ADAMANT

NULLIUS IN VERBA : Lord Rees Replies

Lord Rees , the President of The Royal Society, has taken issue with my Wall Street Journal article last criticizing the Society's attempt to defund critics of its climate policy. Here it is. His reply follows.

......Nullius In Verba

By RUSSELL SEITZ
In 1663, a group of savants formed a London club to discuss "useful knowledge." John Milton's "Areopagitica" was very much on the minds of those early scientists, for it warned that Puritan control of the press could turn into state control of thought. Dissent could get you killed in Restoration England, at sword's point if gentlemen took umbrage, or on the gallows if it traduced royal policy or Holy Writ. So they were mighty relieved when King Charles II agreed to join them, for, with such a patron, the Fellows of the Royal Society (including Oliver Cromwell's brother in law ) would not fear for their necks or purses when speaking truth to power or questioning authority -- until now.

BLUE JADE :

A report on my archaeological work from: 

 

                                      In Guatemala, A Mother Lode Of Jade 

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

For half a century, scholars have searched in vain for the source of the jade that the early civilizations of the Americas prized above all else and fashioned into precious objects of worship, trade and adornment.

The searchers found some clues to where the Olmecs and Mayas might have obtained their jadeite, as the precious rock is known. But no lost mines came to light.

 Now, scientists exploring the wilds of Guatemala say they have found the mother lode — a mountainous region roughly the size of Rhode Island strewn with huge jade boulders, other rocky treasures and signs of ancient mining. It was discovered after a hurricane tore through the landscape and exposed the veins of jade, some of which turned up in stores, arousing the curiosity of scientists. The find includes large outcroppings of blue jade, the gemstone of the Olmecs, the mysterious people who created the first complex culture in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the region that encompasses much of Mexico and Central America.

It also includes an ancient mile-high road of stone traversing jaguar territory in a mountain wilderness containing rocks from the Earth’s mantle , called eclogites. The deposits rival the world's leading current source of mined jade, in Myanmar, formerly Burma, the experts say. The implications for history, archaeology and anthropology are just starting to emerge.

For one thing, the scientists say, the find suggests that the Olmecs, who flourished on the southern gulf coast of Mexico, exerted wide influence in the Guatemalan highlands as well. All told, they add, the Guatemalan lode was worked for millenniums, as compared with centuries for the Burmese one. In part, the discovery resulted from the devastating storm that hit Central America in 1998, killing thousands of people and touching off floods and landslides that exposed old veins and washed jade into river beds.

Local prospectors picked up the precious scraps, which found their way into Guatemalan jewelry shops and, eventually, the hands of astonished scientists.

“‛Lordy,’ I said, ‛this is Olmec type,’” recalled Russell Seitz, who decades earlier directed a jade hunt in Guatemala for the Peabody Museum at Harvard. “Where did it come from?”

 Led by Mr. Seitz and local jade hunters, a team of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History, Rice University and the University of California scoured the forested ravines of the Guatemalan highlands for more than two years. In the end the scientists made a series of discoveries  in bus-size boulders of Olmec blue jade, some astride creeks. "It kept getting better and better," said Virginia B. Sisson, a geologist at Rice University who has recently examined jades in Myanmar as well as Guatemala. The blue jade, she said, “is all over the hillsides.”

The exact locations of the outcroppings are not being given, to protect them. Leading archaeologists in Guatemala, though not directly involved, are applauding the finds. Hector Escobedo of the Universidad del Valle called the jade discovery "one of the most significant" in decades of investigating the Mayan past and said the new deposits probably account for "all of the sources for Mesoamerican jades." He added that

A World Turned Upside Down

Pakistan is subject to another sort of strategic instability:

A World Turned Upside Down
The aftershocks of Pakistan's last earthquake are still being felt.

BY RUSSELL SEITZ
The Wall Street Journal Wednesday, October 12, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

When Kipling was a cub reporter in Lahore, the area struck by the great earthquake  of 2005 was a blank on the map separating British India from the "Independent Khanates of Chinese Turkistan." Washington scarcely cared if the Victorian Empire needed a weapon of mass destruction called the Maxim gun to deter hotheads along the Northwest Frontier, for it was a long way from anywhere. Now America's concerns are more ecumenical and acute. Pakistan's 1998 bomb test conjoined the world's three great monotheistic religions in a nuclear trinity .

There's no predicting the outcome when a natural disaster strikes an inexperienced nuclear state bordering two others. The aftershocks may loosen Pakistan's postcolonial grip on its wild and woolly Northern Areas, or shake its fragile truce with India in long-partitioned Kashmir. The quake rattled Pakistan's armories, nuclear and conventional, shattered its military academy, and left some of its general staff sleeping in the streets alongside a million other traumatized citizens.

It also severed the Karakoram highway, the amazing but fragile artery linking Pakistan to its conflicted frontiers and providing western China's only direct connection to world trade. The new North-South strategic highway runs through a landscape as unstable as the region's politics, for the Indian subcontinent has been thrusting into the heart of Asia since the days of the dinosaurs, raising some of the highest mountains like the bow wave of a dreadnaught and garlanding them with metamorphic treasures like the sapphires of Kashmir and the rubies and lapis lazuli of Hunza and Badakhshan.

This tectonic beauty comes at a high human cost. Last December, the far edge of the Indian Plate popped open a 1,000-kilometer split in the Andaman seabed, raising the tsunami in which 300,000 perished. Now the same great plate's 60-mile-deep keel has surged forward, nudging peaks like K-2 and Nanga Parbat a little higher, and knocking the ground out from under everyone from Kabul to Kashmir.

North of Srinagar, in India's Vale of Kashmir, villagers blocked highways demanding aid for stricken mountain hamlets. Scientists and climbers are missing, too, for the stunning exposure of living rock on 25,000-foot peaks and the flanks of the Indus gorge make the region a geological and mountaineering Mecca.

The exaggerated verticality of northern Pakistan makes it scientifically transparent but politically opaque, with borders hard to define and harder to guard. The chaos in the quake's aftermath has put the field in motion for fugitives of all stripes. Al Qaeda cadres and Islamist Kashmiri separatists can readily lose themselves among the flux of refugees in a region famed for discreet hospitality. It cannot have escaped Osama Bin Laden's attention that in the 19th century the Aga Khan spent tranquil years in Hunza while internecine war made him a hunted man elsewhere in the Islamic world. Today, the Raj has evaporated in India, but in Pakistan's Northern Areas some local notables' business cards still read "Head of State." Political parties--some religious, some ethnic--have proliferated in the Punjab and the parts of southern Pakistan that share an Urdu culture with India; but in the North, men owe their first allegiance to where they were born, not to where politicians in Islamabad  or New Delhi want borders to be.

The region's isolation in the months to come could erode Pakistan's often-resented efforts to integrate the linguistically and ethnically distinct populations of areas like Baltistan, a "Little Tibet" where mountains five miles high enforce local autonomy--and where the central government's authority fades out of sight of the now-obliterated roads built to enforce it. The temblor's timing is itself disastrous, for the north helps feed Pakistan, and harvests have been isolated from the urban markets by the wholesale destruction of infrastructure. Far away, in Karachi and Quetta, the political impact is being felt, as food prices soar despite the imposition of price controls. A month ago, polo was being played at 11,000 feet in the summer pastures of the north. Now the monsoon has combined with the quake to set slow-motion boulder-falls down the Indus Valley, with a hard freeze to follow. Only come spring will Pakistan know the true toll in areas too high for helicopters.

The Indo-European frontier was already an ethnic and religious crossroads when Alexander the Great passed through. It has seen the rise and fall of whatever gods were worshipped in the era of the Mohenjo-Daro civilization, and then of Gandharan Greco-Buddhism; but only in the last few decades has the upper Indus begun to see much of the outside world. Even in four-mile-deep valleys isolated as Kipling's not-quite-fictional "Kaffiristan," Internet cafés are up and running; and this winter, un-wired teahouse firesides may be enlivened by well-armed Afghans driven across the borders of Kunar and Badakhshan by U.S. or U.S.-backed forces. Still, equating Islam on the Upper Indus with the Taliban is as inane and dangerous as representing the Ku Klux Klan as typical of American Christianity; for while hidebound Salafist mullahs may prevail in one mosque, a valley away female education may be compulsory and Ismaili merchants may come and go from around the world.

Mountains like the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush will go on rising whether borders or empires stand or fall, and the erosive force of the Indus River will sweep away whatever the angry earth throws down as the tectonic plates continue their collision. The 2005 quake was as powerful as the one that leveled San Francisco, but one of these centuries the rafting together of the Asian and Indus plates will rock the subcontinent with quakes a hundred times stronger, as it has before.

It may take a harder shock than this to persuade the subcontinent's capitals to recognize that, partition notwithstanding, they are in the same tectonic boat. The region's conflicts may seem intractable, but the Earth is ever patient in its diplomacy. The civilizations of South Asia have eons of grace in which to resolve their age-old differences before the slow tectonic violence that has put fossil seashells atop Everest crumples Ceylon--unserendipitously--into the mountainous seashore of Tibet.

 Mr. Seitz is a physicist in Cambridge, Mass.

Weighing The Web

   The Internet weighs two ounces
But takes fifty million horsepower to run 

Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard's comparison of his home energy costs to Google's multi-gigabuck annual power bill is intriguing. $1,200 a month is rather a lot of Pacific Gas & Electric.

But like Al Gore's 22.6 Megawatt hour a month Eco-mansion , it only serves to make the $3 a year per capita it takes to power the global internet seem a roaring bargain, even by third world standards. Still, my dollar a day ISP bill gives me no joy, because the electrons I feed my pet laptop are costing me about half a billion dollars a pound. Let me explain

I'm taking about the power that drives the bytes, not lights the lights. Geodesic dome guru Bucky Fuller baffled architects by asking how much their buildings weighed? Not being paid by the pound, few cared, but mass and energy matter more than ever in the aftermath of 9-1. Built like a Hummer on steroids, the Empire State Building shrugged off a bomber crash in 1945 while the World Trade Center's economy model frame collapsed. So how much does the internet weigh? And how many horsepower does it take to run it ?

The IgNobelium Prize?

Strange New Element From A Distant World Invades The Aperiodic Table

A new-found lithium mineral has been named  Kryptonite  by London's Natural History Museum because its formula approximates the label on the glowing green maguffin seen in Superman Returns.

This has led Scientific American to encourage patriotic ubergeeks & geekettes to track down the missing  comic book element Adamantium before renegade X-Men swap the silvery body-building aid for recreational alkaloids or unobtanium. I fear the 154 year old magazine may be too late. How can Sci Am be sure the wily metal wasn't discovered ages ago?

The annals of chemistry are awash with apocryphal elements that , instead of proving elemental , turned out to be compounds, alloys, or cases of mistaken identity. Many still enjoyed their moment of published fame before demotion to the dustbin of chemistry. More alas, than there are real elements. 120-odd former ones lurk in the index of Gmelin's Comprehensive Inorganic Chemistry alone.

Neptunium takes the cake. Un-discovered twice in the 1880's, its name was first applied to a ringer for germanium (nee'  Ekasilicon), and when that didn't pan out , to some pseudo-niobium (AKA Columbium). Re-aborted as Eka-rhenium in 1939, the unfortunate stuff was finally banished from The Aperiodic Table after suffering honest-to-gosh discovery in 1941-- it is now a bona fide nuclear bomb material.

So raise a Bohemium glass of Demonium rum to rescuing periodic chart rejects from deserved obscurity by  getting Tom Lehrer  to compose an encore to The Elements [click to listen.] To encourage the effort , please get the lead out , and  send paypal donations to [email protected] --it costs the equivalent of 100 pounds of iron (alias Nebulium) a month to run this place.

Absent Adamantium , Adamant , whose name pertains to mere carbon-the monoisotopic diamond described in US Patent 3,895,313, will offer Lehrer the coveted Nobelium Prize Medal if he performs prestissimo.  He'll have to. The half-life of his trans-uranic gong will give him 58 minutes in which to figure out what rhymes with :
Accretium , Agusterde , Alabamium , Alcaligène , Alkalinium , Aldebaranium
Andronium, Anglium , Anglohelvetium , Angularium , Archonium , Aridium
Asterium , Athenium , Ausonium , Austrium  Berzelium , Bohemium , Brevium
Carolinium , Cassiopeium  , Celtium  , Centium , Centurium , Cererium
Ceresium , Colonium , Coronium , Crodonium , Cyclonium ,Cyclotronium...

>This way to the Dor, Incognitum, and  Phtor:  All names unfortunately guaranteed real
Warning : Although certifiably non-toxic by virtue of their non-existence , these elements are subject to TSA regulation when liquid. Their  use in coinage , pacifiers, or instruments of nuclear deterrence is not recommended.  

Spiral Stairway To Heaven

Creative Accounting In The Land Of The Pharaohs ?

 
Hemienu 
is not exactly a household word nowadays , like Cleopatra  or King Tut , but ancient Egypt revered Pharaoh Khufu's ingenious younger brother as the man who built the Great Pyramid.

It took him a generation- but how did he do it?

New deconvolution software has revealed a spiral structure in gravity  images of the Great Pyramid made using sensitive gradiometers in the 1980's

This has led a French engineer named Houdin to exposit the first seriously new theory of  how the stonepile was piled since  Roman historian Diodorus Siculus proposed  ramps two thousand years ago.

But  big ramps cost big money.

The Secret of the Pyramids may have been an accounting trick. To avoid wasting hundreds of thousands of  man-years of  stonemason's --and teamsters-- valuable time , Houdin proposes Hemienu cannibalized every ramp block hauled in to construct the pyramid's plaza-like lower third. By recycling the six ton stones upwards as work progressed , via a spiral gallery embedded in the outer edge of the rising pile ,they become its higher elevations.  The diagram shows corner platforms for turning  blocks on the integral ramp's  7-degree slope. As the pyramid rose , fewer blocks had to be raised  farther, keeping the rate of work- and taxation  to support it , relatively constant

DOES THIS MEAN WAR ?

If Kim Jong-il seems hopping mad, it's because
He ate the  Easter Bunny

Karl Szmolinsky of  Eberswalde faces a grim Easter.

His pride and joy,  Robert der Grosse, the largest rabbit in recorded Prussian history , is missing and believed dead in North Korea.

The 23 1/2 pound uberbunny was sent to Pyongyang last year along with 11 others "with the aim of setting up a breeding program to alleviate famine, " but they ended up on the table at Dear Leader Kim Jong-il's February 16 birthday banquet.

According to Der Spiegel , Brandenburg's 68-year-old   Meisterkaninchenzüchter  was due to travel to North Korea to set up the farm, but received a call last week from a DPRK official canceling the trip.

"North Korea won't be getting any more rabbits from me, they don't even need to bother asking " Szmolinsky said.

The Berlin embassy of the diminutive Hermit Kingdom Hasenpfepper fiend issued a denial of the alleged lepicide.

Herr Smolinsky's German Giant Greys can produce upwards of seven kilograms of meat, and keen to alleviate hunger in the impoverished country, he gave the North Koreans a 150 Euro per rabbit discount off the usual €200 to 250 price. He had earlier told Spiegel Online. "I've sent them 12 rabbits so far, they're in a petting zoo for now."

Absent the orgy of lagomorphagy, the 12 could have produced 60 bunnies a year if fed properly.  " I feed them everything-- grain, carrots, a lot of cabbages. At the moment they're getting kale," said Szmolinsky of his 50 surviving charges.  Asked if he has any pets he could never part with, he replied: " You can't hang on to them... They cost a lot to feed."

 

 

Meet the Environmental President.............. Ronald Reagan

Ronald  Reagan was as good a  listener as he was widely read.

That's why , despite the president's well founded skepticism of the UN environmental bureaucracy , his science advisers had no difficulty persuading him to sign the Montreal Protocol , which phased out the manufacture of the spray-can and refrigerant Freons that had begun a generation before. This , the National Academy of Science now reports, did more than curb the photochemical erosion of the ozone layer. Because the now banned Freons absorb radiant heat thousands of times more strongly than CO2 , Reagan's prescient environmentalism took a huge bite out of the rate of global warming.

Far more , in fact , than the much-touted Kyoto Convention that the US   Senate overwhelmingly rejected.

In the forthcoming  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Velders et al. reckon  stopping  CFC production here and abroad has removed the equivalent of about 11 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By comparison, had the Kyoto Protocol been fully ratified , only about 2 billion tons of  equivalent carbon dioxide  emission would have been saved.

Without firing a shot in the Climate Wars , the Cold War 's victorious Commander in Chief  did five times as much environmental good as Former Next President Gore aspired to when he led the Clinton administration's drive to ratify the Kyoto treaty .

Playing With Firecrackers ?

    What Was That ?

By RUSSELL SEITZ
Wall Street Journal October 13, 2006; Page A12

Asked the best place to be if an H-bomb goes off, the gadget's legendary father, Edward Teller, responded, "Standing next to somebody who says: 'What was that?'"

Few realize that whatever it was that North Korea detonated on Sunday, it packed barely the explosive force of a 10-yard cube of explosive fertilizer. A hundred thousand bucks' worth of ammonium nitrate could produce much the same bang. Far larger quantities of explosives have gone off accidentally in the last century. Sometimes, these big booms claimed thousands of victims, as at Texas City in 1948. Sometimes, they took only one -- the night watchman of the fertilizer plant in Toulouse that disappeared from the face of the Earth in 2001.

Since the Dear Leader is as unpredictable as North Korean society is opaque, it's hard to reckon exactly what he did. Yet if Sunday night's rumble was intended as an entry-level nuclear test, it must have been a disappointment. One twenty-fifth of a Hiroshima may scare the hatpins out of the Better Red Than Deadheads making the pre-election TV rounds, but it won't get a grouch like Kim Jong Il a decent table at the nuclear club. The Dear Leader's half-kiloton debut was 100,000 times less powerful than the world's largest-ever nuclear test, the 59.2 megaton "Tsar Bomba" set off by Kim Il Sung's shoe-pounding pal, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1961.

Little wonder some optimists are muttering that maybe it was not a proper nuke at all. Perhaps it was only a parody physics package, consisting of a huge conventional explosives charge designed to squeeze the pips out of a tiny plutonium kernel. That's what folks in the H-bomb business in Doctor Strangelove's salad days would deride as "using a blast furnace to light a match."

Next July We Collide With Mars

Reading the Red Planet
Life on Mars looks more likely than ever. Green monsters less so.

BY RUSSELL SEITZ
The Wall Street Journal  C.The author & Dow Jones Inc

In 1880, a myopic Harvard graduate was almost killed galloping headlong into the captain of an opposing polo team. Given a telescope to gaze through as a convalescent pastime, Percival Lowell soon thought that he saw not just canals on Mars but greenery. He devoted himself to astronomy and founded an eponymous observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.

But much of what he sketched of Mars others could neither see nor photograph. In 1976 NASA's Viking Lander revealed a panorama of desolation--a world seemingly as dead as Lowell's reputation. Yet science often beggars fiction. A generation later, a whiff of embalming fluid may herald the discovery of life on Mars.

Last year, a flood of purple prose about water as the cradle of life on the Red Planet flowed from the Opportunity probe's discovery that Mars's saline sands were once as damp as the underside of a walrus. This year, a satellite orbiting the planet has found evidence of an equator once carpeted by ice floes and a recently active geyser. Things have gotten a lot more colorful too. Beyond hematite blueberries and green vitriol on the surface, the spectrum of the Martian atmosphere shows inklings of organic complexity.

Earthbound telescopes have found more than inklings. There is, it now appears, formaldehyde along with methane--i.e., coal gas--in Mars's tenuous air. This is a big deal because they exist in equilibrium, a discovery rich with vital implications. Oxygen and sunlight turn methane into the deadly preservative, but because Mars lacks an ozone layer, the pungent formaldehyde molecules are soon zapped out of existence by ultraviolet rays. The solar wind is blasting methane off the top of the Martian stratosphere, too, so the megatons of formaldehyde in the Martian air imply a constant infusion of fresh methane.

So what? Some geophysicists insist that methane on Earth arises from inorganic sources (e.g., carbide minerals), not just from life (either end of a cow) and its decay (coal). But unlike the tectonically vigorous Earth, Mars's effete geology lacks a crustal conveyor belt to exhume gases from its depths. Absent such upheaval, Occam's razor cuts in: The alternative methane source is life.

Ah, life on Mars! We've heard that one before. Few other potential tourist destinations have offered so wide a range of speculation. Edgar Rice Burroughs, better known for Tarzan, tipped his hat to Trollope by portraying Mars as hunt country, where Confederate veteran John Carter encounters not little green men but 15-footers with four arms and an attitude. Before long he encounters red, white, and yellow Martians galloping astride eight-legged saber-toothed sloths, pursuing 10-legged foxes and maidens demurely attired in stainless-steel brassieres.

The high-water mark of Hollywood's Saturday serials was Flash Gordon's arrival on the Martian scene. Hot on the heels of Orson Welles's 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast came "Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars," whose hero kept fit by wrestling an octopus in the aquarium of Ming the Merciless, an art deco eco-terrorist who set the stage for Michael Crichton's latest technothriller by changing Earth's climate with a Nitron raygun. America loved it, and Cole Porter soon had Bing Crosby crooning: "Have you heard, it's in the stars, / Next July we collide with Mars?"

Porter was off by 35 years, but eventually collide we did--more space probes have crashed on Mars than landed. NASA's past failures to fish up Martian life may be due to random bad luck with landing sites--one mile off a Palm Springs fairway, after all, and the landscape seems as sterile as Death Valley. Magnification matters, too. It's hard to overlook a cavalry of giant sloth, but bacteria are seriously small and often tucked into unattractive places.

It makes one wonder what we may have missed. Bits of Mars are occasionally flung to Earth by impacting asteroids, ending up as the meteorites called shergottites. Reports of tiny fossils in one of them have not panned out, but the rocks match the isotopic composition of Mars so exactly that few doubt that they have been whacked into the inner solar system like golf balls of the gods. Plain-vanilla physics likewise dictates that bits of Earth have hit the Martian fairways over the eons too. One day, Earthmen on Mars may trip over alien-looking rocks from home.

This is less peculiar than it sounds. Deep space is a hostile place, but precisely because it's cold out there, cosmic rays and the solar wind can take a long time to sterilize things flying through it. What if a hypervelocity impact on Earth sent not bits of dead dinosaur but some mineral-encased spores clear to Mars?

If anything earthly got to Mars alive, it can have done only one of three things: lived long, prospered or died. If hardy critters from Earth's ecological skid row landed in Martian brine 10 or 10,000 eons ago--bacteria that thrive in acid hot springs, for instance, or Antarctic frost heaves--it's bad news for Carl Sagan fans today. What will become of funding for the SETI project--searching for extraterrestrial intelligence--if we meet the aliens and they is us? Or us is them?

It would be nice to have some evidence either way. A few strenuous years could see the dispatch of some purpose-built probes to solve the conundrum. Recent Mars-destined instruments have focused not on life but on rocks, and you can't do molecular biology with a geologist's pick. NASA needs money enough to send several robots (in case one crashes as usual) carrying not Viking's Edsel-vintage life detectors but 21st-century mass spectrometers, biochips and glimmerings of artificial intelligence to run them.

If this little fleet sniffs a shift in the light and heavy isotopes in the air, or notices DNA in whatever damp cavern it can drill into, it's even money that we will have to get used to having neighbors. But don't get your hopes up, B-movie fans. The odds against Martians sacking Grover's Mills, N.J.--à la Orson Welles--remain, well, astronomical. Think slime and you won't be disappointed.

In 1969, the Eagle landed on the moon in pathetic black and white after rising in thunder and flame like 9/11 run backward. Mars deserves better. This time, the taxpaying audience should demand NASA's full bandwidth and the eye-popping resolution of an IMAX camera. For if we encounter anything not of this Earth on Mars, its image will begin a new and endless iconic dynasty. You can only be alone in the same universe once.

Trop Fort C'est Pas Manque'

Space Shuttle Atlantis seems to have shrugged off the cascade of debris that its fuel tank shed four minutes after launch--this time too high for aerobraking  to inflict the sort of fatal damage that Columbia suffered. But the material -and bureaucratic - problems reviewed in my  WSJ Op-ed remain:

TOO STRONG IS NEVER WRONG

Seeing is believing, but whether it’s 9-11, or the Columbia disaster, it can take months to comprehend what takes seconds to witness .The more you replay the slow motion video of NASA’s test gun shooting a hole in a space shuttle wing, the harder it is to accept what a chunk of glorified Styrofoam did to Columbia. It's as though one of the Titanic’s lifeboats rammed and sank the iceberg. But watch we must--to avoid future disasters it is vital to understand past ones.

The space shuttle may look like a flatiron clad in firebrick, but it’s really a flying soufflé. Its wing tiles have the density of Balsa wood, and the insulation on its liquid hydrogen tank makes cork look heavy. What punched a hole in the wing weighed  just two pounds per cubic foot- so light that the 1, 600-mile an hour air stream screaming by stopped it almost cold. Whereupon the oncoming wing hit it at 500 miles an hour.

 When physics happens, tragedy can unfold with the bizarre internal logic of a Road Runner cartoon. Foam seems such a lightweight nuisance that it is easy to forget that the weaker things are, the denser they can get. Half the foam retained the innocent consistency of a meringue, but the other side ,struck by the wing, scrunched into a mass of compressed plastic stiff as a sculptor’s mallet. Not just in Norse myth do things harmless as mistletoe transform and deliver killing blows.

 Cold has been NASA’s nemesis since 1986 when a giant 'o-ring' rubber band turned rigid on a frosty morning. Its failure to seal a vital joint caused the Challenger explosion. Seeing what warm foam did, this may make such effects seem moot as the caliber of pistol in Russian Roulette. Yet foam spiked with ice or with solidified gas is a bullet worth dodging- liquid hydrogen can freeze the very air

 NASA’s hydrogen-fueled rockets rise skyward on expanding plumes of water vapor. It’s a sight that antique railroad buffs may admire, but it’s strange to find NASA, that avatar of the space age, using fire and water to raise steam to leave the Earth. Whatever became of physics?

 The answer may be that 1986 saw a worse disaster than the Challenger crack-up: Chernobyl. It was a vintage year for Apocalypse fans for the end of the Soviet Union was indeed nigh and the sick bear’s antics were growing alarming. “Nuclear Winter” was riding on the coat-tails of “The China Syndrome” like an advertising banner behind a witch’s broom, when some Ukrainian apparatchiks disabled the safety systems of a nuclear power plant. Their criminal mischief led to the demonizing of nuclear space research. So here we sit in the 21st century, wondering why we aren’t on our way to Mars.

 The space-shuttle bureaucracy is part of the problem. It would rather replace its backfiring warhorse than face a revolution in propulsion and design. Bridge builders use a safety factor of 400%, but for sheer lack of thrust, NASA’s designers are still stuck with 40% and must hold their peace when good people go down in flames. With two shuttles gone, it takes more of the right stuff than ever to fly rockets built out of perilously close to no stuff at all.

 This cockleshell construction is the antithesis of nuclear submarines. They’re built like tanks yet tear around at flank speed for decades on what amounts to a single tank of gas, simply because nuclear forces are so strong. A million-fold increase in energy density enables a negligible mass of fuel to move a mighty tonnage. The reverse is true of the rockets of today. Care to buy a car that gets a ten-thousandth of a mile per gallon?

 NASA has long worked wonders with wisps of carbon fiber and thin scantlings of other advanced materials, but the Holy Grail of designers, almighty strong and feather light Unobtanium, is simply a myth. Sheer mass  continues to matter, because as good as strong materials are, you can’t have too much of them. The underpowered aircraft of yesteryear had  flimsy wings of spruce and silk only because their engines could lift no more. Today’s spacecraft are not much better. NASA needs more powerful propulsion and more formidable spacecraft to assure future astronauts a safe return . There are worse hazards than flying foam between here and Mars.

 The changes in NASA's culture that the Columbia Accident Investigation Board counsels are vital to a safe return to space, but NASA’s only real nemesis remains the force of gravity. There is plenty of physics to apply to the task of overcoming it, , ranging from ground-based lasers to exotic isomeric isotopes and  the ion drive that will gently loft Europe’s first mission to the moon .

 Such new technologies may set the proverbial rocket scientists of Cape Canaveral free to listen to the wise old shipwrights of Cap Finisterre. On that unforgiving Breton shore, they still build even the smallest craft out of massive timbers. Ask why and they reply: “Trop fort c’est pas manqué.” Too strong is never wrong when strong enough can break.

 Copyright 2005 Russell Seitz & Dow Jones Inc.