Generations: What Newton taught Einstein

Early one morning… in the year 43… Four legions of highly trained Roman soldiers stood on the northern shore of what is now France. Four legions… That’s 20-thousand men.

They had horses and siege equipment… they even had elephants.

Together, they looked out across the English Channel. The fog obscured the horizon… This was the very edge of the Holy Roman Empire.

This incredible fighting force boarded a fleet of ships and invaded Brittania.

After four years of overwhelmingly lopsided fighting, the entire southern half of the island was claimed in the name of Emperor Claudius.

Claudius is one of the Emperors you don’t hear a lot about.

You probably know Caligula… He was the insane one: that vicious killer, that sexual deviant.

And I know you’ve heard of Nero… he’s the guy that “fiddled while Rome burned.”

Well, Claudius ruled for the 13 years in between those two.

Once the fighting was done, and the savages were subdued, Claudius’s troops started trying to change the culture there – renaming the cities with Latinized names, and building temples. And in the city they called Camulodunum (camel -uh- dunnum), they built the grandest of them all. It was called the Temple of Claudius, and it was the largest in all of Britannia.

The Temple of Claudius was a marvel of engineering at the time. The foundation – or ‘podium’ as it was called – was built by digging trenches, then filling them with mortar and crushed rock. That’s a really primitive, but really solid, form of concrete!

There were 28 ornate columns outside, made of curved bricks covered in plaster. There were beautiful gardens and a stone perimeter wall for defence.

The temple itself was more ‘imposing,’ than beautiful. The walls stood more than 65 feet high, and they were faced with polished marble brought all the way from North Africa. The entire building had no windows.

It took 10 years to build and was completed just in time.

In the year 60, a tribe of Britons began a revolt against the Romans. Camulodunum was their first target.

They stormed the town and won swift battles against the Roman garrison. These were not the bold legionnaires that had crossed the channel 17 years before… these troops were old, and fat and lazy … they were the ones left behind to collect taxes.

The survivors ran to the temple to hide. It had been built as an homage to the glory of Rome… but now it served as their last chance for survival.

The tall windowless walls and giant brass doors provided them a safe haven… 

But, after a two-day siege, the Britons forced open the doors and killed everyone inside.

Victorious, the Britons tore down the temple and all the other roman buildings in town.

They toppled the columns… They stripped the marble… until all that remained was the foundation: That concrete base.

Over the next thousand years… the town changed its name from Camulodunum to Colchester and by 1076 it was time to build a proper castle.

They chose a spot on a hill with commanding views of the surrounding countryside…

…and imagine their excitement when they realized there was already a foundation. It was a thousand years old, but still solid rock – already in place for them!

It was the Podium of the old Roman Temple!

The castle they built was historic. The Keep – that’s the central building – has the largest area of any medieval tower built in Britain or anywhere in Europe for that matter. 

200 years later… A group of English Barons (with the support of the French) started a rebellion against King John.

As a result, a contingent of French soldiers found themselves defending Colchester Castle from the British!

Thanks to the strength of the castle, 116 French militiamen were able to hold off the army of King John for three months!

Ultimately, a truce was called. The English got the castle, but the French were allowed to leave safely.

Centuries passed and castles .. well they fell out of fashion. They were expensive to maintain, and they weren’t needed for defence.

Someone figured out that the same construction design that made it great for keeping enemies out — would make it great for keeping enemies in.

So, Colchester Castle became a jail.

It was used to imprison and interrogate suspected witches. And during the Second English Civil War, the leaders of the Royalists were executed there.

In fact, there is a spot out back where they were buried… and to this day… (they say) no grass grows there!

Eventually the land was sold to a private owner, and then another and then another… until in the late 17th century they decided to tear down what was left of the castle and sell the stone as construction material.

They used giant mechanical screws to separate the blocks… and gunpowder to blow apart the mortar…. But it wasn’t enough. This medieval castle, built on the podium of a Roman temple was just too much for 17th century demolition techniques.

So… if you go to England today… and decide to visit a small town 50 miles northeast of London… you will still find a sturdy stone building on that very site.

The building that was used to keep Roman soldiers safe from the Britons…

… French soldiers safe from the English….

… and townspeople safe from witches and rebels….

…Is now a museum. (keeping all of us safe from ignorance, perhaps): It’s where the good people of Colchester protect and preserve Roman artifacts for visitors from all over the world to enjoy.

It’s definitely worth a visit. And when you go, you’ll see first-hand how each generation used what the previous one had built… to make something altogether new.

I’m Dan Riskin – and this is “Inside the Breakthrough – How Science Comes to Life.”

This series is about research – that driving desire to learn new things… answer new questions … and make the world a better place.

Specifically, in this episode I’m looking at how research done many years ago laid the foundation for modern scientists.

“Today’s achievements began in the far far distant past when the earth was shrouded in the mists of ignorance and fear.”

I want to trace a map of the route we’ve taken from the past to the present.

“the achievements of men of science pyramided, laying the foundations of a new and greater industry, and a prosperity that reached to every town and village and farm”

But it wasn’t a straight line – or even a pyramid as those 1950’s newsreels suggest. It was … to use a term that also originated in Britain…  A Long and Winding Road.

And still the need for further development marches on.

This podcast is produced by a research group in Manitoba, Canada.

The company is called SciMar – and the man behind it is Dr Wayne Lautt.

Later in this episode we’ll hear from Dr Lautt about what research served as the foundation for their work…

But first, a campfire story…

It’s a warm summer night. And a family of four is enjoying a fire beside a lake.

Boy. Just look at those stars. You almost feel as if you could touch them.

The boy, a teenager, turns to his father…

Do you suppose we ever will?

Will what?

Oh, reach the planets, the moon, space travel!

No doubt about it.

So that was 1955 – and that dad was right – he even threw in this little bit of wisdom.

Oh maybe it will be a while before we reach the planets, they’re pretty far away.

Yah – the planets are ‘pretty far away.’ That’s why it’s taken us so long to discover them. You might even say it’s taken: Generations.

In ancient times, star gazers identified Mercury, Venus, and Mars – those are the terrestrial planets – the ones that are closest to the sun, and also to Earth.

Jupiter and Saturn were also put on the map in prehistoric times. 

Those planets stood apart from the stars because they moved. If you look at the sky night after night, the stars are all in fixed positions relative to one another, like a giant sphere around us that rotates, but never changes. The planets move, though. Their positions relative to the fixed stars change, and that’s how humans knew from very early on that there was something special about them. In fact the word planet comes from the Greek word meaning “wanderer.”

For centuries we knew about those five – well, six if you include Earth – and that is all.

Eventually we got telescopes… but still no new planets.

Stars?… sure we had lots of those.

John Flamseed, England’s first ever “Astronomer Royal” cataloged more than 3-thousand of them: including one called “34 Tauri.”

Why do I mention that one? Well, Flamseed recorded it in 1690. Then about a hundred years later… William Herschel (the first ever “President of the Royal Astronomical Society”) looked at 34 Tauri and said … “You know what? … I think that’s not a star… I think it’s a very slow comet.”

That is my accent of someone born in Germany and then moves to England at the age of 19 and is very good on the cello.

Anyway. He watched it for a few more months and then said, “Nope, wrong again… it’s a planet.”

And that is how we got our seventh planet, Uranus.

But this is not the story of Flamseed and Herschel… and it’s not the story of Uranus. This is the story of what Uranus taught us.

You see, that giant greenish blue ball of cold gas takes 84 years to go around the sun.

That means, unless they started when they were a baby in diapers… no single human can actually track its entire orbit… it has to be done by a series of astronomers. Each one recording its position, then passing on their observations to their colleagues, over more than eight decades.

And just 60 years into that effort… before we even had one full revolution in the books… a French astronomer named Alexis Bouvard noticed something wasn’t right:

Uranus was wobbling.

So here’s the thing – Bouvard was 14 years old when Uranus was discovered. Over the next 55 years he tracked its movement through the sky. If you were a young, good looking, educated person living in 18th century Paris, you could probably find something a little more exciting to do with your evenings than plotting the location of a tiny spec of light, but that was Bouvard … that’s what he wanted to do…. 

And he wasn’t even looking for anything in particular… he was just plotting its path… and comparing his observations with its predicted path based on where Newton’s laws said it should be…

… So, that’s what Bouvard did: night after night after night.

A planet revolves around its star in a very predictable pattern. We know that because Sir Issac Newton came up with a law of gravity, and based on that equation wrote up the Laws of Motion.

Gravity is a force that pulls two objects towards each other. It’s what pulls an apple to the earth, and it’s what holds a planet in a predictable orbit. Newton’s laws say that the magnitude of that force is determined by each of their masses, and how far apart they are.

Those laws became cornerstone tools for understanding how planets move.

Now, as the science developed and measurements were made ever more accurately the tests of newton’s laws became much more stringent.

That is Richard Feynman – one of America’s most famous physicists… He worked on the Manhattan Project building the first nuclear bomb, he won a Nobel Prize… and was brought in to analyze the Space Shuttle after the Challenger disaster.

And like he said…Newton’s Laws, no matter how much data you threw at them, always held up. You just had to be sure to enter all the masses that are close enough to pull on the object.

This is how Feynman explains it….

The planets shouldn’t really go in ellipses because according to Newton’s laws they’re not attracted only by the sun, but also they pull on each other, a little bit. Only a little bit but a little bit is something. and will alter the motion a little bit.

That “Little Bit” is exactly what Bouvard noticed during those long, lonely nights in Paris.

It was noticed that Jupiter and Saturn went according to the calculations, but that Uranus was doing something funny.

Yah… Uranus wasn’t following the rules. It was dancing a little . Which is what other people would have been doing with those starry nights in Paris… And maybe Bouvard should have done more of that. Because life is short. In fact, just after noting that Uranus was misbehaving, Bouvard died.

Yup… spend your whole life plotting coordinates of the slowest moving planet known … you finally find an irregularity, and then… you keel over. That is a tough break!

But not to worry… other members of the scientific community were there to pick up where he left off.

Two men, Adams and LeVerrier, independently and at almost the same time proposed that the motions of Uranus were due to an unseen as yet new planet.

Adams was John Couch Adams, a Brit… LeVerrier was Urbain LeVerrier, a Frenchman and they both wrote up their theories and sent them to observatories. First, Adams, the Brit:

“Turn your telescope and look there and you’ll find a planet.”

“How absurd,” said one of the observatories that some guy sitting with pieces of paper and pencils could tell us where to look to find some new planet.

Those stuffy jerks wouldn’t even look. So, Adam’s discovery went nowhere.

LeVerrier meanwhile, sent his coordinates to the observatory in Berlin.

…the other observatory, was more, ahh, well less, well, the administration was different. (laughter) And ah they found Neptune.

Yah. They found Neptune.

It’s the only planet discovered through calculation rather than observation.

LeVerrier told the world he found the 8th planet of our solar system… not in the night sky, but rather… “à la pointe de sa plume” – “at the tip of his pen.”

But the truth is he didn’t find it himself … It took John Flamseed, William Herschel, Alexis Bouvard, Urbain LeVerrier, and a guy named Johann Galle, who just happened to be on duty that night in the Berlin Observatory.

It took… generations.

A couple years later, LeVerrier was back at it again. This time he was looking the other direction — at Mercury.

it became apparent that the motion of the planet Mercury was not exaaaa-ctly right.

Just like Uranus…. Mercury had a wobble.

And this caused a lot of trouble and had no explanation.

LeVerrier followed the same playbook that had led to the discovery of Neptune.

He took the observations of Mercury’s actual orbit, and he took everything they knew about how the sun and other planets should affect its movement… and he used Newton’s laws to solve for what was missing.

The result was the discovery of another new planet! Once again, he had discovered a planet … not in the night sky… but at the tip of his pen.

It was smaller than Mercury and Mercury is not big in fact Mercury’s smaller than our own moon so this thing was tiny. And its orbit was even closer to the sun.

A planet with that orbit would have to be scorching hot…. a planet on fire… so it was given the name… “Vulcan.”

“Ahhh – Dan… sorry. Vulcan isn’t a real planet – that’s just from Star Trek. That’s where Mr Spock is from.”

No Vulcan WAS real. To the people of that time it was every bit as real as Neptune. Hear me out on this.

Music change start of a journey

LeVerrier sent the coordinates of where it should be found to a handful of observatories and asked them for visual confirmation. They’d learned the lesson from Neptune, so they all looked.

But none of them could find it.

That wasn’t altogether unexpected… think about the layout of our solar system.

Looking for a planet beyond Uranus means pointing your telescope outward, at night, and looking for sunlight bouncing off a distant object. The lighting is perfect.

Looking for Vulcan requires pointing your telescope towards the sun during the day and looking for a tiny rock that is very close to it and does not emit its own light. There is no reflection, at best, you’re looking for something that is a silhouette as it passes in front of the sun.

Now keep in mind, Urbain LeVerrier was a legend – the most celebrated astronomer of his time. He is the only person in history to discover a planet using math.

And his calculations were based on Sir Issac Newton’s laws of motion. Those were also untouchable… they’d been proven correct time and time again.

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Vulcan was there… we just needed better equipment to see it.

Eventually LeVerrier dies, like Bouvard and Herschel and Flamseed before him.

He dies in 1877. And at the time he is remembered as the man who discovered the most distant planet in our solar system (Neptune) and the innermost planet (Vulcan).

When the Eiffel Tower was built – 10 years after his death – LeVerrier’s name was engraved on it – that is the highest honour available to scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in France.

The only minor blemish on all of his findings was … well…  no one could find Vulcan – but telescopes were improving every year – surely visual confirmation was coming soon.

It’s 1915. Almost 50 years since Vulcan’s existence had been proven mathematically, and still no one has seen it.

The job of explaining the wobble in Mercury’s orbit has fallen to a new generation of scientists.

In particular, an up-and-comer named Albert Einstein.

Einstein took Newton’s Laws, which were universally revered, and asked – “Do they still apply in the most extreme circumstances?”

What he found is that with really massive objects like stars… the space-time relationship gets bent, it gets warped, and that means the calculations change.

Through this hypothesis, time and space are robbed of the last trace of objective reality.

Lots of modern teachers have tried to explain this by saying its kinda like putting a bowling ball in the middle of trampoline… it bends the shape of the trampoline and that affects the movement of a marble being rolled across it… so if you try to roll it straight, the path bends.

It’s worth noting however that Einstein never actually refered to a trampoline, or a bowling ball, or a marble in his papers. Instead, he uses the Sun and Mercury

A point-mass, the sun, is located at the origin of the coordinate system. The gravitational field this point-mass produces can be calculated from these equations by means of successive approximations.

You see the “General Theory of Relativity” (that’s what Einstein called his discovery) isn’t just one equation that you plug everything into once…The way you use it is to run the numbers and get an approximation, then you run them again to get another answer and then you do this over and over each time making your result more accurate.

The calculation yields, for the planet Mercury, a perihelion advance of 43 seconds per century, as the unexplained difference between observations and the Newtonian theory.

Einstein’s new theory perfectly predicts Mercury’s orbit. The planet was following the rules – we just didn’t know the rules until Einstein figured them out.

A lot of people think of Einstein as this singular genius who came up with all this by himself… but that’s not true. In his own paper has two lines that give a more complete picture.

First:

It explains qualitatively and quantitatively the secular rotation of the orbit of Mercury which was discovered by LeVerrier.

Keep in mind, Urbain LeVerrier had been dead for more than 40 years at this point – but Einstein still acknowledges that it’s his observations that form the foundation for this work.

And he finishes his paper with this gem:

However, I prefer to relinquish a final decision to the astronomical specialists.

Yah… after pages and pages of equations, he still says “let’s turn it over to the folks with the telescopes to see if this really works.”

He builds on the past, and he sets a foundation for the future.

Einstein’s papers were a triumph for science… but sadly they were a death blow for the planet Vulcan. The planet that had been discovered at the tip of LeVerrier’s pen… ceased to exist, thanks to the tip of Einstein’s.

That is one of my favourite science stories of all time because it’s a mix of abstract thinkers… and ‘in-the-field’ researchers. And also it also connects a dozen brilliant people… from Newton… all the way to Einstein… each one building on the work of those that came before them.

This is the part of the show where we pivot from historical stories to a modern one: The story of SciMar.

SciMar is a modern medical research company. What they do, and how they do it would have baffled and amaze people like LeVerrier, Bouvard, and Herschel. Even Newton and Einstein would be blown away by what happens in a modern lab.

But some things haven’t changed… one constant is the importance of building on the work of your predecessors.

Just as with Colchester Castle… or the discovery of Neptune… we are going to start at the beginning… with the first diagnosis of diabetes.

There are recorded instances of diabetes from almost 3000 years ago.

That’s Dr Wayne Lautt, the founding researcher at SciMar.

Diabetes was originally diagnosed by tasting the urine. Diabetes mellitus is typified by large volumes of sweet urine. And that’s a different disease from diabetes insipidus, where it’s large volumes of urine that isn’t sweet.

Lautt also learned from more recent scientists.

I’d have to say that Ernest Starling back in the late 1800s is one of my absolute heroes. This guy had to be crazy to have done all of the different things that he did, and to come up with the ideas that he did, simply measuring blood flow in an artery.

Starling measured the flow of blood by sticking a tiny hair into an artery and measuring how much it bent.

Starling did a lot of stuff like that. He actually was the discoverer of the first hormone and was able to show how you had to demonstrate the functions of a hormone being released from an organ and acting on a different organ. So that would be my scientific hero.

It is no surprise that the guy who discovered the first hormone holds a central place in Dr Lautt’s work.

After all, diabetes research has always focused on a hormone from the pancreas – Insulin… and Lautt is building on that by utilizing a second hormone, something called HISS — hepatic insulin-sensitizing substance.

HISS has the potential to change the way we diagnose, treat, and someday even reverse type 2 diabetes.

But it has taken 30 years to get to this stage. And well, Dr. Lautt is not a spring chicken any more. He’s 74 years old. (That’s almost one full orbit of the planet Uranus!)

I don’t really like the idea of slowing down. When I go out, I want to be going so fast. I skin both knees on the way out. if I don’t make it for supper, well, first off our team is already able to carry this forward. There’s no question about that. But the idea of not finishing anything, nothing is ever finished.

‘Nothing is ever finished.’ That’s a good motto for all great scientists.

Science isn’t a straight line. It moves forward in fits and spurts. But it keeps moving! There may be long periods of time when everyone involved says – “yup, we’ve got this nailed down. We know all there is to know about this,” but then all of a sudden, things pick up and move again.

(I mean, for 50 years everyone agreed there was a planet Vulcan.)

And it is those periods of time, the stagnant parts, that Lautt finds problematic.

I’ve always been concerned about plateaus. I like the acceleration of a learning curve, and as long as the effort that I’m putting in leads to an acceleration in the accumulation of knowledge, or experience or whatever, then I’m willing to just put in as much energy as I possibly can.

But in science the effort you put in is not always matched by the output.

When I hit a plateau, and I’m still putting in the same amount of energy, and I’m not moving the needle forward, that’s when I have typically bailed out and move over to something else.

What he’s talking about is ‘not beating your head against a wall.’ Instead, recognizing that sometimes a problem requires a new approach, new technology, or just a fresh set of eyes.

Even if that takes the wisdom of a future generation.

Next time around we are going tackle a thorny, awkward, ugly question:

If you made a discovery that could save a million lives. Would you give it away? Or would you sell it?

And before you say that’s an easy decision, ask yourself if you’re basing your answer on any assumptions? Come back for the next episode and maybe I’ll prove you wrong. That’s next time on “Inside the Breakthrough – How Science Comes to life.” 

I’m Dan Riskin. Thanks for listening.

One last thing … 

Researchers continue to track planets and compare their observed paths to their predicted paths, looking for inconsistencies.

They also do projections of what those planets might do in the future as their orbits degrade.

You see, the Sun is burning so its losing mass, and as it does that it will start throwing a lot of things out of whack.

Some researchers at the Paris Observatory (the same place where Alexis Bouvard spent all those nights alone,) ran 2,500 computer simulations to figure out what might happen with Mercury.

And in 25 of those… 1% … all hell breaks loose.

The scariest scenario sees Mercury getting thrown outward, (because it gets attracted by Jupiter) … that messes up the orbit of Mars, which then has a near miss with the Earth…. And that sends our little blue marble careening inward for a head-on collision with Venus.

But don’t panic yet … the timeline for that scenario is 3.3 Billion years from now. So, we’ve got some time… at least a couple generations.