Science Friday; 455; Hour 2

From National Public Radio in New York, this is Talk of the Nation Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Do you wonder what your genes say about you, or are your heart pressed to explain to your children how the universe got started, how it will end? If you lie awake at night, wondering how you can remember the details of high school physics class, but you can't fathom where you left the car keys? If so, you're not alone. These are some of the same questions that scientists the world over are asking, and this hour will ask our experts to share their favorite unanswered questions as we approach the millennium. Got some of your own? Inquiring minds want to know. The big question then some answers. Coming up right after the news, so stay with us. From National Public Radio News in Washington, I'm Chad Pergram. Russian President Boris Yeltsin today assured the Russian people he was staying on to complete his term. In a televised interview, Yeltsin ended days of reports he was planning to resign. This was the

first time Yeltsin had spoken publicly since Russia's financial markets and currency have turned downward. Last week in Yeltsin fired Prime Minister Sergei Karyenko and replaced him with Viktor Chernomyrdin. It was Yeltsin's second major cabinet reshuffling in five months. A spokesman for the White House, as President Clinton still plans to travel to Russia next week for a planned summit with Yeltsin. NPR's Business Correspondent Jack Spears says the political instability and a devalued Russian rubour are partly what's pushing down US stocks today and around the world. You know, it looked early on like we might have some investors moving back into the market to do some buying this morning, but that evaporated pretty quickly as once again the worries over the situation in Russia kind of came to the fore here. People are just two uncertain meaning investors are just too uncertain about what's going to happen over there to really take a lot of chances right now. And of course, that sent the down down again today after yesterday's big 4 % plunge. NPR's Jack Spear today the down has been up as much as 78 points and down as many as 154 points. Relief workers in Bangladesh say millions of residents are facing food

shortages and serious disease after floods swept through two -thirds of the country. Half the capital is submerged and major rivers continue to rise. More rain is expected over the next week. 110 ,000 people have contracted diarrhea. 400 people have been killed in the flooding. Bonnie has reorganized into a hurricane and is pelting the Virginia coast with wind and rain. Two people have been killed in the storm. A 12 -year -old girl died when a tree fell in her home in North Carolina near the Virginia border. A 50 -year -old man was electrocuted trying to hook up an emergency generator. Bonnie is now expected to follow the eastern seaboard. Tropical storm warnings have been posted as far north as Plymouth, Massachusetts. In the Caribbean another hurricane is racing along Danielle with sustained winds of 90 miles an hour. Airports from Minnesota to Memphis are starting to feel the effects of a possible strike by an northwest airline pilot says tonight's midnight deadline fast approaches. UPI's Jay Saper has this report. Pressure is mounting for a last -minute settlement and some of that pressure is coming from Northwest's passengers.

Tense standby lines crowd the terminals of competing airlines which have had to turn down thousands of flyers who didn't re -book canceled flights on time. Outside O 'Hare a light rain dampens the pilot's picket line. They're short staffing us. They just keep cross cutting to the point of diminishing returns. At Northwest headquarters in Minneapolis they're scrambling and spinning. So we've done our best to try to at least give passengers the tools and the accommodations they need. Pilots still can't postpone the strike if enough progress is made at the talks or President Clinton can step in. Jay Saper should toggle. This is NPR News from Washington. In NPR's Business Update the Commerce Department says Americans' incomes grew in July but people are spending less. The government says the two -tenths of a percentage point decline was the first spending fall since June of 1996. A long strike at General Motors is what economists are blaming on the depressed spending numbers as car purchases dropped in July. A work stoppage at U .S. West is now in its thirteenth day. Members of the

communications workers of America are accusing U .S. West of bringing in strike breakers from Canada. From Member Station KJZ and Phoenix, Chris Chesron reports. The union says U .S. West is luring technicians and other workers across the international border and urging them to lie about what they will be doing here. U .S. West admits it is using contract workers from Canada but spokesman Jim Roof says there's nothing wrong with that. It's not against the law to hire someone to work for you who's from outside the country. You know, there are those kind of workers literally all over the United States. But the union says the company and the workers can be fined. Today, striking employees qualify for a $200 a week strike benefit. Negotiators are talking in Denver today but there's no sign of any progress. For NPR News, I'm Chris Chesron in Phoenix. The International Chamber of Commerce in Paris is its preparing a team to help countries catch high -sea pirates. The ICC's rapid response investigation service would travel to

ports reporting pirate attacks and help local police. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average is down 57 points at 8108 and heavy trading of 694 million shares. I'm Chad Pergram, National Public Radio News in Washington. Support for National Public Radio comes from the Ford Foundation, a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This is Talk of the

Nation's Science Friday, I'm Ira Fledo. Toward the end of the 19th century, scientists began to unify the forces of nature. For example, the electric and magnetic forces were combined into electromagnetism and there was a general feeling at the time that the laws of nature were being understood and simplified and some scientists even worried that they would be out of jobs with no more work to do in science since everything was all figured out. Little did these folks know that in the 100 years that would follow, science would be turned on its head. Physicists would enter the spooky new worlds of relativity and quantum mechanics. Biologists would discover the structure of DNA and learn to engineer life. Space scientists would touch other planets and discover that perhaps life in space looks more like life at the bottom of our own oceans. New tools that watch our brains would open up windows on our minds and raise new questions about who we are. So while they didn't have it down pat a century ago,

neither do we have it now, and while high -powered telescopes and microscopes, high energy particle accelerators and high -tech brain scanners have helped explain many a scientific phenomena, they tend to lead to as many questions as they do answers. Well, and what are the big questions in science at the turn of this century that remain to be answered? This hour we'll talk to experts in astronomy, physics, brain research to hash out the details of some of our biggest scientific mysteries. We'll talk with Professor Philosophy to get a brief history of scientific inquiry. Finally, we want to know what science questions you have for us. What is puzzling you? Do you have questions that neither the Internet nor a trip to the library can answer conclusively? Maybe we can tackle them right here and try to figure out together with our massive international brains put together. We'll try to come up with some answers to some of the questions, but we want to know what you think the questions are. What are some of the great questions that I'm not talking about where the socks go in the laundry here? That's something like that, but some of the bigger

questions that we'll hand at one tackle. If you want to participate, our number is 1 -800 -989 -8255 -1 -800 -989 -TALK, and I invite you to surf over to our website at www .scienceFriday .com where you'll find all kinds of links to unanswered questions we're going to be talking about this hour. Now let me introduce my panel of experts, John McCall is the co -editor of unsolved problems in astrophysics. That sort of gives you an idea what he'd like to talk about, published last year by Princeton University Press. He's also a Richard Black professor of natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and he joins us by phone from Vienna, Austria. Hey, welcome to the program. Thank you, Aura. I'm a big fan of the program, so I'm delighted to join you. Well, it's so great of you to take time out from your dinner, I imagine, to talk with us here in Vienna. Floyd Bloom is the editor -in -chief at Science Magazine. He's also chairman of the Department of Neuro Pharmacology at Scripps Research Institute in LaHoya. He joins us today from the studios of member station KPBS on the campus of

San Diego University. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much, Aura. It's a pleasure to be on this side of the microphone. There you go. Stuart Samuel is an editor of the book, The Bible According to Einstein, published in 1997 by Jupiter Design -Tivic Publishing Company. He's also a research physicist at Columbia University and Professor Physics at City College of New York, and he's here with me and our studios at WNYC. Welcome to the program. Oh, it's a great pleasure to be on such a wonderful program, Science Friday. Good. It's the only testimonial day, Science Friday. Let me start with John McCallway out there in Vienna, Austria. If there's an out -and -out mystery in science, it's got to be the dark matter. Wouldn't you agree? Can you explain what's going on now, where are we trying to figure out what, where is all that mass of the universe? Sure, I think the dark matter is the biggest mystery that we have both in physics and astronomy, and perhaps the most important question that we have

to answer. Most of the matter that we know about in the universe, we don't see. It pulls on stars and makes them move faster than it would otherwise do if we just had the visible matter. So we know there's a lot of it out there, and people with telescopes on tops of mountains below the Earth, pollute people with telescopes in observatories, in outer space, are all searching for what the dark matter is. And although we have lots of speculations, we really don't know. And for a long time, Science has thought this missing mass might be found in neutrinos, right? And in early June of this year, it was discovered they do have some mass. That's right, and at first glance, we thought that was great progress, but it turned out that the most plausible interpretation of the experiments that have been done so far is that the neutrinos have a mass, but too small of a mass, to make much

of a difference in terms of how the universe evolves. So are we back to square one? We've made some progress, important progress, we've found some dark matter, but we haven't found the answer to what is most of the dark matter. So indeed, we are back to square one. To what extent do you think that it will be a discovery in this field due to technology that will, some sort of technology will help solve that question? Well, most of the great discoveries in astronomy and in astrophysics have come serendipitously by the application of new technological developments. People looked for things simply because they had new ways of looking and what they found was always a surprise. They found things unanticipated, things that enabled us to illuminate the view of the universe in ways that were unanticipated. So my expectation is that some of the new technology that is just being developed now

will, in fact, hold the key to the discovery of what most of the universe is made of. Stuart Samuel, let's talk about some of these other theories, maybe I should add a few comments about that. Sure, go ahead, matter. First of all, I think people should realize it's invisible. It's not just dark dust or tiny planets. This dark material is stuff that does not interact with light at all, and it composes about 90 % of the mass of the universe. And the other thing is that this dark matter played a crucial role in the formation, a crucial role during the evolution of the cosmos in terms of the formation of galaxies. So it's very important. Regions of this dark matter that were denser than other regions formed the seeds of galaxies and for clusters of galaxies. The other thing that this dark matter is very important

for is it determines the ultimate fate of the universe. If there's a lot of this dark matter, then the universe will eventually stop its expansion, the space is expanding. That's what's been observed now. And we've seen that's observed astronomically as one sees galaxies moving away from each other and moving away from us, the very fabric of space is stretching. And if there's a lot of this dark matter, then it's going to draw the galaxy, the universe, back together, and there's going to be a big crunch. If there's not too much of this dark matter, then the universe will expand forever. So this dark matter is very important, it determines the ultimate fate of the universe. In terms of talking about the ultimate fate, the ultimate beginning of the universe, and you talk about what's been talked about for many years, is a grand unifying theory about where all this stuff in it, the forces of nature, the particles, where all they come from. Well, when I was first contacted to be on Science Friday, I would ask the question,

what are the great unsolved problems in science? And I began to think, according to particular areas, and we just mentioned an astronomy, I agree, 100 % with John McCall, that the greatest mystery currently perplexing scientists in astronomy is that of dark matter. In the area of cosmology, the greatest thing to know is how the universe and our world were created. In biology, it's how DNA encodes life. And so after being contacted, I then went to my second all -time favorite book, the book you mentioned, the Bible, according to Einstein, to see what it said. I was particularly interested in the book of prophets of the Bible, according to Einstein, since it provides predictions about the future and should mention some of the discoveries that are expected in the next century. And in fact, there they were. For example, it's predicted that in the next 100 years, biologists will understand in a very precise way the genetic code of DNA. Now, you mentioned here

unification of forces. What does it mean to unify forces? And are there any examples of this? In fact, you mentioned an example in your introduction. In the 19th century, the electric force and the magnetic force were thought of as separate forces. Well, a lot of progress was made in the 19th century. And by the end of that period, it was discovered that these two forces are in fact manifestations of a single force, which we now call electromagnetism. It's not surprising that these two forces are closely related. Once you realize that all magnetic fields are created by the motion of electric charges, of course, electric charges also the source of the electric force. Let me also bring a Floyd Blooming to this. Floyd Science Magazine puts out a list every December of the top science stories of the year. And you like Stuart to make a prediction of

important breakthroughs for the next year. As editors, you must have a pretty good sense of some of the major unanswered questions in science. Well, one of the nice things about the unanswered questions that we put out is that we don't have to ask those unanswered questions until December. So we're still having a pecking. So how do you go about doing it? How do you do poll your editors, your polly writers? Not only do we poll our editors and writers, but our editors and writers pull all of the scientists with whom they come in contact. And we keep a constant surveillance over the readers' responses to the papers that we've published and constantly read our competitors' magazines as well. Well, last year we listed Dolly and Morris Pathbinder among the top few. Exactly. And Stuart was talking about genetic engineering, and can you have any predictions on along those lines? What might be? Well, it's been surprising so far this year, what seemed to be an impossible story last year, the Dolly cloning with almost impossible odds to be replicated, has in many ways been replicated in quite interesting ways that suggest that we didn't really understand all the rules of the first successful

cloning experiments. And that's still under intense debate at the moment, among protagonists who claim the cells have to be in this condition or that condition for it to work. The fact is that it does seem to work and can be done with a variety of experimental animal species and farm animals so far. So give us a more of your personal favorites of questions that keep you up at night, the kinds of things that you'd like to have. Let's start with that. It's not my ultimate supreme question, but the one that keeps me up at night is, why can't I go to sleep when I want to? And what is sleep for anyway? And why do I have to spend almost a third of my life doing it? That to me is a really profound mystery of the biology of the mind. That is it. Why do we have to sleep? Exactly. And why can I feel more refreshed from a five minute nap during a seminar than I do after five hours of sleep at night? Floyd Bloom in the origin of species, Charles Darwin commented that, man with all his noble qualities, with his godlike

intellect, which has penetrated into the movements and the constitution of the solar system still bears in his bodily frame, the indelible step of his lowly origin. And it is amazing that all of us share 90 % of our genetic material with the average lab rat. The science understand how it is that we can be made out of the same stuff and yet be so different. That's amazing. Yeah. It's not unlike the original handheld calculators in today's modern computers. They're more or less made out of the same stuff. You take the same principles of building blocks, the same sets of genes and use them in new ways. You use them at different times. You use them in combinations that didn't exist. Part of the great success story of the DNA science has been the ability to recombine elements. Well, Mother Nature has been recombining elements like that for a long time. Some of our genes like the genes that make insulin have been back as far as we can trace living creatures. Others seem to have had more recent starts, but they add on to the same principles the same styles, the same motifs of gene products that we've been watching for a long time.

Another big question, of course, one of the great questions of all time and still being answered is, can we understand? Is it possible to understand ourselves, our minds? And to me, that's really my ultimate big question right now. I don't know how to go about answering it, but what is the nature of what we're doing right now? This conscious, deliberate thinking, the ability to compose profound thoughts and get them out of my mouth and into your microphone while my mind still doesn't know what I'm about to say next. 1 -800 -989 -8255, we're talking about things that people are, you know, maybe you're wondering about it and you will have questions about it and you need to have them answered. Let's go to the phones to Joe and St. Louis, hi Joe. Hi, good afternoon. Just finished reading a book, hyperspace, by Mikio Kikou, and in this speaks about unification of forces and higher dimensions, but that the theory probably would never really be able to be tested experimentally

because of the high energy necessary to check into this. The super -colliding machine was supposed to be built in Texas, but as we all know, last it's funding was probably the best chance of looking into this or at least getting close to testing these small and these high energies. Is there any chance that this theory can be proven mathematically in the sense that it's doubtful that we'll ever have, or at least in the near future, ever have anything powerful enough to test it experimentally? Hi, John McCall. Well, I think very likely that the theory will be tested if it's the right theory because it will lead to a reduction or a theory which also applies in the energy ranges where we can make measurements. If it's a good theory, it will probably also make connections between things

that we've never bought for imagined, for example, the intensity of waves produced by gravity that could be measured here on Earth. So all previous theories have given unique connections between things that have not previously been anticipated, and that's how we know the right. And I suspect that if in fact we're on the right track with unification, there will be a decisive verification. Stuart? Well, first of all, I'd like to say the subject of that book hyperspace was string theory. So perhaps we should explain a little bit of the listeners what is string theory. String theory is the speculative idea that everything is created from tiny microscopic strings. By string, I mean something that looks as mundane as a shoelace or a guitar wire. The different vibrations of these microscopic strings. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You mean there are strings like shoelaces floating in outer space? Well, this is a speculative idea, people don't know what they mean. In other words, it's just a

theoretical idea. Absolutely. You can't see the shoelaces. And the shoelaces would be smaller than an atom, smaller than the nucleus, smaller than the quarks, by factors of thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny, tiny microscopic objects. And so these were things were created when? Well, if this theory is correct, they exist everywhere right now. Still they still, and when were they, when were they created? Well, before asking the question when they were created, I've asked a different question. Well, they always have existed. They would always have existed. But let me, I haven't finished explaining what string theory is. And the idea is that the various vibrations that these microscopic strings can undergo are supposed to produce all the elementary particles. So if you twang this string in a certain way, and it vibrates in a certain way, then what's that one particle comes out, and you twang in another way? Exactly. Just as a guitar string can produce various sounds

by plucking it in different ways, the same is true of these microscopic strings. So one type of a vibration is an electron, another type is a photon, and so forth. Now, strings can undergo various processes. A single string can split into two, and two strings can join to form one. Through these processes, two strings can exchange a third string. Now one of the key facts of nature is that all the fundamental forces are created through the exchange of particles. But in string theory, strings are themselves the particles. So through string exchange, all the fundamental interactions can be generated. String theory is the ultimate in unification. Well, that would that would unify gravity with all the forces in the particles. So there would be a string that if you plucked it the right way, how do you produce it, there would be a gravity particle would come out of it? Well, yes. Well, then the idea would be, well, currently it's speculated that

gravity is produced by the exchange of a particle called the graviton. And one of these strings plays the role, in its particular vibrational mode, would play the role of a graviton, and would be exchanged back and forth between other strings to generate gravity. Then how does that reconcile with the idea, the relativity idea that gravity is curved space? There's no particle there, it's a curvature of space. That's actually a wonderful question, and theorists don't know how that works. One of the great mysteries of string theory is people do not understand, they're making some progress in this, but people do not understand how string theory actually generates space time itself. John McCall, do you have a problem with explaining that to us who can't understand it? Well, I think that was a very, to me, quite clear explanation. The only thing I would take issue with is defining string theory as speculative, where I'm from in Princeton, it's regarded as almost inevitable. Uh -huh. Yes. Some of the

biggest gurus in string theory are... I know of whom I'm speaking to. That's why I asked these questions. So you think that string theory is factual then? Well, I would say... As much as evolution is factual? No. For evolution, there's lots of empirical evidence. For string theory, there's aesthetic evidence and evidence of consistency in terms of theoretical concepts. So everything that we know about in terms of previous theory leads us to think that string theory must be... Something like string theory must be the answer to the unification of all of the forces. And it's the only beautiful idea that's around. But doesn't a string have, like, 24 dimensions to order? Well, we don't know the right number. We don't know yet the right number of dimensions for the basic theory, but it's certainly more than

four. And there is a problem that one has to get down from the larger number of dimensions to the actual four dimensions that we experience with our senses. Actually, to clarify something here, there's one type of string called the bosonic string. And it's formulated in 25 space -time dimensions. And this is the hardest stuff for anybody. Let me remind everybody that this is the talk of the Nation Science Friday from National Public Radio. And when you try to speak in English, I mean, lay English to somebody and say, Well, there are 24, 25 dimensions. We only can fathom four dimensions. It's hard to pick, you know, anybody's mind to make that you're just playing with numbers here, you know? Well, it's four dimensions if we include time. Right. And space is three dimensions. We think in three dimensions. We've lived in three dimensions. That's basically all we can imagine. To try to even imagine four or more is very, very difficult, even for the theorists. 1 -800 -989 -8255 is our number of Floyd. Do you have a problem as an editor here

trying to explain some of these high -falute ideas to the general public? We often encounter the problem. Our readers don't share the language requirements in order to communicate complex problems. So our reporters are quite skilled at rewriting materials so that almost anyone who wishes to understand could do so. It's a real art to be able to do that. Let me go back to a couple of things, more things that might be keeping you awake at night that you think about we had. Give us another thing off your list. Well, we were talking about dimensions there. My closest contact with that is the fifth dimensions and the music group. And it seems to me that one of the mysteries of our life is how is it that music has such profound emotional impact on us? What is the nature of that? How do we have transcultural musical emotions that can be expressed regardless of your cultural background? What are we doing now with this language? How do we do that? What's the representation of language in our brains? The creation of thoughts through words, the perception of emotions painted by word pictures? I think radio does a great job of revealing just how mysterious that process is once you

start to think about what it is you're doing when you're listening to the radio. Anymore? Another one? We haven't even touched on health. Exactly. You could go through, among the, we could go for quite a long list through the question, what is cancer? Why are there so many different kinds of ways for cells to be controlled? What happens when we lose the genes that keep our cells from dividing? What happens when our immune systems get old and can't recognize that new cell that was just divided was a cancer cell and ought to be gotten rid of? Talk about aging itself. What is the nature of aging? Why is it that we can't remain in perfect health till we're 150 years old or approach the biblical, Methuselah kinds of longevity ratings that, at least at one level, were described? And even know what that limit is? And even know what that limit is, exactly right. Why do cells die? How do you stop cells from dying? By the way, our whole issue this week is about the various chemical commands that are used to kill off cells, which is quite an instructive thing. We have programs to kill off cells because

too many cells of the wrong kind are unhealthy in and of themselves. A large part of what happens when our brains develop is to kill off cells that didn't make the right connections. So this very specialized field, the scientific field now that goes by the name of the process called apoptosis, named for the leaves falling off the trees in the fall. That's program cell death of a part of that living structure of the tree. And our cells have the same kinds of life -ending chemical programs to turn them off when they're no longer needed. Was there little shoelace ends at the end? We're talking about that. The only thing I know about strength theory hasn't entered into this stuff for us yet. It would be nice. You never know where any of this thing is. You really do never know what advanced in some area is going to lead to an advanced someplace else. Unquestionably. We're in unquestionably. The biologists are great exploiters. That's why we clearly like to watch what's happening in the physical sciences. But they don't talk to each other. As you say, it's getting

very hard and it is very hard for scientists to converse with what I know. Well, here's an example of one scientist we would love to know what the modern theory of dreams is about. How do we interpret our dreams in terms of the electronic functions that are occurring in the brain? Very interesting question. Right. And it's certainly not an area that's clear. It's clear that we can predict when someone is undergoing a dream from watching the patterns of electrical activity that their brain is giving off. But what's really happening when you replay the episodes of your day or the episodes of some distant time or episodes that never really happen that are pure fantasy? Alright, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my guests to talk lots more about questions you'd like to have answered and some of the great problems that still remain to be answered after we take this short break. This is Talk of the Nation Science Friday from National Public Radio. Support for National Public Radio comes from this and other National Public Radio stations. Special funding for Talk of the Nation Science Friday comes from the National Science Foundation.

Supporting education and research in science, math and technology. Additional support for NPR comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, making grants to improve health and health care for all Americans, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This is NPR, National Public Radio. I'm Melinda Penn -Kava. The U .S. Senate returns to Washington Monday to face a flurry of work before the November elections. There's health care, tax cuts, campaign finance reform, and passing a budget to prevent another government shutdown. Casting a shadow is the report from Independent Council Kenneth Star. Join Ray Suarez for a look at the Senate's fall agenda plus the pull of modern society on the Amish. Next talk of the nation from NPR News. Welcome back to Talk of the Nation Science Friday. I

am I Reflato. We're talking this hour about unanswered questions in science. And I'd like to bring on to discuss with us Jane Mineshine, who is Professor of Philosophy in Biology at Arizona State University, and Science Advisor to Arizona Congressman Matt Salman. Dr. Mineshine has done a lot of research into the history of science, and is here to talk about looking into the past, studying how the big questions of the past have been asked by whom, and to what end, and how they will resolve, and get some perspective on what happens to these big questions. Dr. Mineshine, welcome to the program. Thank you. Are young scientists out there right now trying to answer the big questions, or is that usually left to the older theoreticians? Well, anybody who has children knows that the children and the younger scientists want to answer the big ones before the rest of us. Maybe as we get older, we get a little burned out, and it's too hard to answer the big ones. So I think everybody tries, but it's a matter of figuring out how to work productively, and gradually

with time you work on smaller and smaller questions. Dia, do you sometimes for a new idea to be accepted? Do young scientists have to wait for the older generation to step aside that their time has passed before something new has accepted? That's certainly a theory that many people have suggested, and to a certain extent that's true, there are historical examples of that. Darwin himself said that maybe with time evolution would be accepted. It was a matter of the older guys dying off, and younger ones coming in, though it's taken a rather long time in that particular case, the public at least. Certainly that can be the case in some instances, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's not that the old guys are fuddy deadies and old fogies and stick to their own ideas. Sometimes they see the excitement and new ideas also. Does the scientific community realize that it's on the verge of a breakthrough and a paradigm shift or they have to look backwards and see what had happened?

I think you have to look backwards often, many times the scientific community says, hey, we're on the edge of a breakthrough and then it isn't. So there are a lot of false alarms and it really takes a lot of hindsight to sort through which things were really breakthroughs, which things really made a difference. How have people reacted when a question moves from one that can only be answered philosophically and to one that can be answered scientifically? How have people reacted? Well, the public often gets upset, especially if you have something that's answered initially religiously and then you move to scientific. The religious community says, go away, stay out of our turf. But this change has happened through time. We have a lot of cases where we have questions that are answered philosophically. We can begin to answer them scientifically by which we mean that we can get empirical evidence. We have observables that we can deal with. Consciousness of course is one of those areas. We can start to deal in material terms. We can start to come up with testable explanatory theories. We see that happening all the time. I think it makes the

public nervous sometimes to think that every problem might turn out that way. That everything is just a matter of science in the long term and that nothing will be left over for philosophy and for dreamers. But I think one thing we see in science is there's lots of room left for philosophy. The big questions never really get solved. We just get different sorts of answers to them. And what happens when some of these big questions can only be answered with mathematics, or we're talking about string theories and things like that, or have explanations that are very difficult to put into words, which people can understand. Freaks people out a lot of times. Is this happened a lot in the past? Yes, of course. What we often have is questions that become much and more, maybe mathematical, or they require technical answers of various sorts, and fewer and fewer people in some cases can deal with them. I think the scientific community has a real responsibility, though, to try to explain what the questions

are, and what sorts of answers we can go about getting in terms that the public can understand, while the public has a responsibility to get a little bit of scientific literacy along the way, and begin to understand something about science. Do you think that there are some questions that scientists should not ask? I think that there are lots of questions that at any given time we're not ready to ask, because we won't ask them responsibly. But my personal view is that there aren't very many, if any, that we should never ask ever. So perhaps now, for example, isn't the time to go into the research lab and begin to do human cloning, because we're not ready to understand exactly what's at stake in some of the implications. That doesn't mean that that will always be the case, and I think there are lots of examples like that. How have the big questions changed over time? We're asking big questions today. Have the nature of the questions, the kinds of questions, the kinds of things people wonder about. Have they changed over the

century? At some level, no. We still have the basic questions that Aristotle had. Aristotle is a pretty smart guy. Questions about who are we, and where are we in the universe, and how do we get here, and which is first the chicken or the egg, and those kinds of questions. How do we know? Yeah, those questions are still around. But of course, the way we break them down and take them into the laboratory or into our theoretical study, every tower, whatever, and work on them, that has changed. And we can ask a lot more detailed questions than we could in the past. We know a lot more about how material works. We have a lot better understanding, whatever that means. And there are some new questions that Aristotle wasn't aware of. Questions about the importance of change over time, evolution of not just species, but evolution of the solar system, evolution of our universe, environmental questions. How do things interact? How do we interact with our environment, and how do we affect our environment? Those are questions that are really coming into focus recently in a way that they weren't centuries and

even decades before. Do you find that people would rather not have the answer to some of these big questions that they find more comfort in not having the answers? I think so. Again, you have to ask who are people. For some scientists, who are the ones asking the questions, they probably don't know. They're uncomfortable, but I think there are questions that the public would rather not have answered. Just actually this Monday in the state of Arizona, the state school board decided to include evolution and its science standards. And there had been some discussion about that, and I'm very proud of them that they decided that. There was a lot of discussion and a lot of consideration of what kinds of questions should be part of science. And there, of course, was a coalition of people opposing that and saying that's a kind of question that where did life come from? That's a kind of question that we shouldn't be dealing with in science. But that's something that scientists think it's very important to ask. So you have to look at which people we're talking about. Yeah. Dr. Mineshine, I want to thank you very much for joining us this hour. Thank you. You're welcome.

Jane Mineshine is a professor of philosophy and biology at Arizona State University and science advisor to Arizona Congressman Matt Salmon. It's good to have science advisors out there working. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you. Let me bring back my other guest, John McCall, as co -editor of Unsolved Problems and Astrophysics and Richard Black Professor of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Floyd Bloom, Editor -in -Chief at Science and Chairman of the Department of Neuro Pharmacology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. And Stuart Samuel, an editor of the Bible according to Einstein, a scientist at Columbia University, New York, and Professor Physics at City College of New York. Our number 1 -800 -989 -8255. Let me ask all of you. Let me start with John McCall. Was there a certain mystery of any of which made you say this is what I want to figure out? This is what I want to do with the rest of my life? Well, I would say that when I was getting started, I was more interested in philosophy than I was in sciences. But I switched to science when I

realized that progress was much easier in that field and that there was a consensus. And I think the things that a consensus developed. And I think the things that most attracted me at the time were the questions about the very small, what is the universe made of on the very small level, how do atoms and nuclei work? And how does it evolve and develop on the very largest scales? Those were the big questions that interested me. Those were the ones that excited me in philosophy. And it looked to me like science was the arena in which those questions were being answered. Let me ask you, Floyd Blue? Well, I got started with the science curiosity gig. Well into my medical training. It was quite content to just take the successes of others and try to put them into practice. But then along came a medication that was being used to treat high blood pressure that made people become suicidally depressed. And how this drug actually worked has been one of the questions that's

driven the rest of my scientific career. That's why I turned to the brain to try to understand exactly the chemical and cellular basis of emotions when they're normal and emotions when they go awry. You know, Einstein said a very famous quote about how the most unfathomable thing about the universe is that we can't fathom it, we can't understand it. Do you think that the same thing is true about the brain, that we can look inside and we are smart enough to take, you know, not to be a dimension apart from it? That's one of those places. Yeah, well that's one of those places where you would have said a few years ago that no, it's probably pretty impossible. But the devices you mentioned at the start of the program, these colossal devices that can watch the human brain as it engages in these higher mental activities is beginning to illuminate which parts of the brain are active when, how they work together, how different people do the same kind of mental act in different ways and how we can assemble a more unified theory of how the brain achieves this higher level function. And now we don't understand it, but we believe we can understand enough to understand it. What tool do we need? We're now in the year 2000 something,

you know, what we're waiting for it to help us. You don't understand the language that nerve cells speak in order to combine their activities to achieve these coordinated actions like generating speech and responding to speech. We understand the behavior of single neurons in some things like moving our hands and legs in space. We understand how populations of motor cells can drive the muscles in a coordinated way, but how we do that with thought processes with nonverbal kinds of cognitive acts. That kind of information is going to require a depth of data collection and simultaneous interpretation. We're going to need computers that are at least approaching the power of the brain in order to put this information together in a way that will draw back out the secrets of the scenarios by which they work together. And how close are we to even simpler things, but just as important things like getting our nerves to damage your nerves to knit back together? That was one of our near winner breakthroughs last year. We're exciting devices and experiments that seem to allow and experimental animals the

ability of the spinal cord to repair the circuits that would otherwise have rendered them paralyzed. That's coming along quite a ways. We've discovered a variety of growth factors that nerve cells use to stimulate their growth. We've found ways to overcome the ones that tell them not to grow any further. Scientists have found ways to use drugs to stop scar formation within the brain to allow the neurons natural propensity to grow back to take over. I think we're moving on that field. There's a long, long way to go, but it's much more hopeful than it would have been several years ago. Stuart Samuel, what was your burning desire? When I was a graduate student and a postdoc, there was this outstanding problem called quark confinement. Quark confinement is the idea is the phenomenon that there are three quarks inside a proton and a neutron and they're tied indelibly together by what is known as the strong force. The mechanism for that confinement

was not known. There was this overwhelming feeling, not only among myself but among other young people at the time that if you could solve this problem, it would be the greatest thing that you could do. There was a Nobel Prize waiting for someone to solve this problem. That's what I attacked when I was a graduate student and a postdoc. I didn't solve it. I haven't won a Nobel Prize. In fact, it's taken about 10 years or 15 years for this problem to be solved and it's not solved in a very satisfactory way. People can see confinement by doing simulations with computers, but they don't understand physically too well what's going on. There's still more work to be done. Let's go to Bill and Hudson River Valley, New York. I believe discovered a new force of nature. I call it the ice cube force. This is moving this

discussion toward far, I suspect, but I have observed in my refrigerator when the ice cubes freeze from regular old tap water that one or two of the ice cube surfaces surrounded by the plastic cup. Generate using this ice cube force, I presume, a spike in the middle of the ice cube. It's a couple of millimeters across typically. It's near conical. It doesn't taper too much. There are between three quarters of an inch and an inch tall. They're not connected to anything else. They're free standing. They're like the lactites coming up out of the ice cube. I cannot figure out for the life of me what could possibly account for that. I figured I'd try to use some of those bulging brain jumbled there. I'd like to hear the answer. Maybe I have to have to clean your refrigerator or your freezer. Well, you're assuming there's little little flies or bites or something.

You're dipping your tails in the water. And these things are how tall off the ice cube? Oh, three quarters of an inch, maybe an inch, a little bit more. All right. I'm going to see. Get an answer first. Let me. All right. Let me remind everybody that we're trying to solve problems this hour in talk of the nation science Friday from National Public Radio. I heard you laughing maybe the hardest on this. Well, because the ice cube theory has always been a big thing with me. I always wondered why you couldn't have the world's greatest diet by just having people suck on ice cubes all the time. Think of all the calories you'd burn to keep your mouth warm again. We actually did a we did a computation on that one. Yes. It was like only nine calories or something. Right. You didn't use up many calories on it. No, you don't. John, but call any ideas on the ice cube problem here. Well, no, but I it doesn't happen in my eyes. And so it is perhaps the some surface tension caused by a contaminant on the surface of the ice. I've never observed it. So I would find it hard to make a theory about it. Stuart, I don't think you have anything to add to this one. No, I wouldn't classify it as one of

science greatest unsolved problems. Well, Dana and in Raleigh, no, sorry, have you got a problem for us? Yes, I do. Go ahead. Thanks, I refer letting me have the honor of coming on your asking very pointy questions to your guest. Oh, I'd like to know what do you think of the conundrum with the cosmological constant? I read an article in scientific American a couple of years ago that pretty much says that theory just does not work. Yeah, we've been John McCall. We've been throwing that around a lot lately, haven't we? Yes, first of all, I guess we should remind people our what the cosmological constant is. It is what Einstein defined as his greatest mistake, but it may have been one of his most important successes. Yeah, it's an extra term that one puts into the Einstein equations originally by Einstein to keep his model universe from expanding. But in fact, when he found out that the universe was expanding, he no longer needed that term.

Now there have been some observations made of stars exploding so -called supernova very far away and compared with the explosions of stars nearby, which have suggested that maybe Einstein was right after all in adding this constant. But I think the story is still uncertain what the final answer is on this question. Astronomers are certainly divided in their views about how reliable that evidence is and there are a lot of things that need to be measured in the nearby supernova as well as the more distant ones before we can be sure if we really need that constant. My understanding of it was that the observation shows that it's one value, but the theory would predict that it's another value which is huge orders of magnitude different. That if it was according to the theory, you wouldn't be able to see more than three quarters of a mile before this curvature of space would just make the light

vanish. Well, I think what you're referring to is the present state of string theory or in fact of all theoretical physics that we know about in the natural value for the cosmological constant is huge, enormous, ruled out by many, many observations that we already know about. The value for the cosmological constant that would be necessary to understand these astronomical observations is tiny compared with the natural value that would come out of our current theoretical understanding. Let's go to Charlie quickly in Chicago. Hi, Charlie. Hi. First of all, I'd like to remind you last year in California, I believe it was some researchers managed to separate a particle of a photon. And remember the spooky action in a distance thing. Yeah, it was crazy, you know, but the thing is whatever they did to one part, the other would respond, even though they were across the room, I believe, I

would think that will lead credence to some degree to super string theory. Obviously, they were connected by something. And my question, and I'm almost ashamed to ask this, this is probably the goofiest question anyone's asked on your program, I think. But if everything is made of super string, including our brains or consciousness itself, I mean everything, and it's all laid out randomly throughout space, which when I've read, that's what they say. If that's true, then does the randomness of the super string actually dictate the next thought I have? John McColley got a minute to answer that. Well, that's one of the great questions, which I would love to know the answer to. It goes back to the early earliest philosophers, and that is how we can have the impression that our lives are determined by our own thought. And yet there is a lot of randomness and just physical causality based on the natural laws of physics that we know about. I don't know the answer to that. Do you think we're going to get closer to that soon about

the whole spooky action at a distance idea? Well, I think the action at a distance idea is not so spooky. The caller referred to has been understood since roughly the 30s, and it was understood by Einstein. Well, the same question was posed by Einstein, Rosen, and Pedalski, and was understood by physicists of that era. So it's inherent in the quantum mechanics that we now understand well. Gentlemen, I've run out of time. I'd like to thank you all for joining me, John McColley co -editor of Unsolved Problems and Astrophysics, and Richard Black Professor of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Floyd Bloom, Editor in Chief at Science and Chairman of the Department of Neural Pharmacology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. So it's Samuel Editor of the Bible, according to Einstein, and a scientist at Columbia University and Professor of Physics at City College of New York. Thank you all for joining me this hour. Reminder to join Ray Suarez on the

next talk of the nation for a look at the Amish community and how modern society encroaches on their way of life. Talk of the nation's science Friday is produced by Amish Sarat, Rose Jacobs, and Senior Producer Karen Virgoff. Charles Berquist is our web producer, our intern and Steve Carish. We'll help today from Imperial librarians, Kim Maleski, and Alphons Van and from Engineer Corey Looters and San Diego. We would also like to wish a fond farewell to our summer intern, Rebecca Rose Jacobs. If you call this lately on the phone, you've probably talked to her and heard her voice. She's been tirelessly helping us for the past few months, and she produced the hour that you just heard about science. We wish her well as she continues her studies at the University of Michigan. Thank you, Rose. If you have comments or questions, write to us. At Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, WNYC Radio, one center street, New York, New York, 1 -0 -0 -7. If you missed any of the links or any of the comments we talked about today, and you want to catch up to them, surf over to our website at www .sciencefriday .com, and you'll also find Science Friday's Kids Connection there. Have

a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ireflato in New York. This program is a co -production of National Public Radio and Semana Productions in association with member station WNYC New York. The music expressed are not necessarily those of NPR, the underwriters, or this broadcast station. Tapes and transcripts of Talk of the Nation are available. Call toll free 1 -888 -NPR News. That's 1 -888 -NPR News. Special funding for Talk of the Nation Science Friday comes from the National Science Foundation supporting education and research in science, math, and technology. Additional support for National Public Radio comes from NPR stations, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,

making grants to improve health and health care for all Americans, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Camille and Henry Drifus Foundation dedicated to the advancement of the chemical sciences. This is NPR, National Public Radio. I'm Noah Adams. Later today, a new version of Take Me Out of the Ball Game by Sam Bush. In the 20s and 30s, Mandolin orchestras were quite popular, so I was kind of trying to make that attempt to give it that old time kind of feel like you were going to watch a bunch of guys and hand the bar mustache as you played ball. A new old song, plus the day's news later, on NPR is all things considered. In the 20s and 30s, Mandolin and Henry Drifus Foundation dedicated to the National Science Foundation supporting education and research in science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science,

science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science, science. Russia and President Boris Yeltsin is promising to fight on for Friday, August 28th. This is all things considered from NPR, National Public Radio. After days of silence, President Yeltsin says he will serve his complete term and fight any move for impeachment. Another suspect in the Kenyan embassy bombings brought to the U .S., Bonnie rips into the Virginia coast in Chicago in effort to upgrade teaching skills.

And from 30 years ago, sound to the 10th summer and an angry Democratic convention. Most delegates to this convention do not know that thousands of young people are being beaten, and the streets of Chicago. I can see them shooting gas through the flame floor. That's coming up on NPR's all things considered. First, we have a roundup of the hour's news. From National Public Radio News in Washington, I'm Chad Pergram. Russian leader Boris Yeltsin today quashed reports that he was considering resigning. The Russian political and economic scene has been unstable after Yeltsin fired his cabinet last weekend. The White House's President Clinton will go to Russia as planned next week in spite of the turmoil. NPR's Mar -Alyasin reports. Today, President Clinton was briefed on the situation in Russia by the Deputy Secretary of State, strobe Talbot, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lauren Summers. Talbot met with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow and received assurances from him that he will not

resign until the end of his term in 2000. At that point, Yeltsin announced today he will not run for another term. Rumors that Yeltsin would resign have been circulating in Moscow and Washington, and White House officials were not sure who would actually be President of Russia when the President arrives next week. But the White House National Security Adviser Sandy Berger says the U .S.-Russian relationship is extraordinarily important, and other White House officials say the President plans to deliver a message to Russia that now is not the time to turn back from economic and political reform. Mar -Alyasin, NPR News, the White House. President Clinton spoke publicly today for only the second time since telling a nationwide audience he had a relationship with former intern Monica Lewinsky. Mr. Clinton spoke in Oakton, Massachusetts at a service commemorating the 35th anniversary of Martin Luther King's, I have a dream speech. The President said he has become an expert at asking for forgiveness, but to not directly address the Monica Lewinsky matter. A second suspect in this month's bombing of the U .S. Embassy in Kenya has been brought to the United States for a court appearance.

Mohamed Sadek O'Day is being charged with murder and conspiracy in PR's Tom Jelton reports. An FBI complaint states that O'Day is by his own admission a member of Al Qaeda, which the FBI says is an international terrorist organization. O'Day admits to being in Nairobi before the bombing and he acknowledges that it was an Al Qaeda operation. O'Day allegedly told the FBI he joined Al Qaeda about six years ago and that the organization is led by Osama Bin Laden, whom O'Day identifies as the group's Amir or Prince. U .S. officials say Bin Laden masterminded the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and O'Day apparently does not dispute that charge. The FBI says O'Day was ordered to leave Kenya by August 6th, the day before the bombings, to meet Bin Laden in Afghanistan. He was intercepted along the way by Pakistani authorities and sent back to Kenya where he was interrogated by the FBI. Tom Jelton and pure news Washington. Hurricane Bonnie has recharged and is moving up the Virginia coast. Ways crashed across the

boardwalk at Virginia Beach breaking boats loose from their morings. Thousands are without electricity and residents of the eastern seaboard are bracing for Bonnie's arrival. Just before the close, the Dow was down 131 points. This is NPR News. An NPR's business update for the first time in two years Americans are spending less. The government reports that personal consumption expenditures dropped two tenths of a percent last month. Economists attributed the lower spending to decreased cars.