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04/13/2005
Column Number 300
Bortrum is back after a week off to tend to affairs upon return
home to New Jersey after two months on Marco Island. I’m
ashamed to admit that most of those days off were spent tracking
down records dating back to 1981 in order to calculate the cost
basis of two mutual funds I sold last year. Never again will I
start a dividend reinvestment program! Thankfully, I was
unaware of the magnitude of the task awaiting me while walking
on the beach on Marco Island and could think about other things.
According to my count, this is my 300th Bortrum column.
Reaching another centennial mark of this sort spurs a reflective
mood. We’ve covered a diversity of topics, starting with the role
an oxide of nitrogen plays in the action of Viagra, followed by
subjects ranging from the Big Bang and the vastness of the
universe down to the microscopic world of the circuitry on the
silicon chip and Moore’s Law.
It was 40 years ago this month that Gordon Moore predicted in
an article that the number of components on a given size silicon
chip would double every year. (In 1965, there were only 50
components on a chip.) This prediction proved so true that it
became known as Moore’s Law. Moore also realized that the
cost of each component on the silicon chip would go down
drastically as the number on the chip increased. It was 30 years
ago that Moore revised his doubling time to 18 months, with a
prediction that it would rise to 2 years over time. He proved to
be prophetic in both instances. Moore, co-founder and Chairman
emeritus of Intel, will of course be the featured speaker at a
symposium, “Moore’s Law at 40. Chemistry and the Electronics
Revolution”, to be held next month under the auspices of the
Chemical Heritage Foundation and The Electrochemical Society.
(I’m still the historian of the latter.)
Over the past six years, a recurrent theme in these columns has
been my obsession with finding roots, be they in the Big Bang or
in tiny fungal ancestors. Therefore, I was attracted by an AOL
News item of April 8 by Ryan Foley titled “Earth’s Oldest
Known Object on Display”. Instead of the ancient big rock I
expected, the object turns out to be more the size of one of
Gordon Moore’s early components on a silicon chip. It’s a bit of
zircon less than a couple human hairs in diameter!
Simon Wilde of Curtin University of Technology in Perth
discovered the speck of zircon in Australia back in 1984.
However, to view the object, I would only have had to travel to
Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday, April 9. If all went as planned,
there was a day-long celebration of the speck that culminated
with a “Rock” concert featuring original music composed by
Jazz Passengers, a six-piece New York group hired for the
occasion. Celebrants would have had the chance to view the
speck, under police guard, through a microscope. The speck will
be returned to its native Australia for display in a museum there.
Why the fuss about this microscopic bit of rock? John Valley, of
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has subjected the 4.4
billion year old speck to various types of microanalysis and
concluded that its formation involved liquid water. This was a
startling conclusion that suggests that the earth had cooled down
to about the boiling point of water only a couple hundred million
years after it was formed. Before Valley’s analysis, the earliest
evidence for water on Earth dated to some 600 million years
later, 3.8 billion years ago according to the article.
In the past, we’ve considered significantly larger rocks. I’m
referring to those visitors from outer space that caused such
havoc as the extinction of the dinosaurs. Sunday’s (April 10)
Star Ledger had an article by Ray Gugliotta titled “Earth dodges
big one, for now”. This ‘big one’ is asteroid 2004 MN4, a rock a
thousand feet wide and 106 million miles away when discovered
June 19 last year by David Tholen and his team using the
University of Arizona’s Bok telescope. They managed to get 6
pictures of MN4 that night and the next, after which seeing
conditions worsened and they turned to other pursuits. However,
they filed their data with the Minor Planet Center in
Massachusetts. The center, under the direction of Brian
Marsden, is involved in the hunt for such “near-earth” objects.
On December 18 last year, Gordon Garradd in Coonabarabran,
Australia spotted an object “brightly lit and moving fast”. When
these new sightings reached Marsden at the Minor Planet Center,
the fixes on the object, found to be 2004 MN4, were placed on
the center’s Web site. With these data in hand, on December 20
JPL weighed in with a calculation that the chances were 1 in 270
that MN4 would hit Earth on Friday the 13th in 2039. With
more data, by December 26, the odds had increased to 1 in 38!
This didn’t get much play in the news media because of the
tsunami tragedy that day.
Fortunately, the astronomical community is better organized than
my tax files and they quickly came up with a “precovery”. The
Spacewatch Project in Arizona stores all their images on DVDs
and a search revealed the precovery – three images of MN4 taken
on March 15, 3-months before Tholen’s “discovery”. With the
new data, found on December 27, JPL was able to issue the
reassuring bulletin that MN4 will miss the earth in 2029 by some
25,000 miles. That’s good news but, hey, that’s still close, only
about a tenth the distance to the moon!
We can take heart that an asteroid such as MN4, the size of
several football fields in width, is only a “regional” threat. If it
hit, it would only flatten an area about the size of Texas or
several European countries. The Star Ledger article had some
interesting figures on stuff entering our atmosphere from space.
Today, 25 tons of dust and particles the size of a grain of sand
will burn up entering our atmosphere. During a typical year, an
asteroid the size of a car (hopefully not an SUV) will enter our
atmosphere. Thankfully, this asteroid will also likely burn up
before hitting the ground. In this millennium, chances are a
football field sized asteroid will hit somewhere, causing
significant damage. Sometime in the next few million years,
chances are something bigger than half a mile wide will strike.
Then it’s serious - we’re talking mass extinctions, possibly us.
Another recurring them in these columns has been global
warming and the possibility that melting ice, especially in
Antarctica, could raise water levels drastically. Something’s
happening in Antarctica now, according to a report posted on
AOL News on April 4. A humongous iceberg known as B15A
was moving. The big berg was born in 2000 when part of the
Ross Ice Shelf broke off (due to global warming?). B15A has an
area of 1200 square miles and I’ve seen statements comparing it
in size to Jamaica and stating that it has enough water in it to
supply the River Nile for 80 years.
This, the world’s biggest iceberg, has been blocking supply
routes for various bases located in Antarctica, including the U.S.
McMurdo Station. The iceberg has also threatened the survival
of penguin colonies in the area by making it necessary for the
adult penguins to travel an additional hundred or more miles to
find food in the sea for their chicks. Penguins aren’t known for
their flight capabilities so they have to walk the hundred miles.
If they do manage to pick up some food, it’s gone by the time
they’ve made the roundtrip.
We mentioned Moore’s Law’s anniversary. Yesterday, April 12,
marked the 50th anniversary of a major medical announcement.
When I was doing my graduate work at the University of
Pittsburgh in the years 1946-1950, I was unaware that a fellow
by the name of Jonas Salk had started working a few blocks
away in Pitt’s School of Medicine. In 1955, it was announced
that a trial of Salk’s vaccine against polio was a success and this
dreaded disease was on its way to being eradicated in most of the
world. In 1955, one of our neighbors in our garden apartments
had contracted polio and, needless to say, when the first vaccines
became available my wife and I were quick to get our shots.
Well, the tax deadline draws near and, with cost bases in hand,
it’s time to get back to TurboTax and see what the bottom line is.
It’s touch and go whether I pay or the IRS pays me. If the latter,
it probably won’t be enough to pay for more than a couple
bottles of Charles Shaw merlot at Trader Joe’s.
Allen F. Bortrum
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