Arcadia,
Santa Clara,
California.
Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
This one's getting a "Zombie Day" tag and rightfully so after my first week as a departmental assistant manager. On the bright side, I'm on vacation this week, so look for more and better, coming soon.
Blaise Pascal died young, only 39 years old when he went God called his wager on 19 August, 1662, a year into the personal reign of Louis XIV, eleven months after the arrest of Nicholas Fouquet, Marquis de Belle Ile and Viceroy of the Americas. Not entirely uncommonly for an old-fashioned mathematical prodigy, he was largely past active scientific work when, on 23 January, 1656, the first of the, anonymously authored Lettres proviniciales dropped. Presenting themselves as letters from a sophisticated, Paris-based Jesuit to a provincial colleague, it "humorously" attacked the purported Jesuit methods as casuistry. The sneer quotes shouldn't be taken as an attack on Pascal's comedic stylings, but rather on the impact of the First Letter on the Society of Jesus. More positively, the letter presents Jansenist soteriology, which, for those who care about such things, sounds suspiciously, or, alternatively, auspiciously Protestant. (I'm not going to get any clearer about these matters because I find Seventeenth Century theological debates and their subsequent recapitulations to be so soaked in bad faith, superficial readings that I'd just as rather not.)
There might be a lesson here to the aspiring transportation disruptor about the mixed consequences of indulging in theological and political controversy, because at the time of his death, Pascal was turning his literary profits into investment capital as the operator of one of the earliest omnibus services, a business that was regulated out of existence within twelve years of his death. He is far from the last "disruptor" we're going to hear about this week.
The lesson, if I have to spell it out, is that offending people is a bad idea when you're in business. One guy who would have been offended by the First Letter, had he lived to see it, was Isaac Jogues. The Jesuit father with the suspiciously Protestant-sounding name did not, because he had been martyred on 18 October 1646, supposedly at the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, at the current location of Auriesville, New York. It is likely that this was not the precise site of the martyrdom, and "Ossernenon" is problematic, too, but it is not in doubt that Jogues was tortured to death only 40 miles from Albany.
In any case, the holy saint and martyr could look down from Heaven to see the omnibus fleet pulled from the road for reasons of class anxiety.
In what I was brought up to call the "Bethe Cycle," but which now requires a whole Wikipedia article to describe the various branchings, a presumed homogenous substrate of deuterium (hydrogen atoms with an atomic mass of 2 due to being composed of one neutron and one proton), combined with two electrons, is fused, after multiple intermediate states and the production of "catalysts" of atomic weight up to oxygen, into an atomic weight 4 helium atoms plus 2 electron neutrons and 7 gamma ray photons, with 26.7 MeV free energy.
The CNO cycle occurs in stars, particularly larger ones. It requires less energy to initiate than the naked fusion of two monoatomic hydrogen atoms (in other words, protons), but is also less efficient. Proton-proton fusions dominate stellar processes in smaller stars, but occur at statistically lower rates, causing these stars to burn less hot than larger stars, where the CNO process predominates. By the late 1930s, these facts were understood in vague outline, although given the fact that the neutrino was still at this point a theoretical particle, and its fundamental properties still obscure, physical science's understanding of the process was obviously still incomplete. Note that this not a question of pure scientific curiosity. Neutrinos can, like neutrons, collide with uranium and plutonium nucleii and initiate atomic fission. This happens at a small fraction of the rate of fission events due to free neutrons in atomic explosions, but given that chain reactions are exponential processes, it is something that a responsible weapon designer might want to keep in mind. Ha ha who are we kidding.
In the IVY MIKE test explosion of 1 November, 1952, the American Atomic Energy Commission released 10.4 MT of free energy and a whole lot of radioactive fallout, plus a lot of politics. Considering that the explosion occurred three days before the 1952 Presidential Election, we might on the one hand say that the explosion occurred in a period of great political uncertainty, on the other hand note that while the media was invested in the idea of the election outcome being open, everyone expected Eisenhower to win; and on the third acknowledge that in fact the composition of the Senate was very much in question, and that while the GOP took a two seat majority in the voting, the defection of Oregon Senator Wayne Morse to sit as an independent, reduced that majority to a potential single vote, with Vice-President Nixon voting to break the tie.