covenant college
TRANSCRIPT
T H E
S C O T S C I E N C E
J O U R N A L
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: OJVl'.N~NT COLLEGE, UBR Loo\<out Mountain Tennessee . 37350
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Vol. IV #1 ' , October, 1974
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THE SCOT SCIENCE JOU&~AL
Contents
Editor's Note
News in Science
The Professor's Song
Book ·Review
Chess Problem
Puzzle
Dr. J, C. Keister
Associate Editors
Davis Gunn Dr. J.C. Keister Barbara Rose Elisabeth Strom
Biology & Geology Physics Mathematics Chemistry
Vol. IV, # 1, October, 1974 Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee 37350
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1. EDITOR'S NOTE
This year the editor is most grateful for the volunteered~ vices of Davis Gunn (Associate Editor of Geology and Biology), Lis Strom (Associate Editor of Chemistry), and Barbara Ro se (As sociate Editor of Mathematics).
The first issue this year is being made available to students and faculty in general . Those interested in receiving subsequent issues should s ign the i r name on the back page, tear this page off, and turn it in to me or t o one of t he a ssoc iate edi t ors.
As always , the editor i s interested in receiving responses from students and f aculty alike . In three years of operation , we have received two (2) letters of response. Any suggestions about how to make .this journal more interesting, pertinent , colorful,
accur ate, scholarly, e t c. , etc ., · would be mo s t appreciated by t he entire staf f of the journa l. Letters to the editor (of a non-obscene nature ) will be printed in their entirety. Un solici ted art i cles, r elated to science , a lso will be we l comed .
The purpo se of this j our nal is to kee p the scientifi c community of Covenc..nt (as well a s others who are interested ) up to date in science news; to publish scientific papers having a Christian perspective; and to publish puzzles, chess problems, and other items of en terta i nment value. We' r e thankful for what the Lord has helped us do, and we'd appr eciate your prayers f or t he continued improvement of the journa l .
Dr . J , C. Keister
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2, NEWS IN SCIENCE
---------"'.----------------CHEMISTRY: Lis Strom--------------------- - ---
Questions of Health in a New Industry
In Science, Sept. 20 1 1974, Volume 185, No. 1+156, "Plutonium (I): Questions of Health in a New Industry" is a warning by Robert Gillette that there has been an increasing number of reports of contamination by radioactive plutonium in various nuclear processing and research plants. Most of these accidents have t aken place in nuclear weapons plants, but more and more reports come from privatelyowned plants where plutonium is being reclaimed from spent re-
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actor fuel in order to recycle it to produce new r eactor fuel. Cont amination t akes place by breath ing in or swallowing r adioactive ma t eria l which l eaks t hrough faulty gl a s s boxes , gloves , and loose pipes. I nsuffi cien t vent i la tion can also be a cause fo r con t amination. In mo s t acciden t s the amount inhal ed or swallowed is supposedly below the dangerous limit, but so little i s known about t he l ong- range ef fects of plutonium contaminat ion that i t is hard to see how some med i cal personnel can treat it a s l ightly as they do. Mr. Gillette's article calls for ca re in handling plutonium.
A More Accurate Avogadro's Number
In a report from Science, Sept. 20, 1974, Vol. 185, No. 4156 Arthur L. Robinson states that scientists of the National Bureau of Standards have determined Avogadro's Number more accurately than ever before. Tbe new value17 is 6.022 094) X 1025 ± 6.) X 10 per mole. This does not represent a great difference from the old value. Silicon was used in the measurement of this new value. This element has only one ma jor isotope and has been purified by electronics to the point that it forms almost ideal crystals which have extremely well-defined properties. Eventually the scientists hope to "redefine the kilogram in terms of the product of the Avogadro constant and 1/12 the mass of a Carbon-12 atom."
Caution! Dry- Paint
In Chemistry, July-August, 1974, Vol. 47, No. 7 is a description by Norman R. Roobal of a new kind of paint which is made up of fine plastic particles that form a powder. This powder is sprayed onto the surface to be painted and then heated so that the particles fuse together to form a layer of paint. For heat-sensitive objects, such as those made of wood, the spray gun heats the particles as they leave the gun, and they stay hot enough to fuse together on the surface. This new type of paint is gaining popularity over the usual "wet" paint because it cuts down drastically on paint fumes which are harmful to painters and pollute the air. Dry paint is also economical because little is wasted in painting, and it serves the purpose just as well as wet paint.
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-----------------------MATHEMATICS:
The Game of Life
"Life", John Conway's solitaire game, . is discussed in the October, 1970, and February, 1971, issues of Scientific American. "Life" belongs to the class of "simulation games", that is, games which resemble real life processes such as birth, death, and survival. "Life" can be played on a checker board, graph paper, at least one type of interactive computer, and a computer screen.
The basic idea for the game is to start with a simple configuration of counters (organisms), placing one counter to a cell on a large checkerboard. Then the player observes how the config-
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Barbara Rose-----------------------
uration changes as Conway's "genetic laws" for births, deaths, and survivals are applied. These "genetic laws" or rules are:
1. Survivals. 1very counter with two or three neighboring counters survives for the next generation.
2. Deaths. Each counter with four or more neighbors dies (is removed) from over-population. Every counter with one neighbor or none dies from isolation.
,. Births. Each empty cell adjacent to exactly three neighbors--no more, no fewer-is a birth cell. A counter is placed on it at the next move.
The resulting configuration is the first generation.
The article comments that
all births and deaths occur simultaneously, and together they constitute a single generation in the life history of the original configuration. It is also pointed out that every cell has eight neighbors--four diagonally and four orthogonally.
Conway has chosen the rules so that the behavior of a config- , uration is unpredictable. Some phenomena of "Life" are:
1. There should be no initial pattern for which there is a simple proof that the population can grow without limit.
2 . There should be initial patterns that apparently do grow without limit.
3. There should be simple initial patterns which grow and change for a considerable period of time before coming to an end in one of three ways: dying out completely, becoming stable, or oscillating--repeating an endless cycle of two or more periods.
According to the Scientific American author, Martin Gardner, the "deepest and most difficult question posed" by "Life" is that "any configuration with a finite number of counters cannot grow beyond a finite upper limit to the number of counters on the field."
One type of configuration called a "glider gun" ejects a "glider" every few generations. Gardner states that the "existence of glider guns raises the exciting possibility that Conway's game will allow the simulation of a Turing machine, a universal calculator- capable in principle of doing anything the most powerful computer can do." ·
Gardner explains that the
"gliders" would be used as unit pulses to store and transmit information and to perform the required logic operations th.at are handled in actual computers by their circuitry.
If Conway's g~~e handles a universal calculato r, will it allow for a universal ca lculator capable of self-replication? This is another question rai sed by Gardner.
The October and February articles also include some configurations such as "puffer trains", "traffic lig-hts", and "gliders". One curious configuraticn is the Cheshire Cat, illustrated below.
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Using Conway's rules for births, deaths, and survivals, try to find the end result. Hint: A smile should appear in the sixth generation and a paw print in the seventh.
An in teres t ing point to consider is that Conway does not take into account any "afterlife"--eterna l punishment or reward--for the counters which "die". Neither does Gardner comment on the failure of the analogy between human life and the game "Life" in this aspect.
(Com:nent: " Life" has been programmed in Bas ic language and can be played on the computer in John Barnes's office. If Covenant can purchase the game, it will be made available to students to play.)
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-------------------------PHYSICS: J.C. Keister-------------------------
Galileo and the Inclined Plane
Could Galileo have performed the rolling bal l, inclined plane experiment with the precision of about .1 of a pulse beat (about 1. second) in timing measurements as he apparently claimed? Alexandra Kayre', a noted Ga lileo scholar, stated flatly in 1953 that Galileo could not have performed the experiments with such accuracy.
Dr. Paul D. Sherman, a h i story of science teacher at Pace University, N. Y., reported his efforts to duplicate Galileo's experiment in the Vol. 12, Sept., 1974, issue of The Physics Teach~• p. 343. He and his students constructed a wood trough 5 cubits long, with a "finger's breadth" trench sanded and polished smooth. Dr. Sherman used a burette to simulate the water clock used by Galileo. The burette produced a thin jet of wa ter, which was what Galileo stated he used to measure time for his experiment, The experiment wa s conducted by rolling a "very round" ball down the inclined plane, while at the same time starting the thin jet of water running into a container. When the ball reached the bottom of the plane, the jet of water was turned off, The collected water was then weighed to determine the time the ball took to go down the incline. After a number of initial runs to get used to the apparatus, Dr. ~herman was able to reproduce timing measurements for various distances which varied from less than .1 seconds (for short lengths) to about ,3 seconds (for the full length of the trough). In view of the fact that the accuracy and reproducibility of his 'results improved with practice, Dr. Sherman concluded that it was in-
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deed possible that Galileo could have obtained. the accuracies as he claimed. The fact that some of hi s successors could not duplicate the results may have been more a reflection on the ineptness of the successors rather than on Galileo's veracity.
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Comets R.nd the Age of the Solar System
In Creat ion Research Society Q.uarterly, 1974, Peter A, Steveson, Chairman of the Bible Dept., Bob Jones University, summarizes some of the published information on cornets in the solar system. One of the references is to work by . Vsehksviatskii about the concept of the Jovian ejection of cornets (e.g., the ejection of cornets from the planet Jupi ter), and to the rather strong evidence that comet l ifetimes are very short compared to the generally accepted bill i ons of years of lifetime given to the solar system.
The fact that there are comets with short periods in existence, (which lose mass every t i me they circle the su.~) suggests that the comets could not have been around the solar system for the purported billions of years. Estimates have been made, suggesting the age of short period comets to be no more than 10,000 years. A number of comets have been observed to have broken up after only a few passages in historical times •. The existence of comets with periods of 100,000 years also suggests short solar system ages, because many such comets would have been perturbed out of the solar system in the space of billions of years. Furthermore, the number of comets in the Jupiter family is 100,000 times
more than it 'is estima ted Jupit er could have cautured in the (currently fashio~able) age of the solar system.
All in all, comets are a sticky problem to astronomers who believe in an evolutionary, billions-of-years-old type of solar system_. __
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Time upside Down
The above i s the exact title of another article in Crea tion Research Society Quarterly, by Dr. Erich A, Van Fange, who resides in Michigan. This article has a total of 156 references to the difficulties with Earth age and
epoch time measurements from the evolutionary standpoin t: InstMces of men ' s skulls being found i n stra ta ma..".ly 10' s of mi llions of years old by conventional dating methods; evidence of older layers of r ock being on top of younge r layers, with no evidence of th~Jst faul ting; imprints of a man's sandal on tou of a bed of fo ssil trilobites; a.~d many others.
All in all, this is one of the most comprehensively docu mented presentat i ons of evidence counter t o conventiona l evolutionary theory that I have yet seen. It would be wel l worth taking some of the documents referenced , track ing down these anomal ies, and confronting evolutionary - minded scientists with the data,
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3, TH'E PROFESSOR'S SONG
Words by Tom Lehrer; Tune: "If You Give Me Your Attention" from Princess Ida (Gilbert & Sullivan).-_
(Comment: This article is allowed in the Journal with great reluctance. Hopefully, any resemblance between the professor of this song and any math professor at Covena.".lt College is purely coinci dental.)
If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am. I'm a brilliant math'matician-also something of a ham. I have tried for numerous degrees, in fact I've one of each; Of course that makes me eminently qualified to teach. I understand the subject matter thoroughly, it's true, And I can't see why it isn't all as obvious to YOU,
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Each lecture is a maste rpiece, meticul ously planned, Yet everybody tells me that I'm hard to understand,
And I ca.".l I t think ,•hy .
My diagrams are models of true art, you must agree, And my hruidwriting is famous for its legibi lity . Take a wo r d like "minimum" ( to choose a random word),* For anyone t o say he cannot read that i s absu r d . · The a.".\ecdotes I tell ge t more amusing every year, Though fra.".lkly , what they go to prove is sometimes less thaJl clear, And all my explanations are quite lucid, I am sure, Yet everybody tells me my lectures are obscure,
And I can't t hink why,
Consider for example, just the force of gravity: It's inversely proportional to something--let me see--It's r3--no, r 2--no, it's just r, I' 11 bet--The sign in front is plus--or is it minus, I forget--Well, anyway, there IS a force, of that there is no doubt, All these formulas are trivial if you only think them out. Yet students tell me, "I have memorized the whole year through
Ev'rything you've told us, but the problems I can't do,"
And I can't think why!
-l<·This was performed at a blackboard, and the professor wrote: ~
The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 81, No. 7, August-September, 1974, p. 745, Copyright © The Mathematical Association of America (Inc.), 1974.
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4. BOOK REVIEW
Review of Evolution of Mathematical Concents by Raymond 1, Wilder, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1968).
Wilder aruges that mathematics, especially in its pure form, is basically a humanity. He defines a humanity as being an aesthetic pursuit, and it is to be distinguished from a scientific pursuit in that the purpose of science is to produce a view of reality "with a view to adaptation and prediction" (pp. 6-7), Through the use of symbols, mathematics achieves "beauty, simplicity, harmony, or other types of what are generally considered to be aesthetically satisfying qualities" (p. 6). In presenting his position, Wilder first appeals to Pythagoras, especially the terminology which he used for certain numbers such as "amicable", "friendly", and "perfect".
Another part of the argument deals with the parallel line axiom, Probably from the time of
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Euclid this axiom has been questioned as not being an independent axiom. There is nothing wrong with an axiom's not being independent except that it is not aesthetically pleasing, Attempts to show that the parallel line axiom was unnecessary have taken two forms: (1) to prove it from the other axioms of Euclid, and (2) to shew that if its denial is put with other axioms, a contradiction is produced. Neither of these attempts proved to be successful, A third method was used to deal with this aesthetic problem--namely, to deny the parallel line axiom, The geometry which resulted was radically different from Euclidian geometry, but it was just as logically rigorous, Non-Euclidian geometry was used in the theory of relativity.
Wilder sees cultural stress as playing an important role in the development of science. This stress can play either a positive or a ~egative role. An example of negative cultural stress is _
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found in the dying out of Greek mathematics with the beginning of the Dark Ages . He argues, "Given a different set of environmental circumstances, the algebraic developments, which were later undertaken by the Arabs , might have been crea ted in line with the Greek weys of thought, and modern science might have been developed sixteen centuries ago" (p. 162). Positive cultura l stress can be illustrated by the relationship between mathematics and theoretical physics.
If pure mathemat ics is to be considered a humani ty, as \.ii lder sugges ts, this fact should have important implications both for the core and di st ri bution requirements at Covenant. The level of achievement that is r equired for both the co re and distribution requirements should be increased i n both pure and appl ied mathemat i .cs. Advanced mathematics courses should be satisfactory fulfillment of the distribution r equirement IV, "Creative Man".
--Davis Gunn
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5. CHESS PROBLEM
Answer to Last Month's Problem
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2. p b8 (n!) mate
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THIS MONTH'S PROBLEM
White to move and mate within 5 moves
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6. PUZZLE
Answer to Last Month's Puzzle
The quart jar of bacteria will be half-full at 11:59 (one minute before 12:00 noon).
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THIS MONTH'S PUZZLE
There are three boxes on a table, one of which contains two red marbles, one of which contains a red and a white marbie, and one of which contains two white marbles. A blindfolded man is led up to t he boxes on the table and is asked to select a marble at r andom f rom one of the boxes. He selects a red marble. What is the probability t hat the other marble is also red?
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Yes, I would like to receive a monthly copy of the Scot Science Journal .
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