Wonderful to be

Life is to celebrate, not to destroy

For many years I’ve been interested in, among other things, the miracle of life. In a bygone age I derived information from books – notably The Body (1968) and The Mind (1984), both by Anthony Smith (1968) and then I completed a couple of Open University courses, Brain Biology and Behaviour and Psychology.

There’s a quotation I used in my out-of-print book Pain Wears No Mask; it’s from Robert Boyle: It is highly dishonourable for a reasonable soul to live in so divinely built a mansion as the body she resides in altogether unacquainted with the exquisite structure of it. [The gender used here is immaterial; the bottom line is we all take our bodies for granted; for example, once it starts in the womb, our beating heart never stops until we quit this mortal coil.]

Last night’s BBC2 Countdown to Life: the Extraordinary Making of You was the first of three documentaries and featured the initial eight weeks after conception – a time, as presenter Michael Mosley pointed out, when some women may not even realise they’re pregnant. Yet while there may be no obvious external signs, inside the body hundreds of changes and processes that could determine the rest of our lives are already under way, and this was the point of the engaging programme. [In my co-written fantasy quest, women know at the instant of conception; the first Chronicle of Floreskand is Wings of the Overlord.]

Mosley showed us the identical quads Holly, Jessica, Georgie and Ellie, who were the result of a 64-million-to one chance. Their single egg divided to create four genetically identical sisters – this process happened just five days after conception.

Then there was basketball star Randy, whose life changed just nineteen days after he was conceived. All of his organs are on the wrong sides – he is a perfect mirror image of most human beings. This was due to some tiny structures called cilia that come to life on day 19, spinning clockwise to create a leftward current to activate genes that will tell the organs where to go, but they failed to spin in his case. [In my out of print vampire thriller set in Malta, Death is Another Life, my two vampire brothers are mirror twins – a crucial plot point.]

Supernumerary digits and other body parts occur from time to time; Ian Fleming’s The Man With The Golden Gun villain Francisco Scaramanga had a third nipple. Amazingly, in Brazil, fourteen of twenty six individuals in the De Silva family possess six digits on each hand; as a result of the so-called sonic hedgehog protein (yes, it was named after the Sega game, Sonic the Hedgehog). It’s difficult enough to draw the usual human hand – that’s why cartoon characters generally only have three fingers; fascinatingly, those six digits looked normal, as the hands were larger to accommodate the extra finger.

Studies over seventy years in Gambia have revealed how babies conceived in the wet season – when pregnant mothers eat plenty of greens – are seven times more likely to live longer than those conceived in the dry season, when their mothers eat less healthily.

Mosley met Nell, a seven-year-old who received a double dose of her father’s growth gene in the womb and so towered over her classmates; happily, the growth spurt seems to be stabilising now. He also met Melanie Gaydos, who suffered from a unique genetic slip-up in the womb which caused catastrophic damage to her hair and teeth, transforming her facial features; she has bravely carved out a life as a striking model in New York.

Mosley was enthusiastic, charming and filled with wonder. He described a body scan as ‘a work of art’, which it is.

And no political points were being made, and no reference to Climate Change either.

As Walt Whitman said, I Sing the Body Electric. Wondrous to behold. Wonderful to be.

Quantum of Science

It might be no solace, but this has nothing to do with James Bond...

 

Some time last century, I studied for an Open University degree, tackling over six years the subjects I wasn’t too good at rather than the easier options of the arts. I mixed and matched Maths; Science; Psychology, Brain and Behaviour; Statistics; Economics; Computing and Computers; and Complexity, Management and Change. While I found all of these disciplines enlightening, I was most taken with the latter, plus science and psychology. A number of books I read as background material blew me away, not least Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and John Gribbin’s Spacewarps and Timewarps, to name a few.

Such authors are able to make complex subjects comprehensible and transmit the wonder of science and scientific thought. One such writer is Brian Clegg, who has written an impressive number of science oriented books - see here.

The Quantum Age, his latest work, is due out on Thursday, 5 June but can be pre-ordered now.

 

The blurb goes like this: Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Steam and Electrical Ages all saw the reach of humankind transformed by new technology. Now we are living in the Quantum Age, a revolution in everyday life led by our understanding of the very, very small.

Today, technologies based on quantum physics account for 30 per cent of US GDP, and yet quantum particles such as atoms, electrons and photons remain enigmatic, acting totally unlike the objects we experience directly. Weird quantum behaviour is also essential to nature. From the mechanism of the Sun to quantum biology in our eyesight, photosynthesis in plants and the ability of birds to navigate, quantum effects are key.

Quantum physics lies at the heart of every electronic device, every smartphone and laser, and now quantum superconductors have moved out of the lab to make levitating trains and MRI scanners possible, while soon superfast, ultra-secure quantum computers may be a reality.

Acclaimed popular science author Brian Clegg brings his trademark clarity and enthusiasm to a book that will give the world around you a new sense of wonder.

Veteran science writer John Gribbin commented: 'Brian Clegg does a superb job of explaining complicated scientific concepts in easily understood language. The Quantum Age is his best book yet, because the concepts he explains are central to our everyday lives in the 21st century, even though most people think they are incomprehensible and abstruse. From how the Sun keeps shining to the quantum computer revolution there is plenty here to enthrall and entertain, as well as to inform.'

You can find out more at www.brianclegg.net/quantumage.html

FFB - Catching the Light

Friday's Forgotten Book:

CATCHING THE LIGHT – The entwined history of light and mind

Arthur Zajonc

Professor Zajonc, a physicist, sets out on a journey of discovery, to answer What is Light? He does not simply employ physics but also poetry, philosophy and art. On the way, we encounter: the ancient Greeks, who apparently had no words for green and blue; India’s Bhagavad-Gita featuring a bard who sings to a blind and worldly royalty; the Arab Alhazen’s improvement on Euclid, supposing ‘the eye, once the site of a sun-like, divine fire, fast became a darkened chamber, awaiting an external force to lighten it.’; and Kepler, Copernicus, Descartes, Goethe, Milton , Twain, Galileo, and Einstein to name but a few. The duality of lights, as both a wave and a particle (as I recall from my Open University course) is echoed in Zajonc’s theme, the duality of the two sides of the brain interpreting the artistic and the mathematical views of light, and is explained clearly and insightfully, with Zajonc mustering some quite poetic prose in the process.

Illustrations are not complex and kept to a minimum; this is not a text-book, more a detective adventure story.

Arthur Zajonc

Kepler

 

The dangers of scientists reducing everything, including beauty, to cold passionless data was long-ago appreciated by many ‘natural philosophers’ such as Faraday and poets like Keats, and every effort was made to retain a sense of wonder at the new discoveries; even the late Richard Feynman said that his appreciation of the beauty of nature was enhanced, not diminished, by his knowledge of physics.

This, then, is a celebration of Light, and of our tentative, often frustrated, fumbling in the dark for that understanding. Light is as much a part of our mind-set as it is an external phenomena. For example, Zajonc cites a patient blind from the age of ten months receiving cornea transplants when he was fifty; when his sight was restored he could not see as his brain had not learned to see: the process of learning was slow and never fully completed.

 

Straddling the scientific and artistic cultures, Zajonc may end up satisfying neither; which would be a pity, as this is an enlightening book for the scientist and the poet, for the layman and the artist.

Published in 1995.