Welcome to Akron Physics Club Online

Listed below, for your convenience, are past Physics Club meeting announcements and minutes.

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, October 22nd to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

    The Akron Physics Club convened for the first meeting of its 20th year of operation in the Terrace Room of Tangier Restaurant on Monday, September 28, 2009.
     These 18 persons were in attendance --- including, of course, our invited speaker, Dr. Jie Shan, Associate Professor of Physics at Case-Western Reserve University: Georg Bohm, Tom & Marie Brooker, Bob Erdman, Dave Fielder, Sam Fielding-Russell, Dan & Ben Galehouse, Rus Hamm, Bob Hirst, Jonah Kirszenberg, Charles Lavan, Leon Marker, Dick Sharp, Dave Sours, Ernst von Meerwall & Charlie Wilson.
    After our pretty good meal, Chairman Ernst von Meerwall conducted a brief business meeting. In it Treasurer Dan Galehouse reported that our treasury was unchanged from last time --- at about $355.66. Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell reported that we now have programs arranged for all 8 of our APC meetings for the 2009 - 2010 club-year. (This schedule will be circulated soon to all of our members.) ........ And APC members are encouraged to continue to suggest both speakers and topics for future meetings !!! It is important that our program committee should begin as soon as possible negotiating with our many excellent local experts to deliver their fine talks (always labors of love) to us sometime in the future.
    Chairman Ernst next introduced our invited speaker, Dr. Jie Shan, Associate Professor of Physics at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Shan was educated through high-school in China, then graduated from Moscow (Russia) State University in math & physics, and earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University (New York). She has been on the CWRU Physics faculty since 2001. Her
announced topic was:

    The generation of ultrashort light pulses of coherent optical radiation from Ti:sapphire mode-locked lasers has advanced dramatically. Pulses as short as two optical cycles (about 5 femtoseconds) are now possible. These pulses have had a significant impact on many areas of spectroscopy.   One of these is the time-domain spectroscopy of the Terahertz (THz) or far-infrared spectral region.

    One Terahertz (1 THz) = 1000 Gigahertz = 1,000,000,000,000 Hz

    This region of the electromagnetic spectrum corresponds to the frequencies of many fundamental excitations in solids and molecules, including phonons, low-frequency vibrational modes, rotations and certain collective electronic excitations.
    Using such powerful new Terahertz sources and detectors, it is now possible to study in great detail many interesting materials. These studies are now being carried out by Dr. Shan and others elsewhere.
   Applications of ultrafast laser pulses to the study of various condensed-phase systems were discussed. Possible uses that Dr. Shan suggested were --- in addition to research --- biomedical (e.g., skin imaging for cancer detection), and defense (e.g., different absorption patterns for various explosives in baggage, etc.)
    Dr. Shan kindly passed along copies of her interesting slides for this talk, which will be posted on the Akron Physics Club web-site.

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, September 24th to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

VISITORS ARE WELCOME - COLLEGE STUDENTS are FREE

(But everybody needs a dinner reservation!)

Our last meeting of the season brought a number of visitors, including Mike Piekarski, guest of Dave Fielder; Mike Pliska brought two visitors, Vivak Katigar and Ram Balasudramanian. And we were pleasantly surprised to be “visited” by Associate Secretary Jerry Potts (back temporarily from servicing his customers in India, China and points east). After introducing the first timers, Chairman Ernst von Meerwall called on Secretary Dan Galehouse for a current assessment of our wealth.

Dan was relieved to announce that although we had started the evening with $367.60, after covering dinners for our guests we had finished with the reduced sum of $355.66 — which, as he said, “is a little easier to count.” Dan was followed by Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell, who, having delivered eight months of programs covering a refreshing variety of topics, repeated his plea to the membership for suggestions of speakers and topics for the new year beginning in September — to which he was pleased to add that he already had the acceptance of one speaker. But when asked what the subject was to be, Sam’s (obviously) honest answer was, “I have no idea [thus giving the speaker several months to decide]!”

At this point, your secretary did a five-minute show-and-tell, displaying a polished (silica) fossil of one of the earliest known life forms: semi-circular rings that are chains of "stromatolites," cyanobacteria, which are a primitive algae some 2.1 billion years old. Stomatolites were originally discovered in Australian reefs, but have recently been found in chert layers (amid gunflint deposits) on the north shore of Lake Superior, where neurologist/paleobiologist, Dr. Charles (“Skip”) Brausch dug out my sample. Demonstrating that stromatolites were one of the first green vegetarian life forms whose chlorophyl emitted some of our atmosphere’s first oxygen, Skip had included a small chunk of contemporary sedimentary rock containing layers of iron compounds which had been turned bright red from the oxygen emitted by the algae.

When I passed the above sample around the table before dinner, Dave Fielder pulled from his pocket a considerably younger (about 600,000 years old) fossil of a tiny, lobster-shaped insect with scores of flagella on its sides —an example of the fauna that had evolved in the oxygen atmosphere contributed by primitive flora. Both fossils and the chunk of very old sedimentary rock were on display on the nametag table after the meeting adjourned.

Which brought us to speaker-introduction time, a chore adroitly performed by Chairman Ernst. Dr. Sasi Pillay, a mechanical engineer who earned his PhD in Computer Engineering is Chief Information Officer for NASA Glenn, in which capacity he has won several awards. The title of his talk was High Perforance Computing and Visualization. First, however, he introduced his NASA colleague, Dr. Jay Horowitz, who, Dr. Pillay said, “would go through the more fun part of the demonstration.” To this end they had set up an array of glowing, writhing, electronic A-V equipment that included a pair of projectors with crossed-axis polarized filters.

Dr. Pillay began by restating NASA’s mission: “To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.” He showed us a map illustrating more than a dozen U.S. locations of NASA facilities, which included laboratories, research centers, and flight centers — with a mention of others in Spain and Australia. But Pillay concentrated on the goals of Glenn Research Center, which covers 350 acres at Lewis Field in Cleveland, where it employs 1600 civil servants and 1735 contractors. Then there is Glenn’s Plumb Brook Test Site at Sandusky, covering 6400 acres and employing an additional 14 civil servants and 117 contractors. Currently, Glenn’s total budget is $649 million. Test facilities include two wind tunnels— one 10 X 10 feet and the other 9 X 16 feet. [I’ve heard that these are so powerful that their operation is often scheduled late at night to avoid interfering with the electrical power demands of the City of Cleveland.]

Glenn’s high-performance supercomputing assets are something special. They involve 286 interconnected processors, for which we saw diagrams of cluster configurations and archival storage maps involving sites having hundreds of tetrabyte memories interconnected with others having a thousand times that much, producing a colossal common memory — all of which was beyond the scope of this writer [whose computer experience is limited to his current Mac, a Wang (1982-vintage) and an IBM 1401 (1963) — not counting his Manheim slide rule, which, like all engineering students, he carried in a phallic leather scabbard attached to his belt (1940)].

Dr. Jay Horowitz (who is a member of a stereo-image society) then proceeded to demonstrate the phenomenal visualizations made possible by the Glenn facilities (first distributing crossed-axis polarizing glasses that enabled us to see his images and animations in 3-D). His images began with a moving panorama of a Martian landscape, in which the stereo substantially enhanced the shape of some of the rocks and the wind-swept patterns of red sand surrounding them. Then we saw slowed-down, high-speed, close-up videos of simulated combustion swirl flows from jet engines. These were followed by air-flow studies leading to ice growth on the leading edges of actual wings, shot in flight. To overcome the mismatch between this pair of cameras, the visual data had to be reduced to mathematical calculations and then reconverted to moving images — all of which took about 3 1/2 days. But this exercise resulted in a mathematical working model, which was later used to study the impact of the foam fragments that caused the crash several years ago of Space Shuttle 107 upon re-entry. In this connection, Dr. Horowitz showed us the results of a gas-fired cannon (previously used to study the impact of broken turbine blades flying through the engine and nearby airframe and fuselage, known as fan containment failure).

The cannon was loaded with a pellet of plastic foam that was fired at 800 mph, and the impact photographed with a super-high-speed camera running at the two million frames per second (accomplished by a series of circumferential mirrors on a spinning ring — and a lot of light)! Glenn has other video cameras that mope along at only 150,000 fps. What we were privileged to see was not a mathematical simulation. It was real, and it was impressive.

For dessert, Jay Horowitz showed us a video (with musical accompaniment) that had been created for a party the previous week. They were Hubble images that included a close-up of the Jupiter’s red-spot, actually showing the swirling gas currents. But his later images were distant nebulae that had been mathematically converted to 3-D [having an inter-pupilary (camera separation) distance measured in light years]! The NASA physicist who did it admitted to exercising a little artistic license.

In discussing where future (larger) telescopes were to be placed in space, we learned the significance of Lagrangian points — stable points of neutral gravity between the sun, the earth, the moon and other involved planets, where the next in-space telescope may be placed — perhaps about a million miles from the earth. [Jules Verne understood the concept if not the name, when he wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865. It led to the only scientific mistake in his novel (other than his travelers surviving having been launched from a cannon!) in that it was the first time the capsule’s passengers began to float freely about the capsule.]

Finally the speaker showed us a (frightening) animation of all the satellite orbits currently circling the earth — along with the even larger collection of space junk (golf-ball-size and up). Especially after the recent experience of the Hubble, it was an excellent argument for locating the next telescope(s) a million miles from the earth.

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, May 14th to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

VISITORS ARE WELCOME - COLLEGE STUDENTS are FREE

(But everybody needs a dinner reservation!)

The speaker for our April meeting attracted nearly thirty reservations, including a number of guests. When Speaker Ernst von Meerwall invited their introduction, your secretary introduced Linda Whitman, Professor of Archaeology in the University of Akron’s Department of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Classical Studies; Lynn Whitman, recently “retired” Professor of Anthropology, same department, but now a Research Associate who, still being a Senior Distinguished Lecturer, continues to deliver distinguished lectures; and Ed Metzger, retired president of Metzger Photo Supply. Actually, there was more said at the time — the total characterized by Chairman Ernst as “very comprehensive introductions.”

Charlie Wilson introduced son Will and his wife, Pam, who were visiting from Canada (and Will volunteered for the evening’s duties of Name Tag Marshall Bob Erdman, whose back, we hope, won’t require surgery.) Claire Tessier then introduced Jessica (her and Wiley Youngs’ daughter), who will be a freshman at UA in the fall, and who has an interest in anthropology. And finally, a so-far unidentified member/attendee (who was too far away for your secretary’s digital Olympus recorder, or for his analog hearing aid) – introduced his (therefore nameless) wife. Sorry about that!

At which point Treasurer Dan Galehouse was invited to entertain the multitude by reciting the complex arithmetic involved in accounting for the continued (unwanted!) growth of our wealth, which began at $356.60 and finished the evening with $367.60 (plus the student dinner fund), which growing amount Treasurer Daniel is obligated to carry back and forth in cash in its designated polyesther-polypropylene box because it is too trivial an amount for any Akron bank to accept as a legitimate bank account. [But no, we haven’t asked since the current economic crisis descended.]

Ernst then called on Program Chair Sam Fielding-Russell, who described the NASA program featured above, the last of his outstanding collection of offerings for the past season — after which Sam asked all of us to recommend both a speaker and a subject (in that order) for the new season beginning in September.

Which brought us to the annual festivities that accompany the nominations (and this time the election) of the highly contested roles of the Akron Physics Club’ Officers, as prescribed by our bylaws, authored by Founder Charlie Wilson, who conducted the attendant ceremonies. Charles III reported, however, that after several weeks of solicitation for nominations, he had been “underwhelmed” by the response. Accordingly, we are stuck with almost the same menu we have had for years:

But the good news was that we now have two new, very welcome Associate Officer candidates: Chuck Lavan has agreed to be Associate Treasurer (a fairly miserable job, as Dan Galehouse can testify), and Dave Sours, who will be Associate Nametag Marshall (not quite as bad, as long as one remembers to collect all of them after every meeting, take them home, and bring them back next time). With little pretense of Roberts Rules of Order, we then, somehow, got a (muted) vote by acclamation of Charlie’s hard-won nominees.

At last, to the relief of the multitude, Chairman Ernst introduced our speaker for the evening, Dr. Owen Lovejoy, Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University, who, fortunately, has received so many honors (including having been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences) that they enabled Ernst to fill the time necessary for Claire Tessier to overcome a technical projector/power supply crisis, successfully getting our speaker’s Power Point visuals to project so that our speaker’s program could proceed.

A biological anthropologist, Dr. Lovejoy has been teaching at Kent State since 1968, during which he has published scores of papers resulting from his research in subjects ranging from biomechanics, forensics, and skeletal biology to human evolution, the origin of man, and the basis for human intelligence — not to mention sexual dimorphism in australopithecus afarensis and hominid properties of a pliocene proximal femur from Maka, Middle Awash, Ethiopia (a work in progress). The title of his talk for the April Akron Physics Club was Human Origins: More than Phylogeny.

After explaining how the invention of the electron microscope revolutionized the study of anatomy (reducing it to the cellular level), Dr. Lovejoy reported that his own interest has always been in the history of the human species, and how we came to be a cognitive form of life — questions first raised Thomas Huxley, a contemporary of Darwin and author of “Man’s Place in Nature” (1863), who regarded it as the “ultimate question in nature.” These two subjects would encompass the rest of our speaker’s captivating presentation, with emphasis on the human fossil record.

Following the period of Neanderthals, he said, the earliest recognized hominid ancestors found to date have been Pithecantropus Afarensus in southern and eastern Africa — the most famous of whom is “Lucy” (discovered in 1980), who lived about 3.2 million years ago. However, some new and exciting fossils (pushing the date of our last common ancestors to 8 or 9 million years ago) have been located farther north on the continent, and these will be the subject of a new paper by Dr. Lovejoy to be published in September. It may be the period when apes and other human predecessors (with their remarkably similar DNA) had just separated. A recent find of a partial skeleton about 4.4 million years old is especially exciting.

Showing us the skeletal structure of some of the great apes compared with the modern human skeleton, our speaker demonstrated their remarkable similarities, but pointed out that their primary differences were in their equipment for locomotion — and that poses the question of why a species that locomotes in a fashion different from other animals should become cognitive. But it became obvious that locomotion was somehow intimately involved in the production of the cognitive human species.

Why should bipeds, which require a completely different structural design, evolve to the smart ones? It is, after all, as Dr. Lovejoy characterized it, “a bizarre form of locomotion” [described by older kids I knew 80 years ago as “falling and catching yourself”]. Traditional explanations include: Seeing over tall grass to avoid predators? (Almost any animal can stand on its hind legs to do that.) Dominance posture? (Same answer.) Feeding posture? (The amount of vegetation that grows that tall is minimal; besides, Lucy happened to be only three feet tall!) Moreover, being bipedal increases the risk of injury, reduces agility (including running speed; climbing ability), and wipes out the possibility of “cooperatively” carrying an infant on one’s back. It also reduces an animal’s “home range.” Even the canine teeth (used by many males to dominate other males for sex in order to spread their genes) have nearly disappeared in humans.

Our speaker showed us other examples of human reproductive disadvantages, e.g., our sperm count is two orders of magnitude lower than that of other apes, we have lower sperm motility, and minimum pesticide (which kills competing sperm). Moreover, we are the only species of mammal whose females have permanently enlarged mammary glands, which, in other mammalian females, shrink after their lactation period — a signal that she is not likely to be ovulating, thereby repelling males interested in mating [a reaction quite different from that of most human males!].

One major advantage of bipedality, our speaker explained, is the ability to carry food — especially a high-protein gift by a male to a female, which, in great apes, makes her receptive to cohabitation for at least a day and a half. So, “instead of competing with other males,” our speaker explained, “and aggressively keeping them away from females, do the opposite and exchange food for sex, and your chances for being the sire of any offspring go way up — especially if you don’t know whether she’s available for impregnation or not.” Furthermore, it will tend to make the female more likely to choose you over other males “because she doesn’t know whether they’re going to be good providers or not.” And ultimately she will be attracted to males who, instead of fighting with other males, cooperate with them to hunt and gather food.

Dr. Lovejoy explained something called the r/K cycle in reproductive strategy. Some animals, the rs, seek survival of their species by having large numbers of offspring. That strategy takes so much of their time that they have to rely on instinct; it takes up their whole lives; they don’t have time to learn. The Ks, who generally have much lower sperm count, take time to nurture individual offspring rather than just having more of them. Dart frogs are classic Ks. Both male and female frogs actually carry individual tadpoles on their backs, take them to a part of the pool that is their own home range, and then the female actually deposits unfertilized eggs to feed them. So we’re not just talking about mammals.

Major advantages of Ks over rs include their longevity, their later sexual maturity, and, especially, male attendance to the offspring (making a case for monogamy in the process). Dart frogs, above, have “clutch sizes” of 4 to 30, and have an average life of 13-15 years. Their cousin, the leopard frog, try to raise 3000-6000 children and live 6-9 years — and they lack the male provisioning of the dart frog.

Similarly, in the bird family, Bob-Whites reach sexual maturity in a single year, lay 15 eggs which hatch in 23 days, and take their first flight 15 days later — and they die after 9 years. By contrast, the slower-living albatross, taking 4 to 8 years to reach sexual maturity, lays a single egg, which incubates for 83 days, and although the chick doesn’t take flight until 236 days, it lives more than 40 years [as the Ancient Mariner discovered the hard way]. As the Ks have learned, the way to achieve mortality is to control the environment, or to adapt to it. The physiological advantages that have led to human survivorship and dominance, thus, are bipedality and longevity and being Ks.

When comparing human brain size with other animals, particularly other apes (especially when both are seen in profile), our skulls appear to have twice the volume (1300 cc for us). Yet it is Dr. Lovejoy’s opinion that some birds, e.g., crows, are nearly as smart as humans — a view difficult to accept recognizing the human record (e.g., having developed such novelties as farming, literature, music, science and technology). However, “biological evolution,” he said, “is linear. . . but cultural evolution is logarithmic.” For humans, he pointed out, biological change hasn’t occurred in the million and a half years since tool making began. It took 500,000 years before more precisely made, polished tools are found, and primitive agriculture began. “The urban revolution occurred only 6000 years ago, and writing emerged about 3000 years ago. Once writing evolved we could have the physical sciences, Newton’s calculus, nuclear energy, and the information explosion. What we know ten years from now will be double what we know now.”

Those are some of the things we heard from C. Owen Lovejoy [I regret leaving out the part about the subduction of tectonic plates!]. The audience kept him for more than half an hour with (hard) questions, which precipitated such observations as his finding evolution so unpredictable that “if you started it all over again 40 billion times, the chance of finding advanced cognitive life in the Milky Way is minimal.”

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, April 23rd to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

Although it wasn’t scheduled until a month later, our March meeting began amid signs of spring(!), with temperatures in the 50s (still Fahrenheit during the current century). When Chairman Ernst von Meerwall opened the meeting by asking if there were any first-time visitors, John Sommer introduced his guest, Dennis Taylor, a Hudson neighbor.

Ernst then brought us up to date on our Webmaster, John Kirszenberg, who was home from a brief hospital stay for a coronary problem, which resulted in the installation of two stents in a single artery. As of this writing, John is feeling enough better to drive to the doctor for additional tests, and to go to the grocery store.

Ernst then called on Treasurer Dan Galehouse, who reported that we began the evening with $362.60 and after paying for our dinners, including that of our speaker, earned us (despite the financial climate) a net profit of $4.00 for a new high asset of $352.60, and in it’s all in cash!

Called upon, Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell reviewed the April program described in the headline, and reminded us that our May program (Dr. Sasi Pillary, Chief Information Officer of NASA Glen) will again this year be a week early — on the third Monday in April, because of the Memorial Day holiday. Ernst then invited Founder Charlie Wilson, also author of our bylaws, to remind us that he will be seeking officer candidates for next year via e-mail to conduct our annual election at our next meeting — which prompted Ernst “to put in a plug” for more recent [hopefully younger (this writer’s note!)] members/attendees to consider volunteering to serve if they are interested in helping the club continue, and willing to devote a little of their time.

Which brought us to Chairman Ernst’s introduction of our speaker, who, he pointed out, had brought an uncomfortable amount of equipment for his AV presentation, all by himself! He introduced Scott Graham, Chief of NASA Glenn’s Launch Systems Project Office. Mr. Graham has over 27 years experience at NASA Glenn, working primarily in areas associated with space transportation, launch vehicles, exploration initiatives, and rocket propulsion.His subject was NASA’s New Rockets, The Constellation Program: The Ares Launch Vehicles (Access to the Future!). Mr. Graham illustrated his talk with 20 detailed Power Point stills and several animations, replete with music, sound effects, and their own narrator — the first one in the format of a movie trailer.

The two new vehicles, Ares I and Ares V, he (and his video) explained, will be used to return humans and their extensive new gadgetry to the Moon during the next decade. Ares I is the crew launch Vehicle; Ares V is the heavy-lift cargo launch vehicle, which will be used to launch the Lunar Lander and other cargo.

The Ares I is needed to replace the Space Shuttle. First launched in 1981, the Shuttle has only eight more launches scheduled, after which it will be retired (in 2010). Thereafter, until the development of the Ares I is complete, we will be dependent on other nations (probably Russia) to travel to and return from the International Space Station, which project is now nearly complete, however. The objective for our next Moon launch is to be no later than 2020. The Apollo Moon Program ended in 1972, and as our speaker put it, “we’ve been stuck in low earth orbit ever since.” And because it’s been so long, “we’re going to have to learn the associated skills and disciplines all over again” before getting serious about Mars or other cosmic missions. The Ares I rocket is NASA Glen’s priority project.

After getting the Ares I operational, NASA has ambitious plans for a new Moon Program. It expects to achieve major logistical advances over the Apollo Program, e.g., being able to land anywhere on the Moon (previous missions were limited to locations near the equator). In this regard, the polar regions are of particular interest because of the possibility of frozen water-filled craters at those sites (particularly at the South Pole, which is always in the dark). The Ares I carries the “Orion” space capsule, which will be used to return humans to the surface of the Moon. It will permit landing twice as many as people as the Apollo Program and can accommodate as many as six people on board. As it orbits the Moon, and while the astronauts are on the Moon’s surface, Orion’s electricity will be solar generated by photo-voltaic cells, extending from each side like giant ears.

The new Moon program will involve much longer stays — up to two weeks, initially living aboard the pressurized Lunar Lander (in shirtsleeves not space suits). Long-range goals involve building an infrastructure on the Moon, including a pressurized (and radiation-shielded) dwelling in which astronauts can live for weeks at a time. Present plans call for no operator to remain in the orbiting Orion Space capsule, the vehicle that will return the astronauts to Earth — a source of worry for some of the audience.

In the all-embracing “Constellation” program (to return to the Moon and beyond) Ares I is the crew vehicle and Ares V is the “truck,” which will carry all the heavy cargo. Both are two-stage rockets. To lift its heavy payloads, Ares V will have a pair of booster rockets on the sides, similar to the Shuttle boosters, which are recoverable after dropping off into the ocean. The first stages of both rockets contain solid propellant, the Ares I divided into four sections, the Ares V five and a half. The “upper stage” rockets for both vehicles is liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, so they are essentially jet steam engines producing 300,000 lb of thrust on Ares I; significantly more on Ares V. Aires I and Ares V will join up in Earth orbit before proceeding to the Moon.

At launch, both the assembled Ares I (325 ft) and Ares V (360 ft) vehicles will be substantially taller on their launch pads than the present Space Shuttle (200 ft). Both are taller than the Statue of Liberty, but actually slightly shorter than the Apollo Saturn V. Side by side, the Ares V rocket is almost twice as fat than the Ares I (5.5 meters) (and is about the diameter of the Saturn V). It will be capable of carrying 80 metric tons of cargo, which will include the Lunar Lander. The development of Ares V is several years behind the Ares V, since it won’t be needed until we’re ready to go back to the moon.

     The first test flight of Ares I will happen in the near future. This vehicle, our speaker admitted, “is a funny looking rocket.” Instead of a cylinder of constant diameter, the upper stage (more than a third of its length) is 18 ft in diameter, but it tapers down to the skinnier and much longer section of the first stage, which is only 10 ft in diameter. This hybrid configuration will accelerate development of the Ares I by using existing technologies. To study the flight dynamics of this tall skinny rocket, the first test flight is scheduled for late July of this year. It will, obviously, be heavily instrumented.

     The Constellation Program proclaimed by the Bush Administration in 2004 (the then-head of NASA was a good friend of Dick Cheney’s) includes “going to Mars and beyond,” extravagant goals that are not presently high priority for the Agency — for many reasons, including political ones. But, more practically, it will take six months to get from Earth to Mars and present goals are to remain on the surface of Mars for a year before returning to Earth. The reason for such an ambitious time-table (as explained by John Kirszenberg) is that celestial mechanics dictate a two-year cycle on the relative proximity of the two planets and the ability to use their gravity, as well as that of the sun, to assist the mission.

When asked how and what we will feed the astronauts for such an extended period, Mr. Graham spoke of ideas involving a garden in a pressurized greenhouse on Mars — which doesn’t, however, explain how we would appease their hunger en route. [We’ve all read about recycling urine for water, but that doesn’t supply calories. Science fiction has used freezing passengers into a state of hybernation or suspended animation, but that’s got to be beyond NASA’s job spec.] To show how life might be aboard such an interplanetary spacecraft, click on (or copy and put on your address line):

And if you have trouble (e.g., if you have a Mac), let me know and I’ll send you an icon.

In other news: Since Dan Galehouse has returned from Trieste, where he was invited to speak about his recent contributions in the field of quantum mechanics, several members have asked him to volunteer to speak to the club on the subject. Accordingly, he invites us to submit questions on the subject. As he put it:

“Since the variation in opinions and understanding of this subject is as wide as any other scientific topic, "questions" may include statements or complaints about the subject, or even a general putdown of the whole matter. . . Recent talks and current papers are posted on http://gozips.uakron.edu/~dcg/. It is not advisable or necessary to read any of them. ” Dan adds that he will even be pleased to accept anonymous comments, so if you’d rather not send them directly to Daniel dcg@uakron.edu your Secretary will be pleased to forward them from cine16@aol.com.

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, MARCH 19th to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

     Our February meeting began during dinner with an unplanned event. Club founder Charlie Wilson choked on part of his, and was taken to the Akron General’s Emergency Room by Fire Department paramedics. There, by 2:00 AM(!), his problem was solved with what he has described as a “mini RotoRooter”, wielded by a specialist from South Africa (who, fortunately, now lives in the Akron area), and Charlie’s been fine ever since.

     After dinner, Chairman Ernst von Meerwall introduced Bob Erdman’s guests, Michael Plishka and Vivek Katiyar. Because your secretary was retrieving his cell phone from his car (to keep tabs on Charlie) he missed Treasurer Dan Galehouse’s spellbinding account of how we began the evening with $348.60 and finished with the even higher new sum of $352.60 (but he obviously gave me his infallible documentation). Thanks from all of us, Dan, for continuing to perform this unceasing, vital chore.

     Our treasurer’s report was followed by one from Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell, who reminded us that our calendar is now complete for the balance of the year, and that although he has been pleased to have a received several suggestions for next year, he would welcome more at gsfr@neo.rr.com or 330-688-2602.

     Which brought us to the reason we had assembled. It was time to introduce our colleague of nearly two decades, Dr. Alan Gent, University of Akron Professor Emeritus (and Harold A. Morton Professor Emeritus) of Polymer Physics and Polymer Engineering, whom we have known as icon of all things elastomeric. Dr. Gent’s subject this evening was 100 years of the Poynting Effect and Non-Linear Elasticity.

     The Poynting effect, he explained, was first revealed by Professor of Physics (at the University of Birmingham) Poynting in 1909. He had discovered that when a wire or metal rod is twisted, it gets longer. Moreover, the increase in length is directly proportional to the square of the torque applied. In 1912, Poynting revealed that the same effect occurs in rubber, where it is more obvious because of the larger displacement amplitudes. The Poynting effect is not accounted for by the classic (linear) theory of elasticity, so it remained something of a mystery for many years.

     But during the period 1946-49, Ronald Rivlin, whom our speaker characterized as his mentor, developed his mathematical theory of large elastic strains, beginning with the compressive hydrostatic pressures created when a simple rectangular block of an essentially incompressible solid, e.g. rubber, is stressed in shear. Instead of concentrating on stress-strain relations, however, Rivlin directed his attention to the energy generated within the structure — from which stress-strain relations can be readily derived. One of the results that immediately follows is that to maintain the block in shear, forces must be applied to the ends of the piece. Other conclusions about stresses in a sheared block resulting from Rivlin’s efforts include:

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, February 19th to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

As his first and customary order of business, Chairman Ernst von Meerwall inquired who might be first-time visitors for this first meeting of the New Year. In response, Hendrik Heinz of the U of A’s Polymer Engineering Department introduced himself, and Charlie Wilson introduced Brent Sisler, who was representing ACESS, an Akron-area technical organization comprised of about a dozen familiar scientific, engineering, and technical societies. ACESS (whose mission is “to enhance the technical environment in the Akron area through coordination and cooperation . . .”) invites our club to join the group—a subject that will be taken up at our next APS board meeting. (The invitation could pose an interesting problem for ACESS in that this collective organization charges each society a modest dues of 35 cents per member per year; but our club charges no dues and doesn’t have a membership list — only an e-mail mailing list — which is one reason we are the cheapest club in Akron.)

This brought us to the nail-biting climax of our meeting, a report on the health of the club treasury by Treasurer Dan Galehouse. We started, he said, with $341.60 — a figure which has been getting uncomfortably larger lately, because we charge a dollar more for dinner than Tangier charges us, and we’ve had healthy attendances. Since we had two guests this evening, we should have ended up with 328.60. But two separate counts of Dr. Dan’s plastic safe resulted in a net of $348.60— which seems to be evidence that metaphysics has made its way into the club. (And thanks to new contributions by Bill Arnold and Jack Gieck, our fund for student dinners is now $236.)

Ernst then invited Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell to disclose the identity of the NASA speaker our final program of the year. He will be Dr. Sasi Pillary, Chief Information Officer of NASA Glen. Dr. Pillary’s topic will be High-Performance Computing and Visualization, and its Impact on NASA’s Mission and Program — a presentation, Sam said, that promises to be heavy on digital imagery. In answer to an inquiry from Ernst about next year, Sam reported that he has already had several suggestions, and welcomes more. His e-mail address is gsfr@neo.rr.com; phone
(330) 688-2602.

When called on, your Secretary apologized for having sent out the Newsletter announcement for the January meeting in triplicate (after receiving several false indications of non-deliveries by the Mail Daemon. Webmaster John Kirszenberg suggested that some of the problem may have been due to my e-Blok having no-longer-valid e-mail addresses, which nullified the rest of the list. I explained that this turned out to be indeed true of three uakron.edu addresses, which, when corrected, went through properly. But we still seem to have, as Ernst abbreviated it, an “indicator problem” on about a dozen uakron.edu addresses (some of whom reported getting all three transmissions).

Chairman Ernst then introduced our speaker for the evening Dr. John Portman, Assistant Professor of Physics, Kent State University. Although a biomechanicist, Dr. Portman heads a research group at Kent State University that is “developing theoretical methods to reveal the mechanisms that control conformational changes in proteins relevant to their biological function.” The title of Dr. Portman’s talk was The Dynamics of Flexible Protein Molecules: Folding and Allosteric Transitions.

Proteins, our speaker explained, are polymers, but they are special because they self-organize into three-dimensional structures on which their biological function depends. As the group’s website says, “this structural self-organization of protein molecules has fascinated biologists, chemists, and physicists for many years. Flexibility and dynamics are the key connections between the structure of a protein and its biological function as it reacts with other proteins or DNA.” Such three-dimensionality is illustrated in an animation on their website at: http://phys.kent.edu/Physics/Portman.html. [Then click on Portman Group website].

While this interesting animation is in three dimensions, it merely rotates on the computer screen. But in the real world, when signaled by a calcium messenger protein for example, a protein molecule has the ability to fold and bend and dramatically change shape. It actually hinges on the amino acids; indeed, several of the equations our speaker displayed contained torsional spring constants for these pivot points. Different parts of the structure have different degrees of flexibility, and the value of these spring constants varies with allostery (the attachment of a smaller molecule) and it is reversible.

Proteins fold in an energy landscape that has the shape of a funnel, our speaker said, displaying a V-shaped plot of energy (y) vs. configurational position (x), with the width of the deep well representing configurational entropy. This illustrates, he said, “the principle of minimum frustration amid many fast-folding proteins.” There are many pathways, he said, from a folded to an unfolded state. He went on to describe how he and his group had developed their model(s) for self-organization, but the attendant equations he showed us are probably beyond the scope of AOL to reproduce from this Macintosh.

As Dr. Portman’s website explains, “We are developing analytical and computational approaches to understand the mechanisms controlling large-scale structural changes in proteins. Examples include protein folding, allostery, and conformational changes induced from interactions with molecular surfaces. These questions are addressed using theoretical concepts and approaches from within statistical physics, soft condensed matter physics, and chemical physics, as well as molecular dynamics simulation.” The group is obviously doing pioneer work in a very busy and complex field that is still in its theoretical and computational infancy.

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, January 22nd to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

Our last meeting of the year attracted a welcome number of first-time visitors. Tom Brooker introduced Peter and Theresa Tandy; Peter is Professor of Physics at Kent State University; Theresa raises and shows champion poodles, Stu Clary’s guest was Dale Mugler, and Charlie Wilson invited Dick Wright who has recently retired from his own company. Dave Fielder introduced is wife, Sarah Wright and Dennis Feld introduced his wife, Barbara. Our student guest was Adam Koncz, who is a physics major at the University of Akron. When Chairman Ernst von Meerwall asked him how he heard about the club’s program, he said he found it on the Physics Club’s Website! He’s the first that we know about – too bad Webmaster John/Jonah couldn’t make it.

Ernst then turned to our sedulous, indefatigable treasurer, Dan Galehouse (who had been delayed by a flat tire in this, the former the rubber capital of the world!) for an assessment of “how broke we are.” Dan advised that we had started the evening with the (uncomfortably large) sum of $386.60 (plus an unexplained extra dollar), but that by charging only $17 for dinner, the amount should be trimmed down to $377.60 by the end of the evening. However, when the meeting had adjourned, it turned out that two diners had forgotten to pay, so the net ended up at the more comfortable level of $341.66 plus the student fund.

Then called upon, Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell (who gave us a complete calendar last month – see previous Newsletter) advised that the only slot open for the new year is in May, for which date he is trying to get a speaker from NASA to speak on the Hubble Telescope. At which point Ernst introduced our speaker, Dr. Robert Brown, Institute Professor of Physics at Case Western Reserve University, who received the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching from Baylor University in 2005. Dr. Brown has spoken to us twice before: in March of 1999 (on baseball statistics!), and in January, 2004 he first introduced us to the subject of MRI – his subject for the evening.

Our speaker explained that in, 1982, a former student who worked for a company that manufactured MRI equipment asked him work on some problems with him – after which, he said, “MRI took over my life.” He has since published, with three coauthors, a textbook on the subject, and is still amazed at how MRI is continuing to make major strides in anatomical imaging, not only in the brain (e.g., tumors, motor skills, cognitive functions, Alzheimer’s) but also as an incredible tool for diagnosis of disease (images of the heart, arteries, sports injuries, arthritis, epilepsy) – “you name it, we’ll connect it to magnetic resonance.”

Since, he said, his students insisted he open a lecture with a joke, they had prepared one for him for the occasion – Question: Why can’t two melons run away to get married? Answer: Because they cantaloupe. Relevance: In Japan, watermelons are so expensive ($30 apiece), that they have developed a machine for imaging the insides so they won’t have to cut it open to show that it contains no voids or overripe spots. [Joke Rating: Puns are better spoken than printed,]

Dr. Brown added a funnier contribution by a Cleveland cab driver several years ago when he had organized a workshop on MRI – an assemblage that attracted scientists from all over the world, and which contributed to the local cab drivers getting pretty savvy. As one of the visitors announced his destination, “Oh,” the cabby had responded, “you’ve come to that Magnetic Renaissance!” It really has been a continuing renaissance, our speaker observed, for 26 years.

In MRI we are not just searching for densities, like X-rays, he explained. The power of MRI is that one can measure different tissue properties, the proton density, as well as molecular structure (although last is less important than in NMR). X-ray tubes and ultrasound transducers project a single beam. MRI systems immerse the patient in very large (as well as small) magnetic fields. And MRI images can be displayed in 3-D. They reveal pictures of hydrogen nuclei in a given “slice.” (“Our bodies are, after all, mainly water – with some fat.”) And the reason we don’t get pictures from our body’s O₁₆ and C₁₂ is that neither of these atoms has any net spin, so they don’t precess in a magnetic field.

It takes three fields to achieve 3-D images. The way MRI works is: 1) We immerse a patient in a strong magnetic field created by a giant superconducting solenoid that completely surrounds him – a field 10,000 times as strong as the earth’s magnetic field; 2) we add a small, oscillating radio-frequency magnetic field tuned to the precession frequency of the protons in the strong field; 3) to create an image, we add small non-uniform (gradient) magnetic fields; 4) we then measure the protons’ (hence the body’s) response to these three magnetic fields. Although the assemblage of concentric coils is surrounded by a heavy magnetic shield, we nevertheless, saw a slide of a steel hospital cart that had been lifted off the floor by the strong field and stuck into the end of one machine.

Each proton, Dr. Brown explained, is like a small, spinning magnet. It behaves like a spinning toy top under the influence of gravity, which causes it to tip, or precess, instead of falling. The analogue to the gravitational field, in the case of the hydrogen nucleus, is the strong magnetic field. As the proton precesses, its little magnetic dipole field precesses too. It is this field that induces an EMF in the nearby detector coil, the fourth solenoid surrounding the patient. The applied magnetic field gradients, turned on and off hundreds of times per second in three directions, make it possible to localize the protons and make imaging possible. It is, incidentally, the effect of these flickering gradient fields on adjacent metal structures that creates the deafening (130 db) noise that a patient is subjected to.

Another planted question inquired, “If we are talking about a single proton, quantum mechanics tells us that its spin and spin energy are quantized. Is the picture of a precessing spin with a continuous tilt angle really appropriate?” The answer is that we are talking about trillions of protons. When huge numbers of protons are precessing together in synch to make one big spin, the classical picture is OK! Thus, we can readily detect the precession and its frequency from the millivolts generated in the detector coil.

Each time the gradient field is turned off (hundreds of times a second), a resultant pulse is detected, thus permitting examination of the tissue one slice at a time. For static images, a resolution of a fraction if a millimeter can be achieved. In functional MRI (fMRI), successive images every two seconds for five minutes produce a low-resolution (3 mm) “motion picture.” This makes it possible to examine the magnetic effect on blood, and brain activity associated with blood flow in brain functioning. Oxygenated blood gives a stronger signal than deoxygenated blood (less dephasing). This permits imaging of brain activity, such as that associated with motor skills and cognitive activity.

In a recent fMRI experiment, 2500 brain images from 17 college students who had just fallen in love were analyzed. The volunteers had been shown a series of images that included beautiful landscapes or other pleasant scenes that inspired feelings of admiration or even affection. But when they were shown a picture of their new beloved, a totally different part of the brain was activated – the same site that is turned on by cocaine! So, our speaker suggested, “You can find out if she’s really in love with you.”

It follows that MRI can be a new, more sophisticated lie detector technology. Indeed, a firm in Tarzana, California, No Lie MRITM (http://www.noliemri.com/), is now offering its services to lawyers, corporations, and the federal government, as well as individual customers. Since our meeting, our speaker has acknowledged receiving a website your secretary sent him containing an article in the November 8, New Yorker, entitled “Suffering Souls.” It describes the work of Dr. Kent Kiehl, a research psychologist who uses MRI technology to scan volunteer prison inmates at the Western New Mexico Correction facility for signs of pyschopathy (defined as persons lacking any moral consciousness) in the hope of discovering a treatment. It can be read at http://stircrazyintexas.blogspot.com/.

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, November 20th to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

Returning after conducting a seminar last month at Georgia Tech and sort of apologizing (“I hate to say this but I had a better offer: they actually paid for my dinner!”) for being absent for the first time in the dozen years that he has been our leader, Chairman Ernst von Meerwall began by welcoming visitor Michael Pliska, a guest of Bob Erdman.

He then called on Treasurer Dan Galehouse for his customary chore. Dr. Dan advised that we had begun the evening with a balance of $383.60 (characterized by Chairman Ernst as “an unconscionable amount of money to keep as cash in a box”), which was why, in an effort to reduce it, Dan had charged us only $18 for dinner this evening. This, he said, should drop the balance to 355.60. But such was not to be the case! Frustrating our treasurer’s frugality, our Tangier host, it developed (after feeding us an excellent repast of half a chicken apiece), had also knocked a dollar off the price, resulting in a final balance of $386.60, plus a student fund remainder of $54. In his subsequent reluctant correction, our treasurer assures us (doubtless with a sigh of relief) that “The polyethylene-polypropylene box checks.”

Next, we heard from Program Chair Sam Fielding-Russell, who was pleased to announce that for our March 23rd meeting next year, Jonah Kirszenberg has been successful in getting Scott Graham from NASA Glenn’s Launch Systems Project Office for our speaker. Dr. Graham is and will be speaking on “The Ares Launch Vehicle: Access to the Future.”

After which Ernst advised that – again thanks to our Webmaster Jonah’s spending a significant part of his summer working with the University of Akron – our club’s website is back in business, prompting your secretary to explain (after thanking the membership for putting up with his e-mail experiments) that henceforth the Newsletter will appear as a complete single document of the announcement plus minutes, but with a URL to our website for a more readable copy.

At which point Chairman Ernst introduced our speaker, Prof. Spiros Margetis of the University of Akron, Director of the Center for Nuclear Research – whose current activity involves collisions of heavy nuclei at ultra-relativistic energies. His research is carried on at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) in Geneva, as well as at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. He last spoke to us in April of 2002. Our chairman said that he thinks of him as “an extreme nuclear physicist.” The title of his presentation was “A Trillion Degrees in the Shade.”

Underscoring Ernst’s characterization and the title of our speaker’s talk, the striking image that filled the screen during dinner was of a signal event: a single nucleus being impacted and exploded into 4000 separate tracks. And yes, the local temperature at the time really was about a trillion degrees K. It was the first slide of his Power Point presentation, all of which is accessible at either http://phys.kent.edu/~margetis/talks/Akron-2008.ppt or http://phys.kent.edu/~margetis/talks/Akron-2008.pdf .

At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island, our speaker explained (quoting Nobel Laureate T. H. Lee in 1975), “In high-energy physics . . . we distribute higher and higher amounts of energy into a region with smaller and smaller dimensions.” This brings nucleons as close as possible, he said. As the temperature rises, the strong force gets weaker, and quarks (or “partons”) are free to move around, with the creation of pions – ultimately confining subatomic particles so tightly that the result is a phase transition, which produces “hydronic matter,” a quark-gluon plasma. In the process, the density has increased enormously.

We saw a graph of temperature vs. density that flattens at 1012 K – which, Dr. Margetis suggested, not only shows what happens in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, but also represents the state of our universe a millionth of a second after the beginning of the Big Bang. When two gold ions collide in the RHIC a “Little Bang” occurs, producing an initial layer of what might be described as a highly-confined quantum fluid at a trillion degrees, having concentric pressure gradients and non-zero viscosities (the sort of thing we have in a black hole, our speaker said). At such temperatures, we actually see e=mc² in action. The fluid undergoes a “chemical freeze” to become a hadron gas as it expands.

Our speaker showed us some details of the hardware at the RHIC facility on Long Island: an underground tunnel multiple stories in diameter, laid out in a circle about a mile in circumference. The giant conduit is surrounded by deflecting and focusing magnets that consume several megawatts of power. It tapers down to a much “smaller” detector section (on which a photo of a worker looked like an ant on a stovepipe). The architecture of the assembly resembles two enormous hoses with their nozzles joined facing one another.

The particles traveling around the circle accelerate, reaching 99.99% of the speed of light before smashing together. (That of the new CERN Super Proton Synchrotron in Geneva is 99.9999% of c.) At the RHIC facility we saw bubble-chamber tracks of the particles that are produced in successive billionths of a second during and after the collisions. An array of cascaded computers that are fed dozens of varieties of measurements, sorts out deuterons, protons, kaons, pions, and electrons. “Average” data are calculated from the multiple results.

After going through some of the mathematics associated with Bjorken’s relativistic hydrodynamics model, our speaker followed with a series of animated Power Point images in which he depicted the geometry of heavy ion collisions, elliptic flow in ultra-cold Fermi gas, followed by what for this secretary, were a series of increasingly arcane slides depicting results obtained on such subjects as energy density, time evolution at finite impact parameter “b,” resulting azimuthal distribution from central collision, azimuthal entropy of leading hadrons (which, Dr. Margetis says, show detailed agreements with the hydrodynamic model), viscosity and the perfect fluid, energy loss in Au + Au collisions, a plot of quark mass vs. Higgs quark mass, heavy “flavor,” leading hadron suppression, elliptic flow saturation (even with strange mesons and baryons), disappearance of any side-jets in Au + Au collisions and suppression of jets on the far side, leading to the conclusion that in central Au + Au collisions, hadrons are suppressed and back-to-back jets have disappeared – a result different from that of angular collisions. Some of these results suggest possible effects of multiple dimensions at these relativistic speeds.

The next step in RHIC research is what is called the Gamma-jet: Golden probe of CCD energy loss. It will cost about $50 million. For this engineer, Dr. Margetis’s presentation offered a glimpse into a whole new world of physics.

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, October 23rd to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

Celebrating the Autumnal Equinox on the day, our first meeting of the new season attracted three tables of regulars, including this time Charles Lavan, who, before his retirement from Lockheed Martin, gave us two outstanding programs on automated high-altitude airships. And for the first time since founder Charlie Wilson turned over the reins to Ernst von Meerwall (who was conducting a seminar at George Tech on Monday) the meeting was chaired by Vice-Chairman Darrell Reneker — who admitted as much before calling on Treasurer Dan Galehouse for a report on our wealth. Treasurer Dan advised that we had started the evening with $384.60 (probably a record high for the club) but, after collecting dinner payments and “paying back a dollar owed to one member for whom I didn’t have change last May,” our new balance is $383.60. To which Darrell responded that in view of the current events in the stock market, we’d better be sure we have that in cash!

At which point our temporary chairman called on Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell for news about programs scheduled for the coming season. Sam had obviously done a greater job than any program chairman in years, as evidenced by his reporting nearly full docket by this first meeting of the season. There are only two blanks in the schedule, for which Sam said he had two suggestions during dinner:

November 24: Dr. Bob Brown, Case Western Reserve University (whose specialty is energy), “What’s behind all these Headlines in the Newspaper About the Brain?”

January 26: Prof. John Portman, Kent State University (a bio-mechanicist), title to be announced.

February 23: Dr. Alan Gent, University of Akron, “Non-linear elasticity” — 100 Years of the Poynting Effect. [“If anybody here who knows what the Poynting Effect is,” Sam cautioned, “be quiet, and we’ll listen to Alan in February.”

March 23: Open at the time of the meeting; but since, Sam advises that Jonah Kirszenberg has been successful in getting Scott Graham from NASA as speaker Dr. Graham is NASA Glenn’s Launch Systems Project Office and will be speaking on “The Ares Launch Vehicle: Access to the Future.”

April 27: Dr. Owen Lovejoy, Kent State University, who is in the Department of Anthropology; he will be talking about physical anthropology, title to be announced.

May 18: Open, but “we are trying to sign NASA speaker, who will be talking either on NASA security, or on the Hubble Telescope.” Your secretary is hoping hard for the latter.

Charlie Wilson was then called upon to introduce our speaker, Dr. Jutta Luettmar-Strathmann, Associate Professor of Physics, the University of Akron, who then spoke to us on “Liquid Mixtures in Temperature Gradients — From the Prebiotic Ocean to Thin Layers of Polymer Blends.” What followed was a beautifully documented presentation of what might have come before the content of our 2005 speaker, Randall Mitchell’s exposition of “The Facts of Evolution.” It was the first time any of us have heard a hypothesis that carried hints of how life might have spontaneously begun on this planet.

Our speaker began by introducing Alolph Fick’s “Law of Diffusion,” which describes mass flow in liquids due to concentration difference, which was empirically demonstrated by Carl Ludwig (they were both 19th century German scientists). Ludwig’s experiment consisted of connecting two side-by-side flasks containing different concentrations of NaSO4 joined by a glass U-tube. Ludwig measured the diffusion of the concentration between the static flasks.

Meanwhile, Charles Soret, a mathematician and physicist, was measuring the effect of temperature on dilute solutions of salts in water by filling tubes with a liquid having a uniform concentration of salts from top to bottom, and then heating the top. He found that if you wait long enough (he waited 56 days), the salt becomes more concentrated in the cold part of the tube. His conclusion was that a temperature gradient applied to a fluid mixture generally induces net mass flows, which lead to the formation of concentration gradients. In quiescent mixtures, the effect is known as thermal diffusion or the “Ludwig-Soret effect,” As a mathematician, Soret quantified the phenomenon with an array of differential equations presented by our speaker, which are beyond the fonts available in this Macintosh (and probably this brain).

In conjunction with convective flow, it turns out that thermal diffusion becomes a powerful separation process that affects natural processes under geological conditions. Thermal diffusion is well known today to affect the partitioning of crude oil components in oil fields, and is also currently being investigated in the context of carbon sequestration; and very recently, a mechanism driven solely by a temperature gradient has been proposed to “solve the concentration problem associated with the origin of life. According to this proposal, proto-biological molecules become accumulated so strongly in pore systems associated with submarine hydrothermal vents that their concentration becomes sufficient to allow the spontaneous synthesis of complex biological molecules.

There is a mountain range on the ocean floor, the “Atlantis Massif,” in which there are carbonate “chimneys” rising from thermal vents, which create an ideal environment for the Ludwig-Soret effect. Called the “Lost City,” (by the exploratory group that group that named their research craft “Atlantis”), these structures have a hot interior surrounded by a cold exterior, with a 30-degree Kelvin delta T between them. This supplies the energy to move concentration masses, “writing patterns in polymer islands,” permitting the spontaneous synthesis of complex biological molecules. In living organisms with typically very high concentrations of large organic molecules in their cells, mechanisms like these are how other organic compounds (nutrients, enzymes, hormones, waste products) are transferred across cellular membranes.

Jutta described some of the details of her own work, and she cited a number of practical 21st century industrial uses that have been developed from Ludwig-Soret research: the analysis of liquid mixtures, the blending of nearly immiscible polymers, thermal field flow fractionation and distribution of crude components in oil fields, as well as the large-scale isolation of isotopes in the gas phase. But these advances pale in significance compared to the phenomenon — the event — that may have occurred between 2.8 and 4 billion years ago in the mid-Atlantic Ocean’s Lost City.

RESERVATIONS or REGRETS by Thursday, September 18th to:
Reservation Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com
(330) 836-4167

    Attracted by the subject of the last program before our summer recess, Reservations Secretary Charlie Wilson reported a record attendance of three dozen, which included Founder Charlie’s visiting son, Will, plus five students from such diverse universities as Carnegie-Mellon, University of Pittsburgh and the University of Akron.

     Chairman Ernst von Meerwall began our brief business meeting early — between our entree and dessert courses because Tangier’s Banquet Service (distracted by serving a mere 550 Browns fans upstairs) had forgotten that those us down in the obscure Wine Cellar room (in the basement!) were entitled. The chocolate meringue and cookie were delicious when they arrived a few minutes later, despite the simultaneous business meeting.

     Our first order of business, as usual, was a report by Treasurer Dan Galehouse, who, after doing the accounting in his head, announced that we seemed to have a net gain of $28 for the evening. Receiving no reaction, he advised that “that’s a lot of money”— thus confirming our reputation as the cheapest club in Akron. But it got worse, as he later e-mailed me: It seems that after Bill Arnold insisted on reimbursing the treasury for some past student meals, our treasure has peaked at a new record high” of $384.60, plus a remaining Student Fund of $54! Further, as Treasurer Dan explained (after having run out of one-dollar bills at a critical point in the evening), “I went back and refunded those who were owed money; [but] apparently I missed one. So there is one unclaimed dollar that will have to wait in the polyethylene box [over the summer!] until claimed.” It now being fall, you are appropriately notified.

     Called upon by Ernst, Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell advised that, following his and Charlie’s verbal and e-mailed entreaties to the membership, he now had nine suggestions for programs beginning in September; but these have yet to be scheduled with the speakers.

     Which brought us to the reason for the record assemblage: Chairman Ernst introduced our speaker, Dr. Daniel Akerib, Professor and Chair of Case Western University’s Physics Department. Prof. Akerib is also a member of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search operating two thousand feet underground in the Soudan Mine in Northern Minnesota, where he and his colleagues are researching Dark Matter. We had last heard from him eight years ago.

     Our speaker declared that, since his last report in 2000, his group has continued to look for the elusive substance — “and we’re still looking for it.” There is overwhelming observational evidence, he said, that dark matter constitutes most of the matter in the Universe — material unseen except for its gravitational effects.

     The reason for their extended search, he said, is to learn “what’s missing in the universe. We understand gravity and the origin of structure in galaxies, and we assume that Newton and Einstein got it right. We don’t know that that’s absolutely true on all the scales of the universe, but we take that as a working assumption in pursuing the cause of the forces that hold galaxies together.” They know it’s not ordinary matter and expect to find something that may be a new form of matter — which might also be an indication of some type of new fundamental force.

     There is considerable dynamical evidence for the existence of dark matter. One of these is the rotation curve of particles in the galactic halo of objects rotating about their central masses. In our solar system, planets move slower in their orbits as they get farther from the sun, and one can readily predict their tangential speed from their orbital radius and the masses involved. But on a galactic scale, the speed of orbiting particles is substantially greater than conventional physics would predict, suggesting a much greater central mass. On an even larger scale are anomalies in galactic cluster lensing — the use of a large mass in space that happens to be in the line of sight with a more distant object whose light rays are warped around the closer mass cluster (the famous Einstein prediction), using it as a lens to magnify the more distant object (or cause multiple images of it to appear). But the optical density of the gravitational lens turns out to be about three times greater than that expected, implying a substantially larger mass of the closer cluster than would be expected.

     A current theory that may be applicable in the study of dark matter is that of super-symmetry — a way of describing a new class of subatomic particles and the forces that govern their actions among themselves and with ordinary matter. It is possible, Dr. Akerib explained, that dark matter consists of Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that were produced in the first few minutes of the early Universe. These relics could be in the Milky Way and could be detectable through scattering off of atomic nuclei in a terrestrial detector. The current hypothesis is that dark matter consists of “clouds” of WIMPS permeating the galaxies like a cosmic gas.

     Our speaker devoted most of the rest of his Power Point-illustrated lecture to answering the question, “How do we find this stuff?” The detecting of WIMPs,” he explained, “is a great experimental challenge because they interact at a low rate with small energy depositions, amidst much higher sources of background.” The particles themselves have no charge. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack, and the challenge is to get rid of as much of the “hay” as possible (one reason that the laboratory is half a mile underground to shield it from cosmic rays), using ultra-clean copper and other metals in the construction of their apparati, using noble gases, etc. The likelihood of detecting these rare events (e.g., when a WIMP and a quark happen to collide, i.e., a WIMP colliding with a nucleus), he said, is about a hundred million times less than that of ordinary background radiation of various ilk.

     Dan went on to discuss a range of the techniques that he and his colleagues use in their attempts to detect them. Their approaches include pucks of germanium operating at 50 micro Kelvin, in buckets of liquefied xenon, instrumented with light-sensitive photomultiplier tubes, “and we have even seen the resurgence of bubble chambers from the heyday of accelerator-based particle physics.”

     So far, after five years of “time exposure,” as our speaker put it, “we are the best in the world at finding nothing.” Partly, it is apparent that this is evidence of the group’s meticulous honesty in data evaluation with the necessary skepticism to avoid any optimistic (or pessimistic) influences. Dan Akerib’s fascinating presentation precipitated lots of questions and further discussion — and it inspired Tom Meyers to recall a quote posted on the wall in the Kent UU church, which was authored by British biologist J.V.S. Haldane: “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.”

Jack Gieck

MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT:
May 19, 2008

(A WEEK EARLY THIS TIME!)

Tangier, 532 West Market, 6:00 PM - Dinner at 6:30

RESERVATIONS or regrets by Thursday, May 15th, to:

Reservations Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com (330) 836-4167

Our last meeting of the 2007-8 season features an intriguing (if little-understood) topic currently mentioned in the pages of scientific journals and even in weekly news magazines. On March 19 [a week early this month] Dr. Daniel Akerib, Professor and Chair of Case Western University’s Physics Department (who is also a member of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search operating in the Soudan Mine in Northern Minnesota) will speak to us on

DARK MATTER

As Dr. Akerib explains, “Overwhelming observational evidence indicates that most of the matter in the Universe consists of dark matter -- material unseen except for it's gravitational effects. One possibility is that the dark matter is Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that were produced in the early Universe. These relics could be in the Milky Way and be detectable through scattering off of atomic nuclei in a terrestrial detector. The detecting of WIMPs is a great experimental challenge because they interact at a low rate with small energy depositions, amidst much higher sources of background.”

Dr. Akerib will introduce the dark matter problem and the WIMP hypothesis, and he will discuss a range of the different techniques that he and his colleagues use in their attempts to detect them. These approaches include pucks of germanium operated at 50mK, buckets of liquified xenon instrumented with light-sensitive photomultiplier tubes, and the resurgence of bubble chambers from the heyday of accelerator-based particle physics.

VISITORS ARE WELCOME, and STUDENTS' DINNERS ARE FREE!

Minutes for April 28

     As is his wont, Chairman, Ernst von Meerwall opened the meeting by calling on Treasurer Dan Galehouse for a report on the health of our treasury. Dr. Dan’s response was even more multi-faceted than usual. It seems that Tangier (whose recently-leased-out business has now returned to owner Edward George) somehow charged us only $15 for our dinners in March (instead of the usual $18), resulting “in a lot of extra money in the treasury” (if indeed, one can characterize less than a hundred dollars as a bonanza). At any rate, because of the turnout for the April meeting, the bottom line had become even greater, going from $312.60 to $338.50 — thus preserving our reputation as the cheapest club in Akron.

     Bob Erdman (who had brought guest James Brown for the evening) asked to be heard with his salute to Milian France, who has been our Nametag Marshal (and dispenser of cheerfulness and fun and innovative ideas) for several years, including the unwelcome news that she is planning to move to Albuquerque this summer — possibly before the next meeting. Milian received a hearty salutation of applause, albeit with a hint sadness. We’ll miss her!

     Chairman Ernst then turned to Program Chairman Sam-Fielding Russell, who, after previewing Dr. Akrerib’s “Dark Matter” talk, announced above, repeated his plea for suggested topics for our new season beginning in September — together with speakers for same. But, Sam cautioned, please help avoid scheduling problems by not committing him/her to a specific date.

     At which point Chairman Ernst turned the meeting over to Founder, First President, and By-Laws Author Charlie Wilson for the solemn ceremony of election of club officers for our club for the year to come. Charlie had put out requests for nominees, he said, but his relatively few responses, he said, “were pretty monotonous,” he said. Most offered something like “the best we could do is hang onto the ones we’ve got!”

     Accordingly, Charles III posted the following as proposed Officers of Akron Physics Club for 2008-2009. And he added his personal appreciation to Milian France for her service as Nametag Marshall, together with the news that Bob Erdman has agreed to assume her post:

Chairman     Ernst von Meerwall

Vice Chairman     Darrell Reneker

Program Chairman     Sam Fielding-Russell

Program Vice-Chairmen     Leon Marker & Bob Hirst

Secretary     Jack Gieck

Associate Secretary     Jerry Potts

Treasurer     Dan Galehouse

Associate Treasurer     Kevin Cavicchi

Nametag Marshal     Bob Erdman

Webmaster     Jonah Kirszenberg

Reservations Secretary     Charlie Wilson

     There was a barely audible second to Charlie’s motion. Chairman Ernst asked if there were further nominations. None was offered. He asked whether the current nominees were willing to serve. Embracing a political strategy in sharp contrast to the current national primary contest, not a single candidate uttered a word. Breaking the deathly silence, Charlie moved that the people on the slate be elected by acclamation — ultimately receiving a chorus of ayes. There followed a solitary muted cheer.

     To the relief of the assemblage it had became time to introduce the speaker, ceramic engineer Richard Goettler (son of Lloyd Goettler, from whom we have heard, and whose work was recently featured in Physics Today). His subject was “Solid Oxide Fuel Cells.”

     Richard Goettler is manager of a group of about 35 scientists and others at Rolls Royce Fuel Cells in North Canton. He reminded those of us who still associate Rolls Royce with high-end passenger cars that the company sold off that division six years ago to BMW. In addition to civil aerospace, where the company is famous for its jet engines, Rolls Royce is also into marine turbine engines, oil and gas line service equipment and fuel cells for power generation, which is part of the company’s energy development effort. Rolls Royce’s R & D on fuel cells is unique in that it is 90% self funded. The fuel cell division is headquartered in the UK, where it has about 250 people (plus about half a dozen in Singapore, where a 25% of the activity is owned). Two years ago, Rolls Royce purchased the fuel cell division of Babcock and Wilcox, which is the North Canton facility headed by Goettler. RR’s effort represents the largest fuel cell R & D activity worldwide.

     The initial goal of the Canton group is power-generation fuel cell systems in the one megawatt range, with the probability that they will work on increased capacity systems in the future. What makes fuel cells attractive in comparison with other energy sources is their electrical efficiency (currently 55% with the probability of achieving 65%), compared with reciprocating engines or gas turbine engines— which, at best, are about 45%. A coal-fired power plant is about 35%. Moreover, fuel cells represent a substantial reduction in CO2 emissions. The main market focus of fuel cells in this range is residential and automotive.

     “Fuel cells,” our speaker explained, “are just one type of electrochemical cell. They’re just like a battery except that the chemical reactions are fed continuously to the cell. Charge transfer takes place between electrodes, and there is an electrolyte. For solid oxide fuel cells it is ion-conducting zirconium.” A major advantage of fuel cells is that it directly converts the chemical energy of the fuel to electrical energy.” (Operating in reverse, fuel cells can generate hydrogen — a source of water hydrolysis H2 for emerging hydrogen applications.)

     Fuel cells, Richard said, have been around since the early 1800s (“and we’re still not making money off of them!”). It was a lawyer, William Grove (1811-1896) who began experiments with a platinum electrode in an electrolyte of sulfuric acid. In contrast to fuel cells for automobiles currently in the news (“these are low-temperature cells based on a proton-conducting membranes operating at 140 degrees C”), solid oxide fuel cells employ a solid ionic membrane transporting oxygen, not protons. Oxygen, introduced at the cathode is transported through the electrolyte (zirconium oxide, or zirconia) to the anode where it oxidizes hydrogen, releasing electrons to the circuit. Zirconia is mixed in a solid solution with yttrium oxide in which nickel particles are distributed (they contribute electrons to optimize performance). The cat-ion in the yttrium oxide replaces the zirconium cat-ion in the zirconium oxide, creating vacancies in the anion lattice. This allows for high mobility of the oxygen through the crystal lattice. Because a phase change is involved, the operating temperature of the fuel cell is in the range of 800 degrees to 1000 degrees C. The temperature is self-sustaining.

          The equation describing fuel cell action is

          E = RT/4F in which
          R = Gas Constant
          F = Faraday Constant
          T = Temperature

     The cells on which the Rolls Royce group generate one volt per cell with a current density of 400 to 500 milliwatts. Each is fabricated in several layers and is about ten inches long. These are stacked and arranged in “tubes,” each contributing 42 watts, with its thousand square centimeters of surface. These units are collected in bundles, which have a total capacity of 125-250 kW. A turbo-generator provides and controls gas pressure to the system and it adds about 10% to the power output. Unburned fuel is recycled. There are no heat exchangers.

     A ready-to-roll system with a capacity in the one megawatt range is housed in a unit about the size of a travel trailer, and is designed to fit in a marine shipping container. 35 are being tested in Ohio; another 200 in the UK. Rolls Royce. Their price will be competitive with that of coal-fired plants which have a cost of $2300 per kilowatt, and with a vastly smaller carbon footprint. Exciting, innovative stuff!

Jack Gieck

[Top of Page]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Akron Physics Club

Newsletter

MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT:
April 28, 2008

Tangier, 532 West Market, 6:00 PM - Dinner at 6:30

RESERVATIONS or regrets by Thursday, April 24th, to:

Reservations Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com (330) 836-4167

Our speaker for April will be ceramic engineer Richard Goettler, manager of the fuel cell development team of Rolls Royce Fuel Cell Systems (US), Inc., in North Canton. His subject is:

SOLID OXIDE FUEL CELLS

It is a technology on which our speaker has been working for a dozen years, first at McDonnell Douglas (Boeing) and then at McDermott/Babcock & Wilcox. Rolls-Royce Fuel Cell Systems is developing solid-oxide fuel cell systems for megawatt scale, stationary power generation applications. The company’s hybrid power generation system, he says, will be clean, quiet, compact, fuel-efficient and cost competitive. Field tests are planned for 2008. Rolls-Royce believes the most promising applications for the solid-oxide fuel cell will be for stationary power generation units in such applications as hospitals, universities and shopping malls.

VISITORS ARE WELCOME, and STUDENTS' DINNERS ARE FREE!

Minutes for March 24

     Our February meeting had three welcome visitors, Saunis Parsons, together with student sons Reid and Tracy. All were introduced by Chairman Ernst von Meerwall, following which he called on Treasurer Dan Galehouse. Dr. Dan was obviously somewhat dismayed to report a new treasury balance at the beginning of the evening of $304.60 — the highest our (dues less) club’s wealth has ever been in its eighteen years of existence. Worse than that, he admitted, by the end of the meeting that the treasury would soar to $312.60 — threatening our status as the cheapest club in Akron!

     Called upon for a reminder of the final two programs in store before our summer hiatus, Program Chair Sam Fielding-Russell listed:

     April 28: Richard Goettler
     Rolls Royce Fuel Cells
     Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

     May 19 (Third Monday): Daniel Akerib
     Case Western Reserve University
     Dark Matter

     Sam was pleased to report that his plea for suggested speakers for the new season beginning in September had already resulted in four nominations (a reminder that this invitation includes volunteers who have something to say). And a further reminder that Sam’s e-mail address (correctly transmitted this time!) is gsfr@neo.rr.com.

     Which brought us to the anticipated hour for Ernst to introduce our speaker, Prof. Bryon Anderson, now Chair of Kent State University’s Department of Physics — from whom we have previously been privileged to hear three times over the years, speaking on a variety of subjects: stars and planets, neutrinos, and sailing. His most recent presentation subsequently became a book, The Physics of Sailing Explained, which was featured in the in the February issue of Physics Today, with a cover picture entitled Wings on the Water. (Dr. Anderson has two boats, one of which he sails on Lake Erie, and a 33-footer he has already taken out for the first time this year on Chesapeake Bay – and yes, armed with his knowledge (and a sophisticated computer-navigating device), he can operate it without a crew.

     Dr. Anderson’s topic this time was The Electric Form Factor of the Neutron, a subject to which much of his research has been devoted for years at Jefferson Laboratory. Virginia. He showed us an aerial view of the $500 million facility (at least a billion in today’s dollars) — a cluster of buildings surrounded by a heavy concrete underground tunnel in the shape of a rectangle about half a mile long with rounded ends, Employing about 30 scientists and technicians, its operation is funded by the National Science Foundation. In the tunnel, electrons are accelerated to a velocity so close to the speed of light that the spherical shape of the minute particles is relativistically flattened to become discs in the direction of their motion. The high-velocity electrons are released into three five-story rooms (with four-foot thick walls) containing massive arrays of detectors.

     Since about 1935 it has been known that the proton and neutron are not elementary, i.e., point, particles. Both are now known to be composed of quarks. The charge distribution of the proton was nicely determined in the 1950s, our speaker explained, by high-energy electron scattering. But the neutron is more interesting than the (positively charged) proton because, although the neutron has no net charge, it was found to have a positive core surrounded by a negative outer layer.

     Because there are no pure neutron targets, and since hydrogen’s most common nucleus consists of a single proton, one must use deuterium (whose nucleus consists of one proton and one neutron) or an isotope of helium. The motion of the neutron in these nuclei makes extracting the neutron distribution inherently inaccurate because it is a moving target. Moreover, the lifetime of a free neutron is about ten minutes. One can, however, measure momentum transfer, and by comparing the scattering from these nuclei with that from hydrogen, one can measure both the magnetic and the electric form factor. This was the state of the art until the 1990s when the Jefferson Laboratory was built.

     With the new tools available (including the requirement to cool the target to one or two degrees Kelvin and to measure time of flight to 1.5 millionths of a second) it became possible to refine greatly the determination of the charge distribution of the neutron by measuring the spin transfer from a polarized beam of electrons scattered by a target containing partially polarized neutrons, and to obtain precise determinations of the ratio of the electric form factor to the magnetic form factor. These methods have eliminated most of the inaccuracies associated with simple scattering and they are leading to greatly improved results for the charge distribution of the neutron. These results now provide some of the most sensitive tests available of models of the structure of the nucleon.

     Our speaker discussed the results in detail, comparing them with theoretical models and with plots of previous work. The reduction in the error bars on the points in recent modern era curves when compared with older plots was dramatic. But work is still in progress, Dr. Anderson said, at locations all over the world.

     After attempting to process the above through this engineer’s neurons and receiving some welcome assistance from Chairman Ernst (whose helpful e-mail was entitled Getting a Charge Out of the Neutron!) your secretary found solace in John Updyke’s couplet about yet another subatomic particle:

     Neutrinos: They are very small,
     And do not interact at all.

Jack Gieck

[Top of Page]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Akron Physics Club

Newsletter

MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT:
March 24, 2008

Tangier, 532 West Market, 6:00 PM - Dinner at 6:30

RESERVATIONS or regrets by Thursday, March 20th, to:

Reservations Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com (330) 836-4167

It has been five years since we have been privileged to hear Dr. Bryon Anderson, now Chair of Kent State University’s Department of Physics. In January 2003, Prof. Anderson treated us to a delightful presentation on “The Physics of Sailing” — which, in October of the same year, precipitated his book, “The Physics of Sailing Explained” (currently available from Amazon.com). And his article on the same subject appears in the February issue of Physics Today, with the issue’s cover picture entitled “Wings on the Water.” Our speaker is also the author of more than 200 papers published in scientific journals in experimental nuclear physics. In which regard he is eminently qualified to present our March program, entitled:

THE ELECTRIC FORM FACTOR OF THE NEUTRON

About which Dr. Anderson explains, “Since about 1935 it has been known that the proton and neutron are not elementary, i.e., point, particles. The charge distribution of the proton was nicely determined in the 1950's by high-energy electron scattering. The neutron was studied also and found to have charge, with a positive core surrounded by a negative outer layer, yielding no net charge. Because there are no pure neutron targets, one must use deuterium or helium and the motion of the neutron in these nuclei makes extracting the neutron distribution inherently inaccurate.

“Recently, it has become possible to determine the charge distribution of the neutron by measuring the spin transfer from a polarized beam of electrons scattered by a neutron. This method eliminates most of the inaccuracies associated with simple scattering and is leading to greatly improved results for the charge distribution of the neutron. These results now provide some of the most sensitive tests available of models of the structure of the nucleon.” Our speaker will discuss these measurements and compare them with theoretical models.

Minutes for February 21

     Our February meeting had five visitors we rarely get to see: Pat and Katherine Reilly, Ken and Janice Gui, and Claire Tessier (who gave us a program last February on “The Biomineralization of Silicon”).

     For openers, Chairman Ernst von Meerwall called on Treasurer Dan Galehouse for a report of our wealth. Dan advised that, because Tangier charged us less than $18 per meal last time, this unexpectedly resulted “in a lot of extra money in the treasury,” but he wasn’t “in a position to commit on how much money we are going make.” Later, however, after resorting to empirically counting the money in the metal box that serves as our club’s vault, and after paying Tangier for our dinner (using neither a calculator nor a slide rule — mine resides in its leather scabbard in the top drawer of my desk), he reported a new treasury balance of $306.67 — which is probably a record high since the club was reorganized in 1990. We offer our thanks to Dr. Dan for his continuing to perform this thankless job.

     Called upon for a review of programs he has lined up for the rest of the year, Program Chair Sam Fielding-Russell reviewed the list:

     March 24: Dr. Bryon Anderson
     Prof. Of Physics, Kent State University
     “The Electric Form Factor of the Neutron”

     April 28: Richard Goettler
     Rolls Royce Fuel Cell
     “Solid Oxide Fuel Cells"

     May 19 (Third Monday): Daniel Akerib
     Case Western Reserve University
     “Dark Matter”

     Sam reminded the group that suggestions for speakers (not just subjects) for next year would be very welcome — and this invitation includes volunteers who have something to say. (Ernst pointed out that “the worst that could happen is that we’ll never talk to you again.”) Sam’s e-mail address is gsfr@neo.rr.com.

     Our leader then called on Webmaster, John Kirszenberg, for a report on how things were going with his meetings with the University of Akron with regard to our website: http://physics.uakron.edu/APC/news.htm. John had good news: Not only is the University going to stay with the same server it has had, but our website is now listed on the U of A’s Physics Department Main Page. And the great thing this does, he explained, is that if one calls up Google and types in “Akron Physics Club,” up pops our the link to our site. “So,” John announced, “we now have international presence.” Your secretary has tried it and it works!

     Between Charlie Wilson, Ernst, and Claire Tessier herself, we learned that Claire is featured in the current issue of Chemical and Engineering News. The occasion is the 40th anniversary of an American Chemical Society project of which she was the third graduate. Between her junior and senior years of high school, the program sent her to the University of Vermont for the summer — an experience that caused her to choose chemistry as a career (she is currently the University of Akron’s Professor of Chemistry). The magazine story not only featured her picture, but also her personal logo, which spells her first and last names in the symbols of chemical elements: C La I Re Te S Si Er (carbon, lanthanum, iodine, rhenium, tellurium, sulfur, silicon, erbium). It is apparent that Claire’s career was predestined.

     Which brought us to the introduction of our speaker, Dr. Amy Milsted, Professor of Biology, the University of Akron, who, with degrees in cell biology, education, and chemistry, is also a Fellow, the American Heart Association, Council for High Blood Pressure — obviously an appropriate speaker for the subject of her talk: Hypertension.

     Before we get into the details of her current research, since your secretary was privileged to have dinner at the same table with our speaker, he thought the reader might be interested in some of the things we learned (and subsequently studied) about the physics of blood pressure. The often-quoted normal blood pressure reading of 120/80 is measured in millimeters of mercury (which translates into 2.3/1.5 pounds per square inch). The second number, the “diastolic” reading, is the static pressure — the minimum pressure when the heart is at rest between beats. The first number, the “systolic” pressure, is the maximum pressure that occurs with the beat, and this value usually increases with age, typically going from 120 to 140 mm Hg (2.7 psi). This happens, Dr. Milsted explained, because the blood vessel walls become less elastic as they age; their diameters, which expand slightly with each beat, stretch less and, consequently, are less effective in damping the peak pressure.

     This loss of flexibility is mostly due to the walls of the blood vessel network thickening with age. Another factor affecting blood pressure is the deposit of plaque in these vessels, which further reduces their interior cross sectional area, increasing the resistance to flow. So the sympathetic (or autonomic) nervous system increases the blood pressure by making the heart pump harder to maintain a sufficient flow to nourish the organs and muscles it serves. Some organs have their own regulatory defenses, e.g, when systolic blood pressure falls below 100 mm Hg, the kidneys release the enzyme renin into the bloodstream, stimulating the heart. Although the structure of the pipes and the pump in this system are made of flexible tissue, the same basic laws apply to blood flow as they do in other hydraulic (or electric, or heat flow) systems: flow is equal to pressure (psi — voltage — temperature difference) divided by the resistance. Too much salt in one’s diet increases the volume of fluid in the circulatory system, raising blood pressure. Exercise temporarily raises blood pressure because of the increased demands of the body. Although the hearts of babies beat faster than those of adults, infants have much lower blood pressure because their heart is pumping against less resistance.

     Our speaker pointed out that more than 80 million Americans have one or more kinds of cardiovascular disease: high blood pressure, coronary heart disease (which is the biggest killer of Americans) heart failure, stroke, and/or various congenital diseases. The prevalence increases with age. By the time we get into our eighties, 83% of men and 90% of women have some form of cardiovascular disease. Many more people die of cardiovascular disease than they do of cancer (or anything else). One in three of us has hypertension, which is defined as a systolic blood pressure reading greater than 140 and/or a diastolic greater than 90). Hypertension is associated with a reduced life expectancy and is the most important risk factor for stroke. It can damage the brain, heart, eyes and kidneys. Contributing factors include stress, too much salt, and/or lack of exercise; but the cause of 95 % of hypertension cases is unknown — and for reasons known only to medical linguists, it is therefore called “essential” or “primary” hypertension.

     Our speaker displayed a chart showing the differences in high blood pressure occurrence between the sexes. It was apparent that until middle age, men have a higher rate than women; but after menopause, women (with the decline of estrogen) match men in prevalence. And above 65, many more women have hypertension than men.

     So what can be done about hypertension? The first effective inhibitor was discovered in the 1970s in the South American jungle in the venom of a viper that disabled its prey (including the humans working in the jungle) by dramatically dropping their blood pressure. Its effect was to block a protein that becomes a peptide (angipepsin 2), which causes blood vessels to constrict. The essence of this snake venom is the basis of many of the prescribed hypertension medications today (e.g., ace inhibitors). They essentially relax the blood vessels, increasing their diameter. Alpha- and beta-blockers reduce the strength of the nerve signals to the heart. Diuretics flush out water and sodium. Calcium channel blockers keep calcium ions from entering the cells of the heart, There is a dizzying number of drug names that have subtle, nuantic differences in their effects.

     Amy Misted’s research has been studying the effects of genetics in hypertension, for which there is ample evidence. Several studies have shown that the Y-chromosome (which exists only in males; ladies have two Xs) is associated with high blood pressure. African-Americans have a higher prevalence of high blood pressure than European-Americans. But since they can’t experiment on people, Amy’s group works with rat colonies — including one variant with a high incidence of hypertension. Rats make excellent models because the effects of hypertension on their various organs matches experience in humans. To take the blood pressure of rats, our speaker’s research group usually uses a small cuff surrounding the tail close to the rat’s body. It is now possible, however, for them to implant a wireless transducer in the aorta.

     It is possible to have two generations of rats a year (“a two-year-old rat is a very old rat”), but Amy’s group usually keeps rats for only 15-20 weeks. Nearly two decades ago, the group crossed spontaneously-hypertensive male rats with hypertensive females, and did a similar crossing with those having no history of the disease. Predictably, the first group produced offspring with extremely high blood pressure (above 200), and the tension-free rats results begot children with normal blood pressure. Then they began mixing them up, finding that the results were sharply different depending on whether the mother or the father was the one with high blood pressure. The differences were as much as 230 vs. 150 mm Hg.

     The conclusion of the study was that it is the Y-chromosome (found only in males) that has a significant effect on the inheritance of hypertension. The next step was to investigate the components of the Y-chromosome. They concentrated on a group called SRY, meaning “sex-determining region on the Y,” the gene that causes the sex-neutral embryo to become a male. There are a number of DNA combinations in the Y-chromosome that control other inheritances, and Amy’s group set about to find the one that transmitted hypertension. To this end, they had DNA from the rats assembled into what they call a “genomic library,” from which they have found six different copies of SRY (designated as SRY-1 through SRY-6) in the rats’ genome.

     One of these, they reasoned, had to be responsible for blood pressure. So the group did mini-operations on six rats with normal blood pressure to deliver the different SRY gene combinations to the rats’ kidneys, and we saw charts of the results, together with those of control rats. As it turned out, the SRY-1 sequences significantly affected blood pressure because it released a neuro-peptide that caused the blood vessels to contract. SRY-2 caused no difference in blood pressure, even though the differences in their proteins are small. The group has gone on to study those differences, and we saw how rat cells into which the various DNA combinations had been introduced multiplied (in two weeks time) in a Petri dish.

     A major finding of Amy Milsted’s research to date is that it has now been demonstrated that SRY-1 is heavily involved in the inheritance of hypertension (although it is probably not the only hereditary influence). She is working on many other possibilities, including factors that influence the genes of the African-American male. There were lots of questions after her talk, during which we even learned about the diet of the rats in her care.

Jack Gieck

[Top of Page]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Akron Physics Club

Newsletter

MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT:
February 21, 2008

Tangier, 532 West Market, 6:00 PM - Dinner at 6:30

RESERVATIONS or regrets by Thursday, February 21st, to:
Reservations Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com (330) 836-4167

     Speaker for our February meeting will be will be Dr. Amy Milsted, Professor of Biology, the University of Akron, and, since 2001, a Fellow, the American Heart Association, Council for High Blood Pressure — which organization is the sponsor of one of her current research projects. Her subject is one that is intimately familiar to albeit unwanted by many of us:



HYPERTENSION

     It is subject on which Dr. Milsted has been conducting research for years, as evidenced by the string of papers she has published (e.g., studying the influence of testosterone on blood pressure). Her previous appointments include service at the Cleveland Clinic, the Veterans Administration Medical Center, Case Western Reserve Department of Medicine, and Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

VISITORS ARE WELCOME, and STUDENTS' DINNERS ARE FREE!

Minutes for January 28

     Our January meeting attracted an audience of 35 members and guests, a record attendance that included two students of Bob Erdman — Reid and Tracy Parsons— together with visiting organists Joanna Butler, Carolyn Curtis, Nancy Robinson, and Scott Duncan. Before presenting the speaker who had attracted such a prestigious assemblage, Chairman Ernst von Meerwall called on Treasurer Dan Galehouse (who was present in person!) for a statement of our wealth — which, he was reluctant to report, had increased from $162.60 to $214.60, thereby increasing his responsibilities.

     And in a second item of club business, Program Chairman Sam Fielding-Russell gave us a rundown on our programs for the remainder of the season:

     February 25: Dr. Amy Milsted
     Prof. of Biology, University of Akron
     "Hypertension"

     March 24: Dr. Bryon Anderson
     Prof. Of Physics, Kent State University
     “The Electric Form Factor of the Neutron”

     April 28: Richard Goettler
     Rolls Royce Fuel Cell
     “Solid Oxide Fuel Cells"

     May 19 (Third Monday): Daniel Akerib
     Case Western Reserve University
     “Dark Matter”

     Chairman Ernst advised that the University of Akron, and its Physics Department, are not yet finished with changes to their websites, and this may affect the accessibility to our club’s website, built and maintained by Webmaster John Kirszenberg: http://physics.uakron.edu/APC/news.htm

     At which point Ernst introduced our speaker, Tim Mann, Vice-President of Schantz Organ Company of Orville, Ohio, the largest and oldest pipe organ builder in the nation still under the ownership of the founding family. The company has been building pipe organs since 1873, when the means to distribute air to the sets of variegated whistles that comprise these complex wind instruments was substantially different from today’s technology.

     Entitling his presentation “Pipe Organ Building 101,” our speaker began by introducing the components: the console, the blower, a reservoir bellows, the windchest, and “ranks” of pipes, which are plugged into holes in the top of the wooden windchest.

     While achieving his degree in organ from Indiana University, Tim spent three years building and “voicing” organs at the Holtkemp Organ Company of Cleveland. He recalled that, “In this time period I spent a lot of time studying how pipes produce sound. And most of this is just pure physics: taking columns of air and setting them into vibration, and, depending on how the pipe containing that column of air is constructed, whether it’s capped or fully open, tapered, partially open or mostly closed, it is the geometry of the pipe that determines its tonal quality. It is this artistic practice that we think about rather than the physics behind in achieving the musical result.” Accordingly, the account that follows has been augmented by contributions from Chairman Ernst and other sources to address the physics and engineering of pipe organs in a bit more detail.

     Tim likened the console to “the command and control center” of the instrument. It is, of course, the home of keyboard (or several parallel keyboards or “consoles”) with multiple “stops” at the sides or top, which, when pulled, turn on the various ranks of pipes; and there are foot pedals that are usually bass notes. Fifty to as many as a hundred stops (each controlling the windchest of a separate rank) are common in large churches. Since each rank usually contains 61 pipes, having 6100 pipes in a church organ is not uncommon. The organ in the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles has 265 stops; and the Atlantic City Convention Hall (the largest in the U.S.) has 852 stops, controlling 33,114 pipes.

     For half a millennium, classic pipe organs used strips of wood running from each key to mechanically control the flow of air. The keys (and stops) on today’s organs are electric switches. Since, on larger organs, the bundle of wires from the keys and stops to the electro-pneumatic valves has often become a cable several inches in diameter, computer software has since been devised to handle this myriad of data electronically by polling all the keys and stops many times per second and transmitting the multiplexed signals via one (or several) coaxial cables. These signals are decoded by a central computer, which signals the valves. Very different from the organ played by Bach!

     Air pressure is generated in today’s organs by a centrifugal fan driven by an electric motor. The assembly is enclosed in a soundproof box, the air feeding into a weighted rectangular reservoir bellows, which maintains a constant pressure of 21 inches of water (which is less than one pound per square inch: 0.759 psi). If, during quiet passages, or even if the organ is silent for several minutes, there is more air than needed and the reservoir bellows is filled, the centrifugal fan is designed to spin idly without raising the pressure significantly. Although it does the job well, this is obviously not a very efficient pneumatic pump design — which is probably why the electric motor, even for a small 10-rank organ, is a half-horsepower, while larger organs need as much as 7.5 horsepower. The technology is in contrast to classic mechanical organs, whose more efficient (huge, triangular) bellows were mechanically pumped by a single choirboy — whose continuous-operation capability would probably be about a quarter horsepower. Theater organs (and, no doubt, the Atlantic City Convention Hall above) use higher air pressures.

     Which brings us to the essence — the voice — of the instrument: the organ pipes. Each rank usually consists of 61 pipes, which comprise five octaves — each octave containing 12 black-and white keys (or “semitones”). The length of an open-ended pipe is half the wavelength of the sound produced. Five doublings of pipe length means that the longest pipe in a rank is 32 times the length of the shortest pipe. Thus, an organ whose lowest bass note is a 16-foot pipe “C” will find successive higher Cs at 8 feet, 4 feet, 2 feet, one foot and half a foot. And the largest organs that go an octave lower have 32-foot pipes. The pipes are fabricated from cast sheets of a tin-lead alloy (from 30% to 90% tin). Interestingly, the more tin in the alloy, the “brighter” the sound (and the more expensive the pipe). Some (low-pitch) pipes are made of wood, and have a rectangular cross section.

     Pipes that are essentially pneumatic whistles are called “flue” pipes. Flue pipes have no moving parts and generate their sound by vibrating air in a column like a flute or recorder. Reed pipes have an actual mechanical reed, like a clarinet or saxophone, at the base (except that in a pipe organ the reed is made of brass) and have a resonator column above.

     While the distance between two open ends of a pipe is one-half wavelength for its fundamental frequency (pitch), the distance between the closed end of a pipe and its open end is one-quarter wavelength. The question under what conditions a pipe considers the input end closed rather than open is subtle and depends on details, which may well vary between types of organ pipe, as it does between different wind (or brass) instruments. Open-closed pipes exhibit only odd harmonics, while open-open pipes have the full harmonic spectrum. Partially covering the open end by insertion of a tube, or any partial plug, affects not only the proportion among the harmonics produced, but also, very substantially, the fundamental pitch of the pipe. As a general rule, the narrower the pipe, the more of the higher harmonics it will have. And straight pipes have greater amplitudes of the higher harmonics than tapered pipes.

     All these subtle variations result in selected combinations of harmonic overtones, which are perceived by the human ear (and mind) as the “color” of the tone produced. Most have been empirically developed over the last four hundred years in an effort to imitate the sound emitted by orchestral instruments, including wind, brass, strings, and woodwinds. Drilling a hole at the midpoint of the pipe raises the pitch by an octave and produces a characteristic flute sound. Changing the diameter of the pipe alters the color from an “eee” sound to an “ahh” to an “ooo.”

     Our speaker pointed out that the differences and imperfections that blend in the output of pipe organs give an organ (and the room in which it is played) its characteristic sound. Tim pointed out that is analogous to what we hear in the blending of the instruments in a symphony orchestra — since, as a practical matter, in tuning the strings for example, not every musician exactly matches the 440 Hertz “A” (or whatever the value exactly comes out) emitted by the oboe that evening [the oboe, a double reed horn, is chosen because it is one of the most difficult instruments to tune]. Indeed, depending on the individual musician’s sense of pitch in tuning his violin, there can be as much as a quartertone difference between instruments.

     Tim showed us scores of church interiors in which Schantz organs have been installed. A typical time schedule to manufacture and install a pipe organ is, he said, 18 to 20 months. But from initial contact until completion (including design for the aesthetics and acoustics of the chamber in which it will operate, and the preferences of the congregation), ten years sometimes elapse. Tim pointed out that pipe organs are not cheap. A modest-size organ with 10 or 15 ranks will cost from $12,000 to as much as $30,000 per rank, for a total cost of $150,000 to $200,000. But this is on the low side. The budget for the 134-stop organ restoration described in the last paragraph was $2.1 million.

     One of the company’s current projects has been restoring the massive instrument in the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago (an organ built in 1928, but one with many dead pipes since it sustained water damage and plaster debris from a sloppy ceiling repair in the 1970s). Schwantz has been dismantling and removing its 7000 pipes, which range in length from 3/8 inch to 32 feet. According to University of Chicago organist Thomas Weisflog, after restoration and revoicing, “the sound is going to be just thunderous. You will literally feel the sound when it’s played. This whole place is going to vibrate.”

Jack Gieck

[Top of Page]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Akron Physics Club

Newsletter

MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT:
January 28, 2008

Tangier, 532 West Market, 6:00 PM - Dinner at 6:30

RESERVATIONS or regrets by Thursday, January 24, to:
Reservations Secretary Charlie Wilson: cww3mmwilson@juno.com (330) 836-4167

For our first meeting of 2008 our speaker will be Tim Mann, Vice-President of the Schantz Organ Company of Orville, Ohio, who will be enlightening us about the

PHYSICS AND CONSTRUCTION
OF
LARGE PIPE ORGANS

— a subject in which he is well versed, for the Schantz Organ Company is the largest and oldest pipe organ builder in the nation (still under the ownership of the founding family)— and it has been building pipe organs since 1873. In 2007 the company’s projects included organs in churches from Tempe, Arizona to Mobile, Alabama, and it is currently restoring the massive instrument in the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago (an organ built in 1928, but one with many dead pipes since it sustained water damage and debris from sloppy ceiling repair in the 1970s). The company is dismantling and removing its 7000 pipes, which range in length from three-eighths of an inch to 32 feet. According to University of Chicago organist Thomas Weisflog, after restoration and revoicing, “the sound is going to be just thunderous. You will literally feel the sound when it’s played. This whole place is going to vibrate.”

VISITORS ARE WELCOME, and STUDENTS' DINNERS
ARE FREE!

[Top of Page]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~