American Scientist

Today, September 10, 2008, is the day the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) starts up. As I understand it, things won’t get into 7-trillionelectron-volt full swing (spin?) until next year, but I’m excited anyway. With the exception of neutrino hunting, particle physics has almost seemed to be in suspended animation since the superconducting supercollider ran fiscally aground in 1993. By this time next year, we may be able to report the sighting of that notorious fugitive, the Higgs boson. That would be splendid, but I’m even more captivated by what we won’t see coming.

As has always been the case with science, great steps forward rewrite the rule books. Case in point: Michael Seringhaus and Mark Gerstein bring us up to date on what functionally annotating 1 percent (about 30 million base pairs) of the human genome has revealed about the gene. In “Genomics Confounds Gene Classification” (pp. 466–473), they report that things aren’t as simple and clear cut as once thought. That one-gene, one-protein, one-function picture of subcellular life turns out to be the exception rather than the rule. New thinking is in order.

Jill Zamzow, Peter Nelson and George Losey got an even bigger surprise by what they didn’t see coming: nothing. When the marine biologists wondered what fish see—in particular, if their vision capability includes spectra beyond the lowly human’s—one part of their hypothesis was confirmed. In “UV Lights Up Marine Fish” (pp. 482–489) they report that a majority of the tropical species they examined can see in the ultraviolet. What they didn’t expect when they trained their UV camera on a Hawai’ian puffer fish, however, is that the rascal disappeared. Turns out he makes his own “sunscreen.”

Technology enabling discovery is a commonplace in science, but that makes it no less spectacular. Derek Briggs, Derek Siveter, David Siveter and Mark Sutton filled in a yawning gap in the soft-bodied fossil record by digitally photographing slices of mineralized Silurian creatures and reassembling them in three dimensions using a computer. In “Virtual Fossils from 425 Million-Year-Old Rocks” (pp. 474–481), we see ancient life forms at a detail that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

Of course, engineers are no less prone to discovery, sometimes the hard way. As Henry Petroski observes in “Tower Cranes” (pp. 458–461), “It is human nature to be optimistic about systems that beg us to be pessimistic.”

Howard Wainer offers an explanation for why “wow” happens as infrequently as it does. In “Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?” (pp. 446–449), he explains by example why it’s so hard, even for investigators constantly poking at envelopes, to escape self-imposed boundaries. We type QWERTY because 19th-century typewriters were slow, pie charts excel despite the availability of better visuals, and phonetic languages languish for pure pendantry. Convention has its place, but mainly in meeting halls.

The LHC is likely to throw several conventions out the window, if such a thing is possible 100 meters below ground. The prospect is joyous. Science is about curiosity and surprise. What a drear prospect life would be without them.