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CALENDAR Sunday 25 September: Twenty-sixth Sunday of the Year (Year A) Monday 26 September: Feria or Sts Cosmas and Damian, Martyrs Tuesday 27 September: St Vincent de Paul, Priest Wednesday 28 September: St Wenceslaus, Martyr, or Sts Lawrence Ruiz and Companions, Martyrs Thursday 29 September: Sts Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Archangels Friday 30 September: St Jerome, Priest and Doctor Saturday 1 October: St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Virgin and Doctor Sunday 2 October: Twenty-seventh Sunday of the Year


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Independently audited certified average circulation per issue of THE TABLET for issues distri buted between 1 January and


30 June 2011 is 20,976. Volume 265 No. 8914 ISSN: 0039 8837


ACROSS THE UNIVERSE


Heated discussions GUY CONSOLMAGNO


SCIENCE IS a marriage of theory and exper- iment. Sometimes the marriage is literal. The colleagues I visited this month at Louisiana State University, Brad and Martha Schaefer, have been married 30 years; she’s a whizz in the lab, he’s a maths guru. The three of us have been looking for a quick and non-destructive way to measure the heat absorbed in a meteorite when it is raised from the cold temperatures of space to the temper- ature where water melts. Meteoritic material is typical of the rocky stuff mixed with ice in the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; if those moons melt, the molten regions could be oceans of life beneath their icy crusts. Indeed, Jupiter’s moons deflect its magnetic field in just the way you’d expect from deep internal oceans; and, more dramatically, we see geysers spurting out of the surface of the Saturn moon, Enceladus. If you want to know how much heat it takes


to melt those moons, you have to keep track of all the different places where that heat can go. Measuring heat capacity can be done with great precision using (expensive) modern equipment. But it requires carving your meteorite into a little disk; and it takes two days to run each measurement. So we’ve come up with a fast-and-dirty way


to determine the heat content of our meteorites. We drop a sample into a container of liquid nitrogen, and watch the liquid boil away until the rock is as cold as the nitrogen … a cool 200˚C below zero, about the same as Saturn’s moons. We know how much heat it takes to boil away a gramme of liquid nitrogen; count the number of grammes gone, and you know how much heat came out of the rock. In theory. The details, of course, are devilish. For the past month, Martha has been designing the best way to set up the experiment. For exam- ple, after trying many different kinds of liquid


nitrogen containers, she finally concluded that a stack of Styrofoam coffee cups works bet- ter than far more elaborate Dewar flasks. (Well, we wanted a simple, cheap solution.) Brad, meanwhile, has worked out the complicated equations to correct for how much heat is absorbed from the bottom and sides of the cup instead of from the meteorite. We’ve also been perplexed by any number


of inexplicable fluctuations from run to run. Why the variations? Alas, the results of any experiment may tell you something that is com- pletely true, but the question it answers isn’t necessarily the one you thought you were ask- ing. If we’re actually only seeing how static electricity on the Styrofoam affects the elec- tronics of the scale, when we thought we were measuring fluctuations in the heat content, we will draw seriously erroneous conclusions. Error in experiment comes in two varieties.


Some error is random; if you run the exper- iment many times, this sort of error may average itself out. But other error isbuilt in, and always misleads you in the same direction. When teasing truth from nature, it’s useful


to have some ground truth against which you can test your procedure to look for systematic errors. Knowing what the answer ought to look like – theory – is a good test for an experiment’s accuracy. But, of course, some error is just … well … a mistake; as we discovered when Brad (or was it Martha?) discovered that an essen- tial term in Brad’s equations had mysteriously disappeared from the computer code Martha was using to process her data. When theory and experiment don’t agree, each side is liable to blame the other. But then, a strong mar- riage isn’t afraid of a little bickering.


■Guy Consolmagno SJ is the curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory.


Glimpses of Eden


AND SUDDENLY the wind and the rain ceased. The great storms of the past few days blew away, and the following morning,


the sun rose. I love these sunny days of early autumn. With my desk still in its summer quar- ters at the downstairs window – the first persistent frosts drive me up to the heated room upstairs – I sat watching the progression of aerial visitors to our slender towers of verbena. It wasn’t long before a red admiral arrived.


Last but by no means least of our good- weather migrants, the red admiral butterfly leaves its heartlands in central Europe and reaches us by mid-August. Numbers peak about now, and hold until mid-October: the final


36 | THE TABLET | 24 September 2011


bloom before winter. Browser of late flowers and windfall apples, the red admiral is proof that nature saves the best to last. A second and a third landed on the verbena and began to sip the nectar cups. They take their time feed- ing, contrasting with the busy activity of the bees.


With the sun behind them, lighting up their


velvety black and red wings, I seemed to be looking through pieces of living stained glass; yet when one closed its wings, the dead-leaf- coloured camouflage was almost perfect. Born in the nettles of Bohemia, and spread- ing all the way up to the Shetlands, these travelling pilgrims surprise us by changing our gardens into cathedrals.


Jonathan Tulloch


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