Reaction of bleach With Detergent -- Part 2

I did this again this morning and, although their was still foaming, I felt no heat in the reacting vessel.  Perhaps I was wrong in inferring a chemical reaction last time -- I'm sure if you poured ordinary water into bleach you'd still get some foaming.

Lesson is, science is built on repeatable observations, and I couldn't repeat my own.  Who knows why the mixture grew warm last time; maybe it was nothing but overstimulated imagination.

I guess I'll have to try it one last time, just to make sure.

Wondering About Ourselves: An Excerpt from WONDERING ABOUT

To our astonishment, our common sense view of things biological begins to disintegrate the moment we apply curiosity and imagination to it, to dissect it and look into it at the finest levels science allows us to probe.  In doing so, try as we might, we never encounter this special essence or quality which seems so obvious at first sight.  Instead, what we do find, when we break out our detectors and other scientific instruments, is that living things are composed of atoms and moledcules like everything else, albeit not in the same elemental proportions, yet acting according to the same laws of physics and chemistry as everything else.  The mechanical, Newtonian universe of objects and forces, modified by quantum effects on the smallest scales, appear all that is needed to explain why butterflies fly, or mate, or find food, or stare at us with the seeming same curiosity that we feel gazing upon it.  All our initial impressions, and all the stories that have been told and retold aside, there appears no miraculous special something that we can affix to or inject matter with to make it come alive; no energy fields, no forces, no protoplasm, no elixir of the living, nothing we can pump into Dr. Frankenstein’s reassembled parts of corpses which will make it groan and open its eyes and have thoughts and feelings and break its bonds to move in accordance with them.  There is nothing like that whatsoever.  No, whatever it is that characterizes life lies elsewhere.

But the impression of such a force is so strong, so deep, so instinctual that, try as we might, we cannot simply abandon it without at least wondering why it is there, where it comes from, and what it tells us.  Something is there, of that there can be no question.

Intentionality.  Complexity.  Design.  Try to put aside your ordinary impressions and perceptions of things, and seed your mind, germinate in your mind, take root and push out of the soil and put forth leaves and vines in your mind, the theme that to satisfy our curiosity we must look at the world from a different perspective, the one that imagination unlocks.  Very often, we find that when we look closely, what we thought we were seeing fades away, yet is replaced by something just as amazing – no, more so.

Let us start with the simplest of things that could be called living.  Consider the virus.  Here is something both considerably smaller and simpler than the smallest, simplest bacterium, all biologists would agree.  But on the most microscopic of scales, that of individual atoms and molecules, even the simplest virus turns out to be a machine of remarkable complexity.  At the very least it has to be able to recognize a host cell it can parasitize, whether it is a cell in your body or a bacterium (in which case it is called a bactaeriaphage), somehow figure out the molecular locks and other gizmos which cells use to protect themselves from invasion, penetrate the defenses, then usurp the molecular machinery the cell uses to replicate itself, perverting the cell into a factory for producing many more copies of the virus, copies which then have to figure out how to break out of the cell in order to repeat the cycle on other cells or bacteria, all the while avoiding or distracting the many other layers of defenses cells and bodies use to protect themselves from such invasions.

Biologists still debate whether viruses can be legitimately counted among the various kingdoms and domains of life, but there is no doubt that their hosts, whether bacteria or other single celled organisms or multicellular organisms, can be classified in the great Tree of Life, from which all other living things, be they plants, animals, fungi, or you, diverge from.  And what dominates this tree, right down to the most primitive beginnings we have yet been able to detect, is a level of complexity that we simply do not encounter among the great many more things than don’t belong on this tree, from rocks to stars to solar systems to galaxies.

So after all this, have we cornered our quarry?  We started with the at first sight idea that life possessed some special quality or substance or essence, then realized that we could not find that essence however hard we looked.  But what we did find was that living things, even the simplest of them, showed a level of complex organization well beyond the most complex of non-living things.

Life is special.  I don’t want to lose sight of that.  We are fully justified in our grand division of matter into the non-living – things we explain only by the laws of physics and chemistry at a simple level – and the living, all the things we must also apply whatever biology has to teach us.  What I have been trying to show is that, whatever that specialness is, it isn’t as obvious as it appears upon first sight.  It is more subtle, involving a number of characters and qualities, one of which is complexity and another the appearance of design or purpose.

*          *          *

Again, I say that life truly is special.  It is early May, and I have just come home from a walk through Pennypack Park, one of the many lovely natural places which skirt the city where I live, Philadelphia, one of several cities along the  eastern edge of North America.  I would love one day to walk on the moon or on the red soil of the planet Mars, but what I have just experienced would be utterly lacking in those dead, albeit fascinating places.  In the spring in this part of the world, as in many other parts of our planet, every sense is roused to life by the call of the wild.  Not only are you surrounded by the verdant green of new buds and flowers and grasses, but also by a cacophony of whistles, chirps, tweets, and other rhythmic sounds which reminds you that you that new life is all about, some of it still rustling itself to full wakefulness after winter but much of it already in the air and alit on the many twigs and branches.  And even without vision and sound, you can still smell the musty beginnings of stirrings things, the scents of enticing blossoms and irritating pollens, and you can still feel the grass between your toes and the softness of young leaves on your skin as you brush by the undergrowth.

Here I have spoken of complexity and the appearance of purpose and meaning, and perhaps that is exactly what our scientific mission into the heart and soul of biology requires, but this is one place where, I have to submit, we will never really capture the essence of what we are studying.  Life is something that has to be experienced, and only living things themselves have the capacity, as far as we know, to experience anything.  So, in a sense, our quest to satisfy our curiosity begins with the admission that, at least for the world of the living, we never can completely satisfy it.

Am I going to give up, then?  No, because, as I have maintained up to this point, curiosity combined with imagination and the scientific method can undo any knot, unlock any riddle, however baffling and impervious it may seem.  I have even suggested a starting place even, this idea of complexity combined with apparent purposefulness, an idea I hope to build upon and demonstrate just how powerful it is.  I think we can agree that it is a good starting place.  Biological things, even the simplest of them, are highly complex, we now see, and there does seem to be something to this notion of being imbued with purpose, however that comes about.  If we can make some progress on this front, then perhaps in the end we will satisfy our intellects after all, as impossible as that seems looking at things from their beginnings.

Quadratic Fitting of Data

I recently had to tear my hair out finding an algorithm for the coefficients of a second order fit for a set of data points ( first order fits are easy).  I found this below, in FORTRAN, and translated it into VB:

  Sub QuadFit(N As Double, P As Double, i As Integer, X() As Double, _
              Y() As Double, Q As Double, N As Double, R As Double, _
              S As Double, T as Double, U As Double, V As Double, _
              W as Double, as As Double, b As Double, c As Double)
  
    P = 0

    For i = 1 To N
      P = P + X(i)
    Next i

    Q = 0

    For i = 1 To N
      Q = Q + X(i) ^ 2
    Next i

    R = 0

    For i = 1 To N
      R = R + X(i) ^ 3
    Next i

    S = 0

    For i = 1 To N
      S = S + X(i) ^ 4
    Next i

    T = 0

    For i = 1 To N
      T = T + Y(i)
    Next i

    U = 0

    For i = 1 To N
      U = U + X(i) * Y(i)
    Next i

    V = 0

    For i = 1 To N
      V = V + X(i) ^ 2 * Y(i)
    Next i

    W = N * Q * S + 2 * P * Q * R - Q ^ 3 - P ^ 2 * S - N * R ^ 2
    a = (N * Q * V + P * R * T + P * Q * U - Q ^ 2 * T - P ^ 2 * V - N * R * U) / W
    b = (N * S * U + P * Q * V + Q * R * T - Q ^ 2 * U - P * S * T - N * R * V) / W
    c = (Q * S * T + Q * R * U + P * R * V - Q ^ 2 * V - P * S * U - R ^ 2 * T) / W

  End Sub

I hope you can use it.

I love this illusion. Squares A and B are "clearly" of different shades of grey, eh? So why do when I connect them with a line with A's shade (or B's shade), a line which is in fact of one shade because I selected it that way (with Paintbrush), the lines lighten or darken depending on which square that it is in.

Of course you're brain is fooling you. Lesson? Take caution listening to your brain!

How We Know What We Know -- Chapter Two

When I was in my early twenties I was in love.  It was unrequited, but we still got along well and to this day I still say that she is one of the finest persons I have ever met.  I won’t say it wasn’t painful – as an aspie I probably just didn’t have the knowledge and maturity to win her heart (or maybe it just wasn’t “meant to be”, whatever that means) – but I have always been glad that I knew her.  She was a  terrific friend and companion.

One day, we were discussing ancient pyramids, of both the old and new worlds. You might have noticed that among the very large structures built by these ancient cultures (Maya, Mesopotamia, and Egypt mainly) were a variety of pyramids, from step to flat-faced, with the smaller step ones coming first because they are easier to build, and often evolving, as in Egypt about 2500 BC, toward the huge, flat-faced structures (e.g., Giza).  That this came about by improvements in the needed engineering skills is fairly certain (I doubt they needed ancient astronauts, though of course it is possible), and probably also by larger populations, a decreasing portion of which didn’t have to grow food and so were available as necessary labor.  Better political and cultural organization no doubt played a role too.

In chatting on the subject, she made a claim which I immediately found hard to swallow.  I can accept the Egyptians and Mesopotamians influencing each other; the areas are nearby in the Middle East, while excursions (and even conquests) between the two are common in history.  It’s quite reasonable to imagine (though I am not certain) the two cultures shared and contributed to each others’ pyramid construction techniques and strategies.  I am ignorant of whether this really happened, but it is plausible and easy to believe.

But Egypt/Mesopotamia influencing the Maya?  She was quite sure of this; but it was only because she couldn’t imagine two separate cultures building such common structures, especially such massive ones, without their being a physical connection.  To be fair, the idea sounds superficially reasonable and even compelling, this idea of Egyptian boats making the trans-Atlantic voyage to the Yucatan peninsula and instructing the Mayans on the time-honored art of pyramid building.

What a minute, though.  Ancient Egyptian boats making trans-Atlantic voyages?  In fact, this is a real problem.  As the Europeans were to find out in the 15’th and 16’th centuries AD (and the Chinese about the same time), there are huge differences between large ocean-traversing vehicles and those who stick to rivers, bays, and small seas and lakes.  You need deep, complex keels in the ocean variety to handle the higher and more violent waters and storms, deep harbor ports to handle such vehicles, which are larger, sturdier boats (made with hard wood at least, which Egypt had little of) with more men and much more supplies (to handle journeys of months instead of days or weeks at most), and so on.  Now, I have never heard of any discoveries of these things being made in Egypt through the many centuries she was a great power in the western world; and we certainly would have found them if they’d existed, for there is no lack of archeological exploration there.  What we do know is that Egyptian boats were mostly made from papyrus and other reeds, hardly up to ocean travelling needs.  Indeed, these ancient, (mostly Mediterranean and Black) sea travelling boats stuck close to shorelines for safety, something you couldn’t do in a large ocean.

This would seem to make it virtually impossible for any ancient Egyptians/Mesopotamians to reach the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America.  Even if one did, by accident say (this is possible, with incredible luck), why would they carry pyramid builders and technology with them?  They would have had no ideas what to expect, besides, perhaps, an end of the world to fall off (the ancient Egyptians didn’t know Earth was spherical, a fact that was discovered by the Greeks many centuries later).

I think all this alone destroys this hypothesis, though it is not always easy to make such statements with certainty.  For there is still the fact of similar pyramids in old and new world cultures, something that still needs explaining.  To be complete, the one fact that fits poorest for my friend’s idea (perhaps even worse than the ship dilemma) is that the new world pyramids were built many centuries and even millennia after the old world ones.  If an Egyptian boat were to somehow cross the Atlantic at its pyramid building times it would not have encountered a culture that could imitate much of the Egyptian/Mesopotamian technology/political/cultural levels even to save its life.  Yet by the time the Mayans (and some other Central American cultures) were ready for it, the old world was far beyond pyramids, having acquired the ability to build more complex and useful structures (oh, say, like the Valley of the Kings, the Greek Parthenon and Roman aqueducts, maybe even medieval castles).

*          *          *

Think about it.  You are a well organized, powerful, and highly command-centered Neolithic stone-age culture, with a good supply of available manual labor (including, no doubt and, alas, slaves) and rock.  Time, as in decades, you have in abundance too, or so you hope.  As the leader of this culture you want to construct huge monuments to your greatness, both to intimidate the masses and your neighbors, and to make you remembered for “all of time.”  What would you construct?

Your engineering skills are still pretty primitive for such tasks, so you need the easiest to build, strongest, and most sturdiest structure you can manage.  Is it hard to see that this would be a pyramid, starting off with small, steps ones and building them larger, with smaller steps, as your engineering and architectural skills were acquired over decades and centuries?  A pyramid is in fact very strong, with a stable, a broad, flat bottom combined with tapering construction above it.  I’m sure it requires the least engineering and architectural mastery, as you are just basically carving out (shaped) stones from a quarry, dragging them to the pyramid, and using scaffolding or levering to get them on top of the existing stones.  You may or may not have wheels (as in logs?) and animal power to help you, but that just increases the time it takes.  Enough people, time, and sophisticated enough stone carving tools, and it can be done in a lifetime or less, maybe a decade or less.

Apparently, my friend didn’t think of all these objections to her “hypothesis” (better just called a belief).  She’d stumbled across one fact, the similarities between old and new world pyramids, and that was good enough for her;  there was little or no further researching, or thinking, or skepticism.  I have an unpleasant feeling that that is the way many if not most people think, especially B people (As can’t do this).  They find one or two facts (or factoids even) which suggest an exciting idea, or one that fits a pre-existing idea, and if they look or think further it is only to confirm the idea, which becomes a simple article of faith from thereon.

I have used the word hypothesis occasionally here, as though it is interchangeable with belief or idea, or even speculation, but to the scientific mind the words hardly approach each other in their meanings.  I haven’t used the word theory yet, which I will now, for again in many minds sets up an equivalency:

Belief/Idea/Speculation = Hypothesis = Theory = Truth

It’s clear to me that my friend, though quite intelligent, thought largely along these lines, while it’s a pretty standard philosophical approach for most of Earth’s population.  Unfortunately, it is wrong, dead wrong,  a mistake no scientists worth rock salt would ever make.  I also think it is why B-type people are much more prevalent than they ought to be.  I also connect it with the authoritarian thinking, mentioned in the last chapter, which can bury human curiosity under a think, wet, cold, woolen blanket; for it is seriously, and even dangerously, fallacy supporting.  My friend was intelligent, but she didn’t know how to think or question things.  Shame, though I still respect her.

*          *          *

Belief/Idea/Speculation (BIS) = Hypothesis = Theory = Truth.

Is this truly the way type Bs (not all, to be fair) think?  Type As, definitely not:  they could not perform their jobs, or carry on with their enthusiams, if they did.  But is it as common as I have implied?  And if it is, what is really wrong with it?  We are pretty much all after the truth, after all, and this could be a formula for it, one I simply don’t appreciate for prejudices of my own.

Actually I don’t think it is all that too common as pessimism would suggest, at least not in so pure a form.  But people do routinely make confusions here.  This is important:  a big part of science is giving words and concepts precise, accurate meanings, ones that can then be used in almost mathematical formulations.  And so, if we are to use the words/concepts here in like fashion, we must do the same.  Then, perhaps, we can answer the question I raised at the beginning of the section.

BIS’s are what most of our minds are filled with most of the time, even, I strongly expect, most scientists.  E.g., we Believe in an Idea called God, or maybe various gods; or if we don’t, we still Speculate about whether our sentience is a soul, and whether it survives death, by becoming, say, part of some BIS called “cosmic consciousness”.  Or, to be less esoteric, we have plenty of BIS’s about the people in our lives, about politics, economics, religion, and the many, many other things we “think about without thinking about.”

I am not criticizing here.  The human mind probably has to work this way, if for no other reason that if we were as meticulous about science as we are about everything else, it would be difficult to get anything done!  Remember, too, our brains have been largely wired by genes we’ve inherit from our stone age, uncivilized ancestors.  Making “snap decisions” or acting on gut feeling, without too much asking and exploring, was, for most of our evolution, the better way to save your life and pass on your genes.  But  the result is, we’re stuck with them, at least for the time being.

I think my friend’s idea about Egypt helping with new world pyramid building is a textbook example of a BIS.  It is so easy to bring this Idea down, by being skeptical and thinking about it, that she must have never done those things.  No doubt she just liked the idea so much, and, having one fact to support it, simply assumed that meant it was true.  Man BIS’s are based on the one fact fallacy.

*          *          *

Let’s focus our microscopes on the other three words of the equation:  Hypothesis, Theory, and Fact.

First thing that needs to be said is that, despite all the = signs, from a scientific view they are not equals at all, but distinctly different entities.  At the same time I’ll add up front that in fact they are also not really so distinctly different, but overlap to considerable degrees. 

Let’s start with the word hypothesis, and as usual, an example of it.  I think my counter-arguments to my friend’s idea constitute a valid hypothesis.  It is not theory, and certainly not fact, but simple hypothesis.  First of all, after all I not only attacked the idea (with gusto, of course; all ideas should be attacked with gusto), but presented counter-ideas of my own; for example why pyramid building is natural for a well organized, stone age culture at an early age, and why.

But I did not present any supporting evidence for that, other than the “it should be obvious and here’s why” implication.  Given that, you might dispute my claim to hypothesis status!  But I did give, I believe, some pretty sound logic for it; more important than that, logic that can be explored and tested to see whether it holds up to test.

“Whether it holds up to test” is a great deal of what true hypotheses, the ones in type A minds, concern themselves with.  For an hypothesis is a concept that proposes something, or explains some phenomenon, and which fits all known facts, contradicts none, and can be further tested (that is, can it make predictions).  I believe my friend’s pseudo-hypothesis has actually failed this concept (in her defense, though, she isn’t here to counter her critic, which really isn’t fair), while mine passes muster – probably; I am not an expert in the subjects and there could be facts difficult to fit into it – if only by the skin of its teeth.  And, to reemphasize, it is nowhere near to being a theory, or a fact itself.

I am taking a conservative approach here, as should all scientists.  At heart, we’re curmudgeons who hale from Missouri and often don’t believe things even when we see them with our own eyes (not a good reason to believe just about anything, by the way).  Propose something to a scientist and the best you’re likely to get is, “That’s interesting” along with appropriate body language, or something like that.  Believe it or not, it’s a compliment.

Such are the basics behind hypotheses.  So, next time some fascinating sounding thought comes to you, wait until you’ve checked it against all the facts and logic you can find, and think of some ways it could be further tested, before you announce it to the world.  Not that the thought is automatically useless if you don’t; but then, you’ve just been lucky.  My friend was not lucky.

*          *          *

Theory and fact are more difficult to pin down, because they really have multiple, sometimes interlocking, meanings.  In common parlance, and often in science too, theory just means an explanation for something, even if not a necessarily proven true one (though it must have good evidence for it); in the former, common parlance, case, but decidedly not for scientists, it is not even a necessarily clear, well-supported explanation.  So if, for example, I propose an explanation for how stars form (already been done!), and it passes the hypothesis examinations, people will call it a theory.  But they might not call it a fact because it still hasn’t passed enough testing.

Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection was initially an idea, then a hypothesis, and is now, as it is usually called, a theory.  It’s an explanation, true; but it is also, because it has passed so many tests and has so much evidence on its side, a fully-fledged fact as well.  Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity also get similar, justified, status.  As does the atomic theory of matter.  They’re explanations and they are facts.  Nobody seriously disputes this.

At the same time, as a theory is in another sense also just an hypothesis that has stood up to further testing and observation, such that it can be a claim to fact that may or may not (though most facts do) explain other facts, or support other theories.  I’ll put Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift in this arena.  The theory says that the different continents move around on the ocean beds, occasionally joining each other and then breaking up, as shown below:

Figure II.

     In fact, for much of its existence this theory wasn’t even taken seriously even as an hypothesis by most of the scientific community.  This was partly Wegener’s fault, for he proposed causes for continental drift that were clearly absurd – I emphasize however that this really should not be regarded as evidence against an hypothesis – and mostly (I believe) that community’s fault for not supporting an out of league player (Wegener was a meteorologist by training, not a geologist).

Currently, the theory now is not only clearly true, but is a theory in both senses:  continental drift is a fact (with clear, proven causes), and it is a theory that explains many other phenomena about Earth, ones that had puzzled scientists for a long time.  We now call it rightfully  the theory of plate tectonics, after the true causes of drift.

*          *          *

Fact.  Now, don’t go thinking that fact means “naked observation by the senses” or anything like that.  I already alluded to this, but this is a good time to go further.  If observation really is equal to fact, then the (fact? – maybe you’re lying, or psychotic) that you just saw someone walk through a wall of solid concrete without smashing it apart in someway a fact, or merely an observation – that is to say, a visual illusion?  I’m sure you’ll conclude the latter, even if you have no idea how the illusion was pulled off or how convincing it is.

This may put us in a pickle.  Facts aren’t observations, but don’t they have to be, somehow, supported by observations?  But how do we know whether we’re being fooled or not by these other observations?

One of the problems of science is that it really can’t make indisputable proclamations about the universe.  This makes science vulnerable to “straw men” arguments, often easy to demolish, but unfortunately inevitable if we want to keep it pure.  Yet we can still make real progress here.  For example, sticking with our concrete-traversing man scenario, what would happen if we were to view it from all viewpoints, even those slowed or speeded up in time?  Why, somewhere the illusion would certainly be revealed, for a lot of magic is based on the magician having his/her audience in a chosen viewpoint.  The brain  insists on interpreting sensory input in certain ways, another evolutionary trap which actually is reasonable but sometimes leads us to error.

This suggests a good way of determining fact (if not with infinite certainty).  We make our observations from as many viewpoints as we can, and compare the results.  If they agree, especially repeatedly, we accept them as true; otherwise, they are spurious observations, fascinating possibly but of little scientific value.  Of course, this is not always easy to do!  Do two astronomers, gazing at the same phenomenon a billion light-years in space, really constitute two viewpoints?  In some ways yes, in others certainly not.  But it is the best we can do in this case.

*          *          *

One conclusion of this chapter is that the dividing line between hypothesis, theory, and fact is not always clear, in fact it can be quite broad and grey, the subject of innumerable, passionate, debates.  But, I maintain, the line between the first part of the equation, the BIS, and the others is night and day.  And, I emphasize further, this is the line that is so precise in type A’s minds, but can get so muddled in type B’s.  I think this is the main cause of why B’s (say they) don’t get science and math, beyond any natural talents in either areas.

So remember:  you can have all the ideas you want, but if you want them widely accepted as true, you must eschew the BIS approach and embrace the scientific one.  And good luck to you, for it can be and often is a hard trek.

Kepler-22B; A Warning or Two

The recent discovery of planet Kepler-22B (orbiting the sunlike star Kepler-22) has set off a flurry of articles and other printed/spoken material speculating that we have at last found another Earth-like planet in our immediate stellar neighborhood (the star Kepler-22 is about 600 light-years from our sun, making it quite close insofar as intra-galactic distances are concerned; the Milky way is approximately 100,000 light-years across).

In science however, excitement must be tempered by sober examination of evidence, and there are some good reasons why we should not get too excited by Kepler-22B just yet.   In the first place, we don’t have a good estimate of its mass yet, and probably won’t for a few more months.  This is the most critical consideration as to whether the new planet is a (relatively small) gas-giant world, like Neptune or Uranus, only about half their diameters, or is truly an Earth-like planet, one with a rocky core probably covered with deep oceans.

If the first scenario is true is found to be the truth, this doesn’t automatically rule out life on the new world.  It might still possess liquid water, here as cloud layers, and life could possibly begin in droplets or drops of water seeded with ammonia, methane, hydrogen cyanide, and carbon dioxide, a lá the Stanley Milgrim experiments of the 1950s.  A distinct planetary surface is not actually needed for life, or so current thinking runs.  However, its seems doubtful that such life would have evolved far beyond the single cell, or prokaryotic, stage.  Definitely worth knowing however, if it turns out true.

The other, mass-determined, probability is that of a “super Earth”, a planet like our own, only considerably larger, and one probably covered by ocean-girdling waters and a thick, greenhouse atmosphere.  Again, primitive life is a good candidate for the place, and here even complex, multi-cellular organisms may have gotten a toe-hold.  They could be swimmers and flyers, though almost certainly little in the way of land dwellers, for there would be little of any land to dwell on.  Still, polar icecaps might provide some of this.  A lot depends on the depth of the greenhouse effect, driven largely by water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane.  All three gasses should be copiously produced by volcanism, so we shall see. Volcanism in turn is driven by a hot liquid core containing sufficient amounts of radioactive atoms, atoms like uranium-235/-238, thorium-232, potassium-40 and strontium-87.  Earth has significant amounts of them (creating also our strong magnetic field which protects us from the solar wind) because the creation of our solar system was probably initiated by a supernova type-II explosion, seeding us with heavier elements, but it is not clear whether Kepler-22 was born under similar circumstances (it is not all that unlikely however, so we can reasonably speculate it).  If not however, Kepler-22B might be frozen over, with little internal heat or heavy elements, leading to few prospects for life.

All this is speculation right now, but it may be of the purely academic kind, for other conditions are needed for life.  The biggest problem is the apparent lack of large gas giant worlds, situated further out than Kepler-22B.  They may still exist, in slightly different orbital places than 22B, such that we don’t see their occultations from Earth; doppler “wobbles” in the star’s spectrum might yet root them out.

If they are not found, however, this is troubling for life’s prospects on 22B.  Jupiter and Saturn stand as staunch shields against a large number of asteroid and comet impacts to our planet, impacts that nevertheless occur to a disturbing degree and which could wipe out all life here if large enough ones occurred with sufficient frequency.  But we have a couple of heavy duty bar bouncers that either suck up those impacts themselves, or hurl the offending rock/ice worldlets out of the solar system, or park them in the asteroid belt.

If Kepler-22B doesn’t have its own bouncers, then it is probably being regularly pounded by asteroids and comets, so much so that life can’t get started there.  Now perhaps its not that bad a problem out there because the Kepler-22 system was not the result of a supernova explosion; but then there might not be enough heavy elements to make a hot, molten core, with its attending strong magnetic field and copious atmospheric components.

Then there’s the other problem, which I’m not certain is truly severe or not.  Earth has an axial tilt of 23° , which is almost perfect for our seasons and the life adapted to it.  The tilt does not vary greatly, and supposedly we have our large moon to largely thank for that.  The reasonable length of our day is also due largely to the moon.  Frankly, I don’t know how large of a problem this really is; with the exception of Uranus (with a 98° axial tilt, rotating virtually on its side), all the planets rotate on roughly vertical axes to the solar system’s orbital plane, and only Mercury and Venus have unusual days, in the first case one locked in a 2:3 resonance with its solar orbit, and in the second, Venus’, case a slow retrograde axial orbit (opposite to its movement about the sun).

If these parameters are important (as suggested by the “Rare Earth” hypothesis) then 22B could be in big trouble, though this is not certain.  But all of these considerations, taken together, should keep our enthusiasm in check as we explore Kepler-22B further.

Another Mixing Snafu

I just got nailed on another reaction of household products, this time regular bleach with toilet bleach.  Remember that regular bleach is just sodium hypochlorite dissolved in water:

NaOCl (H2O) ® Na⁺ + OCl^-

OCl^- + H2O ↔ HOCl + OH^-

H⁺ + Cl^- + OCl^- ® OH^- + Cl₂

H⁺ + Cl^- + HOCl ® H₂O + Cl₂

In both of the bottom reactions gaseous chlorine is generated in serious quantities.  This is because often, not always but in this case, which I would have known had I bothered to read the labels instead of just assuming, toilet bleach is fairly concentrated hydrochloric acid.  Needless to say it starting foaming at once, and when I came had just enough to flush before being driven out, coughing and tearing.

Lesson:  read labels on chemicals before using!