States. It has been an ugly clash in

some ways, but it has rarely been violent. Western society has had a

hundred and forty years to get used to Darwin. Many of the

sternest opponents of creation-science have in fact been orthodox

American Christian theologians and church officials, wary of a

breakdown in traditional American relations of church and state.

It may be that the most determined backlash will come not

from Christian fundamentalists, but from the legions of other

fundamentalist movements now rising like deep-rooted mushrooms

around the planet: from Moslem radicals both Sunni and Shi'ite, from

Hindu groups like Vedic Truth and Hindu Nation, from militant

Sikhs, militant Theravada Buddhists, or from a formerly communist

world eager to embrace half-forgotten orthodoxies. What loyalty do

these people owe to the methods of trained investigation that made

the West powerful and rich?

Scientists believe in rationality and objectivity -- even though

rationality and objectivity are far from common human attributes,

and no human being practices these qualities flawlessly. As it

happens, the scientific enterprise in Western society currently serves

the political and economic interests of scientists as human beings.

As a social group in Western society, scientists have successfully

identified themselves with the practice of rational and objective

inquiry, but this situation need not go on indefinitely. How would

scientists themselves react if their admiration for reason came into

direct conflict with their human institutions, human community, and

human interests?

One wonders how scientists would react if truly rational, truly

objective, truly nonhuman Artificial Intelligences were winning all

the tenure, all the federal grants, and all the Nobels. Suppose that

scientists suddenly found themselves robbed of cultural authority,

their halting efforts to understand made the object of public ridicule

in comparison to the sublime efforts of a new power group --

superbly rational computers. Would the qualities of objectivity and

rationality still receive such acclaim from scientists? Perhaps we

would suddenly hear a great deal from scientists about the

transcendant values of intuition, inspiration, spiritual understanding

and deep human compassion. We might see scientists organizing to

assure that the Pursuit of Truth should slow down enough for them

to keep up. We might perhaps see scientists struggling with mixed

success to keep Artificial Intelligence out of the schoolrooms. We

might see scientists stricken with fear that their own children were

becoming strangers to them, losing all morality and humanity as they

transferred their tender young brains into cool new racks of silicon

ultra-rationality -- all in the name of progress.

But this isn't science. This is only bizarre speculation.

For Further Reading:

THE CREATIONISTS by Ronald L. Numbers (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

Sympathetic but unsparing history of Creationism as movement and

doctrine.

THE GENESIS FLOOD: The Biblical Record and its Scientific

Implications by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian

and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961). Best-known and most

often-cited Creationist text.

MANY INFALLIBLE PROOFS: Practical and Useful Evidences of

Christianity by Henry M. Morris (CLP Publishers, 1974). Dr Morris

goes beyond flood geology to offer evidence for Christ's virgin birth,

the physical transmutation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, etc.

CATALOG of the Institute for Creation Research (P O Box 2667, El

Cajon, CA 92021). Free catalog listing dozens of Creationist

publications.

CULT ARCHAEOLOGY AND CREATIONISM: Understanding

Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past edited by Francis B. Harrold

and Raymond A. Eve (University of Iowa Press, 1987). Indignant

social scientists tie into highly nonconventional beliefs about the

past.

"Robotica '93"

We are now seven years away from the twenty-first

century. Where are all our robots?

A faithful reader of SF from the 1940s and '50s might

be surprised to learn that we're not hip-deep in robots by

now. By this time, robots ought to be making our

breakfasts, fetching our newspapers, and driving our

atomic-powered personal helicopters. But this has not

come to pass, and the reason is simple.

We don't have any robot brains.

The challenge of independent movement and real-time

perception in a natural environment has simply proved too

daunting for robot technology. We can build pieces of

robots in plenty. We have thousands of robot arms in

1993. We have workable robot wheels and even a few

workable robot legs. We have workable sensors for robots

and plenty of popular, industrial, academic and military

interest in robotics. But a workable robot brain remains

beyond us.

For decades, the core of artificial-intelligence

research has involved programming machines to build

elaborate symbolic representations of the world. Those

symbols are then manipulated, in the hope that this will

lead to a mechanical comprehension of reality that can

match the performance of organic brains.

Success here has been very limited. In the glorious

early days of AI research, it seemed likely that if a

machine could be taught to play chess at grandmaster

level, then a "simple" task like making breakfast would be

a snap. Alas, we now know that advanced reasoning skills

have very little to do with everyday achievements such as

walking, seeing, touching and listening. If humans had

to "reason out" the process of getting up and walking out

the front door through subroutines and logical deduction,

then we'd never budge from the couch. These are things

we humans do "automatically," but that doesn't make them

easy -- they only seem easy to us because we're organic.

For a robot, "advanced" achievements of the human brain,

such as logic and mathematical skill, are relatively easy

to mimic. But skills that even a mouse can manage

brilliantly are daunting in the extreme for machines.

In 1993, we have thousands of machines that we

commonly call "robots." We have robot manufacturing

companies and national and international robot trade

associations. But in all honesty, those robots of 1993

scarcely deserve the name. The term "robot" was invented

in 1921 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek, for a stage

drama. The word "robot" came from the Czech term for

"drudge" or "serf." Capek's imaginary robots were made

of manufactured artificial flesh, not metal, and were very

humanlike, so much so that they could actually have sex

and reproduce (after exterminating the humans that created

them). Capek's "robots" would probably be called

"androids" today, but they established the general concept

for robots: a humanoid machine.

If you look up the term "robot" in a modern

dictionary, you'll find that "robots" are supposed to be

machines that resemble human beings and do mechanical,

routine tasks in response to commands.

Robots of this classic sort are vanishingly scarce in

1993. We simply don't have any proper brains for them,

and they can scarcely venture far off the drawing board

without falling all over themselves. We do, however, have

enormous numbers of mechanical robot arms in daily use

today. The robot industry in 1993 is mostly in the

business of retailing robot arms.

There's a rather narrow range in modern industry for

robot arms. The commercial niche for robotics is menaced

by cheap human manual labor on one side and by so-called

"hard automation" on the other. This niche may be

narrow, but it's nevertheless very real; in the US alone,

it's worth about 500 million dollars a year. Over the

past thirty years, a lot of useful technological lessons

have been learned in the iron-arms industry.

Japan today possesses over sixty percent of the entire

world population in robots. Japanese industry won this

success by successfully ignoring much of the glamorized

rhetoric of classic robots and concentrating on actual

workaday industrial uses for a brainless robot arm.

European and American manufacturers, by contrast, built

overly complex, multi-purpose, sophisticated arms with

advanced controllers and reams of high-level programming

code. As a result, their reliability was poor, and in the

grueling environment of the assembly line, they frequently

broke down. Japanese robots were less like the SF concept

of robots, and therefore flourished rather better in the

real world. The simpler Japanese robots were highly

reliable, low in cost, and quick to repay their

investment.

Although Americans own many of the basic patents in

robotics, today there are no major American robot

manufacturers. American robotics concentrates on narrow,

ultra-high-tech, specialized applications and, of course,

military applications. The robot population in the

United States in 1992 was about 40,000, most of them in

automobile manufacturing. Japan by contrast has a

whopping 275,000 robots (more or less, depending on the

definition). Every First World economy has at least some

machines they can proudly call robots; Germany about

30,000, Italy 9,000 or so, France around 13,000, Britain

8,000 and so forth. Surprisingly, there are large numbers

in Poland and China.

Robot arms have not grown much smarter over the years.

Making them smarter has so far proved to be commercially

counterproductive. Instead, robot arms have become much

better at their primary abilities: repetition and

accuracy. Repetition and accuracy are the real selling-

points in the robot arm biz. A robot arm was once

considered a thing of loveliness if it could reliably

shove products around to within a tenth of an inch or so.

Today, however, robots have moved into microchip assembly,

and many are now fantastically accurate. IBM's "fine

positioner," for instance, has a gripper that floats on a

thin layer of compressed air and moves in response to

computer-controlled electromagnetic fields. It has an

accuracy of two tenths of a micron. One micron is one

millionth of a meter. On this scale, grains of dust loom

like monstrous boulders.

CBW Automation's T-190 model arm is not only accurate,

but wickedly fast. This arm plucks castings from hot

molds in less than a tenth of a second, repeatedly

whipping the products back and forth from 0 to 30 miles

per hour in half the time it takes to blink.

Despite these impressive achievements, however, most

conventional robot arms in 1993 have very pronounced

limits. Few robot arms can move a load heavier than 10

kilograms without severe problems in accuracy. The links

and joints within the arm flex in ways difficult to

predict, especially as wear begins to mount. Of course

it's possible to stiffen the arm with reinforcements, but

then the arm itself becomes ungainly and full of

unpredictable inertia. Worse yet, the energy required to

move a heavier arm adds to manufacturing costs. Thanks to

this surprising flimsiness in a machine's metal arm, the

major applications for industrial robots today are

welding, spraying, coating, sealing, and gluing. These

are activities that involve a light and steady movement of

relatively small amounts of material.

Robots thrive in the conditions known in the industry

as "The 3 D's": Dirty, Dull, and Dangerous. If it's too

hot, too cold, too dark, too cramped, or, best of all, if

it's toxic and/or smells really bad, then a robot may well

be just your man for the job!

When it comes to Dirty, Dull and Dangerous, few groups

in the world can rival the military. It's natural

therefore that military-industrial companies such as

Grumman, Martin Marietta and Westinghouse are extensively

involved in modern military-robotics. Robot weaponry and

robot surveillance fit in well with modern US military

tactical theory, which emphasizes "force multipliers" to

reduce US combat casualties and offset the relative US

weakness in raw manpower.

In a recent US military wargame, the Blue or Friendly

commander was allowed to fortify his position with

experimental smart mines, unmanned surveillance planes,

and remote-controlled unmanned weapons platforms. The Red

or Threat commander adamantly refused to take heavy

casualties by having his men battle mere machinery.

Instead, the Threat soldiers tried clumsily to maneuver

far around the flanks so as to engage the human soldiers

in the Blue Force. In response, though, the Blue

commander simply turned off the robots and charged into

the disordered Red force, clobbering them.

This demonstrates that "dumb machines" needn't be

very smart at all to be of real military advantage. They

don't even necessarily have to be used in battle -- the

psychological advantage alone is very great. The US

military benefits enormously if can exchange the potential

loss of mere machinery for suffering and damaged morale in

the human enemy.

Among the major robotics initiatives in the US arsenal

today are Navy mine-detecting robots, autonomous

surveillance aircraft, autonomous surface boats, and

remotely-piloted "humvee" land vehicles that can carry and

use heavy weaponry. American tank commanders are

especially enthused about this idea, especially for

lethally dangerous positions like point-tank in assaults

on fortified positions.

None of these military "robots" look at all like a

human being. They don't have to look human, and in fact

work much better if they don't. And they're certainly not

programmed to obey Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. If

they had enough of a "positronic brain" to respect the

lives of their human masters, then they'd be useless.

Recently there's been a remarkable innovation in the

"no-brain" approach to robotics. This is the robotic bug.

Insects have been able to master many profound abilities

that frustrate even the "smartest" artificial

intelligences. MIT's famous Insect Lab is a world leader

in this research, building tiny and exceedingly "stupid"

robots that can actually rove and scamper about in rough

terrain with impressively un-robot-like ease.

These bug robots are basically driven by simple

programs of "knee-jerk reflexes." Robot bugs have no

centralized intelligence and no high-level programming.

Instead, they have a decentralized network of simple

abilities that are only loosely coordinated. These

robugs have no complex internal models, and no

comprehensive artificial "understanding" of their

environment. They're certainly not human-looking, and

they can't follow spoken orders. It's been suggested

though that robot bugs might be of considerable commercial

use, perhaps cleaning windows, scavenging garbage, or

repeatedly vacuuming random tiny paths through the carpet

until they'd cleaned the whole house.

If you owned robot bugs, you'd likely never see them.

They'd come with the house, just like roaches or termites,

and they'd emerge only at night. But instead of rotting

your foundation and carrying disease, they'd modestly tidy

up for you.

Today robot bugs are being marketed by IS Robotics of

Cambridge, MA, which is selling them for research and also

developing a home robotic vacuum cleaner.

A swarm of bugs is a strange and seemingly rather

far-fetched version of the classic "household robot." But

the bug actually seems rather more promising than the

standard household robot in 1993, such as the Samsung

"Scout-About." This dome-topped creation, which weighs 16

lbs and is less than a foot high, is basically a mobile

home-security system. It rambles about the house on its

limited battery power, sensing for body-heat, sudden

motion, smoke, or the sound of breaking glass. Should

anything untoward occur, Scout-About calls the police

and/or sets off alarms. It costs about a thousand

dollars. Sales of home-security robots have been less

than stellar. It appears that most people with a need for

such a device would still rather get themselves a dog.

There is an alternative to the no-brain approach in

contemporary robotics. That's to use the brain of a human

being, remotely piloting a robot body. The robot then

becomes "the tele-operated device." Tele-operated robots

face much the same series of career opportunities as their

brainless cousins -- Dirty, Dull and Dangerous. In this

case, though, the robot may be able to perform some of the

Dull parts on its own, while the human pilot successfully

avoids the Dirt and Danger. Many applications for

military robotics are basically tele-operation, where a

machine can maintain itself in the field but is piloted by

human soldiers during important encounters. Much the same

goes for undersea robotics, which, though not a thriving

field, does have niches in exploration, oceanography,

underwater drilling-platform repair, and underwater cable

inspection. The wreck of the *Titanic* was discovered and

explored through such a device.

One of the most interesting new applications of tele-

operated robotics is in surgical tele-operations.

Surgery is, of course, a notoriously delicate and

difficult craft. It calls for the best dexterity humans

can manage -- and then some. A table-mounted iron arm can

be of great use in surgery, because of its swiftness and

its microscopic precision. Unlike human surgeons, a

robot arm can grip an instrument and hold it in place for

hours, then move it again swiftly at a moment's notice

without the least tremor. Robot arms today, such as the

ROBODOC Surgical Assistant System, are seeing use in hip

replacement surgery.

Often the tele-operated robot's grippers are tiny and

at the end of a long flexible cable. The "laparoscope" is

a surgical cable with a tiny light, camera and cutters at

one end. It's inserted through a small hole in the

patient's abdominal wall. The use of laparoscopes is

becoming common, since their use much reduces the shock

and trauma of major surgery.

"Laparoscopy" usually requires two human surgeons,

though; one to cut, and one to guide the cable and camera.

There are obvious potential problems here from missed

communications or simple human exhaustion. With Britain's

"Laparobot," however, a single surgeon can control the

camera angle through a radio-transmitting headband. If he

turns his head, the laparoscope camera pans; if he raises

or lowers his head it tilts up and down, and if he leans

in, then it zooms. And he still has his hands free to

control the blades. The Laparobot is scheduled for

commercial production in late 1993.

Tele-operation has made remarkable advances recently

with the advent of fiber-optics and high-speed computer

networking. However, tele-operation still has very little

to do with the classic idea of a human-shaped robot that

can understand and follow orders. Periodically, there are

attempts to fit the human tele-operator into a human-

shaped remote shell -- something with eyes and arms,

something more traditionally robotlike. And yet, the

market for such a machine has never really materialized.

Even the military, normally not disturbed by commercial

necessity, has never made this idea work (though not from

lack of trying).

The sensory abilities of robots are still very

primitive. Human hands have no less than twenty different

kinds of nerve fiber. Eight kinds of nerve control

muscles, blood vessels and sweat-glands, while the other

twelve kinds sense aspects of pain, temperature, texture,

muscle condition and the angles of knuckles and joints.

No remote-controlled robot hand begins to match this

delicate and sophisticated sensory input.

If robot hands this good existed, they would obviously

do very well as medical prosthetics. It's still

questionable whether there would be a real-world use and

real-world market for a remotely-controlled tele-operated

humanlike robot. There are many industrial uses for

certain separate aspects of humanity -- our grip, our

vision, our propensity for violence -- but few for a

mechanical device with the actual shape and proportions of

a human being.

It seems that our fascination with humanoid robots has

little to do with industry, and everything to do with

society. Robots are appealing for social reasons.

Robots are romantic and striking. Robots have good image.

Even "practical" industrial robots, mere iron arms,

have overreached themselves badly in many would-be

applications. There have been waves of popular interest

and massive investment in robotics, but even during its

boom years, the robot industry has not been very

profitable. In the mid-1980s there were some 300 robot

manufacturers; today there are less than a hundred. In

many cases, robot manufacturers survive because of

deliberate government subsidy. For a nation to own robots

is like owning rocketships or cyclotrons; robots are a

symbol of national technological prowess. Robots mark a

nation as possessing advanced First World status.

Robots are prestige items. In Japan, robots can

symbolize the competition among Japanese firms. This is

why Japanese companies sometimes invent oddities such as

"Monsieur," a robot less than a centimeter across, or a

Japanese boardroom robot that can replace chairs after a

meeting. (Of course one can find human office help to

replace chairs at very little cost and with great

efficiency. But the Japanese office robot replaces

chairs with an accuracy of millimeters!)

It makes a certain sense to subsidize robots. Robots

support advanced infrastructure through their demand-pull

in electronics, software, sensor technology, materials

science, and precision engineering. Spin-offs from

robotics can vitalize an economy, even if the robots

themselves turn out to be mostly decorative. Anyway, if

worst comes to worst, robots have always made excellent

photo-op backgrounds for politicians.

Robots truly thrive as entertainers. This is where

robots began -- on the stage, in Mr. Capek's play in

1921. The best-known contemporary robot entertainers are

probably "Crow" and "Tom Servo" from the cable television

show MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. These wisecracking

characters who lampoon bad SF films are not "real robots,"

but only puppets in hardshelled drag; but Crow and Tom are

actors, and actors should be forgiven a little pretense.

Disney "animatronic" robots have a long history and still

have a strong appeal. Lately, robot dinosaurs, robot

prehistoric mammals, and robot giant insects have proved

to be enormous crowd-draws, scaring the bejeezus out of

small children (and, if truth be told, their parents).

Mark Pauline's "Survival Research Laboratories" has won an

international reputation for its violent and catastrophic

robot performance-art. In Austin Texas, the Robot Group

has won a city arts grant to support its robot blimps and

pneumatically-controlled junk-creations.

Man-shaped robots are romantic. They have become

symbols of an early attitude toward technology which, in a

more suspicious and cynical age, still has its own charm

and appeal. In 1993, "robot nostalgia" has become a

fascinating example of how high-tech dreams of the future

can, by missing their target, define their own social

period. Today, fabulous prices are paid at international

antique toy collections for children's toy robots from the

'40s and '50s. These whirring, blinking creatures with

their lithographed tin and folded metal tabs exert a

powerful aesthetic pull on their fanciers. A mint-in-

the-box Robby Robot from 1956, complete with his Space

Patrol Moon Car, can bring over four thousand dollars at

an auction at Christie's. Thunder Robot, a wondrous

creation with machine-gun arms, flashing green eyes, and

whirling helicopter blades over its head, is worth a

whopping nine grand.

Perhaps we like robots better in 1993 because we can't

have them in real life. In today's world, any robot

politely and unquestioningly "obeying human orders" in

accord with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics would face

severe difficulties. If it were worth even half of what

the painted-tin Thunder Robot is worth, then a robot

streetsweeper, doorman or nanny would probably be beaten

sensorless and carjacked by a gang of young human

unemployables. It's a long way back to yesterday's

tomorrows.

"Watching the Clouds"

In the simmering depths of a Texas summer, there are

few things more soothing than sprawling on a hillside and

watching the clouds roll by. Summer clouds are

especially bright and impressive in Texas, for reasons we

will soon come to understand-- and anyhow, during a Texas

summer, any activity more strenuous than lying down,

staring at clouds, and chewing a grass-stem may well cause

heat-stroke.

By the early nineteenth century, the infant science of

meteorology had freed itself from the ancient Aristotelian

dogma of vapors, humors, and essences. It was known that

the atmosphere was made up of several different gases.

The behavior of gases in changing conditions of heat,

pressure and density was fairly well understood.

Lightning was known to be electricity, and while

electricity itself remained enormously mysterious, it was

under intense study. Basic weather instruments -- the

thermometer, barometer, rain gauge, and weathervane --

were becoming ever more accurate, and were increasingly

cheap and available.

And, perhaps most importantly, a network of amateur

natural philosophers were watching the clouds, and

systematically using instruments to record the weather.

Farmers and sailors owed their lives and livelihoods

to their close study of the sky, but their understanding

was folkloric, not basic. Their rules of thumb were

codified in hundreds of folk weather-proverbs. "When

clouds appear like rocks and towers/ the earth's refreshed

with frequent showers." "Mackerel skies and mares'

tails/ make tall ships carry low sails." This beats

drowning at sea, but it can't be called a scientific

understanding.

Things changed with the advent of Luke Howard, "the

father of British meteorology." Luke Howard was not a

farmer or sailor -- he was a Quaker chemist. Luke Howard

was born in metropolitan London in 1772, and he seems to

have spent most of his life indoors in the big city,

conducting the everyday business of his chemist's shop.

Luke Howard wasn't blessed with high birth or a formal

education, but he was a man of lively and inquiring mind.

While he respected folk weather-wisdom, he also regarded

it, correctly, as "a confused mass of simple aphorisms."

He made it his life's avocation to set that confusion

straight.

Luke Howard belonged to a scientific amateur's club in

London known as the Askesian Society. It was thanks to

these amateur interests that Howard became acquainted with

the Linnaean System. Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century

Swedish botanist, had systematically ranked and classified

the plants and animals, using the international language

of scholarship, Latin. This highly useful act of

classification and organization was known as

"modification" in the scientific terminology of the time.

Though millions of people had watched, admired, and

feared clouds for tens of thousands of years, it was Luke

Howard's particular stroke of genius to recognize that

clouds might also be classified.

In 1803, the thirty-one-year-old Luke Howard presented

a learned paper to his fellow Askesians, entitled "On the

Modifications of Clouds, and On the Principles of Their

Production, Suspension, and Destruction."

Howard's speculative "principles" have not stood the

test of time. Like many intellectuals of his period,

Howard was utterly fascinated by "electrical fluid," and

considered many cloud shapes to be due to static

electricity. Howard's understanding of thermodynamics was

similarly halting, since, like his contemporaries, he

believed heat to be an elastic fluid called Caloric.

However, Howard's "modifications" -- cirrus, cumulus,

and stratus -- have lasted very successfully to the

present day and are part of the bedrock of modern

meteorology. Howard's scholarly reputation was made by

his "modifications," and he was eventually invited to join

the prestigious Royal Society. Luke Howard became an

author, lecturer, editor, and meteorological instrument-

maker, and a learned correspondent with superstars of

nineteenth-century scholarship such as Dalton and Goethe.

Luke Howard became the world's recognized master of

clouds. In order to go on earning a living, though, the

father of British meteorology wisely remained a chemist.

Thanks to Linnaeus and his disciple Howard, cloud

language abounds in elegant Latin constructions. The

"genera" of clouds are cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus;

altocumulus, altostratus, nimbostratus; stratocumulus,

cumulus and cumulonimbus.

Clouds can also be classified into "species," by their

peculiarities in shape and internal structure. A glance

through the World Meteorological Organization's official

*International Cloud Atlas* reveals clouds called:

fibratus, uncinus, spissatus, castellanus, floccus,

stratiformus, nebulosus, lenticularis, fractus, humilis,

mediocris, congestus, calvus, and capillatus.

As if that weren't enough, clouds can be further

divvied-up into "varieties," by their "special

characteristics of arrangement and transparency":

intortus, vertebratus, undulatus, radiatus, lacunosis,

duplicatus, translucidus, perlucidus and opacis.

And, as a final scholastic fillip, there are the nine

supplementary features and appended minor cloud forms:

incus, mammatus, virga, praecipitatio, arcus, tuba,pileus,

vella, and pannus.

Luke Howard had quite a gift for precise language, and

sternly defended his use of scholar's Latin to other

amateurs who would have preferred plain English. However

elegant his terms, though, Howard's primary insight was

simple. He recognized that most clouds come in two basic

types: "cumulus" and "stratus," or heaps and layers.

Heaps are commoner than layers. Heaps are created by

local rising air, while layers tend to sprawl flatly

across large areas.

Water vapor is an invisible gas. It's only when the

vapor condenses, and begins to intercept and scatter

sunlight as liquid droplets or solid ice crystals, that we

can see and recognize a "cloud." Great columns and

gushes of invisible vapor continue to enter and leave the

cloud throughout its lifetime, condensing within it and

evaporating at its edges. This is one reason why clouds

are so mutable -- clouds are something like flames,

wicking along from candles we can't see.

Who can see the wind? But even when we can't feel

wind, the air is always in motion. The Earth spins

ponderously beneath its thin skin of atmosphere, dragging

air with it by gravity, and arcing wind across its surface

with powerful Coriolis force. The strength of sunlight

varies between pole and equator, powering gigantic Hadley

Cells that try to equalize the difference. Mountain

ranges heave air upward, and then drop it like bobsleds

down their far slopes. The sunstruck continents simmer

like frying pans, and the tropical seas spawn giant

whirlpools of airborne damp.

Water vapor moves and mixes freely with all of these

planetary surges, just like the atmosphere's other trace

constituents. Water vapor, however, has a unique quality

-- at Earth's temperatures, water can become solid, liquid

or gas. These changes in form can store, or release,

enormous amounts of heat. Clouds can power themselves by

steam.

A Texas summer cumulus cloud is the child of a rising

thermal, from the sun-blistered Texan earth. Heated air

expands. Expanding air becomes buoyant, and rises. If

no overlying layer of stable air stops it from rising, the

invisible thermal will continue to rise, and cool, until

it reaches the condensation level. The condensation level

is what gives cumulus clouds their flat bases -- to Luke

Howard, the condensation level was colorfully known as

"the Vapour Plane." Depending on local heat and humidity,

the condensation level may vary widely in height, but it's

always up there somewhere.

At this point, the cloud's internal steam-engine kicks

in. Billions of vapor molecules begin to cling to the

enormous variety of trash that blesses our atmosphere:

bits of ash and smoke from volcanoes and forest-fires,

floating spores and pollen-grains, chips of sand and dirt

kicked up by wind-gusts, airborne salt from bubbles

bursting in the ocean, meteoric dust sifting down from

space. As the vapor clings to these "condensation

nuclei," it condenses, and liquefies, and it gives off

heat.

This new gush of heat causes the air to expand once

again, and propels it upward in a rising tower, topped by

the trademark cauliflower bubbles of the summer cumulus.

If it's not disturbed by wind, hot dry air will cool

about ten degrees centigrade for every kilometer that it

rises above the earth. This rate of cooling is known to

Luke Howard's modern-day colleagues as the Dry Adiabatic

Lapse Rate. Hot *damp* air, however, cools in the *Wet*

Adiabatic Lapse Rate, only about six degrees per kilometer

of height. This four-degree difference in energy --

caused by the "latent heat" of the wet air -- is known in

storm-chasing circles as "the juice."

When bodies of wet and dry air collide along what is

known as "the dryline," the juice kicks in with a

vengeance, and things can get intense. Every spring, in

the High Plains of Texas and Oklahoma, dry air from the

center of the continent tackles damp surging warm fronts

from the soupy Gulf of Mexico. The sprawling plains that

lie beneath the dryline are aptly known as "Tornado

Alley."

A gram of condensing water-vapor has about 600

calories of latent heat in it. One cubic meter of hot

damp air can carry up to three grams of water vapor.

Three grams may not seem like much, but there are plenty

of cubic meters in a cumulonimbus thunderhead, which tends

to be about ten thousand meters across and can rise eleven

thousand meters into the sky, forming an angry, menacing

anvil hammered flat across the bottom of the stratosphere.

The resulting high winds, savage downbursts, lashing

hail and the occasional city-wrecking tornado can be

wonderfully dramatic and quite often fatal. However, in

terms of the Earth's total heat-budget, these local

cumulonimbus fireworks don't compare in total power to the

gentle but truly vast stratus clouds. Stratus tends to

be the product of air gently rising across great expanses

of the earth, air that is often merely nudged upward, at a

few centimeters per second, over a period of hours. Vast

weather systems can slowly pump up stratus clouds in huge

sheets, layer after layer of flat overcast that sometimes

covers a quarter of North America.

Fog is also a stratus cloud, usually created by warm

air's contact with the cold night earth. Sometimes a

gentle uplift of moving air, oozing up the long slope from

the Great Plains to the foot of the Rockies, can produce

vast blanketing sheets of ground-level stratus fog that

cover entire states.

As it grows older, stratus cloud tends to break up

into dapples or billows. The top of the stratus layer

cools by radiation into space, while the bottom of the

cloud tends to warm by intercepting the radiated heat from

the earth. This gentle radiant heat creates a mild, slow

turbulence that breaks the solid stratus into thousands of

leopard-spots, or with the aid of a little wind, perhaps

into long billows and parallel rolls. Thicker, lowlying

stratus may not break-up enough to show clear sky, but

simply become a dispiriting mass of gloomy gray knobs and

lumps that can last for days on end, during a quiet

winter.

When vapor condenses into droplets, it gives off

latent heat and rises. The cooler air from the heights,

shoved aside by the ascending warm air, tends to fall. If

the falling air drags some captured droplets of water with

it, those droplets will evaporate on the way down. This

makes the downdraft cooler and denser, and speeds its

descent. It's "the juice" again, but in reverse. If

there's enough of this steam-power set-loose, it will

create vertically circulating masses of air, or

"convection cells."

Downdraft winds are invisible, but they are a vital

part of the cloud system. In a patchy summer sky,

downdrafts fill the patches between the clouds --

downdrafts *are* the patches. They tear droplets from

the edges of clouds and consume them.

Most clouds never manage to rain or snow. They simply

use the vapor-water cycle as a mechanism to carry and

dissipate excess heat, doing the Earth's quiet business of

entropy.

Clouds also scour the sky; they are the atmosphere's

cleaning agents. A good rain always makes the air seem

fresh and clean, but even clouds that never rain can

nevertheless clean up billions of dust particles. Tiny

droplets carry their dust nuclei with them as they collide

with one another inside the cloud, and combine into large

drops of water. Even if this drop then evaporates and

never falls as rain, the many dust particles inside it

will congeal thorough adhesion into a good-sized speck,

which will eventually settle to earth on its own.

For a drop of water to fall successfully to earth, it

has to increase in size by about one million times, from

the micron width of a damp condensation nucleus, to the

hefty three millimeters of an honest raindrop. A raindrop

can grow by condensation about to a tenth of a millimeter,

but after this scale is reached, condensation alone will

no longer do the job, and the drop has to rely on

collision and capture.

Warm damp air rising within a typical rainstorm

generally moves upward at about a meter per second.

Drizzle falls about one centimeter per second and so is

carried up with the wind, but as drops grow, their rate of

descent increases. Eventually the larger drops are poised

in midair, struggling to fall, as tiny droplets are swept

up past them and against them. The drop will collide and

fuse with some of the droplets in its path, until it grows

too large for the draft to support. If it is then caught

in a cool downdraft, it may survive to reach the earth as

rain. Sometimes the sheer mass of rain can overpower the

updraft, through accumulating weight and the cooling power

of its own evaporation.

Raindrops can also grow as ice particles at the frigid

tops of tall clouds. "Sublimation" is the process of

water vapor directly changing from water to ice. If the

air is cold enough, ice crystals grow much faster in

saturated air than a water droplet does. An ice crystal

in damp supercooled air can grow to raindrop size in only

ten minutes. An upper-air snowflake, if it melts during

its long descent, falls as rain.

Truly violent updrafts to great heights can create

hail. Violent storms can create updrafts as fast as

thirty meters a second, fast enough to buoy up the kind of

grapefruit-sized hail that sometimes kills livestock and

punches holes right through roofs. Some theorists believe

that the abnormally fat raindrops, often the first signs

of an approaching thundershower, are thin scatterings of

thoroughly molten hail.

Rain is generally fatal to a cumulonimbus cloud,

causing the vital loss of its "juice." The sharp, clear

outlines of its cauliflower top become smudgy and sunken.

The bulges flatten, and the crevasses fill in. If there

are strong winds at the heights, the top of the cloud can

be flattened into an anvil, which, after rain sets in, can

be torn apart into the long fibrous streaks of anvil

cirrus. The lower part of the cloud subsides and

dissolves away with the rain, and the upper part drifts

away with the prevailing wind, slowly evaporating into

broken ragged fragments, "fractocumulus."

However, if there is juice in plenty elsewhere, then a

new storm tower may spring up on the old storm's flank.

Systems of storm will therefore often propagate at an

angle across the prevailing wind, bubbling up to the right

or left edge of an advancing mass of clouds. There may

be a whole line of such storms, bursting into life at one

end, and collapsing into senescence at the other. The

youngest tower, at the far edge of the storm-line, usually

has the advantage of the strongest supply of juice, and is

therefore often the most violent. Storm-chasers tend to

cluster at the storm's trailing edge to keep a wary eye on

"Tail-End Charlie."

Because of the energy it carries, water vapor is the

most influential trace gas in the atmosphere. It's the

only gas in the atmosphere that can vary so drastically,

plentiful at some times and places, vanishing at others.

Water vapor is also the most dramatic gas, because liquid

water, cloud, is the only trace constituent in our

atmosphere that we can actually see.

The air is mostly nitrogen -- about 78 percent.

Oxygen is about 21 percent, argon one percent. The rest

is neon, helium, krypton, hydrogen, xenon, ozone and just

a bit of methane and carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide,

though vital to plant life, is a vanishingly small 0.03

percent of our atmosphere.

However, thanks to decades of hard work by billions of

intelligent and determined human beings, the carbon

dioxide in our atmosphere has increased by twenty percent

in the last hundred years. During the next fifty years,

the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will

probably double.

It's possible that global society might take coherent

steps to stop this process. But if this process actually

does take place, then we will have about as much chance to

influence the subsequent course of events as the late Luke

Howard.

Carbon dioxide traps heat. Since clouds are our

atmosphere's primary heat-engines, doubling the carbon

dioxide will likely do something remarkably interesting to

our clouds. Despite the best efforts of whirring

supercomputers at global atmospheric models around the

world, nobody really knows what this might be. There are

so many unknown factors in global climatology that our

best speculations on the topic are probably not much more

advanced, comparatively speaking, than the bold but

mistaken theorizing of Luke Howard.

One thing seems pretty likely, though. Whatever our

clouds may do, quite a few of the readers of this column

will be around in fifty years to watch them.

"Spires on the Skyline"

Broadcast towers are perhaps the single most obvious

technological artifact of modern life. At a naive glance,

they seem to exist entirely for their own sake. Nobody

lives in them. There's nothing stored in them, and they

don't offer shelter to anyone or anything. They're

skeletal, forbidding structures that are extremely tall

and look quite dangerous. They stand, usually, on the

highest ground available, so they're pretty hard not to

notice. What's more, they're brightly painted and/or

covered with flashing lights.

And then there are those *things* attached to them.

Antennas of some kind, presumably, but they're nothing

like the normal, everyday receiving antennas you might

have at home: a simple telescoping rod for a radio, a

pair of rabbit ears for a TV. These elaborate,

otherworldly appurtenances resemble big drums, or sea

urchin spines, or antlers.

In this column, we're going to demystify broadcast

towers, and talk about what they do, and why they look

that way, and how they've earned their peculiar right to

loom eerily on the skyline of every urban center in

America.

We begin with the electromagnetic spectrum. Towers

have everything to do with the electromagnetic spectrum.

Basically, they colonize the spectrum. They legally

settle various patches of it, and they use their

homestead in the spectrum to make money for their owners

and users.

The electromagnetic spectrum is an important natural

resource. Unlike most things we think of as "resources,"

the spectrum is immaterial and intangible. Odder still,

it is limited, and yet, it is not exhaustible. Usage of

the spectrum is controlled worldwide by an international

body known as the International Telecommunications Union

(ITU), and controlled within the United States by an

agency called the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Electromagnetic radiation comes in a wide variety of

flavors. It's usually discussed in terms of frequency and

wavelength, which are interchangeable terms. All

electromagnetic radiation moves at one uniform speed, the

speed of light. If the frequency of the wave is higher,

then the length of the wave must by necessity become

shorter.

Waves are measured in hertz. One hertz is one cycle

of frequency per second, named after Heinrich Hertz, a

nineteenth-century German physicist who was the first in

history to deliberately send a radio signal.

The International Telecommunications Union determines

the legally possible uses of the spectrum from 9,000 hertz

(9 kilohertz) to 400,000,000,000 hertz (400 gigahertz).

This vast legal domain extends from extremely low

frequency radio waves up to extremely high frequency

microwaves. The behavior of electromagnetic radiation

varies considerably along this great expanse of frequency.

As frequency rises, the reach of the signal deteriorates;

the signal travels less easily, and is more easily

absorbed and scattered by rain, clouds, and foliage.

After electromagnetic radiation leaves the legal

domain of the ITU, its behavior becomes even more

remarkable, as it segues into infrared, then visible

light, then ultraviolet, Xrays, gamma rays and cosmic

rays.

From the point of view of physics, there's a strangely

arbitrary quality to the political decisions of the ITU.

For instance, it would seem very odd if there were an

international regulatory body deciding who could license

and use the color red. Visible colors are a form of

electromagnetism, just like radio and microwaves. "Red"

is a small piece of the electromagnetic spectrum which

happens to be perceivable by the human eye, and yet it

would seem shocking if somebody claimed exclusive use of

that frequency. The spectrum really isn't a "territory"

at all, and can't really be "owned," even though it can

be, and is, literally auctioned off to private bidders by

national governments for very large sums. Politics and

commerce don't matter to the photons. But they matter

plenty to the people who build and use towers.

The ITU holds regular international meetings, the

World Administrative Radio Conferences, in which various

national players jostle over spectrum usage. This is an

odd and little-recognized species of diplomacy, but the

United States takes it with utter seriousness, as do other

countries. The resultant official protocols of global

spectrum usage closely resemble international trade

documents, or maybe income-tax law. They are very arcane,

very specific, and absolutely riddled with archaisms,

loopholes, local exceptions and complex wheeler-dealings

that go back decades. Everybody and his brother has some

toehold in the spectrum: ship navigation, aircraft

navigation, standard time signals, various amateur ham

radio bands, industrial remote-control radio bands, ship-

to-shore telephony, microwave telephone relays, military

and civilian radars, police radio dispatch, radio

astronomy, satellite frequencies, kids' radio-controlled

toys, garage-door openers, and on and on.

The spectrum has been getting steadily more crowded

for decades. Once a broad and lonely frontier, inhabited

mostly by nutty entrepreneurs and kids with crystal sets,

it is now a thriving, uncomfortably crowded metropolis.

In the past twenty years especially, there has been

phenomenal growth in the number of machines spewing radio

and microwave signals into space. New services keep

springing up: telephones in airplanes, wireless

electronic mail, mobile telephones, "personal

communication systems," all of them fiercely demanding

elbow-room.

AM radio, FM radio, and television all have slices of

the spectrum. They stake and hold their claim with

towers. Towers have evolved to fit their specialized

environment: a complex interplay of financial necessity,

the laws of physics, and government regulation.

Towers could easily be a lot bigger than they are.

They're made of sturdy galvanized steel, and the

principles of their construction are well-understood.

Given four million dollars, it would be a fairly simple

matter to build a broadcast tower 4,000 feet high. In

practice, however, you won't see towers much over 2,100

feet in the United States, because the FCC deliberately

stunts them. A broadcast antenna atop a 4000-ft tower

would hog the spectrum over too large a geographical area.

Almost every large urban antenna-tower, the kind you

might see in everyday life, belongs to some commercial

entity. Military and scientific-research antennas are

more discreet, usually located in remote enclaves.

Furthermore, they just don't look like commercial

antennas. Military communication equipment is not

subject to commercial restraints and has a characteristic

appearance: rugged, heavy-duty, clunky, serial-numbered,

basically Soviet-looking. Scientific instruments are

designed to gather data with an accuracy to the last

possible decimal point. They may look frazzled, but they

rarely look simple. Broadcast tower equipment by

contrast is designed to make money, so it looks cheerfully

slimmed-down and mass-produced and gimcrack.

Of course, a commercial antenna must obey the laws of

physics like other antennas, and has been designed to do

that, but its true primary function is generating optimal

revenue on capital investment. Towers and their antennas

cost as little as possible, consonant with optimal

coverage of the market area, and the likelihood of

avoiding federal prosecution for sloppy practices. Modern

antennas are becoming steadily more elaborate, so as to

use thinner slices of spectrum and waste less radiative

power. More elaborate design also reduces the annoyance

of stray, unwanted signals, so-called "electromagnetic

pollution."

Towers fall under the aegis of not one but two

powerful bureaucracies, the FCC and the FAA, or Federal

Aviation Administration. The FAA is enormously fond of

massive air-traffic radar antennas, but dourly regards

broadcast antennas as a "menace to air navigation."

This is the main reason why towers are so flauntingly

obvious. If towers were painted sky-blue they'd be almost

invisible, but they're not allowed this. Towers are

hazards to the skyways, and therefore they are striped in

glaring "aviation white" and gruesome "international

orange," as if they were big traffic sawhorses.

Both the FCC and FAA are big outfits that have been

around quite a while. They may be slow and cumbersome,

but they pretty well know the name of the game. Safety

failures in tower management can draw savage fines of up

to a hundred thousand dollars a day. FCC regional offices

have mandatory tower inspection quotas, and worse yet, the

fines on offenders go tidily right into the FCC's budget.

That orange and white paint costs a lot. It also

peels off every couple of years, and has to be replaced,

by hand. Depending on the size of the tower, it's

sometimes possible to get away with using navigation-

hazard lights instead of paint, especially if the lights

strobe. The size of the lights, and their distribution

on the tower structure, and their wattage, and even their

rate and method of flashing are all spelled out in

grinding detail by the FCC and FAA.

In the real world -- and commercial towers are very

real-world structures -- lights aren't that much of an

advantage over paint. The bulbs burn out, for one thing.

Rain shorts out the line. Ice freezes solid on the high

upper reaches of the tower, plummets off in big thirty-

pound chunks, cracking the lights off (not to mention

cracking the lower-mounted antennas, the hoods and

windshields of utility trucks, and the skulls of unlucky

technicians). The lights' power sometimes fails entirely.

And people shoot the lights and steal them. In the

real world, people shoot towers all the time. Something

about towers -- their dominating size, their lonely

locales, or maybe it's that color-scheme and that pesky

blinking -- seems to provoke an element of trigger-happy

lunacy in certain people. Bullet damage is a major

hassle for the tower owner and renter.

People, especially drunken undergraduates in college

towns, often climb the towers and steal the hazard lights

as trophies. If you visit the base of a tower, you will

usually find it surrounded with eight-foot, padlocked

galvanized fencing and a mean coil of sharp razor-wire.

But that won't stop an active guy with a pickup, a ladder,

and a six-pack under his belt.

The people who physically build and maintain towers

refer to themselves as "tower hands." Tower engineers and

designers refer to these people as "riggers." The suit-

and-tie folks who actually own broadcasting stations refer

to them as "tower monkeys." Tower hands are blue-collar

industrial workers, mostly agile young men, mostly

nonunionized. They're a special breed. Not everybody

can calmly climb 2,000 feet into their air with a twenty-

pound tool-belt of ohmmeters, wattmeters, voltage meters,

and various wrenches, clamps, screwdrivers and specialized

cutting tools. Some people get used to this and come to

enjoy it, but those who don't get used to it, *never* get

used to it.

While 2,000 feet in the air, these unsung knights of

the airwaves must juggle large, unwieldy antennas. Quite

often they work when the station is off the air -- in the

midnight darkness, using helmet-mounted coal-miners'

lamps. And it's hot up there on the tower, or freezing,

or wet, and almost always windy.

The commonest task in the tower-hand's life is

painting. It's done with "paint-mitts," big soppy gloves

dipped in paint, which are stroked over every structural

element in the tower, rather like grooming a horse. It

takes a strong man a full day to paint a hundred feet of

an average tower. (Rip-off hustlers posing as tower-hands

can paint towers at "bargain rates" with amazing

cheapness and speed. The rascals -- there are some in

every business -- paint only the *underside* of the

tower, the parts visible from the ground.)

Spray-on paint can be faster than hand-work, but with

even the least breeze, paint sprayed 2,000 feet up will

carry hundreds of yards to splatter the roofs, walls, and

cars of angry civilians with vivid "international orange."

There simply isn't much calm air 2,000 feet up in the sky.

High-altitude wind doesn't have to deal with ground-level

friction, so wind-speed roughly doubles about every

thousand feet.

Building towers is known in the trade as "stacking

steel." The towers are shipped in pieces, then bolted or

welded into segments, either on-site or at the shop. The

rigid sections are hauled skyward with a winch-driven

'load line,' and kept from swaying by a second steel

cable, the 'tag-line.' Each section is bootstrapped up

above the top of the tower, through the use of a tower-

mounted crane, called the 'gin pole.' The gin pole has a

360-degree revolving device at its very top, the 'rooster

head.' Each new section is deliberately hauled up, spun

deftly around on the rooster head, stacked on top of all

the previous sections, and securely bolted into place.

Then the tower hands detach the gin pole, climb the

section they just stacked, mount the ginpole up at the

top again, and repeat the process till they're done.

Tower construction is a mature industry; there have

not been many innovations in the last forty years.

There's nothing new about galvanized steel; it's not high-

tech, but it's plenty sturdy, it's easy to work and weld,

and it gets the job done. The job's not cheap. In

today's market, galvanized steel towers tend to cost about

a million dollars per thousand feet of height.

Towers come in two basic varieties, self-supporting

and guyed. The self-supporting towers are heavier and

more expensive, their feet broadly splayed across the

earth. Despite their slender spires, the guyed towers

actually require more room. The bottom of a guyed tower

is tapered and quite slender, often a narrow patch of

industrial steel not much bigger than the top of a child's

school-desk. But the foundations for those guy cables

stretch out over a vast area, sometimes 100 percent of the

tower's height, in three or four different directions.

It's possible to draw the cables in toward the tower's

base, but that increases the "download" on the tower

structure.

Towers are generally built as lightly as possible,

commensurate with the strain involved. But the strain

is very considerable. Towers themselves are heavy. They

need to be sturdy enough to have tower-hands climbing any

part of them, at any time, safely.

Small towers sometimes use their bracing bars as

natural step-ladders, but big towers have a further

burden. It takes a strong man, with a clear head, 3/4 of

an hour to climb a thousand feet, so any tower over that

size definitely requires an elevator. That brings the

full elaborate rigging of guide rails, driving mechanism,

hoisting cables, counterweights, rope guards, and cab

controls, all of which add to the weight and strain on the

structure. Even with an elevator, one still needs a

ladder for detail work. Tower hands, who have a very good

head for heights, prefer their ladders out on the open

air, where there are fewer encumbrances, and they can get

the job done in short order. However, station engineers

and station personnel, who sometimes need to whip up the

tower to replace a lightbulb or such, rather prefer a

ladder that's nestled inside the tower, so the structure

itself forms a natural safety cage.

Besides the weight of the tower, its elevator, the

power cables, the waveguides, the lights, and the

antennas, there is also the grave risk of ice. Ice forms

very easily on towers, much like the icing of an aircraft

wing. An ice-storm can add hugely to a tower's weight,

and towers must be designed for that eventuality.

Lightning is another prominent hazard, and although

towers are well-grounded, lightning can be freakish and

often destroys vulnerable antennas and wiring.

But the greatest single threat to a tower is wind-

load. Wind has the advantage of leverage; it can attack

a tower from any direction, anywhere along its length, and

can twist it, bend it, shake it, pound it, and build up

destructive resonant vibrations.

Towers and their antennas are built to avoid resisting

wind. The structural elements are streamlined. Often the

antennas have radomes, plastic weatherproof covers of

various shapes. The plastic radome is transparent to

radio and microwave emissions; it protects the sensitive

antenna and also streamlines it to avoid wind-load.

An antenna is an interface between an electrical

system and the complex surrounding world of moving

electromagnetic fields. Antennas come in a bewildering

variety of shapes, sizes and functions. The Andrew

Corporation, prominent American tower builders and

equipment specialists, sells over six hundred different

models of antennas.

Antennas are classified in four basic varieties:

current elements, travelling-wave antennas, antenna

arrays, and radiating-aperture antennas. Elemental

antennas tend to be low in the frequency range,

travelling-wave antennas rather higher, arrays a bit

higher yet, and aperture antennas deal with high-frequency

microwaves. Antennas are designed to meet certain

performance parameters: frequency, radiation pattern,

gain, impedance, bandwidth, polarization, and noise

temperature.

Elemental antennas are not very "elemental." They

were pretty elemental back in the days of Guglielmo

Marconi, the first to make any money broadcasting, but

Marconi's radiant day of glory was in 1901, and his field

of "Marconi wireless" has enjoyed most of a long century

of brilliant innovation and sustained development.

Monopole antennas are pretty elemental -- just a big metal

rod, spewing out radiation in all directions -- but they

quickly grow more elaborate. There are doublets and

dipoles and loops; slots, stubs, rods, whips; biconal

antennas, spheroidal antennas, microstrip radiators.

Then there's the travelling-wave antennas: rhombic,

slotted waveguides, spirals, helices, slow wave, fast

wave, leaky wave.

And the arrays: broadside, endfire, planar, circular,

multiplicative, beacon, et al.

And aperture variants: the extensive microwave clan.

The reflector family: single, dual, paraboloid,

spherical, cylindrical, off-set, multi-beam, contoured,

hybrid, tracking.... The horn family: pyramidal,

sectoral, conical, biconical, box, hybrid, ridged. The

lens family: metal lens, dielectric lens, Luneberg lens.

Plus backfire aperture, short dielectric rods, and

parabolic horns.

Electromagnetism is a difficult phenomenon. The

behavior of photons doesn't make much horse sense, and is

highly counterintuitive. Even the bedrock of

electromagnetic understanding, Maxwell's equations,

require one to break into specialized notation, and the

integral calculus follows with dreadful speed. To put it

very simply: antennas come in different shapes and sizes

because they are sending signals of different quality, in

fields of different three-dimensional shape.

Wavelength is the most important determinant of

antenna size. Low frequency radiation has a very long

wavelength and works best with a very long antenna. AM

broadcasting is low frequency, and in AM broadcasting the

tower *is* the antenna. The AM tower itself is mounted

on a block of insulation. Power is pumped into the entire

tower and the whole shebang radiates. These low-frequency

radio waves can bounce off the ionosphere and go amazing

distances.

Microwaves, however, are much farther up the spectrum.

Microwave radiation has a short wavelength and behaves

more like light. This is why microwave antennas come as

lenses and dishes, rather like the lens and retina of a

human eye.

An array antenna is a group of antennas which

interreact in complex fashion, bouncing and shaping the

radiation they emit. The upshot is a directional beam.

"Coverage is coverage," as the tower-hands say, so

very often several different companies, or even several

different industries, will share towers, bolting their

equipment up and down the structure, rather like oysters,

limpets and barnacles all settling on the same reef.

Here's a brief naturalist's description of some of the

mechanical organisms one is likely to see on a broadcast

tower.

First -- the largest and most obvious -- are things

that look like big drums. These are microwave dishes

under their protective membranes of radome. They may be

flat on both sides, in which case they are probably two

parabolic dishes mounted back-to-back. They may be flat

on one side, or they may bulge out on both sides so that

they resemble a flying saucer. If they are mounted so

that the dish faces out horizontally, then they are relays

of some kind, perhaps local telephone or a microwave long-

distance service. They might be a microwave television-

feed to a broadcast TV network affiliate, or a local

cable-TV system. They don't broadcast for public

reception, because the microwave beams from these focused

dishes are very narrow. Somewhere in the distance,

probably within 30 miles, is another relay in the chain.

A tower may well have several satellite microwave

dishes. These will be down near the base of the tower,

hooked to the tower by cable and pointed almost straight

up. These satellite dishes are generally much bigger than

relay microwave dishes. They're too big to fit on a

tower, and there's no real reason to put them them on a

tower anyway; they'll scarcely get much closer to an

orbiting satellite by rising a mere 2,000 feet.

Often, small microwave dishes made of metal slats are

mounted to the side of the tower. These slat dishes are

mostly empty space, so they're less electronically

efficient than a smooth metal dish would be. However, a

smooth metal dish, being cupshaped, acts just like the cup

on a wind-gauge, so if a strong wind-gust hits it, it will

strain the tower violently. Slotted dishes are

lighter,cheaper and safer.

Then there are horns. Horns are also microwave

emitters. Horns have a leg-thick, hollow tube called a

wave-guide at the bottom. The waveguide supplies the

microwave radiation through a hollow metallic pipe, and

the horn reflects this blast of microwave radiation off an

interior reflector, into a narrow beam of the proper

"phase," "aperture," and "directivity." Horn antennas are

narrow at the bottom and spread out at the top, like

acoustic horns. Some are conical, others rectangular.

They tend to be mounted vertically inside the tower

structure. The "noise" of the horn comes out the side of

the horn, not its end, however.

One may see a number of white poles, mounted

vertically, spaced parallel and rather far apart, attached

to the tower but well away from it. On big towers, these

poles might be half-way up; on shorter towers, they're at

the top. Sometimes the vertical poles are mounted on the

rim of a square or triangular platform, with catwalks for

easy access by tower hands. These are antennas for land

mobile radio services: paging, cellular phones, cab

dispatch, and express mail services.

The tops of towers may well be thick, pipelike,

featureless cylinders. These are generally TV broadcast

antennas encased in a long cylindrical radome, and topped

off with an aircraft beacon.

Very odd things grow from the sides of towers. One

sometimes sees a tall vertically mounted rack of metal

curlicues that look like a stack of omega signs. These

are tubular ring antennas with one knobby stub pointing

upward, one stub downward, in an array of up to sixteen.

These are FM radio transmitters.

Another array of flat metal rings is linked lengthwise

by two long parallel rods. These are VHF television

broadcast antennas.

Another species of FM antenna is particularly odd.

These witchy-looking arrays stand well out from the side

of the tower, on a rod with two large, V-shaped pairs of

arms. One V is out at the end of the rod, canted

backward, and the other is near the butt of the rod,

canted forward. The two V's are twisted at angles to one

another, so that from the ground the ends of the V's

appear to overlap slightly, forming a broken square. The

arms are of hollow brass tubing, and they come in long

sets down the side of the tower. The whole array

resembles a line of children's jacks that have all been

violently stepped on.

The four arms of each antenna are quarter-wavelength

arms, two driven and two parasitic, so that their FM

radiation is in 90-degree quadrature with equal amplitudes

and a high aperture efficiency. Of course, that's easy

for *you* to say...

In years to come, the ecology of towers will probably

change greatly. This is due to the weird phenomenon known

as the "Great Media Exchange" or the "Negroponte Flip,"

after MIT media theorist Nicholas Negroponte. Broadcast

services such as television are going into wired

distribution by cable television, where a single

"broadcast" can reach 60 percent of the American

population and even reach far overseas. With a

combination of cable television in cities and direct

satellite broadcast rurally, what real need remains for

television towers? In the meantime, however, services

formerly transferred exclusively by wire, such as

telephone and fax, are going into wireless, cellular,

portable, applications, supported by an infrastructure of

small neighborhood towers and rather modestly-sized

antennas.

Antennas have a glowing future. The spectrum can only

become more crowded, and the design of antennas can only

become more sophisticated. It may well be, though, that

another couple of decades will reduce the great steel

spires of the skyline to relics. We have seen them every

day of our lives, grown up with them as constant looming

presences. But despite their steel and their size, their

role in society may prove no more permanent than that of

windmills or lighthouses. If we do lose them to the

impetus of progress, our grandchildren will regard these

great towers with a mixture of romance and incredulity, as

the largest and most garish technological anomalies that

the twentieth century ever produced.

"The New Cryptography"

Writing is a medium of communication and

understanding, but there are times and places when one

wants an entirely different function from writing:

concealment and deliberate bafflement.

Cryptography, the science of secret writing, is almost

as old as writing itself. The hieroglyphics of ancient

Egypt were deliberately arcane: both writing and a cypher.

Literacy in ancient Egypt was hedged about with daunting

difficulty, so as to assure the elite powers of priest and

scribe.

Ancient Assyria also used cryptography, including the

unique and curious custom of "funerary cryptography."

Assyrian tombs sometimes featured odd sets of

cryptographic cuneiform symbols. The Assyrian passerby,

puzzling out the import of the text, would mutter the

syllables aloud, and find himself accidentally uttering a

blessing for the dead. Funerary cryptography was a way

to steal a prayer from passing strangers.

Julius Caesar lent his name to the famous "Caesar

cypher," which he used to secure Roman military and

political communications.

Modern cryptographic science is deeply entangled with

the science of computing. In 1949, Claude Shannon, the

pioneer of information theory, gave cryptography its

theoretical foundation by establishing the "entropy" of a

message and a formal measurement for the "amount of

information" encoded in any stream of digital bits.

Shannon's theories brought new power and sophistication to

the codebreaker's historic efforts. After Shannon,

digital machinery could pore tirelessly and repeatedly

over the stream of encrypted gibberish, looking for

repetitions, structures, coincidences, any slight

variation from the random that could serve as a weak point

for attack.

Computer pioneer Alan Turing, mathematician and

proponent of the famous "Turing Test" for artificial

intelligence, was a British cryptographer in the 1940s.

In World War II, Turing and his colleagues in espionage

used electronic machinery to defeat the elaborate

mechanical wheels and gearing of the German Enigma code-

machine. Britain's secret triumph over Nazi

communication security had a very great deal to do with

the eventual military triumph of the Allies. Britain's

code-breaking triumph further assured that cryptography

would remain a state secret and one of the most jealously

guarded of all sciences.

After World War II, cryptography became, and has

remained, one of the crown jewels of the American national

security establishment. In the United States, the science

of cryptography became the high-tech demesne of the

National Security Agency (NSA), an extremely secretive

bureaucracy that President Truman founded by executive

order in 1952, one of the chilliest years of the Cold War.

Very little can be said with surety about the NSA.

The very existence of the organization was not publicly

confirmed until 1962. The first appearance of an NSA

director before Congress was in 1975. The NSA is said to

be based in Fort Meade, Maryland. It is said to have a

budget much larger than that of the CIA, but this is

impossible to determine since the budget of the NSA has

never been a matter of public record. The NSA is said to

the the largest single employer of mathematicians in the

world. The NSA is estimated to have about 40,000

employees. The acronym NSA is aptly said to stand for

"Never Say Anything."

The NSA almost never says anything publicly. However,

the NSA's primary role in the shadow-world of electronic

espionage is to protect the communications of the US

government, and crack those of the US government's real,

imagined, or potential adversaries. Since this list of

possible adversaries includes practically everyone, the

NSA is determined to defeat every conceivable

cryptographic technique. In pursuit of their institutional

goal, the NSA labors (in utter secrecy) to crack codes and

cyphers and invent its own less breakable ones.

The NSA also tries hard to retard civilian progress in

the science of cryptography outside its own walls. The

NSA can suppress cryptographic inventions through the

little-known but often-used Invention Secrecy Act of 1952,

which allows the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks to

withhold patents on certain new inventions and to order

that those inventions be kept secret indefinitely, "as the

national interest requires." The NSA also seeks to

control dissemination of information about cryptography,

and to control and shape the flow and direction of

civilian scientific research in the field.

Cryptographic devices are formally defined as

"munitions" by Title 22 of the United States Code, and are

subject to the same import and export restrictions as

arms, ammunition and other instruments of warfare.

Violation of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations

(ITAR) is a criminal affair investigated and administered

by the Department of State. It is said that the

Department of State relies heavily on NSA expert advice in

determining when to investigate and/or criminally

prosecute illicit cryptography cases (though this too is

impossible to prove).

The "munitions" classification for cryptographic

devices applies not only to physical devices such as

telephone scramblers, but also to "related technical data"

such as software and mathematical encryption algorithms.

This specifically includes scientific "information" that

can be "exported" in all manner of ways, including simply

verbally discussing cryptography techniques out loud. One

does not have to go overseas and set up shop to be

regarded by the Department of State as a criminal

international arms trafficker. The security ban

specifically covers disclosing such information to any

foreign national anywhere, including within the borders of

the United States.

These ITAR restrictions have come into increasingly

harsh conflict with the modern realities of global

economics and everyday real life in the sciences and

academia. Over a third of the grad students in computer

science on American campuses are foreign nationals.

Strictly appled ITAR regulations would prevent

communication on cryptography, inside an American campus,

between faculty and students. Most scientific journals

have at least a few foreign subscribers, so an exclusively

"domestic" publication about cryptography is also

practically impossible. Even writing the data down on a

cocktail napkin could be hazardous: the world is full of

photocopiers, modems and fax machines, all of them

potentially linked to satellites and undersea fiber-optic

cables.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the NSA used its surreptitious

influence at the National Science Foundation to shape

scientific research on cryptography through restricting

grants to mathematicians. Scientists reacted mulishly, so

in 1978 the Public Cryptography Study Group was founded as

an interface between mathematical scientists in civilian

life and the cryptographic security establishment. This

Group established a series of "voluntary control"

measures, the upshot being that papers by civilian

researchers would be vetted by the NSA well before any

publication.

This was one of the oddest situations in the entire

scientific enterprise, but the situation was tolerated for

years. Most US civilian cryptographers felt, through

patriotic conviction, that it was in the best interests of

the United States if the NSA remained far ahead of the

curve in cryptographic science. After all, were some

other national government's electronic spies to become

more advanced than those of the NSA, then American

government and military transmissions would be cracked and

penetrated. World War II had proven that the

consequences of a defeat in the cryptographic arms race

could be very dire indeed for the loser.

So the "voluntary restraint" measures worked well for

over a decade. Few mathematicians were so enamored of

the doctrine of academic freedom that they were prepared

to fight the National Security Agency over their supposed

right to invent codes that could baffle the US government.

In any case, the mathematical cryptography community was a

small group without much real political clout, while the

NSA was a vast, powerful, well-financed agency

unaccountable to the American public, and reputed to

possess many deeply shadowed avenues of influence in the

corridors of power.

However, as the years rolled on, the electronic

exchange of information became a commonplace, and users of

computer data became intensely aware of their necessity

for electronic security over transmissions and data. One

answer was physical security -- protect the wiring, keep

the physical computers behind a physical lock and key.

But as personal computers spread and computer networking

grew ever more sophisticated, widespread and complex, this

bar-the-door technique became unworkable.

The volume and importance of information transferred

over the Internet was increasing by orders of magnitude.

But the Internet was a notoriously leaky channel of

information -- its packet-switching technology meant that

packets of vital information might be dumped into the

machines of unknown parties at almost any time. If the

Internet itself could not locked up and made leakproof --

and this was impossible by the nature of the system --

then the only secure solution was to encrypt the message

itself, to make that message unusable and unreadable, even

if it sometimes fell into improper hands.

Computers outside the Internet were also at risk.

Corporate computers faced the threat of computer-intrusion

hacking, from bored and reckless teenagers, or from

professional snoops and unethical business rivals both

inside and outside the company. Electronic espionage,

especially industrial espionage, was intensifying. The

French secret services were especially bold in this

regard, as American computer and aircraft executives found

to their dismay as their laptops went missing during Paris

air and trade shows. Transatlantic commercial phone calls

were routinely tapped by French government spooks seeking

commercial advantage for French companies in the computer

industry, aviation, and the arms trade. And the French

were far from alone when it came to government-supported

industrial espionage.

Protection of private civilian data from foreign

government spies required that seriously powerful

encryption techniques be placed into private hands.

Unfortunately, an ability to baffle French spies also

means an ability to baffle American spies. This was not

good news for the NSA.

By 1993, encryption had become big business. There

were one and half million copies of legal encryption

software publicly available, including widely-known and

commonly-used personal computer products such as Norton

Utilities, Lotus Notes, StuffIt, and several Microsoft

products. People all over the world, in every walk of

life, were using computer encryption as a matter of

course. They were securing hard disks from spies or

thieves, protecting certain sections of the family

computer from sticky-fingered children, or rendering

entire laptops and portables into a solid mess of

powerfully-encrypted Sanskrit, so that no stranger could

walk off with those accidental but highly personal life-

histories that are stored in almost every PowerBook.

People were no longer afraid of encryption.

Encryption was no longer secret, obscure, and arcane;

encryption was a business tool. Computer users wanted

more encryption, faster, sleeker, more advanced, and

better.

The real wild-card in the mix, however, was the new

cryptography. A new technique arose in the 1970s:

public-key cryptography. This was an element the

codemasters of World War II and the Cold War had never

foreseen.

Public-key cryptography was invented by American

civilian researchers Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman,

who first published their results in 1976.

Conventional classical cryptographic systems, from the

Caesar cipher to the Nazi Enigma machine defeated by Alan

Turing, require a single key. The sender of the message

uses that key to turn his plain text message into

cyphertext gibberish. He shares the key secretly with the

recipients of the message, who use that same key to turn

the cyphertext back into readable plain text.

This is a simple scheme; but if the key is lost to

unfriendly forces such as the ingenious Alan Turing, then

all is lost. The key must therefore always remain hidden,

and it must always be fiercely protected from enemy

cryptanalysts. Unfortunately, the more widely that key is

distributed, the more likely it is that some user in on

the secret will crack or fink. As an additional burden,

the key cannot be sent by the same channel as the

communications are sent, since the key itself might be

picked-up by eavesdroppers.

In the new public-key cryptography, however, there are

two keys. The first is a key for writing secret text,

the second the key for reading that text. The keys are

related to one another through a complex mathematical

dependency; they determine one another, but it is

mathematically extremely difficult to deduce one key from

the other.

The user simply gives away the first key, the "public

key," to all and sundry. The public key can even be

printed on a business card, or given away in mail or in a

public electronic message. Now anyone in the public, any

random personage who has the proper (not secret, easily

available) cryptographic software, can use that public key

to send the user a cyphertext message. However, that

message can only be read by using the second key -- the

private key, which the user always keeps safely in his own

possession.

Obviously, if the private key is lost, all is lost.

But only one person knows that private key. That private

key is generated in the user's home computer, and is never

revealed to anyone but the very person who created it.

To reply to a message, one has to use the public key

of the other party. This means that a conversation

between two people requires four keys. Before computers,

all this key-juggling would have been rather unwieldy, but

with computers, the chips and software do all the

necessary drudgework and number-crunching.

The public/private dual keys have an interesting

alternate application. Instead of the public key, one can

use one's private key to encrypt a message. That message

can then be read by anyone with the public key, i.e,.

pretty much everybody, so it is no longer a "secret"

message at all. However, that message, even though it is

no longer secret, now has a very valuable property: it is

authentic. Only the individual holder of the private key

could have sent that message.

This authentication power is a crucial aspect of the

new cryptography, and may prove to be more socially

important than secrecy. Authenticity means that

electronic promises can be made, electronic proofs can be

established, electronic contracts can be signed,

electronic documents can be made tamperproof. Electronic

impostors and fraudsters can be foiled and defeated -- and

it is possible for someone you have never seen, and will

never see, to prove his bona fides through entirely

electronic means.

That means that economic relations can become

electronic. Theoretically, it means that digital cash is

possible -- that electronic mail, e-mail, can be joined by

a strange and powerful new cousin, electronic cash, e-

money.

Money that is made out of text -- encrypted text. At

first consideration such money doesn't seem possible,

since it is so far outside our normal experience. But

look at this:

ASCII-picture of US dollar

This parody US banknote made of mere letters and

numbers is being circulated in e-mail as an in-joke in

network circles. But electronic money, once established,

would be no more a joke than any other kind of money.

Imagine that you could store a text in your computer and

send it to a recipient; and that once gone, it would be

gone from your computer forever, and registered infallibly

in his. With the proper use of the new encryption and

authentication, this is actually possible. Odder yet, it

is possible to make the note itself an authentic, usable,

fungible, transferrable note of genuine economic value,

without the identity of its temporary owner ever being

made known to anyone. This would be electronic cash --

like normal cash, anonymous -- but unlike normal cash,

lightning-fast and global in reach.

There is already a great deal of electronic funds

transfer occurring in the modern world, everything from

gigantic currency-exchange clearinghouses to the

individual's VISA and MASTERCARD bills. However, charge-

card funds are not so much "money" per se as a purchase

via proof of personal identity. Merchants are willing to

take VISA and MASTERCARD payments because they know that

they can physically find the owner in short order and, if

necessary, force him to pay up in a more conventional

fashion. The VISA and MASTERCARD user is considered a

good risk because his identity and credit history are

known.

VISA and MASTERCARD also have the power to accumulate

potentially damaging information about the commercial

habits of individuals, for instance, the video stores one

patronizes, the bookstores one frequents, the restaurants

one dines in, or one's travel habits and one's choice of

company.

Digital cash could be very different. With proper

protection from the new cryptography, even the world's

most powerful governments would be unable to find the

owner and user of digital cash. That cash would secured

by a "bank" -- (it needn't be a conventional, legally

established bank) -- through the use of an encrypted

digital signature from the bank, a signature that neither

the payer nor the payee could break.

The bank could register the transaction. The bank

would know that the payer had spent the e-money, and the

bank could prove that the money had been spent once and

only once. But the bank would not know that the payee had

gained the money spent by the payer. The bank could track

the electronic funds themselves, but not their location or

their ownership. The bank would guarantee the worth of

the digital cash, but the bank would have no way to tie

the transactions together.

The potential therefore exists for a new form of

network economics made of nothing but ones and zeroes,

placed beyond anyone's controls by the very laws of

mathematics. Whether this will actually happen is

anyone's guess. It seems likely that if it did happen, it

would prove extremely difficult to stop.

Public-key cryptography uses prime numbers. It is a

swift and simple matter to multiply prime numbers together

and obtain a result, but it is an exceedingly difficult

matter to take a large number and determine the prime

numbers used to produce it. The RSA algorithm, the

commonest and best-tested method in public-key

cryptography, uses 256-bit and 258-bit prime numbers.

These two large prime numbers ("p" and "q") are used to

produce very large numbers ("d" and "e") so that (de-1) is

divisible by (p-1) times (q-1). These numbers are easy to

multiply together, yielding the public key, but extremely

difficult to pull apart mathematically to yield the

private key.

To date, there has been no way to mathematically prove

that it is inherently difficult to crack this prime-number

cipher. It might be very easy to do if one knew the

proper advanced mathematical technique for it, and the

clumsy brute-power techniques for prime-number

factorization have been improving in past years. However,

mathematicians have been working steadily on prime number

factorization problems for many centuries, with few

dramatic advances. An advance that could shatter the RSA

algorithm would mean an explosive breakthrough across a

broad front of mathematical science. This seems

intuitively unlikely, so prime-number public keys seem

safe and secure for the time being -- as safe and secure

as any other form of cryptography short of "the one-time

pad." (The one-time pad is a truly unbreakable cypher.

Unfortunately it requires a key that is every bit as long

as the message, and that key can only be used once. The

one-time pad is solid as Gibraltar, but it is not much

practical use.)

Prime-number cryptography has another advantage. The

difficulty of factorizing numbers becomes drastically

worse as the prime numbers become larger. A 56-bit key

is, perhaps, not entirely outside the realm of possibility

for a nationally supported decryption agency with large

banks of dedicated supercomputers and plenty of time on

their hands. But a 2,048 bit key would require every

computer on the planet to number-crunch for hundreds of

centuries.

Decrypting a public-keyed message is not so much a

case of physical impossibility, as a matter of economics.

Each key requires a huge computational effort to break it,

and there are already thousands of such keys used by

thousands of people. As a further blow against the

decryptor, the users can generate new keys easily, and

change them at will. This poses dire problems for the

professional electronic spy.

The best-known public-key encryption technique, the

RSA algorithm, was named after its inventors, Ronald L.

Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leon Adleman. The RSA technique

was invented in the United States in the late 1980s

(although, as if to spite the international trade in arms

regulations, Shamir himself is an Israeli). The RSA

algorithm is patented in the United States by the

inventors, and the rights to implement it on American

computers are theoretically patented by an American

company known as Public Key Partners. (Due to a patent

technicality, the RSA algorithm was not successfully

patented overseas.)

In 1991 an amateur encryption enthusiast named Phil

Zimmerman wrote a software program called "Pretty Good

Privacy" that used the RSA algorithm without permission.

Zimmerman gave the program away on the Internet network

via modem from his home in Colorado, because of his

private conviction that the public had a legitimate need

for powerful encryption programs at no cost (and,

incidentally, no profit to the inventors of RSA). Since

Zimmerman's action, "Pretty Good Privacy" or "PGP" has

come into common use for encrypting electronic mail and

data, and has won an avid international following. The

original PGP program has been extensively improved by

other software writers overseas, out of the reach of

American patents or the influence of the NSA, and the PGP

program is now widely available in almost every country on

the planet -- or at least, in all those countries where

floppy disks are common household objects.

Zimmerman, however, failed to register as an arms

dealer when he wrote the PGP software in his home and made

it publicly available. At this writing, Zimmerman is

under federal investigation by the Office of Defense Trade

Controls at the State Department, and is facing a

possible criminal indictment as an arms smuggler. This

despite the fact that Zimmerman was not, in fact, selling

anything, but rather giving software away for free. Nor

did he voluntarily "export" anything -- rather, people

reached in from overseas via Internet links and retrieved

Zimmerman's program from the United States under their own

power and through their own initiative.

Even more oddly, Zimmerman's program does not use the

RSA algorithm exclusively, but also depends on the

perfectly legal DES or Data Encryption Standard. The Data

Encryption Standard, which uses a 56-bit classical key,

is an official federal government cryptographic technique,

created by IBM with the expert help of the NSA. It has

long been surmised, though not proven, that the NSA can

crack DES at will with their legendary banks of Cray

supercomputers. Recently a Canadian mathematician,

Michael Wiener of Bell-Northern Research, published plans

for a DES decryption machine that can purportedly crack

56-bit DES in a matter of hours, through brute force

methods. It seems that the US Government's official 56-

bit key -- insisted upon, reportedly, by the NSA -- is now

too small for serious security uses.

The NSA, and the American law enforcement community

generally, are unhappy with the prospect of privately

owned and powerfully secure encryption. They acknowledge

the need for secure communications, but they insist on the

need for police oversight, police wiretapping, and on the

overwhelming importance of national security interests and

governmental supremacy in the making and breaking of

cyphers.

This motive recently led the Clinton Administration to

propose the "Clipper Chip" or "Skipjack," a government-

approved encryption device to be placed in telephones.

Sets of keys for the Clipper Chip would be placed in

escrow with two different government agencies, and when

the FBI felt the need to listen in on an encrypted

telephone conversation, the FBI would get a warrant from a

judge and the keys would be handed over.

Enthusiasts for private encryption have pointed out a

number of difficulties with the Clipper Chip proposal.

First of all, it is extremely unlikely that criminals,

foreign spies, or terrorists would be foolish enough to

use an encryption technique designed by the NSA and

approved by the FBI. Second, the main marketing use for

encryption is not domestic American encryption, but

international encryption. Serious business users of

serious encryption are far more alarmed by state-supported

industrial espionage overseas, than they are about the

safety of phone calls made inside the United States. They

want encryption for communications made overseas to people

overseas -- but few foreign business people would buy an

encryption technology knowing that the US Government held

the exclusive keys.

It is therefore likely that the Clipper Chip could

never be successfully exported by American manufacturers

of telephone and computer equipment, and therefore it

could not be used internationally, which is the primary

market for encryption. Machines with a Clipper Chip

installed would become commercial white elephants, with no

one willing to use them but American cops, American spies,

and Americans with nothing to hide.

A third objection is that the Skipjack algorithm has

been classified "Secret" by the NSA and is not available

for open public testing. Skeptics are very unwilling to

settle for a bland assurance from the NSA that the chip

and its software are unbreakable except with the official

keys.

The resultant controversy was described by Business

Week as "Spy Vs Computer Nerd." A subterranean power-

struggle has broken out over the mastery of cryptographic

science, and over basic ownership of the electronic bit-

stream.

Much is riding on the outcome.

Will powerful, full-fledged, state-of-the-art

encryption belong to individuals, including such unsavory

individuals as drug traffickers, child pornographers,

black-market criminal banks, tax evaders, software

pirates, and the possible future successors of the Nazis?

Or will the NSA and its allies in the cryptographic

status-quo somehow succeed in stopping the march of

scientific progress in cryptography, and in cramming the

commercial crypto-genie back into the bottle? If so, what

price will be paid by society, and what damage wreaked on

our traditions of free scientific and technical inquiry?

One thing seems certain: cryptography, this most

obscure and smothered of mathematical sciences, is out in

the open as never before in its long history.

Impassioned, radicalized cryptographic enthusiasts, often

known as "cypherpunks," are suing the NSA and making it

their business to spread knowledge of cryptographic

techniques as widely as possible, "through whatever means

necessary." Small in number, they nevertheless have

daring, ingenuity, and money, and they know very well how

to create a public stink. In the meantime, their more

conventional suit-and-tie allies in the Software

Publishers Association grumble openly that the Clipper

Chip is a poorly-conceived fiasco, that cryptographic

software is peddled openly all over the planet, and that

"the US Government is succeeding only in crippling an

American industry's exporting ability."

The NSA confronted the worst that America's

adversaries had to offer during the Cold War, and the NSA

prevailed. Today, however, the secret masters of

cryptography find themselves confronting what are perhaps

the two most powerful forces in American society: the

computer revolution, and the profit motive. Deeply hidden

from the American public through forty years of Cold War

terror, the NSA itself is for the first time, exposed to

open question and harrowing reassessment.

Will the NSA quietly give up the struggle, and expire

as secretly and silently as it lived its forty-year Cold

War existence? Or will this most phantomlike of federal

agencies decide to fight for its survival and its

scientific pre-eminence?

And if this odd and always-secret agency does choose

to fight the new cryptography, then -- how?

"The Dead Collider"

It certainly seemed like a grand idea at the time, the

time being 1982, one of the break-the-bank years of the

early Reagan Administration.

The Europeans at CERN, possessors of the world's

largest particle accelerator, were planning to pave their

massive Swiss tunnel with new, superconducting magnets.

This would kick the European atom-smasher, already

powerful, up to a massive 10 trillion electron volts.

In raw power, this would boost the Europeans

decisively past their American rivals. America's most

potent accelerator in 1982, Fermilab in Illinois, could

manage a meager 2 TeV. And Fermilab's Tevatron, though

upgraded several times, was an aging installation.

A more sophisticated machine, ISABELLE at Brookhaven

National Laboratory in New York, had been planned in 1979

as Fermilab's successor at the forefront of American

particle physics. But by 1982, it was clear that

ISABELLE's ultra-sophisticated superconducting magnets had

severe design troubles. The state-of-the-art bungling at

Brookhaven was becoming an open embarrassment to the

American particle-physics community. And even if the

young ISABELLE facility overcame those problems and got

their magnets to run, ISABELLE was intended to sacrifice

raw power for sophistication; at best, ISABELLE would

yield a feeble .8 TeV.

In August 1982, Leon Lederman, then director of

Fermilab, made a bold and visionary proposal. In a

conference talk to high-energy physicists gathered in

Colorado, Lederman proposed cancelling both ISABELLE and

the latest Fermilab upgrade, in pursuit of a gigantic

American particle accelerator that would utterly dwarf the

best the Europeans had to offer, now or in the foreseeable

future. He called it "The Machine in the Desert."

The "Desertron" (as Lederman first called it) would be

the largest single scientific instrument in the world,

employing a staff of more than two thousand people, plus

students, teachers and various properly awestruck visiting

scholars from overseas. It would be 20 times more

powerful than Fermilab, and full sixty times more powerful

than CERN circa 1982. The accelerator's 54 miles of deep

tunnels, lined with hard- vacuum beamguides and helium-

refrigerated giant magnets, would be fully the size of the

Washington Beltway.

The cost: perhaps 3 billion dollars. It was thought

that the cash- flush Japanese, who had been very envious

of CERN for some time, would be willing to help the

Americans in exchange for favored status at the complex.

The goal of the Desertron, or at least its target of

choice, would be the Higgs scalar boson, a hypothetical

subatomic entity theoretically responsible for the fact

that other elementary particles have mass. The Higgs

played a prominent part at the speculative edges of

quantum theory's so-called "Standard Model," but its true

nature and real properties were very much in doubt.

The Higgs boson would be a glittering prize indeed,

though not so glittering as the gigantic lab itself.

After a year of intense debate within the American high-

energy-physics community, Lederman's argument won out.

His reasoning was firmly in the tradition of 20th-

century particle physics. There seemed little question

that massive power and scale of the Desertron was the

necessary next step for real progress in the field.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Ernest

Rutherford (who coined the memorable catch-phrase, "All

science is either physics or stamp-collecting") discovered

the nucleus of the atom with a mere five million electron

volts. Rutherford's lab equipment not much more

sophisticated than string and sealing-wax. To get

directly at neutrons and protons, however, took much more

energy -- a billion electron volts and a cyclotron. To

get quark effects, some decades later, required ten

billion volts and a synchrotron. To make quarks really

stand up and dance in their full quantum oddity, required

a hundred billion electron volts and a machine that was

miles across. And to get at the Higgs boson would need

at least ten trillion eV, and given that the fantastically

powerful collision would be a very messy affair, a full

forty trillion -- two particle beams of twenty TeV each,

colliding head-on -- was a much safer bet.

Throughout the century, then, every major new advance

in particle studies had required massive new infusions of

power. A machine for the 1990s, the end result of

decades of development, would require truly titanic

amounts of juice. The physics community had hesitated at

this step, and had settled for years at niggling around in

the low trillions of electron volts. But the field of

sub-atomic studies was looking increasingly mined-out, and

the quantum Standard Model had not had a good paradigm-

shattering kick in the pants in some time. From the

perspective of the particle physicist, the Desertron,

despite its necessarily colossal scale, made perfect

scientific sense.

The Department of Energy, the bureaucratic descendant

of the Atomic Energy Commission and the traditional

federal patron of high-energy physics, had more or less

recovered from its last major money-wasting debacle, the

Carter Administration's synthetic fuels program. Under

new leadership, the DoE was sympathetic to an ambitious

project with some workable and sellable rationale.

Lederman's tentative scheme was developed, over three

years, in great detail, by an expert central design group

of federally-sponsored physicists and engineers from

Lawrence Berkeley labs, Brookhaven and Fermilab. The

"Desertron" was officially renamed the "Superconducting

Super Collider." In 1986 the program proposal was carried

to Ronald Reagan, then in his second term. While Reagan's

cabinet seemed equally split on the merits of the SSC

versus a much more modest research program, the Gipper

decided the issue with one of his favorite football

metaphors: "Throw deep."

Reagan's SSC was a deep throw indeed. The collider

ring of Fermilab in Illinois was visible from space, and

the grounds of Fermilab were big enough to boast their

own herd of captive buffalo. But the ring of the mighty

Super Collider made Fermilab's circumference look like a

nickel on a dinner plate. One small section of the Super

Collider, the High Energy Booster, was the size of

Fermilab all by itself, but this Booster was only a

humble injection device for the Super Collider.

The real action was to be in the fifty-four-mile, 14-

ft-diameter Super Collider ring.

As if this titanic underground circus were not enough,

the SSC also boasted two underground halls each over 300

feet long, to be stuffed with ultrasophisticated particle

detectors so huge as to make their hard-helmeted minders

resemble toy dolls. Along with the fifty-four miles of

Collider were sixteen more miles of injection devices:

the Linear Accelerator, the modest Low Energy Booster, the

large Medium Energy Booster, the monster High Energy

Booster, the Boosters acting like a set of gears to drive

particles into ever-more frenzied states of relativistic

overdrive, before their release into the ferocious grip of

the main Super Collider ring.

Along the curves and arcs of these wheels-within-

wheels, and along the Super Collider ring itself, were

more than forty vertical access shafts, some of them two

hundred feet deep. Up on the surface, twelve separate

refrigeration plants would pipe tons of ultra-frigid

liquid helium to more than ten thousand superconducting

magnets, buried deep within the earth. All by itself, the

SSC would more than double the amount of helium

refrigeration taking place in the entire planet.

The site would have miles of new-paved roads, vast

cooling ponds of fresh water, brand-new electrical

utilities. Massive new office complexes were to be built

for support and research, including two separate East and

West campuses at opposite ends of the Collider, and two

offsite research labs. With thousands of computers:

personal computers, CAD workstations, network servers,

routers, massively parallel supercomputing simulators.

Office and laboratory networking including Internet and

videoconferencing. Assembly buildings, tank farms,

archives, libraries, security offices, cafeterias. The

works.

There were, of course, dissenters from the dream.

Some physicists feared that the project, though workable

and probably quite necessary for any real breakthrough in

their field, was simply too much to ask. Enemies from

outside the field likened the scheme to Reagan's Star Wars

-- an utter scientific farce -- and to the Space Station,

a political pork-barrel effort with scarcely a shred of

real use in research -- and to the hapless Space Shuttle,

an overdesigned gobboon.

Within the field of high-energy-physics, though, the

logic was too compelling and the traditional arc of

development too strong. A few physicists -- Freeman Dyson

among them -- quietly suggested that it might be time for

a radically new tack; time to abandon the tried-and-true

collider technology entirely, to try daringly novel,

small-scale particle-acceleration schemes such as free-

electron lasers, gyroklystrons, or wake- field

accelerators. But that was not Big Thinking; and

particle physics was the very exemplar of Big Science.

In the 1920 and 1930s, particle physicist Ernest

Lawrence had practically invented "Big Science" with the

Berkeley cyclotrons, each of them larger, more expensive,

demanding greater resources and entire teams of

scientists. Particle physics, in pursuit of ever-more-

elusive particles, by its nature built huge, centralized

facilities of ever greater complexity and ever greater

expense for ever-larger staffs of researchers. There

just wasn't any other way to do particle physics, but the

big way.

And then there was the competitive angle, the race for

international prestige: high-energy physics as the

arcane, scholarly equivalent of the nuclear arms race.

The nuclear arms race itself was, of course, a direct

result of progress in 20th-century high-energy physics.

For Cold Warriors, nuclear science, with its firm linkage

to military power, was the Big Science par excellence.

Leon Lederman and his colleague Sheldon Glashow played

the patriotic card very strongly in their influential

article of March 1985, "The SSC: A Machine for the

Nineties." There they wrote: "Of course, as scientists,

we must rejoice in the brilliant achievements of our

colleagues overseas. Our concern is that if we forgo the

opportunity that SSC offers for the 1990s, the loss will

not only be to our science but also to the broader issue

of national pride and technological self-confidence. When

we were children, America did most things best. So it

should again."

Lederman and Glashow also argued for the SSC on the

grounds of potential spinoffs for American industry:

energy storage, power transmission, new tunneling

techniques, industrial demand-pull in superconductivity.

In meeting "all but insuperable technical obstacles," they

declared, American industries would learn better to

compete. (There was no mention of what might happen to

American "national pride and technological self-

confidence" if American industries simply failed to meet

those "insuperable obstacles" -- as had already happened

in ISABELLE.)

Glashow and Lederman also declared, with perhaps

pardonable professional pride, that it was simply a good

idea for America to create and employ large armies of

particle physicists, pretty much for their own sake.

"(P)article physics yields highly trained scientists

accustomed to solving the unsolvable. They often go on to

play vital roles in the rest of the world.... Many of us

have become important contributors in the world of energy

resources, neurophysiology, arms control and disarmament,

high finance, defense technology and molecular biology....

High energy physics continues to attract and recruit into

science its share of the best and brightest. If we were

deprived of all those who began their careers with the

lure and the dream of participating in this intellectual

adventure, the nation would be considerably worse off than

it is. Without the SSC, this is exactly what would come

to pass."

Funding a gigantic physics lab may seem a peculiarly

roundabout way to create, say, molecular biologists,

especially when America's actual molecular biologists, no

slouches at "solving the unsolvable" themselves, were

getting none of the funding for the Super Collider.

When it came to creating experts in "high finance,"

however, the SSC was on much firmer ground. Financiers

worked overtime as the SSC's cost estimates rose again and

again, in leaps of billions. The Japanese were quite

interested in basic research in superconductive

technology; but when they learned they were expected to

pay a great deal, but enjoy little of the actual technical

development in superconductivity, they naturally balked.

So did the Taiwanese, when an increasingly desperate SSC

finally got around to asking them to help. The

Europeans, recognizing a direct attempt to trump their

treasured CERN collider, were superconductively chilly

about the idea of investing in any Yankee dream- machine.

Estimated cost of the project to the American taxpayer --

or rather, the American deficit borrower -- quickly jumped

from 3.9 billion dollars to 4.9 billion, then 6.6

billion, then 8.25 billion, then 10 billion. Then,

finally and fatally, to twelve.

Time and again the physicists went to the

Congressional crap table, shot the dice for higher stakes,

and somehow survived. Scientists outside the high-energy-

physics community were livid with envy, but the powerful

charisma of physics -- that very well-advanced field that

had given America the atomic bomb and a raft of Nobels --

held firm against the jealous, increasingly bitter gaggle

of "little science" advocates.

At the start of the project, the Congress was highly

enthusiastic. The lucky winner of the SSC had a great

deal to gain: a nucleus of high-tech development,

scientific prestige, and billions in federally-subsidized

infrastructure investment. The Congressperson carrying

the SSC home to the district would have a prize beyond

mere water-project pork; that lucky politician would have

trapped a mastodon.

At length the lucky winner of the elaborate site-

selection process was announced: Waxahachie, Texas.

Texas Congresspeople were, of course, ecstatic; but other

competitors wondered what on earth Waxahachie had to offer

that they couldn't.

Waxahachie's main appeal was simple: lots of Texas-

sized room for a Texas-sized machine. The Super Collider

would, in fact, entirely encircle the historic town of

Waxahachie, some 18,000 easy-going folks in a rural county

previously best known for desultory cotton-farming. The

word "Waxahachie" originally meant "buffalo creek."

Waxahachie was well-watered, wooded, farming country built

on a bedrock of soft, chalky, easily-excavated limestone.

Lederman, author of the Desertron proposal, rudely

referred to Waxahachie as being "in Texas, in the desert"

in his SSC promotional pop- science book THE GOD PARTICLE.

There was no desert anywhere near Waxahachie, and worse

yet, Lederman had serious problems correctly pronouncing

the town's name.

The town of Waxahachie, a minor railroad boomtown in

the 1870s and 1880s, had changed little during the

twentieth century. In later years, Waxahachie had made a

virtue of its fossilization. Downtown Waxahachie had a

striking Victorian granite county courthouse and a brick-

and- gingerbread historical district of downtown shops,

mostly frequented by antique-hunting yuppies on day-

trips from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, twenty miles

to the north. There was a certain amount of suburban

sprawl on the north edge of town, at the edge of commuting

range to south Dallas, but it hadn't affected the pace of

local life much. Quiet, almost sepulchral Waxahachie was

the most favored place in Texas for period moviemaking.

Its lovely oak-shadowed graveyard was one of the most-

photographed cemeteries in the entire USA.

This, then, was to become the new capital of the

high-energy physics community, the home of a global

scientific community better known for Mozart and chablis

than catfish and C&W. It seemed unbelievable. And it was

unbelievable. Scientifically, Waxahachie made sense.

Politically, Waxahachie could be sold. Culturally,

Waxahachie made no sense whatsoever. A gesture by the

federal government and a giant machine could not, in fact,

transform good ol' Waxahachie into Berkeley or Chicago or

Long Island. A mass migration of physicists might have

worked for Los Alamos when hundreds of A-Bomb scientists

had been smuggled there in top secrecy at the height of

World War II, but there was no atomic war on at the

moment. A persistent sense of culture shock and

unreality haunted the SSC project from the beginning.

In his 1993 popular-science book THE GOD PARTICLE,

Lederman made many glowing comparisons for the SSC: the

cathedrals of Europe, the Pyramids, Stonehenge. But those

things could all be seen. They all made instant sense

even to illiterates. The SSC, unlike the Pyramids, was

almost entirely invisible -- a fifty-mile subterranean

wormhole stuffed with deep-frozen magnets.

A trip out to the SSC revealed construction cranes,

vast junkyards of wooden crating and metal piping, with a

few drab, rectangular, hopelessly unromantic assembly

buildings, buildings with all the architectural vibrancy

of slab-sided machine-shops (which is what they were).

Here and there were giant weedy talus-heaps of limestone

drill-cuttings from the subterranean "TBM," or Tunnel

Boring Machine. The Boring Machine was a state-of-the-art

Boring Machine, but its workings were invisible to all but

the hard-hats, and the machine itself was, well, boring.

Here and there along the SSC's fifty-four mile

circumference, inexplicable white vents rose from the

middle of muddy cottonfields. These were the SSC's

ventilation and access shafts, all of them neatly

padlocked in case some mischievous soul should attempt to

see what all the fuss was about. Nothing at the SSC was

anything like the heart-lifting spires of Notre Dame, or

even the neat-o high-tech blast of an overpriced and

rickety Space Shuttle. The place didn't look big or

mystical or uplifting; it just looked dirty and flat and

rather woebegone.

As a popular attraction the SSC was a bust; and time

was not on the side of its planners and builders. As the

Cold War waned, the basic prestige of nuclear physics was

also wearing rather thin. Hard times had hit America,

and hard times had come for American science.

Lederman himself, onetime chairman of the board of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science, was

painfully aware of the sense of malaise and decline. In

1990 and 1991, Lederman, as chairman of AAAS, polled his

colleagues in universities across America about the basic

state of Science in America. He heard, and published, a

great outpouring of discontent. There was a litany of

complaint from American scholars. Pernickety government

oversight. Endless paperwork for grants, consuming up to

thirty percent of a scientist's valuable research time. A

general aging of the academic populace, with graying

American scientists more inclined to look back to vanished

glories than to anticipate new breakthroughs.

Meanspirited insistence by both government and industry

that basic research show immediate and tangible economic

benefits. A loss of zest and interest in the future,

replaced by a smallminded struggle to keep making daily

ends meet.

It was getting hard to make a living out there. The

competition for money and advancement inside science was

getting fierce, downright ungentlemanly. Big wild dreams

that led to big wild breakthroughs were being nipped in

the bud by a general societal malaise and a failure of

imagination. The federal research effort was still vast

in scope, and had been growing steadily despite the

steadily growing federal deficits. But thanks to decades

of generous higher education and the alluring prestige of

a life in research, there were now far more mouths to feed

in the world of Science. Vastly increased armies of grad

students and postdocs found themselves waiting forever for

tenure. They were forced to play careerist games over

shrinking slices of the grantsmanship pie, rather than

leaving money problems to the beancounters and getting

mano-a-mano with the Big Questions.

"The 1950s and 1960s were great years for science in

America," Lederman wrote nostalgically. "Compared to the

much tougher 1990s, anyone with a good idea and a lot of

determination, it seemed, could get his idea funded.

Perhaps this is as good a criterion for healthy science as

any." By this criterion, American science in the 90s was

critically ill. The SSC seemed to offer a decisive way to

break out of the cycle of decline, to return to those good

old days. The Superconducting Super Collider would make

Big Science really "super" again, not just once but twice.

The death of the project was slow, and agonizing, and

painful. Again and again particle physicists went to

Congress to put their hard-won prestige on the line, and

their supporters used every tactic in the book. As

SCIENCE magazine put in a grim postmortem editorial: "The

typical hide-and-seek game of 'it's not the science, it's

the jobs' on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and 'it's not

about jobs, it is very good science' on Tuesday, Thursday

and Saturday wears thin after a while."

The House killed the Collider in June 1992; the Senate

resurrected it. The House killed it again in June 1993,

the Senate once again puffed the breath of life into the

corpse, but Reagan and Bush were out of power now.

Reagan had supported SSC because he was, in his own

strange way, a visionary; Bush, though usually more

prudent, took care to protect his Texan political base.

Bush did in fact win Texas in the presidential election of

1992, but winning Texas was not enough. The party was

over. In October 1993 the Super Collider was killed yet

again. And this time it stayed dead.

In January 1994 I went to Waxahachie to see the dead

Collider.

To say that morale is low at the SSC Labs does not

begin to capture the sentiment there. Morale is

subterranean. There are still almost two thousand people

employed at the dead project; not because they have

anything much to do there, but because there is still a

tad of funding left for them to consume -- a meager six

hundred million or so. And they also stay because,

despite their alleged facility at transforming themselves

into neurophysiologists, arms control advocates, et al.,

there is simply not a whole lot of market demand anywhere

for particle physicists, at the moment.

The Dallas offices of the SSC Lab are a giant maze of

cubicles, every one of them without exception sporting a

networked color Macintosh. Employees have pinned up

xeroxed office art indicative of their mood. One was a

chart called:

"THE SIX PHASES OF A PROJECT: I. Enthusiasm.

II. Disillusionment. III. Panic. IV. Search for the

Guilty. V. Punishment of the Innocent. VI. Praise &

Honor for the Nonparticipants."

According to the chart, the SSC is now at Phase Five,

and headed for Six.

SSC staffers have a lot of rather dark jokes now.

"The Sour Grapes Alert" reads "This is a special

announcement for Supercollider employees only!! Your job

is a test. It is only a test!! Had your job been an

actual job, you would have received raises, promotions,

and other signs of appreciation!! We now return you to

your miserable state of existence."

Outside the office building, one of the lab's

monstrous brown trash dumpsters has been renamed

"Superconductor." The giant steel trash-paper compactor

does look oddly like one of the SSC's fifty-foot-long

superconducting magnets; but the point, of course, is that

trash and the magnet are now roughly equivalent in worth.

The SSC project to date has cost about two billion

dollars. Some $440,885,853 of that sum was spent by the

State of Texas, and the Governor of the State of Texas,

the volatile Ann Richards, is not at all happy about it.

The Governor's Advisory Committee on the

Superconducting Super Collider held its first meeting at

the SSC Laboratory in Dallas, on January 14, 1994. The

basic assignment of this blue-ribbon panel of Texan

scholars and politicians is to figure out how to recoup

something for Texas from this massive failed investment.

Naturally I made it my business to attend, and sat in

on a day's worth of presentations by such worthies as Bob

White, President of the National Academy of Engineering;

John Peoples, the SSC's current director; Roy Schwitters,

the SSC's original Director, who resigned in anguish after

the cancellation; the current, and former, Chancellors of

the University of Texas System; the Governor's Chief of

Staff; the Director of the Texas Office of State-Federal

Relations; a pair of Texas Congressmen, and various other

interested parties, including engineers, physicists,

lawyers and one, other, lone journalist, from a Dallas

newspaper. Forty-six people in all, counting the Advisory

Committee of nine. Lunch was catered.

The mood was as dark as the fresh-drilled yet

already-decaying SSC tunnels. "I hope we can make

*something* positive out of all this," muttered US

Congressman Joe Barton (R-Tex), Waxahachie's

representative and a tireless champion of the original

project. A Texas state lawyer told me bitterly that "the

Department of Energy treats our wonderful asset like one

of their hazardous waste sites!"

For his part, the DoE's official representative, a

miserably unhappy flak-catcher from the Office of Energy

Research, talked a lot under extensive grilling by the

Committee, but said precisely nothing. "I honestly don't

know how the Secretary is going to write her report," he

mourned, wincing. "The policy is to close things down in

as cheap a way as possible."

Nothing about the SSC can be cleared without the nod

of the new Energy Secretary, the formidable Hazel O'Leary.

At the moment, Ms. O'Leary is very busy, checking the

DoE's back-files on decades of nuclear medical research on

uninformed American citizens. Her representative

conveyed the vague notion that Ms. O'Leary might be

inclined to allow something to be done with the site of

the SSC, if the State of Texas were willing to pay for

everything, and if it weren't too much trouble for her

agency. In the meantime she would like to cut the SSC's

shut-down budget for 1994 by two-thirds, with no money at

all for the SSC in 1995.

Hans Mark, former Chancellor of the University of

Texas System, gamely declared that the SSC would in fact

be built -- someday. Despite anything Congress may say,

the scientific need is still there, he told the committee

-- and Waxahachie is still the best site for such a

project. Mr. Mark compared the cancelled SSC to the

"cancelled" B-1 Bomber, a project that was built at last

despite the best efforts of President Carter to kill it.

"Five years down the road," he predicted, "or ten years."

He urged the State of Texas not to sell the 16,747 acres

it has purchased to house the site.

Federal engineering mandarin Bob White grimly called

the cancellation "a watershed in American science," noting

that never before had such a large project, of undisputed

scientific worth, been simply killed outright by Congress.

He noted that the physical assets of the SSC are worth

essentially nothing -- pennies per pound -- without the

trained staff, and that the staff is wasting away.

There remain some 1,983 people in the employ of the

SSC (or rather in the employ of the Universities Research

Association, a luckless academic bureaucracy that manages

the SSC and has taken most of the political blame for the

cost overruns). The dead Collider's technical staff

alone numbers over a thousand people: 16 in senior

management, 133 scientists, 56 applied physicists, 429

engineers, 159 computer specialists and network people,

159 guest scientists and research associates on grants

from other countries and other facilities, and 191

"technical associates."

"Deadwood," scoffed one attendee, "three hundred and

fifty people in physics research when we don't even have a

machine!" But the truth is that without a brilliantly

talented staff in place, all those one-of-a-kind cutting-

edge machines are so much junk. Many of those who stay

are staying in the forlorn hope of actually using some of

the smaller machines they have spent years developing and

building.

There have been, so far, about sixty more-or-less

serious suggestions for alternate uses of the SSC, its

facilities, its machineries, and its incomplete tunnel.

The SSC's Linear Accelerator was one of the smaller

assets of the great machine, but it is almost finished and

would be world-class anywhere else. It has been

repeatedly suggested that it could be used for medical

radiation treatments or for manufacturing medical

isotopes. Unfortunately, the Linear Accelerator is in

rural Ellis County, miles from Waxahachie and miles from

any hospital, and it was designed and optimized for

physics research, not for medical treatment or

manufacturing.

The former "N-15" site of the Collider, despite its

colorless name, is the most advanced manufacturing and

testing facility in the world -- when it comes to giant

superconducting magnets. The N-15 magnet facility is not

only well-nigh complete, but was almost entirely financed

by funds from the State of Texas. Unfortunately, the only

real market remaining for its "products" --

brobdingnagian frozen accelerator magnets -- is the

European CERN accelerator.

CERN itself has been hurting for money lately, its

German and Spanish government partners in particular

complaining loudly about the dire expense of hunting top

quarks and such.

Former SSC Director Roy Schwitters therefore declared

that CERN would need SSC's valuable magnets, and that the

US should use these assets as leverage for influence at

CERN.

This suggestion, however, was too much for Texan

Congressman Joe Barton. He described Schwitter's

suggestion as "very altruistic" and pointed out that the

Europeans had given the SSC "the back of their hand for

eight years!"

One could only admire the moral grit of SSC's former

Director in gamely proposing that the magnets, the very

backbone of his dead Collider, should be shipped, for the

good of science, to his triumphant European rivals. It

would seem that the American particle-physics research has

suffered such a blow from the collapse of the SSC that the

only reasonable course of action for the American physics

community is to go cap in hand to the Europeans and try,

somehow, to make things up.

At least, that proposal, galling as it may be, does

make some sense for American physicists -- but for an

American politician, to drop two billion dollars on the

SSC just to ship its magnets to some cyclotron in

Switzerland is quite another matter. When an attendee

gently urged Congressman Barton to "take a longer view" -

- perhaps, someday, the Europeans would reciprocate the

scientific favor -- the Texan Congressman merely narrowed

his eyes in a glare that would have scared Clint Eastwood,

and vowed "I will 'reciprocate' the concern that the

Europeans have shown for the SSC!"

It's been suggested that the numerous well-appointed

SSC offices could become campuses of some new research

institution: on magnets, or cryogenics, or controls, or

computer simulation. The physics departments of many

Texas colleges and universities like this idea. After

all, there's a great deal of handy state-of-the-art

clutter there, equipment any research lab in the world

would envy. Six and a half million dollars' worth of

machine tools and welding equipment. Three million in

high-tech calibration equipment and measuring devices.

Ten million dollars in trucks, vans, excavators,

bulldozers and such. A million-dollar print shop.

And almost fifty million dollars worth of state-of-

the-art computing equipment circa 1991 or so, including a

massively parallel Hypercube simulator, CAD/CAM

engineering and design facilities with millions of man-

hours of custom software, FDDI, OSI, and videoconferencing

office computer networks, and 2,600 Macintosh IIvx

personal computers. Plus a two-million dollar, fully-

equipped physics library.

Unfortunately it's very difficult to propose a new

physics facility just to make use of this, well, stuff,

when there are long-established federal physics research

facilities such as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, now

going begging because nobody wants their veteran personnel

to build new nuclear weapons. If anyone builds such a

place in Waxahachie, then the State of Texas will have to

pay for it. And Texas is not inclined to shell out more

money. Texas already feels that the rest of the United

States owes Texas $440,885,853 for the dead Collider.

Besides the suggestions for medical uses, magnetic and

superconductive studies, and the creation of some new

research institute, there are the many suggestions

collectively known as "Other." One is to privatize the

SSC as the "American Institute for Superconductivity

Competitiveness" and ask for corporate help.

Unfortunately the hottest (or maybe "coolest") research

area in superconductivity these days is not giant helium-

frozen magnets for physicists, but the new ceramic

superconductors.

Other and odder schemes include a compressed-air

energy-storage research facility. An earth-wobble

geophysics experiment. Natural gas storage.

And, perhaps inevitably, the suggestion of Committee

member Martin Goland that the SSC tunnel be made into a

high-level nuclear waste-storage site. A "temporary"

waste site, he assured the Committee, that would store

highly radioactive nuclear waste in specially designed

"totally safe" steel shipping casks, until a "permanent"

site opens somewhere in New Mexico.

"I'm gonna sell my house now," stage-whispered the

physicist next to me in the audience. "Waxahachie will be

a ghost town!"

This was an upshot worthy of Greek myth -- a tunnel

built to steal the fiery secrets of the God Particle,

which ends up constipated by thousands of radioactive

steel coprolites, the Trojan Horse gift of Our Friend Mr.

Atom. It's such a darkly poetic, Southern-Gothic

example of hubris clobbered by nemesis that one almost

wishes it would actually happen.

As far as safety goes, hiding nuclear waste in an

incomplete 14.7 mile tunnel under Texas is certainly far

more safe than leaving the waste where it is at the moment

(basically, all over America, from sea to shining sea).

DoE's nuclear-waste chickens have come back to roost in

major fashion lately, as time catches up with a generation

of Cold War weapons scientists. "They were never given

the money they needed to do it cleanly, but just told to

do it right away in the name of National Security," a

federal expert remarked glumly over the ham and turkey

sandwiches at the lunch break. He went on to grimly

mention "huge amounts of carbon tetrachloride seeping into

the water table" and radioactive waste "storage tanks

that burp hydrogen."

But the Texans were having none of that; the chairman

of the Committee declared that they had heard Mr.

Goland's suggestion, and that it would go no further. The

room erupted into nervous laughter.

The Committee's first meeting broke up with the

suggestion that sixty million dollars be found somewhere-

or-other to maintain an unspecified "core staff" of SSC

researchers, while further study is undertaken on what to

actually do with the remains.

As the head of SMU's physics department has remarked,

"The general impression was that it would be an

embarrassment or a waste or sinful to say that, after $2

billion, you get nothing, zip, zero for it." However,

zip and zero may well be exactly the result, despite the

best intentions of the Texan clean-up crew. The dead

Collider is a political untouchable now. The Texans would

like to make something from the corpse, not for its own

sake, really, but just so the people of Texas will not

look quite so much like total hicks and chumps. The DoE,

for its part, would like this relic of nutty Reagan

Republicanism to vanish into the memory hole with all

appropriate speed. The result is quite likely to be a

lawsuit by the State of Texas against the DoE, where yet

more millions are squandered in years of wrangling by

lawyers, an American priesthood whose voracious appetite

for public funds puts even physicists to shame.

But perhaps "squandered" is too harsh a word for the

SSC. After all, it's not as if those two billion dollars

were actually spent on the subatomic level. They were

spent in perfectly normal ways, and went quite legally

into the pockets of standard government contractors such

as Sverdrup and EG&G (facilities construction), Lockheed

(systems engineering), General Dynamics, Westinghouse,

and Babcock and Wilcox (magnets), Obayashi & Dillingham

(tunnel contractors), and Robbins Company (Tunnel Boring

Machine). The money went to architects and engineers and

designers and roadpavers and people who string Ethernet

cable and sell UNIX boxes and Macintoshes. Those dollars

also paid the salaries of 2,000 researchers for several

years. Admittedly, the nation would have been far

better off it those 2,000 talented people simply had been

given a million dollars each and told to go turn

themselves into anything except particle physicists, but

that option wasn't presented.

The easy-going town of Waxahachie seems to have few

real grudges over the experience. A public meeting,

called so that sufferers in Waxahachie could air their

economic complaints about the dead Collider, had almost no

attendees. The entire bizarre enterprise seems scarcely

to have impinged at all on everyday life in Waxahachie.

Besides, not five miles from the SSC's major campus,

the Waxahachians still have their "Scarborough Fair," a

huge mock-medieval "English Village" where drawling "lords

and ladies" down on day-trips from Dallas can watch fake

jousts and drink mead in a romantic heroic-fantasy

atmosphere with ten times the popular appeal of that

tiresome hard-science nonsense.

As boondoggles go, SSC wasn't small. However, SSC

wasn't anywhere near so grotesque as the multiple billions

spent, both openly and covertly, on American military

science funding. Many of the SSC's contractors were in

fact military-industrial contractors, and it may have done

them some good to find (slightly) alternate employment.

The same goes for the many Russian nuclear physicists

employed by the SSC, who earned useful hard currency and

were spared the grim career-choices in Russia's collapsing

nuclear physics enterprise. It has been a cause of some

concern lately that Russian nuclear physicists may, as

Lederman and Glashow once put it, "go on to play vital

roles in the rest of the world" -- i.e., in the nuclear

enterprises of Libya, North Korea, Syria and Iraq. It's a

pity those Russians can't be put to work salting the tails

of quarks inside the SSC; though a cynic might say it's a

greater pity that they were ever taught physics in the

first place.

SCIENCE magazine, in its editorial post-mortem "The

Lessons of the Super Collider," had its own morals to

draw. Lesson One: "High energy physics has become too

expensive to be defined by national boundaries." Lesson

Two: "Just because particle physics asks questions about

the fundamental structure of matter does not give it any

greater claim on taxpayer dollars than solid-state physics

or molecular biology. Proponents of any project must

justify the costs in relation to the scientific and social

return."

That may indeed be the New Reality for American

science funding today, but it was never the justification

of the Machine in the Desert. The Machine in the Desert

was an absolute vision, about the absolute need to know.

And it was about pride. "Pride," wrote Lederman and

Glashow in 1985, "is one of the seven deadly sins," yet

they nevertheless declared their pride in the successes of

their predecessors, and their unbounded determination to

make America not merely the best in particle physics, but

the best in everything, as America had been when they were

children.

In his own 1993 post-mortem on the dead Collider,

written for the New York Times, Lederman raised the

rhetorical question, "Is the real problem the hubris of

physicists to believe that society would continue to

support this exploration no matter what the cost?" A

rhetorical question because Lederman, having raised that

cogent question, never bothered to address it. Instead,

he ended his column by blaming the always-convenient

spectre of American public ignorance of science. "Most

important of all," he concluded, "scientists must

rededicate themselves to a massive effort at raising the

science literacy of the general public. Only when the

citizens have a reasonable science savvy will their

congressional servants vote correctly."

Alas, many of our congressional servants already

possess plenty of science savvy; what they have, is

science savvy to their own ends. Not science for the sake

of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein or Leon Lederman,

but science for the sake of the devil's bargain American

science has made with its political sponsors: knowledge

as power.

As for the supposedly ignorant general public, the

American public were far more generous with scientists

when scientists were very few in number, and regarded with

a proper superstitious awe by a mainly agricultural and

blue-collar populace. The more they come to understand

science, the less respect the American general public has

for the whims of its practitioners. Americans may not do

a lot of calculus, but most American voters are "knowledge

workers" of one sort or another nowadays, and they've

seen Carl Sagan on TV often enough to know that, even

though Carl's a nice guy, billions of stars and zillions

of quarks won't put bread on their tables. Raising the

general science literacy of the American public is

probably a self-defeating effort when it comes to monster

projects like the SSC. Teaching more American kids more

math and science will only increase the already vast

armies of scientists and federally funded researchers,

drastically shrinking the pool of available funds

tomorrow.

It's an open question whether a 40TeV collider like

the SSC will ever be built, by anyone, anywhere, ever.

The Europeans, in their low-key, suave, yet subtly

menacing fashion, seem confident that they can snag the

Higgs scalar boson with their upgraded CERN collider at a

mere tenth of the cost of Reagan's SSC. If so, corks

will pop in Zurich and there will be gnashing of teeth in

Brookhaven and Berkeley. American scientific competitors

will taste some of the agony of intellectual defeat in the

realm of physics that European scientists have been

swallowing yearly since 1945. That won't mean the end of

the world.

On the other hand, the collapse of SSC may well suck

CERN down in the backdraft. It may be that the global

prestige of particle physics has now collapsed so utterly

that European governments will also stop signing the

checks, and CERN itself will fail to build its upgrade.

Or even if they do build it, they may be simply

unlucky, and at 10 TeV the CERN people may get little to

show.

In which case, it may be that the entire pursuit of

particle physics, stymied by energy limits, will simply go

out of intellectual fashion. If the global revulsion

against both nuclear weapons and nuclear power increases

and intensifies, it is not beyond imagination to imagine

nuclear research simply dwindling away entirely. The

whole kit-and-caboodle of pions, mesons, gluinos,

antineutrinos, that whole strange charm of quarkiness, may

come to seem a very twentieth-century enthusiasm.

Something like the medieval scholastic enthusiasm for

numbering the angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

Nowadays that's a byword for a silly waste of intellectual

effort, but in medieval times that was actually the very

same inquiry as modern particle physics: a question about

the absolute limits of space and material being.

Or the SSC may never be built for entirely different

reasons. It may be that accelerating particles in the

next century will not require the massive Rube Goldberg

apparatus of a fifty-four-mile tunnel and the twelve

cryogenic plants with their entire tank farms of liquid

helium. It is a bit hard to believe that scientific

questions as basic as the primal nature of matter will be

abandoned entirely, but there is more than one way to

boost a particle. Giant *room-temperature*

superconductors really would transform the industrial

base, and they might make quarks jump hoops without the

macho necessity of being "super" at all.

In the end, it is hard to wax wroth at the dead

Collider, its authors, or those who pulled the plug. The

SSC was both sleazy and noble: at one level a "quark-

barrel" commercialized morass of contractors scrambling at

the federal trough, while Congressmen eye-gouged one

another in the cloakroom, scientists angled for the main

chance and a steady paycheck, and supposedly dignified

scholars ground their teeth in public and backbit like a

bunch of jealous prima donnas. And yet at the same time,

the SSC really was a Great Enterprise, a scheme to gladden

the heart of Democritus and Newton and Tycho Brahe, and

all those other guys who had no real job or a fat state

sinecure.

The Machine in the Desert was a transcendant scheme to

steal cosmic secrets, an enterprise whose unashamed raison

d'etre was to enable wild and glorious flights of

imagination and comprehension. It was sense-of-wonder

and utter sleaze at one and the same time. Rather like

science fiction, actually. Not that the SSC itself was

science fictional, although it certainly was (and is). I

mean, rather, that the SSC was very like the actual

writing and publishing of science fiction, an enterprise

where bright but surprisingly naive people smash galaxies

for seven cents a word and a chance at a plastic brick.

It would take a hard-hearted science fiction writer

indeed to stand at the massive lip of that 240-foot hole

in the ground at N15 -- as I did late one evening in

January, with the sun at my back and tons of hardware

gently rusting all around me and not a human being in

sight -- and not feel a deep sense of wonder and pity.

In another of his determined attempts to enlighten the

ignorant public, in his book THE GOD PARTICLE, Leon

Lederman may have said it best.

In a parody of the Bible called "The Very New

Testament," he wrote:

"And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east,

that they found a plain in the land of Waxahachie, and

they dwelt there. And they said to one another, Go to,

let us build a Giant Collider, whose collisions may reach

back to the beginning of time. And they had

superconducting magnets for bending, and protons had they

for smashing.

"And the Lord came down to see the accelerator, which

the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold

the people are unconfounding my confounding. And the Lord

sighed and said, Go to, let us go down, and there give

them the God Particle so that they may see how beautiful

is the universe I have made."

A man who justifies his own dreams in terms of

frustrating God and rebuilding the Tower of Babel -- only

this time in Texas, and this time done right -- has got to

be utterly tone-deaf to his own intellectual arrogance.

Worse yet, the Biblical parody is openly blasphemous,

unnecessarily alienating a large section of Lederman's

potential audience of American voters. Small wonder that

the scheme came to grief -- great wonder, in fact, that

Lederman's Babel came anywhere as near to success as it

did.

Nevertheless, I rather like the sound of that

rhetoric; I admire its sheer cosmic chutzpah. I

scarcely see what real harm has been done. (Especially

compared to the harm attendant on the works of Lederman's

colleagues such as Oppenheimer and Sakharov.) It's true

that a man was crushed to death building the SSC, but he

was a miner by profession, and mining is very hazardous

work under any circumstances. Two billion dollars was,

it's true, almost entirely wasted, but governments always

waste money, and after all, it was only money.

Give it a decade or two, to erase the extreme

humiliation naturally and healthfully attendant on this

utter scientific debacle. Then, if the United States

manages to work its way free of its fantastic burden of

fiscal irresponsibility without destroying the entire

global economy in the process, then I, for one, as an

American and Texan citizen, despite everything, would be

perfectly happy to see the next generation of particle

physicists voted another three billion dollars, and told

to get digging again.

Or even four billion dollars.

Okay, maybe five billion tops; but that's my final

offer.

"Bitter Resistance"

Two hundred thousand bacteria could easily lurk under the top half

of this semicolon; but for the sake of focussing on a subject that's too

often out of sight and out of mind, let's pretend otherwise. Let's pretend

that a bacterium is about the size of a railway tank car.

Now that our fellow creature the bacterium is no longer three

microns long, but big enough to crush us, we can get a firmer mental grip

on the problem at hand. The first thing we notice is that the bacterium is

wielding long, powerful whips that are corkscrewing at a blistering

12,000 RPM. When it's got room and a reason to move, the bacterium can

swim ten body-lengths every second. The human equivalent would be

sprinting at forty miles an hour.

The butt-ends of these spinning whips are firmly socketed inside

rotating, proton-powered, motor-hubs. It seems very unnatural for a

living creature to use rotating wheels as organs, but bacteria are serenely

untroubled by our parochial ideas of what is natural.

The bacterium, constantly chugging away with powerful interior

metabolic factories, is surrounded by a cloud of its own greasy spew. The

rotating spines, known as flagella, are firmly embedded in the bacterium's

outer hide, a slimy, lumpy, armored bark. Studying it closely (we evade

the whips and the cloud of mucus), we find the outer cell wall to be a

double-sided network of interlocking polymers, two regular, almost

crystalline layers of macromolecular chainmail, something like a tough

plastic wiffleball.

The netted armor, wrinkled into warps and bumps, is studded with

hundreds of busily sucking and spewing orifices. These are the

bacterium's "porins," pores made from wrapped-up protein membrane,

something like damp rolled-up newspapers that protrude through the

armor into the world outside.

On our scale of existence, it would be very hard to drink through a

waterlogged rolled-up newspaper, but in the tiny world of a bacterium,

osmosis is a powerful force. The osmotic pressure inside our bacterium

can reach 70 pounds per square inch, five times atmospheric pressure.

Under those circumstances, it makes a lot of sense to be shaped like a

tank car.

Our bacterium boasts strong, highly sophisticated electrochemical

pumps working through specialized fauceted porins that can slurp up and

spew out just the proper mix of materials. When it's running its osmotic

pumps in some nutritious broth of tasty filth, our tank car can pump

enough juice to double in size in a mere twenty minutes. And there's

more: because in that same twenty minutes, our bacterial tank car can

build in entire duplicate tank car from scratch.

Inside the outer wall of protective bark is a greasy space full of

chemically reactive goo. It's the periplasm. Periplasm is a treacherous

mess of bonding proteins and digestive enzymes, which can yank tasty

fragments of gunk right through the exterior hide, and break them up for

further assimilation, rather like chemical teeth. The periplasm also

features chemoreceptors, the bacterial equivalent of nostrils or taste-

buds.

Beneath the periplasmic goo is the interior cell membrane, a tender

and very lively place full of elaborate chemical scaffolding, where pump

and assembly-work goes on.

Inside the interior membrane is the cytoplasm, a rich ointment of

salts, sugars, vitamins, proteins, and fats, the tank car's refinery

treasure-house.

If our bacterium is lucky, it has some handy plasmids in its custody.

A plasmid is an alien DNA ring, a kind of fly-by-night genetic franchise

which sets up work in the midst of somebody else's sheltering cytoplasm.

If the bacterium is unlucky, it's afflicted with a bacteriophage, a virus

with the modus operandi of a plasmid but its own predatory agenda.

And the bacterium has its own native genetic material. Eukaryotic

cells -- we humans are made from eukaryotic cells -- possess a neatly

defined nucleus of DNA, firmly coated in a membrane shell. But bacteria

are prokaryotic cells, the oldest known form of life, and they have an

attitude toward their DNA that is, by our standards, shockingly

promiscuous. Bacterial DNA simply sprawls out amid the cytoplasmic

goo like a circular double-helix of snarled and knotted Slinkies.

Any plasmid or transposon wandering by with a pair of genetic

shears and a zipper is welcome to snip some data off or zip some data in,

and if the mutation doesn't work, well, that's just life. A bacterium

usually has 200,000 or so clone bacterial sisters around within the space

of a pencil dot, who are more than willing to take up the slack from any

failed experiment in genetic recombination. When you can clone yourself

every twenty minutes, shattering the expected laws of Darwinian heredity

merely adds spice to life.

Bacteria live anywhere damp. In water. In mud. In the air, as

spores and on dust specks. In melting snow, in boiling volcanic springs. In

the soil, in fantastic numbers. All over this planet's ecosystem, any liquid

with organic matter, or any solid foodstuff with a trace of damp in it,

anything not salted, mummified, pickled, poisoned, scorching hot or frozen

solid, will swarm with bacteria if exposed to air. Unprotected food

always spoils if it's left in the open. That's such a truism of our lives

that it may seem like a law of physics, something like gravity or entropy;

but it's no such thing, it's the relentless entrepreneurism of invisible

organisms, who don't have our best interests at heart.

Bacteria live on and inside human beings. They always have;

bacteria were already living on us long, long before our species became

human. They creep onto us in the first instants in which we are held to

our mother's breast. They live on us, and especially inside us, for as long

as we live. And when we die, then other bacteria do their living best to

recycle us.

An adult human being carries about a solid pound of commensal

bacteria in his or her body; about a hundred trillion of them. Humans have

a whole garden of specialized human-dwelling bacteria -- tank-car E. coli,

balloon-shaped staphylococcus, streptococcus, corynebacteria,

micrococcus, and so on. Normally, these lurkers do us little harm. On the

contrary, our normal human-dwelling bacteria run a kind of protection

racket, monopolizing the available nutrients and muscling out other rival

bacteria that might want to flourish at our expense in a ruder way.

But bacteria, even the bacteria that flourish inside us all our lives,

are not our friends. Bacteria are creatures of an order vastly different

from our own, a world far, far older than the world of multicellular

mammals. Bacteria are vast in numbers, and small, and fetid, and

profoundly unsympathetic.

So our tank car is whipping through its native ooze, shuddering from

the jerky molecular impacts of Brownian motion, hunting for a

chemotactic trail to some richer and filthier hunting ground, and

periodically peeling off copies of itself. It's an enormously fast-paced

and frenetic existence. Bacteria spend most of their time starving,

because if they are well fed, then they double in number every twenty

minutes, and this practice usually ensures a return to starvation in pretty

short order. There are not a lot of frills in the existence of bacteria.

Bacteria are extremely focussed on the job at hand. Bacteria make ants

look like slackers.

And so it went in the peculiar world of our acquaintance the tank

car, a world both primitive and highly sophisticated, both frenetic and

utterly primeval. Until an astonishing miracle occurred. The miracle of

"miracle drugs," antibiotics.

Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, and the power

of the sulfonamides was recognized by drug company researchers in 1935,

but antibiotics first came into general medical use in the 1940s and 50s.

The effects on the hidden world of bacteria were catastrophic. Bacteria

which had spent many contented millennia decimating the human race

were suddenly and swiftly decimated in return. The entire structure of

human mortality shifted radically, in a terrific attack on bacteria from

the world of organized intelligence.

At the beginning of this century, back in the pre-antibiotic year of

1900, four of the top ten leading causes of death in the United States

were bacterial. The most prominent were tuberculosis ("the white

plague," *Mycobacterium tuberculosis*) and pneumonia (*Streptococcus

pneumoniae,* *Pneumococcus*). The death rate in 1900 from

gastroenteritis (*Escherichia coli,* various *Campylobacter* species,

etc.) was higher than that for heart disease. The nation's number ten

cause of death was diphtheria (*Corynebacterium diphtheriae*). Bringing

up the bacterial van were gonorrhea, meningitis, septicemia, dysentery,

typhoid fever, whooping cough, and many more.

At the end of the century, all of these festering bacterial afflictions

(except pneumonia) had vanished from the top ten. They'd been replaced

by heart disease, cancer, stroke, and even relative luxuries of

postindustrial mortality, such as accidents, homicide and suicide. All

thanks to the miracle of antibiotics.

Penicillin in particular was a chemical superweapon of devastating

power. In the early heyday of penicillin, the merest trace of this

substance entering a cell would make the hapless bacterium literally

burst. This effect is known as "lysing."

Penicillin makes bacteria lyse because of a chemical structure

called "beta-lactam." Beta-lactam is a four-membered cyclic amide ring,

a molecular ring which bears a fatal resemblance to the chemical

mechanisms a bacterium uses to build its cell wall.

Bacterial cell walls are mostly made from peptidoglycan, a plastic-

like molecule chained together to form a tough, resilient network. A

bacterium is almost always growing, repairing damage, or reproducing,

so there are almost always raw spots in its cell wall that require

construction work.

It's a sophisticated process. First, fragments of not-yet-peptided

glycan are assembled inside the cytoplasm. Then the glycan chunks are

hauled out to the cell wall by a chemical scaffolding of lipid carrier

molecules, and they are fitted in place. Lastly, the peptidoglycan is

busily knitted together by catalyzing enzymes and set to cure.

But beta-lactam is a spanner in the knitting-works, which attacks

the enzyme which links chunks of peptidoglycan together. The result is

like building a wall of bricks without mortar; the unlinked chunks of

glycan break open under osmotic pressure, and the cell spews out its

innards catastrophically, and dies.

Gram-negative bacteria, of the tank-car sort we have been

describing, have a double cell wall, with an outer armor plus the inner cell

membrane, rather like a rubber tire with an inner tube. They can

sometimes survive a beta-lactam attack, if they don't leak to death. But

gram-positive bacteria are more lightly built and rely on a single wall

only, and for them a beta-lactam puncture is a swift kiss of death.

Beta-lactam can not only mimic, subvert and destroy the assembly

enzymes, but it can even eat away peptide-chain mortar already in place.

And since mammalian cells never use any peptidoglycans, they are never

ruptured by penicillin (although penicillin does sometimes provoke serious

allergic reactions in certain susceptible patients).

Pharmaceutical chemists rejoiced at this world-transforming

discovery, and they began busily tinkering with beta-lactam products,

discovering or producing all kinds of patentable, marketable, beta-lactam

variants. Today there are more than fifty different penicillins and

seventy-five cephalosporins, all of which use beta-lactam rings in one

form or another.

The enthusiastic search for new medical miracles turned up

substances that attack bacteria through even more clever methods.

Antibiotics were discovered that could break-up or jam-up a cell's protein

synthesis; drugs such as tetracycline, streptomycin, gentamicin, and

chloramphenicol. These drugs creep through the porins deep inside the

cytoplasm and lock onto the various vulnerable sites in the RNA protein

factories. This RNA sabotage brings the cell's basic metabolism to a

seething halt, and the bacterium chokes and dies.

The final major method of antibiotic attack was an assault on

bacterial DNA. These compounds, such as the sulphonamides, the

quinolones, and the diaminopyrimidines, would gum up bacterial DNA

itself, or break its strands, or destroy the template mechanism that reads

from the DNA and helps to replicate it. Or, they could ruin the DNA's

nucleotide raw materials before those nucleotides could be plugged into

the genetic code. Attacking bacterial DNA itself was the most

sophisticated attack yet on bacteria, but unfortunately these DNA

attackers often tended to be toxic to mammalian cells as well. So they

saw less use. Besides, they were expensive.

In the war between species, humanity had found a full and varied

arsenal. Antibiotics could break open cell walls, choke off the life-giving

flow of proteins, and even smash or poison bacterial DNA, the central

command and control center. Victory was swift, its permanence seemed

assured, and the command of human intellect over the realm of brainless

germs was taken for granted. The world of bacteria had become a

commercial empire for exploitation by the clever mammals.

Antibiotic production, marketing and consumption soared steadily.

Nowadays, about a hundred thousand tons of antibiotics are

manufactured globally every year. It's a five billion dollar market.

Antibiotics are cheap, far cheaper than time-consuming, labor-intensive

hygienic cleanliness. In many countries, these miracle drugs are routinely

retailed in job-lots as over-the-counter megadosage nostrums.

Nor have humans been the only mammals to benefit. For decades,

antibiotics have been routinely fed to American livestock. Antibiotics

are routinely added to the chow in vast cattle feedlots, and antibiotics are

fed to pigs, even chickens. This practice goes on because a meat animal

on antibiotics will put on poundage faster, and stay healthier, and supply

the market with cheaper meat. Repeated protests at this practice by

American health authorities have been successfully evaded in courts and

in Congress by drug manufacturers and agro-business interests.

The runoff of tainted feedlot manure, containing millions of pounds

of diluted antibiotics, enters rivers and watersheds where the world's

free bacteria dwell.

In cities, municipal sewage systems are giant petri-dishes of

diluted antibiotics and human-dwelling bacteria.

Bacteria are restless. They will try again, every twenty minutes.

And they never sleep.

Experts were aware in the 1940s and 1950s that bacteria could, and

would, mutate in response to selection pressure, just like other

organisms. And they knew that bacteria went through many generations

very rapidly, and that bacteria were very fecund. But it seemed that any

bacteria would be very lucky to mutate to successfully resist even one

antibiotic. Compounding that luck by evolving to resist two antibiotics at

once seemed well-nigh impossible. Bacteria were at our mercy. They

didn't seem any more likely to resist penicillin and tetracycline than a

rainforest can resist bulldozers and chainsaws.

However, thanks to convenience and the profit motive, once-

miraculous antibiotics had become a daily commonplace. A general

chemical haze of antibiotic pollution spread across the planet. Titanic

numbers of bacteria, in all niches of bacterial life, were being given an

enormous number of chances to survive antibiotics.

Worse yet, bacteriologists were simply wrong about the way that

bacteria respond to a challenge.

Bacteria will try anything. Bacteria don't draw hard and fast

intellectual distinctions between their own DNA, a partner's DNA, DNA

from another species, virus DNA, plasmid DNA, and food.

This property of bacteria is very alien to the human experience. If

your lungs were damaged from smoking, and you asked your dog for a

spare lung, and your dog, in friendly fashion, coughed up a lung and gave

it to you, that would be quite an unlikely event. It would be even more

miraculous if you could swallow a dog's lung and then breathe with it just

fine, while your dog calmly grew himself a new one. But in the world of

bacteria this kind of miracle is a commonplace.

Bacteria share enormous amounts of DNA. They not only share

DNA among members of their own species, through conjugation and

transduction, but they will encode DNA in plasmids and transposons and

packet-mail it to other species. They can even find loose DNA lying

around from the burst bodies of other bacteria, and they can eat that DNA

like food and then make it work like information. Pieces of stray DNA can

be swept all willy-nilly into the molecular syringes of viruses, and

injected randomly into other bacteria. This fetid orgy isn't what Gregor

Mendel had in mind when he was discovering the roots of classical genetic

inheritance in peas, but bacteria aren't peas, and don't work like peas, and

never have. Bacteria do extremely strange and highly inventive things

with DNA, and if we don't understand or sympathize, that's not their

problem, it's ours.

Some of the best and cleverest information-traders are some of the

worst and most noxious bacteria. Such as *Staphylococcus *(boils).

*Haemophilus* (ear infections). *Neisseria *(gonorrhea).

Pseudomonas (abcesses, surgical infections). Even *Escherichia,* a very

common human commensal bacterium.

When it comes to resisting antibiotics, bacteria are all in the effort

together. That's because antibiotics make no distinctions in the world of

bacteria. They kill, or try to kill, every bacterium they touch.

If you swallow an antibiotic for an ear infection, the effects are not

confined to the tiny minority of toxic bacteria that happen to be inside

your ear. Every bacterium in your body is assaulted, all hundred trillion

of them. The toughest will not only survive, but they will carefully store,

and sometimes widely distribute, the genetic information that allowed

them to live.

The resistance from bacteria, like the attack of antibiotics, is a

multi-pronged and sophisticated effort. It begins outside the cell, where

certain bacteria have learned to spew defensive enzymes into the cloud of

slime that surrounds them -- enzymes called beta-lactamases,

specifically adapted to destroy beta-lactam, and render penicillin useless.

At the cell-wall itself, bacteria have evolved walls that are tougher and

thicker, less likely to soak up drugs. Other bacteria have lost certain

vulnerable porins, or have changed the shape of their porins so that

antibiotics will be excluded instead of inhaled.

Inside the wall of the tank car, the resistance continues. Bacteria

make permanent stores of beta-lactamases in the outer goo of periplasm,

which will chew the drugs up and digest them before they ever reach the

vulnerable core of the cell. Other enzymes have evolved that will crack

or chemically smother other antibiotics.

In the pump-factories of the inner cell membrane, new pumps have

evolved that specifically latch on to antibiotics and spew them back out

of the cell before they can kill. Other bacteria have mutated their interior

protein factories so that the assembly-line no longer offers any sabotage-

sites for site-specific protein-busting antibiotics. Yet another strategy

is to build excess production capacity, so that instead of two or three

assembly lines for protein, a mutant cell will have ten or fifty, requiring

ten or fifty times as much drug for the same effect. Other bacteria have

come up with immunity proteins that will lock-on to antibiotics and make

them useless inert lumps.

Sometimes -- rarely -- a cell will come up with a useful mutation

entirely on its own. The theorists of forty years ago were right when they

thought that defensive mutations would be uncommon. But spontaneous

mutation is not the core of the resistance at all. Far more often, a

bacterium is simply let in on the secret through the exchange of genetic

data.

Beta-lactam is produced in nature by certain molds and fungi; it was

not invented from scratch by humans, but discovered in a petri dish. Beta-

lactam is old, and it would seem likely that beta-lactamases are also very

old.

Bacteriologists have studied only a few percent of the many

microbes in nature. Even those bacteria that have been studied are by no

means well understood. Antibiotic resistance genes may well be present

in any number of different species, waiting only for selection pressure to

manifest themselves and spread through the gene-pool.

If penicillin is sprayed across the biosphere, then mass death of

bacteria will result. But any bug that is resistant to penicillin will

swiftly multiply by millions of times, thriving enormously in the power-

vacuum caused by the slaughter. The genes that gave the lucky winner its

resistance will also increase by millions of times, becoming far more

generally available. And there's worse: because often the resistance is

carried by plasmids, and one single bacterium can contain as many as a

thousand plasmids, and produce them and spread them at will.

That genetic knowledge, once spread, will likely stay around a while.

Bacteria don't die of old age. Bacteria aren't mortal in the sense that we

understand mortality. Unless they are killed, bacteria just keep splitting

and doubling. The same bacterial "individual" can spew copies of itself

every twenty minutes, basically forever. After billions of generations,

and trillions of variants, there are still likely to be a few random

oldtimers around identical to ancestors from some much earlier epoch.

Furthermore, spores of bacteria can remain dormant for centuries, then

sprout in seconds and carry on as if nothing had happened. This gives the

bacterial gene-pool -- better described as an entire gene-ocean -- an

enormous depth and range. It's as if Eohippus could suddenly show up at

the Kentucky Derby -- and win.

It seems likely that many of the mechanisms of bacterial resistance

were borrowed or kidnapped from bacteria that themselves produce

antibiotics. The genus Streptomyces, which are filamentous, Gram-

positive bacteria, are ubiquitous in the soil; in fact the characteristic

"earthy" smell of fresh soil comes from Streptomyces' metabolic products.

And Streptomyces bacteria produce a host of antibiotics, including

streptomycin, tetracycline, neomycin, chloramphenicol, and erythromycin.

Human beings have been using streptomycin's antibiotic poisons

against tuberculosis, gonorrhea, rickettsia, chlamydia, and candida yeast

infection, with marked success. But in doing so, we have turned a small-

scale natural process into a massive industrial one.

Streptomyces already has the secret of surviving its own poisons.

So, presumably, do at least some of streptomyces's neighbors. If the

poison is suddenly broadcast everywhere, through every niche in the

biosphere, then word of how to survive it will also get around.

And when the gospel of resistance gets around, it doesn't come just

one chapter at a time. Scarily, it tends to come in entire libraries. A

resistance plasmid (familiarly known to researchers as "R-plasmids,"

because they've become so common) doesn't have to specialize in just one

antibiotic. There's plenty of room inside a ring of plasmid DNA for handy

info on a lot of different products and processes. Moving data on and off

the plasmid is not particularly difficult. Bacterial scissors-and-zippers

units known as "transposons" can knit plasmid DNA right into the central

cell DNA -- or they can transpose new knowledge onto a plasmid. These

segments of loose DNA are aptly known as "cassettes."

So when a bacterium is under assault by an antibiotic, and it

acquires a resistance plasmid from who-knows where, it can suddenly

find an entire arsenal of cassettes in its possession. Not just resistance

to the one antibiotic that provoked the response, but a whole Bible of

resistance to all the antibiotics lately seen in the local microworld.

Even more unsettling news has turned up in a lab report in the

Journal of Bacteriology from 1993. Tetracycline-resistant strains in the

bacterium Bacteroides have developed a kind of tetracycline reflex.

Whenever tetracycline appears in the neighborhood, a Bacteroides

transposon goes into overdrive, manufacturing R-plasmids at a frantic

rate and then passing them to other bacteria in an orgy of sexual

encounters a hundred times more frequent than normal. In other words,

tetracycline itself now directly causes the organized transfer of

resistance to tetracycline. As Canadian microbiologist Julian Davies

commented in Science magazine (15 April 1994), "The extent and

biochemical nature of this phenomenon is not well understood. A number

of different antibiotics have been shown to promote plasmid transfer

between different bacteria, and it might even be considered that some

antibiotics are bacterial pheromones."

If this is the case, then our most potent chemical weapons have been

changed by our lethal enemies into sexual aphrodisiacs.

The greatest battlegrounds of antibiotic warfare today are

hospitals. The human race is no longer winning. Increasingly, to enter a

hospital can make people sick. This is known as "nosocomial infection,"

from the Latin for hospital. About five percent of patients who enter

hospitals nowadays pick up an infection from inside the hospital itself.

An epidemic of acquired immune deficiency has come at a

particularly bad time, since patients without natural immunity are forced

to rely heavily on megadosages of antibiotics. These patients come to

serve as reservoirs for various highly resistant infections. So do patients

whose immune systems have been artificially repressed for organ

transplantion. The patients are just one aspect of the problem, though;

healthy doctors and nurses show no symptoms, but they can carry strains

of hospital superbug from bed to bed on their hands, deep in the pores of

their skin, and in their nasal passages. Superbugs show up in food, fruit

juices, bedsheets, even in bottles and buckets of antiseptics.

The advent of antibiotics made elaborate surgical procedures safe

and cheap; but nowadays half of nosocomial infections are either surgical

infections, or urinary tract infections from contaminated catheters.

Bacteria are attacking us where we are weakest and most vulnerable, and

where their own populations are the toughest and most battle-hardened.

From hospitals, resistant superbugs travel to old-age homes and day-care

centers, predating on the old and the very young.

*Staphylococcus aureus,* a common hospital superbug which

causes boils and ear infections, is now present in super-strains highly

resistant to every known antibiotic except vancomycin. Enterococcus is

resistant to vancomycin, and it has been known to swap genes with

staphylococcus. If staphylococcus gets hold of this resistance

information, then staph could become the first bacterial superhero of the

post-antibiotic era, and human physicians of the twenty-first century

would be every bit as helpless before it as were physicians of the 19th. In

the 19th century physicians dealt with septic infection by cutting away

the diseased flesh and hoping for the best.

Staphylococcus often lurks harmlessly in the nose and throat.

*Staphylococcus epidermis,* a species which lives naturally on human

skin, rarely causes any harm, but it too must battle for its life when

confronted with antibiotics. This harmless species may serve as a

reservoir of DNA data for the bacterial resistance of other, truly lethal

bacteria. Certain species of staph cause boils, others impetigo. Staph

attacking a weakened immune system can kill, attacking the lungs

(pneumonia) and brain (meningitis). Staph is thought to cause toxic shock

syndrome in women, and toxic shock in post-surgical patients.

A 1994 outbreak of an especially virulent strain of the common

bacterium Streptococcus, "necrotizing fasciitis," caused panic headlines

in Britain about "flesh-eating germs" and "killer bugs." Of the fifteen

reported victims so far, thirteen have died.

A great deal has changed since the 1940s and 1950s. Strains of

bacteria can cross the planet with the speed of jet travel, and populations

of humans -- each with their hundred trillion bacterial passengers --

mingle as never before. Old-fashioned public-health surveillance

programs, which used to closely study any outbreak of bacterial disease,

have been dismantled, or put in abeyance, or are underfunded. The

seeming triumph of antibiotics has made us careless about the restive

conquered population of bacteria.

Drug companies treat the standard antibiotics as cash cows, while

their best-funded research efforts currently go into antiviral and

antifungal compounds. Drug companies follow the logic of the market;

with hundreds of antibiotics already cheaply available, it makes little

commercial sense to spend millions developing yet another one. And the

market is not yet demanding entirely new antibiotics, because the

resistance has not quite broken out into full-scale biological warfare.

And drug research is expensive and risky. A hundred million dollars of

investment in antibiotics can be wiped out by a single point-mutation in a

resistant bacterium.

We did manage to kill off the smallpox virus, but none of humanity's

ancient bacterial enemies are extinct. They are all still out there, and

they all still kill people. Drug companies mind their cash flow, health

agencies become complaisant, people mind what they think is their own

business, but bacteria never give up. Bacteria have learned to chew up,

spit out, or shield themselves from any and every drug we can throw at

them. They can now defeat every technique we have. The only reason true

disaster hasn't broken out is because all bacteria can't all defeat all the

techniques all at once. Yet.

There have been no major conceptual breakthroughs lately in the

antibiotic field. There has been some encouraging technical news, with

new techniques such as rational drug design and computer-assisted

combinatorial chemistry. There may be entirely new miracle drugs just

over the horizon that will fling the enemy back once again, with enormous

losses. But on the other hand, there may well not be. We may already

have discovered all the best antibiotic tricks available, and squandered

them in a mere fifty years.

Anyway, now that the nature of their resistance is better

understood, no bacteriologist is betting that any new drug can foil our

ancient enemies for very long. Bacteria are better chemists than we are

and they don't get distracted.

If the resistance triumphs, it does not mean the outbreak of

universally lethal plagues or the end of the human race. It is not an

apocalyptic problem. What it would really mean -- probably -- is a slow

return, over decades, to the pre-antibiotic bacterial status-quo. A return

to the bacterial status-quo of the nineteenth century.

For us, the children of the miracle, this would mean a truly shocking

decline in life expectancy. Infant mortality would become very high; it

would once again be common for parents to have five children and lose

three. It would mean a return to epidemic flags, quarantine camps,

tubercular sanatariums, and leprosariums.

Cities without good sanitation -- mostly Third World cities --

would suffer from water-borne plagues such as cholera and dysentery.

Tuberculosis would lay waste the underclass around the world. If you cut

yourself at all badly, or ate spoiled food, there would be quite a good

chance that you would die. Childbirth would be a grave septic risk for the

mother.

The practice of medicine would be profoundly altered. Elaborate,

high-tech surgical procedures, such as transplants and prosthetic

implants, would become extremely risky. The expense of any kind of

surgery would soar, since preventing infection would be utterly necessary

but very tedious and difficult. A bad heart would be a bad heart for life,

and a shattered hip would be permanently disabling. Health-care budgets

would be consumed by antiseptic and hygienic programs.

Life without contagion and infection would seem as quaintly exotic

as free love in the age of AIDS. The decline in life expectancy would

become just another aspect of broadly diminishing cultural expectations

in society, economics, and the environment. Life in the developed world

would become rather pinched, wary, and nasty, while life in the

overcrowded human warrens of the megalopolitan Third World would

become an abattoir.

If this all seems gruesomely plausible, it's because that's the way

our ancestors used to live all the time. It's not a dystopian fantasy; it

was the miracle of antibiotics that was truly fantastic. It that miracle

died away, it would merely mean an entirely natural return to the normal

balance of power between humanity and our invisible predators.

At the close of this century, antibiotic resistance is one of the

gravest threats that confronts the human race. It ranks in scope with

overpopulation, nuclear disaster, destruction of the ozone, global

warming, species extinction and massive habitat destruction. Although it

gains very little attention in comparison to those other horrors, there is

nothing theoretical or speculative about antibiotic resistance. The mere

fact that we can't see it happening doesn't mean that it's not taking place.

It is occurring, stealthily and steadily, in a world which we polluted

drastically before we ever took the trouble to understand it.

We have spent billions to kill bacteria but mere millions to truly

comprehend them. In our arrogance, we have gravely underestimated our

enemy's power and resourcefulness. Antibiotic resistance is a very real

threat which is well documented and increasing at considerable speed. In

its scope and its depth and the potential pain and horror of its

implications, it may the greatest single menace that we human beings

confront -- besides, of course, the steady increase in our own numbers.

And if we don't somehow resolve our grave problems with bacteria, then

bacteria may well resolve that population problem for us.