Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves

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To the memory of my mom, Paula Dunn

“Forward”

The heavens rejoice in motion…

—JOHN DONNE, ELEGIES (CA. 1590)

We are embedded in a magical matrix of continuous motion. Clouds change shape, tsunamis destroy cities. Nature’s animation happens eternally. Its energy springs from no apparent source. Nor, we learn, does it ever diminish. It’s tireless.

As we have with all magic, we’ve grown accustomed to nature’s endless guises. Too accustomed; we scarcely give it a second thought. Yet it is intimately close. Even the workings of our eyes and brains, reading these words, are examples of natural motion. In our minds’ case it’s the action of electrons and neurons as one hundred millivolts of electricity make various connections in the brain’s one hundred trillion synapses. The result: our perceptions.

This book, then, is about natural activity in all its forms. It is essentially a book of miracles. To paint this dynamism in the vivid colors it deserves, I will offer close-up peeks at the most fantastic, epic, intriguing, but also little-known ways in which spontaneous action operates, using the discoveries of scientists from ancient times to the twenty-first century.

Because motion is everywhere and takes all forms, this cannot possibly be an exhaustive survey, though I have endeavored to include all nature’s major theaters, such as wind, digestion, and shifting poles.

A mere dry recital of facts and data wouldn’t be much fun. So let’s marvel—not at man-made motion, even if our rockets and bullet trains are indeed wonderful, but at the kind that unfolds on its own. This book itself moves, too, after the opening high-speed salvo, from the slowest entities to the fastest ones. Along the way I’ve paused to recount the stories of some of the fascinating people who brought us discoveries in various venues. Some were geniuses. Others were lucky. Many were so far ahead of their time they were ridiculed.

This, then, is our story—of the endless movements that forever surround us and the brilliant people who uncovered these revelations through the centuries. And how destiny’s own quirky momentum carried them through their lives.

Bob Berman

Willow, New York

It’s a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries…

—JOHN MASEFIELD, “THE WEST WIND” (1902)

The storm was scary-wild.

Although it had lost hurricane strength before slamming into upstate New York, the wind still howled at fifty-five miles per hour, and the dog hid under the bed. But it was the rain, the relentless rain, that had us all worried. By the second day, more than eight inches had fallen. In our mountainous area, streams overflowed before the first sunrise. Many wooden spans, along with two steel-and-concrete bridges, did not survive the night. They were simply gone, vanished without a trace. Authorities later assumed they must be lying at the bottom of the enormous reservoir twenty miles downstream.

Entire communities were isolated from the world. At noon that day, some homes, those still inhabiting their footprints, had water up to their windowsills. Meanwhile the ground had become so soft and wet that the gales had no trouble knocking down swaths of trees, root balls and all.

The power went out the first night. In our rural region, which doesn’t offer mail delivery or cell-phone service even on the sunniest days, we were utterly alone. No one had water, plumbing, or telephones. It might as well have been the year 1500.

Morning dawned to find trees across my roof. Shattered glass littered the stone entranceway. But this wind-borne destruction paled next to the devastation wrought by the waters moving through those valleys. My niece lost her entire house. It had been standing placidly for forty years, and then it was gone. The floodwaters had been five feet deep and had crept along at less than four miles per hour. Yet this sluggish brown water had created far more devastation than my own backyard’s fifty-five-mile-per-hour gales.

It was ironic, in a way. For decades I had made my living narrating nature’s activity as though I were a sportscaster. As the astronomy editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac and a columnist for Discover and then Astronomy magazines, I would routinely calculate how the moon and planets moved and describe their exuberant conjunctions. Nature’s motions reliably put bread on my table. Now they had turned on me. Like everyone else, I wondered how many out-of-pocket repair dollars I would have to spend.

If nature’s activity had long paid my mortgage and yet was now chasing me out of the house, I smelled a story whose dramas, tragicomedies, and linked biographies might equal any novel’s. I already knew that water moving at just four miles per hour is as destructive as a medium-strength tornado, which is why floods kill more people than windstorms. Water is eight hundred times denser than air and pushes things far more easily. But who were the first scientists to discover this? Were they impelled by personal events, as I was? Did their own lives and struggles include dramatic episodes?

Nature’s whimsy obsessed me even before the winds quieted. I realized that my ideas about physical and biological animation were themselves forms of motion on the neural-electrical level. So it’s all motion, everything of interest, always.

After the storm, the power remained out and would not be restored for more than a week. I scribbled notes by hand, by candlelight, the way Thomas Jefferson had done, for he was obsessed with natural science, too. (John F. Kennedy, presiding over a 1962 gathering of forty-nine Nobel laureates, commented that never before had such talent been assembled at the White House, “with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”)

My lifelong preoccupation with celestial motion then expanded to the movements of desert sand, disease, and maple sap. As the heavy rain continued, I recalled that it falls at twenty-two miles per hour. In nature, this same number repeats over and over, like the restatement of a musical motif. Were there other recurring patterns? What were the boundaries—the fastest and slowest in the universe and in everyday life?

I knew I would have time on my hands while workmen repaired the house. I made my decision. I would raid my savings and travel the world. I’d use my press credentials to find the experts and researchers who probe the most amazing motions of nature. I would explore and expose anything that stirs, budges, or animates itself, from the strangest and slowest entities to the very fastest. I would also research the ways in which earlier cultures uncovered these secrets.

One adventure had barely ended. A much bigger one was beginning.

And I knew exactly where I would go first.

And what does this awesome motion mean?

—NIKOLAI GOGOL, DEAD SOULS (1842)

From an observatory atop a mountain in the Andes one moonless midnight, untwinkling stars peppered the heavens. Not even the smallest patch of celestial real estate was starless. The Milky Way split the universe in two with such ferocious brilliance that the observatory’s giant domes cast blurry, surreal shadows on the ground.

The clank of footsteps on the building’s metal catwalk broke the silence. It was the observatory director, Miguel Roth. He stopped and casually surveyed the scene as if he hadn’t spent the last twenty years in this place. Handsome as a movie star, Roth is the undisputed godfather of the researchers who live in this thin air, breathing in the cosmos from the most perfect astronomical site on earth. That night Dr. Roth was generously accompanying a lucky visiting American journalist interested in how the world moves.

That was me.

Looking for motion, I had gone for broke.

Starting at my local public library, where things move with a wonderful slowness, I had hunted for the earliest recorded thoughts about nature’s animation. I toyed with the logical approach of beginning with viruses, fingernails, or tectonic plates—things that move and grow so slowly, so grudgingly, that they are imperceptible. Start slow and build from there.

But action films never begin with lethargy. I liked the idea of moving from slow to fast, but why not shoot an opening scene in which everything hurtles at screaming velocities? Hit the ground running with frantic exploits only the lunatic mind of nature could choreograph? After all, the biggest of all known motions encompass everything we could possibly consider.

But that hysterical realm is not of this earth. The mother of all motion is the entire universe, which is blowing itself apart. As it does so it creates separate animated venues, like swirling eddies in rapids.

Venture off the planet, and wildness rules. The smallest solar telescope shows that even on our nearby sun, that beloved giver of life, it’s always the apocalypse. By the time we gaze toward the farthest galaxies, we see spinning, colliding things that are tumbling faster than the speed of light.

But how can mortals even perceive a universe that is exploding around them? I needed to visit cutting-edge astrophysicists working with the world’s best equipment, people who are used to thinking outside the box. And, moreover, that “box” is not some well-behaved container but rather the spherical earth, crazily hurtling like jettisoned cargo toward no particular destination. No one’s built a major observatory east of the Mississippi for more than a century, so this meant a distant odyssey. The problem is not just clouds. Astronomers require steady “seeing” (nonblurry images), and this happens when overhead air is spared the turbulence of multiple temperature layers. Mountaintops are good, but the most ideal locations do not exist in the mainland United States or Europe—not even in Asia’s Himalayas. They are in South America. The reason for that continent’s top celestial status has odd roots, entangled with a long-dead Scotsman.

The Scotsman was industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and he was easy to hate. While his workers lived from hand to mouth, unsuccessfully fighting their boss’s miserly pay cuts, he became the world’s richest man. By the late 1800s, Carnegie Steel Company—later called United States Steel Corporation—propelled its tiny owner, exactly five feet tall, into a royal life in a Scottish castle.

But everyone loves a converted tyrant, a sinner turned saint. Carnegie did a 180-degree turnaround just as the century flipped from the nineteenth to the twentieth. In a series of newspaper articles, the robber baron, outperforming even the metamorphosis of Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge, started advocating the abolition of war and free nonsectarian education. Donating fantastic sums that ultimately totaled his entire fortune of $380 million—several billion in today’s dollars—he established more than three thousand free libraries, funded African-American education, built concert venues (Carnegie Hall comes to mind), and (in case you thought this was never heading toward science) established a series of cutting-edge foundations. Thus came the birth of the Carnegie Observatories, a unique institution that still is working full-time on the greatest mysteries of the universe, which, fortunately for us, revolve around motion on the most epic scale.

Carnegie hired the best possible person to be the first director of his fledgling institute—George Ellery Hale, who in turn rounded up the sharpest minds of his time. First he employed the renowned Harlow Shapley, the person who found that Earth does not sit inertly at the center of our galaxy like Jabba the Hutt. This was the biggest motion-related headline of the newly born twentieth century. The sun and Earth, he found, lie closer to the edge of the galaxy than the middle, and thus they whirl around as it spins.

Next Carnegie hired Edwin Hubble, freshly returned from studying in Oxford, where he acquired a British accent that, annoyingly, he never shed. It drove his colleagues bonkers.

Hale and Carnegie believed that great discoveries demanded the world’s biggest telescope, and they set out to build it. Site tests for the area around Mount Wilson, then a dark and sleepy region outside Los Angeles, began in 1903. The men soon completed a behemoth that had a mirror sixty inches wide, the largest in the world. Then in 1917, also at Mount Wilson, they outdid themselves with the completion of the hundred-inch Hooker colossus and its nine-thousand-pound optical surface made of melted wine-bottle glass, which explains why that telescope has a green mirror, a fact capable of stumping any Jeopardy! champion. In that era before rural electrification, each telescope precisely tracked stars with a mechanical drive mechanism propelled by two-ton falling weights.