10 Computer

A MODNART

When my oldest daugh-ter was in secondgrade, she learned anew song, “All ThingsAre Connected.” The

song seemed to be an environmentallesson, along the lines of “whateverhappens to the birds and the beasts willalso happen to us.” A nice sentiment,delivered in an effective way to a sec-ond-grade audience. But she and I alsohad a lot of fun with word substitu-tions—ejected, dejected, erected, dis-sected, elected, subjected, and evensome stretches like eclectic, apoplectic,and heretic(al)—resulting in new songtitles that were hilarious to at least onesecond-grader. I personally liked “AllThings Have Dielectrics” best, but forsome reason my daughter didn’t thinkthat one was particularly funny.

I also wondered if there wasn’t somesubliminal quantum-mechanical mes-sage in the “Connected” song, consid-ering that in some degenerate sense,whatever happens to any charged par-ticle anywhere in the universe impingeson the ones that compose you and me,after a suitable transit time governedby the speed of light. But when I raisedthat possibility with my daughter, shecocked her head to one side, andadopted a familiar “What the heck iswrong with my dad?” look. I took thatto mean, “No, I don’t think so.”

THE SPEED OF LIGHTWhat better way to increase the over-

all quantum connectedness of all thingsthan to speed up light? It’s way overduefor improvement, after all. Computershave gotten faster, highway speed limits

are increasing to previous levels (evi-dently to compensate for the increasingeffectiveness of safety devices), the over-all pace of life has gone from busy tofrenetic, and Internet bandwidth isimproving. But the speed of light hadbeen a constant for approximately 5.5billion years, and nobody had done adarned thing about it.

Well, now, somebody has. In FasterThan the Speed of Light: The Story ofa Scientific Speculation (Perseus BooksGroup, 2003) physicist Joao Magueijoprovides a captivating look over hisshoulder as he tries to push scienceahead by taking a clear-eyed inventoryof what is working and not workingabout the best available theories in cos-mology. How many physics bookshave back-cover reviews with words

like “racy,” “irreverent,” or “vicariousthrills” in them? Those descriptions, asit turns out, are quite accurate. Thisbook is a page-turner.

Magueijo’s exposition of the BigBang theory, its connections toEinstein’s general theory of relativity,and the holes in today’s “inflationarymodel” is lucid, immediate, and en-thralling. He proposes that, regardlessof the overwhelming general accep-tance of a constant speed of light, ifthat constant were allowed to vary, itwould nicely explain many of the out-standing conundrums of cosmology.

Incremental or revolutionary?There is also a story-within-the-

story. What happens to scientists whopropose something revolutionary?

The scientific establishment is pre-wired to encourage certain behaviorpatterns and discourage others. If youwant to get a paper published in a peer-reviewed conference or journal, thereare two principal avenues. The first,and by far most common, is to proposean incremental improvement to anexisting idea; the second is to proposea revolutionary idea that almostalways refutes something that the restof the field has accepted as doctrine.

How does a researcher convince thefield that a new idea is a winner, giventhe implication that they must all dosome uncomfortable neural rewiringto accommodate it? New ideas seldomcome with compelling proof and usu-ally appear to be somewhat unlikely.They often originate with one person,which gives them an idiosyncratic andgenerally shaky appearance; there is lit-tle substantive data with which to jus-tify them; and the person proposingthe idea is seldom one of the field’strusted authorities. Instead, the revo-lutionary is often an unknown with notrack record.

Finding fundingAnd then there’s the funding “big

hammer.” Most science requiresmoney, and some science requires largeamounts of it. The people at the agen-

All Things AreConnectedBob Colwell

For any field tomove ahead,researchers musttry things evenwhen they don’tquite know whatthey’re doing.

November 2004 11

cies who control these disbursementsare in their positions because they aretechnically skilled enough to identifypromising ideas. But that very skillmeans they are themselves predisposedto incremental science.

Competently plying her trade, afunding agent will solicit peer reviews,and at least one of those reviews willcome back in the form of “This pro-posal has no investigators with anytrack record. It makes claims that can’tbe confirmed from the current state ofthe art, and there’s no compelling datato justify the extrapolated conclusionsproffered. All things considered, thisproposal doesn’t look substantially dif-ferent from one that might come froma complete crackpot.” The fundingperson could then reject the proposalwith high confidence. This processleaves such would-be revolutionarieson their own. All Things Are Rejected.

Challenging the establishmentFollowing Magueijo’s struggle, based

on the idea that essentially begins with“Einstein was wrong, the speed of lighthas not always been a constant,” is anincredible ride. It’s clear that at somerational level, Magueijo fully under-stands what he’s up against. He says,“Every new idea is gibberish until it sur-vives ruthless challenge. After all, whathad motivated my idea [of a varying-speed-of-light, VSL] was precisely myquestioning the validity of inflation.”Inflation was a theory that tried to “fix”the Big Bang’s problems of dark matterand uniformity.

Don’t be fooled. While his rationalmind understands, Magueijo is hu-man, and he’s not afraid to show thatside as well. Maybe he’s a little toounafraid. But this is ultimately whatmakes his book compelling. He talksabout schools, school administrations,friends, colleagues, English society, girl-friends, conferences, Berkeley (“semi-deranged people constantly sniping ateach other”), journals, and many otherthings, in language you might hear onlyfrom a vice president on the Senatefloor.

Right or wrong? Is Magueijo’s theory right? Nobody

knows yet. This book lays out hisrationale and context for it, andMagueijo argues as strongly as possi-ble (in a popular-science style book: nomath allowed) that it’s plausible. Buthe stops short of claiming victory. He

prefers to predict the reactions of hiscolleagues: If the theory turns out to beright, he says they will “twist historyto claim priority;” if it turns out to bewrong, well, some of them are “des-perate to see VSL fall on its face.”Welcome to big science.

BURYING YOUR MISTAKESFor any field to move ahead,

researchers must try things even whenthey don’t quite know what they’redoing. This means that mistakes willbe made. And the bigger the thingyou’re trying, the bigger the potentialmistakes will be.

When the field in question is themedical profession, these mistakes willliterally be buried. To remind yourselfof why you chose engineering insteadof medicine, read Oscar London’s Killas Few Patients as Possible (Ten SpeedPress, 1987) or Samuel Shem’s TheHouse of God (Dell, 2003). In fact,read them both, and then try hardnever to get sick.

Perhaps physicians generally realizethat, without treatment, some deathswill occur anyway, so they might aswell try some courses of treatment thatare only partially effective or are ofunknown efficacy. For whatever rea-son, apart from malpractice (a topic ofits own) society tends to accept the stateof the medical art, and it doesn’t try toshut down hospitals just because physi-cians sometimes can’t prevent deaths.

Engineers are held to much higher

standards than that. If our bridges falldown, airplanes crash, or computerchips don’t always get long divisionright, investigations are launched todetermine the root causes.

Granted, maybe we are held tohigher standards because we can be.“The best we can do” is sufficientlygood that our designs can be—andtherefore are—expected to be depend-able and our methods repeatable. Insome areas, such as setting brokenbones, medical practice approachesthat same level of reliability. But in oth-ers, such as internal medicine, orworse, psychiatric disorders, it isn’tpractical to insist on extremely highreliability. The field simply isn’t thereyet. All Things Are Affected.

SPEAKING OF SPACEThe Last Man on the Moon (St.

Martin’s Griffin, 1999) is EugeneCernan’s book about his role inAmerica’s space program. Chapter 1begins with the infamous Apollo 1 firethat killed fellow astronauts Virgil“Gus” Grissom, Roger Chaffee, andEdward White and ends with Cernanstanding at their funerals, wonderingif the space program had just endedwith their deaths.

Reading about this from Cernan’sperspective casts new light on this eventand the people it affected. They weren’tjust government employees having abad day at work. They were friends;they and their wives and children werepart of an extended family. They livednearby and had barbeques andwatched football games together. Thisintroduction to Cernan’s intensely first-person way of viewing everything in hislife sets the tenor for the book perfectly.

The right stuffCernan was one of the people Tom

Wolfe had in mind when he coined thephrase “the right stuff.” Cernan obvi-ously idolized those who had comebefore him, such as Chuck Yeager andAlan Shepherd. Although it’s clear hethought of himself as an outstandingpilot, he has a disarming way of first

Maybe engineers areheld to higher standards

because they can be.

12 Computer

A t R a n d o m

marvelling that some others were evenbetter than he was. But he quickly fol-lows that with “I’d never let themknow I thought that, of course.” Thatattitude of striving for excellence, whileallowing for others to do the same andsometimes get there sooner, holds greatappeal for me, and I think it appliesequally well to engineering.

I’ve always been fascinated by thelarger-than-life space program thatlanded humans on the moon. I’m inawe of the engineering, the programmanagement, the utter dedication ofall involved, and the astronauts them-selves. The inside-the-scenes look at theentire space program from Cernan’spoint of view is eye opening.

Spacewalk survivorDespite having read many books

about the program, I had never encoun-tered some of the events Cernandescribes. For instance, he was the firstUS astronaut to attempt a tetheredspacewalk from his Gemini capsule, anaccomplishment that was officiallydeemed a success—success beingdefined as “spacewalker survived theexperience.” But Cernan’s account ofthis event is absolutely harrowing.Once he was outside the capsule,

Newton’s third law of motion—“Forevery action there is an equal and oppo-site reaction”—ruled in a way that themission planners simply hadn’t appre-ciated. Perhaps Newton’s third law isjust “all things are connected” for thespecial case of only two things?

Cernan was supposed to go outsidethe capsule, navigate his way to arocket-powered backpack, cruisearound as the world’s first human

satellite for a while, then get backinside. What actually happened wasthat Cernan made it to the backpackonly with tremendous difficulty, andhe was seriously overheated and nearlyexhausted when he got there. Hisspacesuit couldn’t handle the overload,and it fogged up so that he couldn’t see.

After he eventually cleared a smallspot on the visor from the inside withthe tip of his nose, Cernan had to tacklethe nearly impossible task of gettingback into the capsule in a fully inflatedspacesuit. Accomplishing that requiredhaving his fellow astronaut essentiallycrush him back into his seat, at painlevels that made him almost pass out.

Then, after he returned to Earth,Cernan had to face doubts from mis-sion planners and fellow astronautswho speculated that his difficulties inthe spacewalk had been self-inflicted—the dreaded Right-Stuff DeficiencySyndrome. He was vindicated onlyafter more spacewalk experience hadbeen collected from others.

Pilot talesCernan also relays stories about

once having flown a jet so low that heclipped a 10-foot pole and landed witha chunk of wood sticking out of a gunport. Another time he flew a helicopterso low that its skids dug into a wave,flipping the machine forward, and

sinking it to the bottom of a river.Whereupon, his helmet rose like a corkand threatened to strangle him. Whenhe managed to extricate himself,Cernan found that the surface of theriver was a sea of flame, and he had toswim quite a distance underwater tofind safety.

He also explained something I’dlong wondered about. He was in theLunar Excursion Module for theApollo 10 mission, which did every-thing but actually land on the lunarsurface. In one exercise, the astronautswere to fly the lunar module to withina few miles of the surface, as if theywere going to land. Then on the wayback up, they were to run a test, whichwent seriously awry, apparently fromjoint pilot error. Due to an open micro-phone, we knew on Earth that some-thing bad had happened because thepilots were using swear words rivalingthose cited earlier.

Cernan explains that while only afew miles high, their LEM flew “eightcartwheels” and was completely out ofcontrol for several seconds, until TomStafford took manual control and sta-bilized it. Hmmm, Chernobyl, ThreeMile Island, Apollo 1, Apollo 10—test-ing can be very dangerous. So can nottesting.

E ugene Cernan exemplifies theengineering attitude I think isoptimal: Have total confidence

in your mission and your ability toaccomplish it. But work toward itknowing there are a thousand ways tofail, and that you will have to takequick, decisive actions to avoid someof them. Purposefully nurture the judg-ment needed to successfully navigatethese waters. Remember: All ThingsAre Suspected. �

Bob Colwell was Intel’s chief IA32architect through the Pentium II, III,and 4 microprocessors. He is now anindependent consultant. Contact himat bob.colwell@comcast.net.

Testing can be very dangerous.

So can not testing.

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