Coal Is Cool Again?

Even alliteratively speaking, especially in today’s antiseptic climate and environmental fervor from a significant sector of the population, “coal is cool” has a strange and unseemly crisp ring to it. Such a sentiment has not percolated much during the last ten years or longer.  To paraphrase Mark Anthony from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I’m here not to praise coal but to bury its character into the hearts and mind of people from either side of the argument.

Coal is the dark and gloomy portrait it represents in the poor mining towns of Kentucky and Virginia and in many other places around the globe.  It is black lung, sooty and dirty.  In Charles Dickens mind, a coal in the stocking on Christmas Eve was not such a joyous gift.  In Beijing’s Summer Olympics, coal burning plants were put on short vacation to clear the air for the two-week event.  Coal had become the environmentalist’s bogeyman. Coal has been made the enemy; carbon has been taxed, regulated and declared a nuisance and a danger.  It has been made the villain of all the elements in the Periodic Table.  Coal mining meant a generational servitude, a hole that many families of miners find difficult to dig out of, a cruel pun, I know. A mining family had always been a mining family.  A son whose father is a miner, whose father was a miner, whose grandfather was a miner, had gone on over many generations. Coal represents hardship, rural and the blue collar make up of society hardly seen or paid attention to by much of the populated cities and even from the seat of government, except in times when votes are needed on election day.

What good can be said about coal?  I’ll speak for it when  only a few will; and fewer still from the progressive thinkers to give it second thoughts.  Let’s shed some light where all we see is the sheer sheen of its blackness.  We can wipe off the grime from every nook it settles on, rinse the grey sweat from every furrowed forehead of the hapless coal miner. Or blow the coal dust away from mining roads …

Coal: it is one of man’s earliest sources of energy since the discovery of fire. Coal meant heat and for over three thousand years the Chinese depended on it, more so today when its industrial development lives and dies by it.  It is understandable for people to forget that the railroad singlehandedly paved the way to the West, the life blood connecting Asia’s contiguous borders, from Burma to China to India’s rapid industrial development, etc. Although the iconic black-smoky trains are almost a thing of the past, coal still accounts for 37 per cent of tonnage moved by rail.  Coal’s dominance in the U.S. has receded to give way to cleaner fuels like natural gas but it still accounts for 33%. It is a lot more in China and India – the two leading producers and consumers of coal by a huge margin over the U.S. – but does not quite get the same negative press there.

Coal is more than any of the above. Let’s digress for a bit.  Coal is carbon, plain and simple.  Carbon is as old as the solar system and older still when we go beyond our little community of a handful of planets orbiting a medium star.  Isn’t carbon the reason coal is maligned? Is it not what everyone wants to get rid of?  Carbon, lest we forget, is the reason we are called carbon-based creatures.  It does not only fuel industry, it fuels us.  We will not have the energy to do anything without carbohydrates in our diet.  Carbon is us.  We will not have steel to cut our meat or make our skyscrapers and cars if not for carbon mixed with iron.  I know many will say, “But that is neither here nor there”.  Well, sodium in salt is not getting hammered but high salt diets contribute to two of the more serious human ailments: heart disease and hypertension.  When we think about it, salt and sugar and fat are likely to cause more ailments than carbon from coal.  Carbon filters are one of the more effective air and water cleaners. Let us not forget plants cannot be without carbon.  All fossil fuel today are reincarnated dead plants over millions of years. The carbon that was in those dead plants were alien components from dying stars billions of years ago.

Let’s have a quick review of coal’s life story. Every star is merely a ball of hydrogen. Every single second it shines, hydrogen is fused to form into helium – tremendous amount of energy is generated that a cup full of hydrogen plasma will have produced enough energy to power a small town for a year. Lithium is next to form and three steps down the evolution of the elements carbon is produced but as soon as all the star’s hydrogen runs out, more heavy elements are formed in rapid succession and in just 20 more steps of compression, iron is formed and in an instant, if the star is several times bigger than our sun, it explodes into a supernova. All of the elements are flung out into space.  The shock wave will further create all the other natural elements we know today; compressing surrounding gas and hydrogen floating around in trillion cubic miles of space that coalesce to form new stars.  Some, if not all of the stars formed will have planets orbiting them and some or a few will have left over carbon, iron, and many other elements from the last explosion to become rocky orbiters.  One such rocky but lucky planet happened to orbit the sun from a Goldilocks distance where it is not too hot, not too cold, just right for life to develop and flourish.

Regardless of your faith or belief, think carbon, with all the other elements, as a gift from God, from the Creator, a token from the universe, from nature, if you are so inclined according to your ideology or persuasion.  What is undeniable is that all that had been created cannot be destroyed; they just take on a different form, reincarnated, reformed and even reshaped to make other materials.

Carbon’s more elegant incarnation – the diamond – is coveted by all, maligned only by a handful.   It is “a girl’s best friend”, a famous song says, but today we must remind ourselves that so called “blood diamond” has killed thousands of people and enslaved a good fraction of some of Africa’s poorest population, enriched the diamond cartels, monopolized by a handful, smuggled and used in so many criminal enterprises, but there has not been the same outrage. Diamond is pure carbon. Coal is demonized, diamond is worshiped.  I merely used this extreme comparison to get the reader’s attention. Indeed diamond is not just used as an adornment because it has an industrial utility as a cutting tool and as an abrasive, so it has its uses but coal does much more, by a thousand fold.  Coal does more than sparkle, adorn fingers and ears, or hang around necks or compete with necklines. Look no further from your kitchen, your garage and the place where you work and the roads and bridges that take you there, carbon, in a manner of speaking, has its finger print in all of those places, its ubiquitous presence obscured by our nonchalance..

Coal is cool again as regulations are eased to make mining and use of coal a cleaner undertaking. Did the new administration do the right thing?  The question and similar one like it are the reasons political pundits were created and for protesters to find temporary foothold to stake their claim in the arena of public opinion. Is coal cool again?

Not to the environmentalists for sure, but to the coal miners and the coal regions of the U.S. the latest development is nothing short of salvation, liberation at the very least, especially to those in fear of losing their livelihood and hope floats once more to those laid off, who now may find themselves lining up along the corridors of the employed, once more. However, we can set aside for the moment the politics of it and the emotional outflow from one side or the other and look at this from the other perspective cited above. 

And one more thing to ponder: What if all there was to burn was firewood for heating, cooking, and all locomotives used fire logs (as indeed wood was the fuel for the early trains), will we have much of a forest left in the first twenty five years of the industrial revolution? Coal indeed saved the trees!

Not to overly praise coal but to sear into our consciousness this: from an infinite past the Creator, nature and the universe, or whomever you worship, had predestined the purpose of everything that was created – including coal.

Wonderment of Pondering

“When walking, you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder”.

Tom Hodgkinson

Tom Hodgkinson is the founder of the magazine, The Idler, who also wrote the book, “How to be Idle”.  Obviously I’m not here to endorse the idea to anyone still at work, earning a living.  I’m here to tickle the mind of those fortunate to have the free time to indulge on such activities that do not necessarily require going outdoors, or break a sweat on some physical activity, or anything requiring manual labor. But I’ll have you know that the mind, in its own right, can be made to engage in activities that could rival physical labor, consuming calories in the process. The brain may only weigh 5% of our total body weight but it consumes 25% of the energy the body produces. The mind can travel to places far longer than a 26.2 mile run, or through an impervious wall; or across oceans; even through time. And it will cost nothing.  A cup of steaming coffee helps but not necessary.

“Many things that don't really mean so much of anything are wonderful.”

― C. JoyBell C.

One could be doing wood working or some other worthy hobby and in between steps of activities one will always find the mind wandering into something else.  That’s when I usually take a break.  In those breaks when the hands and eyes are free to uncoordinate (hobbies and sports always require hand/eye coordination) the mind whirs into activity to fill the gap. It may have been idling at some moments when the activity becomes routine but it is winding up to uncoil when given the chance. The idle mind would go to ponder at any moment.  I’ve collected a few of those wandering wonders:

  

1. First, let's do the numbers:

When I was a little kid I thought a thousand was such a huge number. Now retired, I woke up one morning and our government owes 20 trillion dollars.  I have not even begun to wonder what it feels like to have or owe $1 billion. 

Now, to deal with big numbers we make short cuts to say or write them. K is now a thousand, so we had Y2K at the turn of the century – Year Two Thousand. Then to deal with the past, naturalists would shorten “one hundred thousand years ago” to 100 KYA. Paleontologists and cosmologists then came up with 67 MYA, or 4 BYA.  You guessed it: 67 million years ago and 4 billion years ago, thus explaining when the dinosaurs began to perish after an asteroid impact, and the moment our solar system was created, respectively.

In 1920 when mathematician Edward Kasner was contemplating the largest whole number he can think of, his nephew, Milton Sirotta suggested the word googol, to stand for a number followed by lots of zeros. Expressed as an exponent, it would be 1 X 10¹⁰⁰, which means 10 multiplied by 10 a hundred times (10X10X10...). If we have each and every person (man, woman and child) count down one million grains of sand from the total of grains in a googol each (to save time and effort) there are not enough people in the entire world to account for all of it in a googol (not even close as a fraction of one per cent).  Not content with the googol and wanting to come up with yet another big number, Kasner coined a googolplex – 1 followed by a googol of zeros: 1 X 10^googol. Paraphrasing Carl Sagan, assuming we have the capability to write down in zeros the number of particles in a googol, it will be physically impossible because there is not enough space in the entire "known" universe to hold all of it if they were written as an average hand-written zero, about 1/8 inch in diameter formed into a pellet. How crazy is that? And, get this, a googol or googolplex does not have much of a mathematical significance or utility.  But as large as a googolplex is, there is one even larger, represented only by a single character.

As a side note, I suspect Google intentionally made its name a homophone of googol as a subtle suggestion that the search engine company covers a googol of stuff.

 2.  Let’s one-up the Googolplex.

Three hundred years ago, both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently discovered calculus.  In this branch of mathematics we are confronted with this symbol ∞. As a word it is written as infinity. It is essential to integral calculus, appears in mathematical operations but is not considered a number, yet it is used as a numerical limit.  We can say 1 + ∞ = ∞.  1 X 10¹⁰⁰ + ∞ = ∞; and get this, ∞ - 10^googol still equals∞ (that is ∞ minus a googolplex!!); in other words, no number can ever be larger than ∞ and neither does it devalue to anything less than∞. However, you cannot subtract∞ from ∞. It is indeterminate! It’s not only in mathematics that ∞ plays a role although it does not follow any of the mathematical rules. But  calculus without it makes calculations impossible to do. 

Beyond the math infinity is also physically real.  Aside from symbolizing the extent of the universe it actually manifests itself in other mind boggling phenomenon.

When a very massive star collapses after it had exhausted all of its hydrogen, it will implode from its own gravitation that, at some point, its gravitational field becomes infinitely strong as to pull all of its mass into an infinitely small point. It becomes a black hole. Einstein’s theory predicted it although he was actually skeptical that anything as large as a star could be reduced to a single point – smaller than an atom. And now the phenomenon of black holes is as common as there are galaxies. The gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong it will pull surrounding stars until they too become part of it and the infinite gravity prevents anything to come back out once inside; not even light can escape, hence a black hole.

3. Let’s get a sample of Infinity

There are quite a number of examples from day to day activities.  Some people claim to have infinite patience while waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Driver’s License office.  Some pet owners think the same way about training a cat to do anything.  It takes infinite intelligence to decipher the tax code or assemble anything without a single screw or nut left over .  A husband prays for infinite wisdom when he asks his visibly upset wife what’s wrong and not understanding what it means when she replies, “Nothing”.  I know to stop these analogies when I get close to the limit so on to the serious stuff.

We know a square is a polygon with four sides. If we keep adding sides, using straight lines, soon the square becomes circular.  We keep doing it and sure enough we have a circle.  A circle is essentially a polygon with an infinite number of sides. Proof? See photos below.  I learned to cut a perfect circle using my table saw (that cuts only in straight lines !!). I would begin with a square board with a center hole for it to pivot on a jig. I would cut additional sides, first making it an octagon and by repeatedly cutting more and more sides, what began as a square board is turned into a perfect circle in just a few cuts - technically making it a polygon with an infinite number of sides.  

Someone, a long time ago, while I was at school, told me that infinity is arrived at by dividing a number, any number, by zero.  For a while I believed it but now I know better.

Say, divide 1 by .01, thus 1/.01 = 100; 1/.0000000001= 1 billion. If we keep adding zeros after the decimal point in the denominator but always keeping 1, or any number for that matter, at the end, the answer keeps getting bigger and bigger.  Try 1/.00000000000000000000000000000000000001 = ?  So, if we do the math with 1/.00000000000000000 … 1, with zeros so unimaginably never ending, we get a glimpse of what infinity is in numerical terms.  However, we will only get there for as long as the denominator gets to be infinitely small, approaching but not quite zero.  Almost like a circular argument, isn’t it?  And it brings us back to the circle.

Well, unlike infinity, and human that I am, incapable of an infinite musing, I must end it here.

For now.  There could be a sequel because there is an endless material to ponder.

 (I can tell the interest level by the readership feedback I get.  I see that, outside of the U.S., I get more readership in France, which leads me to wonder... and ponder... hmm).

Small Medium at Large

That is the punch line to an old joke:

 A very petite clairvoyant escaped from prison. The newspaper headline said, “A small medium at large”.

For the second time you will read here my not so favorite of all human beliefs – anthropocentricism (“ánthrōpos, "human being"; and Ancient Greek: κέντρον , kéntron, "center") the belief that considers human beings to be the most significant entity of the universe and interprets or regards the world in terms of human values and experiences”. So everything must be reckoned from our points of view. And for that, when we look around us, something is either small or large and everything in between, in the purely human context. Human nature, such as it is, is naturally self-centered so that our everyday experiences are framed by the world we know. And what we know is limited by what we observe; then we ponder, we think and even conclude based on those limitations. Our ideas therefore of what is small and what is large and everything in between are confined within or restricted by those limitations.

This may not altogether be such a truly human deficiency if it were not the wellspring of hubris, condescension, self-adulation, vanity and arrogance, when we think large of our status or position and look down upon those of small stature or of insignificant rank in the social ladder.

If that might seem harsh of an indictment on the nature of man, it can also be this: there are little problems, sometimes too small we ignore them; and there are seemingly insurmountable challenges that we don’t bother to face. Little problems sometimes turn into big ones, often after it is too late to grapple with; huge challenges are not met because we don’t even try.

Circumspection aside, some very serious people spend their career or their entire adult lives looking into the very small and looking up to the incomprehensibly and insanely large. Since Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first laid eyes on the then unknown living microorganisms and when Galileo first glanced at Jupiter’s moons when he improved the telescope’s magnification, much of man’s perspective had been altered.  

Astronomers cannot help themselves as they marvel at the size of the universe while many of us merely shrug at how it is beyond our comprehension. Then we are told that everything in it is actually made up of very small stuff.  Here is the thing though. We really don’t know how truly large the universe is and how small are the really small, despite how much advances scientists have come to find out about either one.

What has all these got to do with anything?  To make us properly grounded to our place in this world, a different kind of perspective from what we’re typically used to must be called upon in order for us to appreciate what is far more profound than the ever so human idea of small, large and in between.

Let’s see about how large the universe is. Keep in mind this is just our vision of it based on what the most powerful Hubble Space Telescope can discern so far and what mathematics from cosmology can estimate: If our entire solar system (which would include the sun that is 1.3 million times larger than the earth) were the size of a grain of sand, the universe would be all the sand contained in all the shorelines around the world. And I think I am being conservative about that analogy.  Because we truly cannot know about what is beyond what is observable from where we are.  This brings us to the idea of the infinite size of the universe. Mind boggling, perhaps, but someone had a clever idea on how to deal with that.

A German mathematician, David Hilbert, in his famous 1924 lecture, “Über das Unendliche", which roughly translates into, “on [the idea of] infinity”, proposed a thought experiment that deals with the paradox of The Grand Hotel with an infinite number of rooms. Suppose all the rooms were occupied, will the hotel still be able to accept one more guest?  This is how Hilbert solved it, “Suppose a new guest arrives and wishes to be accommodated in the hotel. We can (simultaneously) move the guest currently in room 1 to room 2, the guest currently in room 2 to room 3, and so on, moving every guest from his current room n to room n+1. After this, room 1 is empty and the new guest can be moved into that room. By repeating this procedure, it is possible to make room for any finite number of new guests”.

We remember the silly argument kids do when trying to one up another: “whatever number you can think of my number is one over that”… which is essentially how youngsters deal with what is infinite; n + 1 +1 + … to forever, is one version of infinity – no matter how large a number one can think of, it will only be a small part of infinity.

In other words the human mind has a way to deal with the idea of the insanely large without having to confront what the concept of how huge exactly is infinity.  Or, are we just fooling ourselves? Well, we must know that there is no point in trying to make sense of what could very well be beyond any of our limited natural or physical senses.  Just as we cannot discern what our limited sense of smell cannot detect, although our friendly blood hound does not only smell a hamburger, it can actually breakdown everything that’s in it and even track it down if the meat were in a bun wrapped in a foil and then dragged from one location to another; a day later.

So, if we cannot tell how infinitely large anything is, how do we know what everything is that’s in between?  Wait, we haven’t dealt with how small is small, yet.  It is actually very interesting because small is something we can hold up close; study intently on a work table or under a microscope.  Well, it is just as challenging as finding out about how large the universe is.

When first our ancestors thought a grain of sand, then a speck of dust, was the smallest particle there was, an early Greek philosopher, Leucippus of Miletus and his student Democritus of Abdera in the 5th century B.C. came up with the idea that all matter was made up of indivisible particles called atoms (atomos was Greek for indivisible). A little later after about 2,300 years since, more enlightened folks discovered that the indivisible atom was composed of a nucleus, with one or more electrons circling it. Then much later on, even cleverer individuals realized that much of what is in an atom was empty space.  This calls for another analogy. If the nucleus were the size of a basketball, the electron was the size of a ping-pong ball, orbiting it at a distance at roof top level of the Houston Astrodome in Texas. The implication is that no matter how solid an object is it has lots of empty spaces in it.  That is good in a very big way, because that’s how X-rays make it through our body to reveal a fractured bone or a decayed tooth, and a host of other unseen issues within. Defective welding joints in steel structures, etc. are detected in a similar manner, thus preventing disastrous failures that in some cases save lives.

Presently, the electron is now a huge particle because it is still made up of even smaller stuff.  But first, let me mention that around us, from somewhere in outer space, are “ghostly” particles called neutrinos.  The sun makes lots of them, exploding stars from billions of miles away expel them, and they come showering down on us from all directions, passing our entire bodies from head to toes, or from our toes through our heads, without interacting with a single atom of any part of any organ. Actually, neutrinos will hit China, go through from there and come out the opposite side in a straight line, without stopping, go through your body, and out it goes towards outer space. And in one square centimeter of your body, 65 billion of them pass through every second. Throughout your life a trillion trillions of them will have passed through your body. (I’ve always wanted to say, “a trillion trillions”, just to one-up the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who made famous the phrase, “billions and billions” in his famed TV show, “Cosmos”). However, all trillion trillions of them, if compacted, would be the size of an average mole. That is how small they are.  But there are particles smaller than them.

How in the world do scientists find these smaller than small stuff?  Here is an analogy they love to use. To find out what cars are made of, two superfast racing cars are accelerated to their maximum speed from opposite directions of the race track for a head on collision (let’s assume they were driven remotely, so we don’t have to worry about the drivers). All that will be left are smithereens of car parts. From the parts one may conclude what the cars were made of.  So, physicists do the same thing with accelerating heavy particle beams from opposite sides of the Large Hadron Collider until some of them collide head on. High speed cameras capture the smithereens that result from the collisions.  Cameras had to be used because the smithereens will decay quickly (as in microseconds) into some other stable stuff.  From the pictures they can tell what makes up the basic component of matter.  They do indeed have a short glossary of what they are: six quarks and bosons, etc.  Now, is a quark made up of something even more basic or smaller?  We don’t know that.  Will we actually find out someday that matter is after all made up of even more “ghostly” particles and we’ll ultimately call them “spirit” particles?

So, we can potentially have infinitely small stuff and infinitely huge stuff, so that everything that is in between could still be beyond our limited comprehension.  And we must still deal with what is infinitely forever versus the infinitely short period of time.  Max Planck some time ago thought of very short units of time.  So short that there are more Planck units of time in one second than there are seconds in the entire age of the universe that today is estimated at 13.7 billion years.

Your head has not exploded since you did make it to this point. Well, I hope you now have a slightly modified view of what is small, medium and large.