Ions are the 99%

Remember what you were taught in chemistry at school? It was very exact. Water is solid at 0°C, gas at 100°C, and liquid in between. Metals are solids; oxygen and nitrogen are gases. Gases like oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and chlorine are invariably molecules containing two atoms of each element. Atoms like their outer "shells" to be "full" and join up with other atoms to reach this stability. Oxygen is electronegative: it likes to grab electrons. You never hear of an oxygen giving up its electrons to some other type of atom.

But there is nothing universal about this.

These are what, by A level at any rate, we call "standard conditions" - 25°C, Earth's atmospheric pressure, Earth's gravity, and with all the protections of Earth's atmosphere from the violent radiation from space.

Of course, we learn that it's not like that everywhere. The pressure at the bottom of the sea, for instance, is intense - "if you went there, you'd end up the size of a chip," my Chemistry teacher told us when we were about 13. And up at the top of the atmosphere, in the ozone layer, you hear about photodissociation and ultraviolet light (the type that is dangerous if you're out in it too long) snapping ordinary two-atom oxygen molecules in half, leading to each single oxygen atom joining up with a normal two-atom pair to make a three-atom molecule of ozone.

But all this is just on our little planet Earth: a tiny, tiny place in our great Universe.


(The Pale Blue Dot.)

What about on other planets? Well, we know the gas giants, such as Jupiter, are made largely of hydrogen. Jupiter is almost 318 times more massive than Earth, though less dense; and its gravity is gigantic. It is therefore hypothesised that hydrogen in its core is likely to be solid, behaving like a metal. (If you look on the Periodic Table of the elements you'll see that hydrogen, H, actually rests right above lithium, sodium, potassium etc. - due to having one electron in the outermost "shell"; and arrangements in common like this create characteristics in common.)

(Jupiter from NASA/JPL/Cassini's Photojournal. The Great Red Spot is on the right. On the left is a black circle - it's the moon Europa's shadow. It's worth zooming in!)

But Earth and Jupiter are planets. That means they're compact, cold and - in our cases; not in the case of Mercury, for example - there is a protective atmosphere. Off a planet, this stabilising gentleness is gone.

In space, you often get one atom - or fewer - knocking about in every cubic centimetre (it varies, of course, for example whether you're near a star or in a nebula or inside or outside a galaxy, etc. etc. In the meantime, you might enjoy this little bulletin of interstellar medium facts, from a lecture in Ohio). At sea level, the "standard conditions" on Earth, you get 100,00,000,000,000,000,000 or so. Marcus Chown likes to remind us that atoms are so numerous that every breath that you take will contain an atom breathed in by Marilyn Monroe!

This of course makes it pretty easy for molecules to find and bond with each other. In space, to be able to do this is very rare.

Apart from on nice cool compact places like planets, the only places you're likely to find actual molecules are inside nebulae. It wasn't until last August that it was announced that molecular oxygen - the type of oxygen we breathe in - was discovered in space. Molecular hydrogen of course is better known, and carbon monoxide - the same type of carbon monoxide that is poisonous - is a good "tracer". That means that it's easy to find by its spectrum, so astronomers look for it as an indication of what else is going on around the place.

There is, according to the APOD I nicked it from anyway, molecular gas here. It's been able to form molecules because - although even though those dark "pillars", similar to the marvellous "Pillars of Creation", are devastatingly empty and thin compared to what we know - the environment is dense enough to block out a lot of light. ("Light" is a loose term for what stars give out. You've probably heard of ultra-violet radiation damaging your skin. That's the same type of thing as light, but it's a shorter wavelength we can see. Shorter still are X-rays. Hot stars and energetic environments give those out too. Longer include microwaves, infra-red, etc.) This does two things. Firstly, it allows the gas to cool and condense. Secondly, a lot of light in space (electromagnetic radiation) is "ionizing": it knocks the electrons' atoms right off!

99% of atoms in space are ions. Lone electrons, or (as "ion" usually means) a charged nucleus - a proton if it's hydrogen, or a ball of protons and neutrons if it's anything else. Some of these nuclei may retain some of their electrons. This completely changes their properties - they become much more affected by electric and magnetic fields, for example.

Stars are almost all ions - unless they're incredibly cool stars. So is most of the interstellar medium. All that radiation flying around is no match for poor lonely atoms. They might find an electron and combine with it, but chances are it'll be knocked off again before too long.

And this is the norm. The orderly, neutral molecules that make up the Earth we know behave as only 1% of the matter in the Universe behaves. The upper atmosphere is full of ions that bear the brunt of the stronger radiation from the Sun. By having their electrons knocked off, they absorb the energy and let the rest of the planet go relatively unmolested!

This ionization is what we noticed going on when we discovered the "Pea" galaxies: that oxygen, that really electronegative atom that loved electrons, was present and getting two electrons knocked off. (Of course there was a great deal more hydrogen, but oxygen shows up better in the spectrum.) This happens pretty frequently in space, of course, but things were really firing up in those peas!

One of the units I'm studying this semester is called "Astrophysical Plasmas". You'll have heard that matter is a solid, a liquid or a gas. If they taught you much science, you'll have heard of the fourth state: plasma. Plasma, as you've probably guessed by now, is the state of matter when some or all of the atoms' electrons have been torn off, whether by radiation or electricity or intense heat. It behaves like a gas - even in the centres of stars where it is millions of times denser than any environment you get on earth. Most of the Sun is a plasma, as is the solar wind that triggers the Aurora.

You'll have seen gorgeous pictures of the Aurora from the ground, for example this lovely picture from Alaska Photographics - and also this footage of the Aurora in real-time from the Bad Astronomer is breathtaking to watch.

Looking at it from space, you can see that it's going on very high up in the atmosphere . . .

. . . and, in fact, that the Earth's magnetic field direct the charged particles from the solar wind to form rings around the poles (in this case, the South pole - the Aurora Australis).

The Aurora is caused when charged particles strike oxygen and nitrogen in the magnetosphere of the Earth's upper atmosphere. The molecules don't zoom around in those dancing curtains. It's different areas being struck at different times - like the light from a torch moves around when you point the torch in different directions.

What happens is ionization, or excitation of an electron - the same mechanism, but without enough energy to actually kick the electron free! Two charged particles from the Sun strike, say, two nitrogen atoms. One loses its electron altogether - and becomes an ion, one of the "99%". The other's electron gets "excited", into a higher energy state, but doesn't actually lose the electron. Later, the nitrogen ion finds an electron (maybe the one it had before, maybe another) to recombine with. This releases energy in the form of blue light. The other nitrogen atom's electron also falls back into a lower-energy state, releasing red light. (This process is described here.)

The oddness of ions doesn't stop there. Our lecturer gave us the example of a gyroscope: that when you push it forwards, it will move left or right; and charged particles can behave in this counterintuitive way, too. (We write about parallel and perpendicular vectors quite a lot in Astrophysical Plasmas - and, if you don't mind, I'm not going to go into that here, for I may well make a fool of myself.)

I mentioned earlier that the properties change and that magnetic fields have an effect on them. Ions in a magnetic field will gyrate as if they are sliding along a spring: round and round (in opposite ways depending on their charge!), and along, sometimes at right angles to forces acting on them. And sometimes they will reach a point in the magnetic field where they are "mirrored" - it is as if they hit a brick wall and are bounced straight back in the other direction.

And this is what helps create the van Allen belts around our little blue planet.

The van Allen belts, although - like the Earth's upper atmosphere - help protect us from solar radiation, are dangerous areas spacecraft have to watch out for. They are lobes of ions from the solar wind and our own atmosphere that are held in place by the Earth's magnetic fields. Some ions travel along in a banana-shaped object from the North Pole to the South, and vice versa - because when they stray too near the pole, the Earth's magnetic field lines become closer and closer together, and eventually this causes the "mirroring" of the particle - and it will zoom back off in the banana-shaped orbit. It's a bit like a skateboarder on one of those amazing curved platforms in the park, who doesn't go quite fast enough to get to the top and rushes back down again. He speeds up as he reaches the bottom and zooms his way back up the other end - but slows again towards the top. It's a constant motion, like a pendulum; potential and kinetic energy swap places again and again as the particle goes back and forth.

Charges make particles do very strange things.

Celebrating Ice

I see that, just like last year, a bit of water in its solid form on the ground has, well, ground things to a halt again - apparently it's making even more news than the coming Royal Wedding. It's not stopping the students demonstrating in the open air, though! Oh and I hear we're out of grit? Come and sweep some off Haverfordwest's streets, there's so much I mistook a huge puddle of it for the results of an over-enthusiastic night out . . .

All right, sarcasm over (head over here for more from me if you like that sort of thing).

I have to say a personal thank you to the ice that froze on the inside of my car's windscreen, because it finally cleaned it. I'd dried off some condensation with a cloth bag weeks before, and it had been mucky ever since - despite umpteen cleans with tissue paper, towel, ice scraper, glass cleaner, and you name it - which made driving in the sunset a particular eye-watering nightmare. But every bit of that dirt fell off with the ice!

But look what came out of our bird bath a few days ago . . .



The leaves are actually less obvious to the naked eye than to my mobile's not-very-good camera. I think the ice actually expanded away from them, but retained their veiny patterns, so that it looked like a laser cutting into a piece of glass. Sadly, it's melting now . . .


I noticed that when I arrived home in the rain . . .

Off the topic of ice for a moment, I had one of those headache-inducing-ly annoying days at work today. It was supposed to be my day off, but of course certain people (who don't usually work in my office) decided to summon in me, and someone else who's disabled and doesn't come in on a Friday, all the same for our delightful monthly meeting. What happens in these is that we provide a lot of tea and biscuits, shove all our stuff off our information table for our guests, get yelled at for not doing it fast enough and generally criticised because our desks aren't empty (doh . . . believe it or not, we do do paperwork in my office), put the table somewhere stupid, arrange chairs for those who demand to be waited on hand and foot, apologise when the phone rings because somebody actually needs us, and take minutes while the same two people (neither of whom work at our office) go on and on and on about how sleepless they are about our future and how many idiotic irrelevant things they demand we must do instead of look after the people we're supposed to be serving. You get the picture. Pretty typical office meeting, I should imagine. To be fair, it isn't half as dishonest, unprincipled, bullying, or generally stressful and soul-destroying as the meetings I sat in on when I was teaching . . .

Anyway, today the person who generally takes the minutes and provides the records in my department hadn't turned up. So this task fell to me, as did taking the prolonged public kicking for not knowing the things this person knows, who has been here 15 years longer than me, and because somebody didn't know something that I thought they knew and that wasn't part of my plans so not my job to tell them . . . Again, you get the picture. I'll shut up now.

I then had an icy walk to the car and shopping to do, and my head was pounding. On the roads leading away from the town I work in are signs to one of our local beaches. They point right, while my home lies left (roughly speaking).

So today I thought . . . I will follow those signs.

As soon as I'd parked the car and got out to hear those waves between the still, silent cliffs, I felt better. The wind was painful around my un-scarfed face, it got in under my coat, and the clouds were dark; but the sea was a surprisingly bright blue-green.


This is Broad Haven according to the holiday websites . . .


This is it earlier today . . .


. . . yep . . . lots of water had frozen right there on the stones and sand. I walked on ice puddles which made wonderful noises but did not snap, merely created bubbles and pushed the sand around! (I'm actually really cheesed off - you see that blurry bit on the bottom right? That was an amazing ice puddle in which stones were nestled, but I somehow managed to delete that photo when I got home).

The ice had fascinating effects on the sand. It was wonderful to see where there was both solid and liquid water, and the alien landscapes it was managing to produce . . .





If someone had told you this was a satellite photo of Mars, would you have believed them? I'm afraid I might! But it's just ice and sand. Look at the effects . . .


. . . and just next to the image above:


It's a funny thing, ice. Most materials - as far as I know - contract when they cool. But the water molecule is a very special thing. It's sort of Mickey Mouse shaped, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The oxygen atom is much greedier for electrons than the hydrogen atoms are, so they spend, on average, more time with the oxygen - or to put it in another way, their "probability cloud" or where they will be is somewhat skewed towards the oxygen. This means that the oxygen has a negative dipole, the hydrogen a positive one - so, like a magnet, they will be attracted to each other (this wonderful article mentions an old description of two hydrogen atoms desperately in unrequited love with an oxygen atom). But this affects other water molecules too: the oxygen will also be attracted to hydrogen atoms of other water molecules, and vice versa, which makes the general structure stick together very nicely. Most molecules so small, and made of such small atoms as hydrogen and oxygen, would be gas (think of nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide . . .). But water's a liquid, because of this dipole. And although they slip under and over and around each other a lot, their strong bonding also causes capillary action - just watch rain falling on the window and notice how a new drop will leap into the track of an old one, rather than make a new trail.

But once water goes solid, the molecules form hexagonal lines. Russell Stannard, in his book "Ask Uncle Albert", describes ice molecules (water molecules below freezing point, if you will) as being like long, long lines of people all sitting on each other's laps. This rigidity leaves plenty of gaps between those lines, which is why it expands. That's why, when water trickles into rocks and soil and then expands, we get weathering. I believe that's probably what's happened in the last picture above.

It was also very satisfying scientifically to notice that the water that remained liquid seemed to be coming from under the stones or sand - since ice expands, it's lighter than liquid water, and so it rises. Again, this isn't true of most liquids. But it's made pondlife and icebergs possible. Without this characteristic of water, I bet a lot of Earthly life would be hugely different.

And meanwhile, something's a bit wrong with the cliff . . .


But after only a short time of tramping across the beach I was starving. So I went to the cafe by the road. It was closed, but another was open. I bought scampi and chips and a hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows. While I waited, I chatted with a family already scoffing chips there. They had two utterly adorable and very well-behaved dogs, who let me stroke them like cats, one hand on each. I honestly cannot recommend a better remedy for awful meetings!

Anyway, yes, I took my scampi and chips and hot chocolate and two sachets of tomato ketchup straight out there to the beach again. I went closer to that cliff . . .


And mostly stayed away from the water; can you imagine how slippery it was there? I plonked myself down on a rock, found a little well-like bit to put my hot chocolate in, and gobbled scampi for a while. It was raining slightly but I decided I didn't care. Surprisingly it really wasn't that cold.

Nevertheless, although the huge icicles hanging from the cliff were shedding water and indeed a few chunks of ice onto the sand, clearly the ice wasn't going to melt very fast!


What a sight!






While a chap nearby did a crazy dance, I photographed and photographed, my hand over my mobile to shield it from the rain - also to put it in shadow, since the picture went especially dark whenever I tried to include a bit of sky. I wondered how long it had taken those icicles to form. I remembered a phrase I'd heard in my first year of university, describing Antarctica, which really tickled me: "thermal inertia". I think the gist was that an increased amount of water vapour in the atmosphere would increase the size of Antarctica to some extent, since the water molecules would be likely to stick to it. If the size of Antarctica increases, that will increase its albedo - in other words, it will reflect away more sunlight. Of course, it will also raise the average temperature of Antarctica, too, just the same as if you pour warm water into a bucket of ice.

Another beautiful characteristic of water is its high specific heat capacity or enthalpy of melting. Heat is basically molecules wriggling about frantically due to having plenty of energy. (Absolute zero is of course when they stop moving altogether.) Now, because of the strong attractions between water molecules, it takes quite a lot to make them separate, or wriggle away from each other. That means that you have to put an awful lot of heat in before it'll warm up. The converse is true, too: water will take a long time to freeze, because it's got so much spare energy you had to put in to warm it up in the first place.

And that is why the Earth's surface is (contrary to how it often feels) remarkably similar in temperature all over. OK, OK, so hot countries seem incredibly hot and cold ones seem incredibly cold, but that's because we're adapted to a narrow range of temperatures, and what cosmologically speaking is only a slight variation seems extreme to a biological entity. When water evaporates from the equatorial regions, it carries plenty of heat to the poles. And those cold deep currents that start at the poles and head towards the equator remain cold, which again is useful, because more oxygen can dissolve in cold water - so cold water upwellings are particularly useful for marine and coastal life in the equatorial regions.

In short, if the Earth's oceans were oil, the heat would be far less evenly distributed around the globe!

I love the water molecule. I actually fell in love with it during A level Chemistry, and kept up with it for my A level project and several of my university units. If you want more of what it can do, check out this site - I've linked to it before, but it has some desperately gorgeous close-ups of snowflakes!

I'll leave you with the most spectacular photos of that cliff . . . and by the way, it was very nice to get home!

They Protest!

OK, this is going to be a bit of a lazy link round-up, but I've been following two amusing but worrying stories over the weeks - those concerning our guests of honour at Cardiff Skeptics. One of these stories has just ended, and I wanted to put together an update.

First the one that isn't: the MMS saga, known on Twitter as #bleachgate. Although the hero of this saga is of course Rhys, I think the best place to start is Noodlemaz's in-depth investigation. It's pretty frightening. For more on the early episodes, check out LizDitz's link round-up (now we need a link round-up of link round-ups . . .).

To summarise, MMS, "miracle mineral solution", is basically bleach. People are sold it as a "cure" for anything from AIDS to Crohn's Disease, and are told that when they feel nausated that is the "toxins being released". Actually, when they feel nauseated it's because it's doing exactly what it does to everything else: oxidising it, which basically means destroying living tissue. Supporters who understand this much chemistry claim that it somehow magically selects pathogens in our bodies and leaves our own tissues alone. They also repeatedly claim that "THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN CURED WHY DON'T YOU LISTEN TO THEM YOU BIG PHARMA SCOURGES" (etc), though have not provided any links to such stories - and obviously not to scientific studies.

That's because there aren't any. This is how they go about things - again, credit to Noodlemaz for finding this:

Do you understand the power that a church has that hasn’t given up its power? Look at the Catholics. Their priests have been molesting women and children for centuries and the governments have not been able to stop it. If handled properly a church can protect us from vaccinations that we don’t want, from forced insurance, and from many things that a government might want to use to oppress us.

I will let you form your own opinion of the above.

Martin Robbins wrote this brilliant article about MMS - both the forum incident and the worldwide state, both of which attracted a lot of comment. Several folks from the Crohn's Forum came along to offer their defences, and the replies to them made highly amusing reading. On a larger scale . . . look what's happened as a result, again by Martin Robbins.

I feel terrible about Africa when I think about it. I know it has a lot of problems of its own - the stories of mass rape in Darfur and children being killed as witches - and yet I can't help but feel that if it wasn't pushed into treaties that kept it as a recipient of aid rather than a participant in trade, among so much more, incidents like these would be fewer. Countries themselves, drawn up by Europeans, have very little to do with the people that populate them, who think of themselves as members of their tribe rather than citizens of their countries. (If anybody thinks I'm patronising anyone by saying this, it's not unique - I give you as a more local example certain folks in Cornwall who would boast for half an hour at a time about their Cornish ancestry and surnames as a means of putting me in my place when I lived there. I haven't got a direct link to source my Africa/countries comment, but a close relative lived in Africa for many years, and I recommend this in which it's mentioned - though it's hardly the focus.) That also makes Africa the perfect haven for those who wish to market their untested products and ideas which would be promptly stopped in their own countries, from anti-condom propaganda to MMS.

Onto more cheerful subjects, look what Rhys Morgan has done! Not a bad thing to start off such a huge campaign before even reaching 16. You can also hear him on the radio (if I remember rightly, about 17 minutes in) here. He's got a link round-up too (see what I mean about link round-ups . . .). The BBC report that there's now an official safety warning in this country, too. Those MMS adverts which keep appearing on Wordpress sites whenever the product is mentioned - I wonder how long they will stay?

All this has seriously rattled Jim Humble himself. Or at least, someone posing as him - you never know. Check out these comments early on in Rhys's blog . . . it's really quite surreal. Note that the first thing he does is advise Rhys not to speak publicly any more.

There's no point trying to convince him or his fanatical supporters, though. The best thing, in my opinion, is to try and educate the consumers and regulators. It's always the hardest, most costly solution, I hear a few people cry, isn't it? To round up as many people as possible, which will take the most time and the most resources. You could say the same of a scientific trial. Yet it seems worth it to me a thousand times over. Because putting in lots of time, money, resources and people is going to have thousands more good effects than just encouraging people not to drink bleach. Because this is very tied up with some of mankind's greatest problems, and there are no quick fixes to those.

(Humankind if you prefer, but I write it meaning the same thing.)

That story might only be just beginning. But here's one that's ended, at least this part of one. Councillor John Dixon's #stupidscientology tweet has been deemed to be in a private capacity. That is, he is entitled to tweet an obviously personal rather than Cardiff Council representing opinion.

WalesOnline and the Guardian have also reported on the case, and the latter has a brief follow-up on the disagreement of the Ombudsman. (You can read the Ombudsman's report a little way down Jack of Kent's blogpost here.) I recommend the comments of the Guardian website. I couldn't resist inserting a cheeky idea - the one about how, if he was representing his constituents, he was probably doing so quite accurately. A couple of comments above mine is the remark that whether John Dixon was cleared or not is beside the point for the scientologists - their aim was to make councils worry and waste their time, and therefore to discourage freedom of speech, rather than to punish John Dixon particularly.

The story coincided neatly with a Panorama documentary on scientology. I didn't watch it, and understand that while it was revealing about some of the strangeness of the cult, it didn't go into its practice of harrassing its critics. Why We Protest has revealed a most interesting e-mail sent around to scientologists on how to handle criticism on websites. I don't suggest this represents scientologists as a whole, and you know what? I also don't think it's likely to be terribly effective. (The tired part of me wonders if any comment on any news-related website is ever effective.)

On a lighter note, the Daily Mash and Crispian Jago have thrown their oars in for a good laugh. But best of all is John's guest post on Jack of Kent, which goes into the Paul Chambers case and Rhys's campaigning too.

It looks like the Internet is shaping things up for quite a lot of coordinated fighting from both sides of all controversy. Well, I suppose that's better than nothing . . .

Moderators of a medical forum hide safety warning about drinking what is effectively bleach

Yes, they really did. But let me give you a little background.

I love chemistry, so I'm going to start with the element chlorine. For the chemists, it's element no. 17, the second lightest halogen - you'll find it on the second-from-right column (called "Row 17") of the Periodic Table (not this Periodic Table, excellent as that is). There are some pretty good visual aids of the atomic structure here.

Each atom has a different number of protons, neutrons and electrons (please do scroll down if you already know this). The number of protons and electrons are the same. It's the number of neutrons and protons that determine the "big" stuff, for example in stellar reactions such as the Sun making helium from hydrogen - that determines the qualities of the element, as well as swaps around masses amounts of energy. The number of electrons is, effectively, the skin. That determines what the element does in more shall we say relaxed conditions, such as on Planet Earth, where lots of things change in a mundane way without (usually) nuclear bombs and so on.

This works because, although chemists will tell you that electrons are found in "probability clouds", these clouds have a rather well-formed structure that we can represent as shells, or layers, around the nucleus of protons and electrons. You can think of these like bookshelves longing to be filled up, too. The innermost one only has space for two electrons. The next two can hold eight. Now, an atom prefers that all its shells are filled up, and the closer it comes to this state, the more upset it gets - and the more eagerly it will rush to do anything to achieve this state, either by casting an electron off, or by snatching one. Chlorine belongs to the latter group.

Chlorine's outer "shell" has seven out of eight possible, and so it's always longing to get another one. Sodum, meanwhile, has one out of eight, so it's all too pleased to throw an electron off. So if a sodium atom meets a chlorine atom, the chlorine will snatch the sodium's electron. Now the chlorine has too many electrons. This means it's now a chloride ion, that it has a negative charge, and that correspondingly the sodium has a positive charge. This makes them stick together. That makes salt.

This kind of thing can happen with other elements, too, but chlorine is particularly eager to do it.

That's ionic bonding. Now what happens among non-metals, organic chemistry, and generally a great deal on this Earth, is covalent bonding. In this case, picture two chlorine atoms. They "share" two of their electrons. Although they've still only got seven electrons in their outer shell each, this "sharing" allows them a lot more stability. Not a great deal, though. Chlorine gas is very reactive.

It's a powerful oxidant, or oxidising agent. To oxidise something often means you add some oxygen, which is the case with rusted iron. What this oxygen does is steal some electrons. And that's what, in chemistry terms, "oxidising" really means - to nick some electrons. This of course changes the properties of whatever has been oxidised. It makes them want to bond with other materials, because they're unstable now. With fats in foods, it often makes them smell rancid. With iron, it makes it brown and flaky. With biological matter, it often completely screws it up.

That's why chlorine is often used as a sterelising agent in swimming pools, and why labels keep going on about "antioxidants" as a matter of safety as well as taste. And why it was used as a weapon, poisonous gas, in World War I. Oxidising is a nasty process.

And it's really not a good idea to drink the stuff. (Did anyone else do "An Inspector Calls" at school, in which Eva Smith drinks a bottle of disinfectant that "burnt out her throat"?)

However, a 15-year-old skeptic, Rhys Morgan, has been permanently banned from a medical forum for pointing out this danger to vulnerable people.

I first came across Rhys on Twitter when FerFrias introduced him to my homeopathy post. It was clear that he was exceptionally keen on what was real science and what wasn't, and what is good for people's health and what is just a belief, or indeed a scam. He suffers from Crohn's Disease, which I understand varies in severity but can be extremely nasty. I suffered from digestive problems for several years and had to deal with daily pain and nausea, sometimes non-stop for days on end. Rhys is extremely brave and optimistic about it, but he also knows how vulnerable people can be when they're ill, how they are driven to try absolutely anything for a cure.

He joined a forum for suffers of Crohn's disease and colitis - to exchange mutual support and medical information. There are many of such forums, but this one is called crohnsforum so is probably the first that most people find. Here he encountered a user who fervently encouraged his fellow forum users to use "Miracle Mineral Solution", abbreviated to MMS.

Look at that link a moment.

Yes, it says 28% sodium chlorite.

Just scroll up a moment and read back to what I wrote about chlorine.

Yes, sodium chlorite is not chlorine - but it contains chlorine and will easily let it go. It's also not sodium chloride, which is salt. A mere flick through the Wiki entry (which seems to have been thoroughly researched) reveals snippets such as: "Do not mix with organic chemicals in case of explosion" (such as . . . Your throat?); that it's used as an antiseptic (i.e. to kill germs) in mastitis in cattle; that it's used in the bleaching of paper; that "chronic exposure . . . could cause reproductive and neurodevelopmental damage"; and that it's an oxidant (see above where I mentioned oxidation reactions).

Not something I'd much fancy drinking, thanks. For more information on Jim Humble, its first advocate, check out this excellent blogpost by Noodlemaz (but finish reading this first, please, because you will get about as distracted as it's possible to get!).

However, a user on the forum of which Rhys was a member urged a user with a sore throat not only to drink this solution, but to continue drinking it when he said his thraot was getting worse. Drinking MMS makes you feel nauseous. I gather the reasoning is that the nausea demonstrates the removal of toxins.

I've often heard about toxins, and educated science students talking about detox. I have yet to hear what these toxins actually are, or how they could so suddenly be removed from the body, from where or to where. In his book "Bad Science", Ben Goldacre writes brilliantly about how, just as people used to wish for penance to "cleanse" themselves of their sins, the modern consumer longs for "detox" in a similar wish to feel somehow pure and good.

I've also read a book about self-harm, which makes it very clear how going through pain can often feel like an achievement. Not to mention articles which remark on how people can be quite competitive about how stressed they are. It sounds to me as if vulnerable people are being encouraged, effectively, to self-harm, and feel that the discomfort and indeed agony they go through is going to help them.

Besides all this being basically twisted, wrong, and not going to cure the person at all, it sounds bloody dangerous to me.

Rhys challenged this person and was on the receiving end of a great deal of public and private abuse for it. He was sworn at, for a start; he was also informed that "Big Pharma" should pay for medical trials because the poor little billion-pound complementary and alternative medicine industry can't afford them, that conventional medicine has problems (see "ARGUMENT FROM NECESSARY OPPOSITES (1)"), and that conventional medicine only contains chlorine.

All right, let's actually deal with some of these points. Why is it so expensive to do a proper medical trial? Again, read Ben Goldacre's book, which tells you in a very straightforward way how to do one. (I have some ideas on that and citizen science myself, which I hope to speak about at Skeptics in the Pub some time . . .) Also, the fact that you're too poor to test something for safety doesn't mean it's safe, or that you have any right to promote it. Trying to make others feel guilty is really not an argument!

As for the chlorine - recall the sodium chloride. You ever see salt turning into sodium and chlorine again, out of the school lab where you do electrolysis with a load of wires and rusty crocodile clips? No. Because chlorine's very reactivity gives it another important characteristic. Because it's so reactive, once it does make a bond it's "happy" with, it stays that way. The chlorine-chlorine bond isn't very strong - nor are the bonds in sodium chlorite - so they'll fall apart easily. But chlorine's very strenth can give it amazingly strong bonds. Once it's chloride - the negative ion - it's perfectly happy, and that's how it'll stay. You'll find chloride ions all over the world - they're the biggest component, after water, of sea water. I hope this makes it clear that, when pointing out the "such and such" uses chlorine, you need to be a tad more specific if you want to make a proper argument.

By now you might also be thinking: "Hang on, our stomach contains hydrochloric acid - that's half chlorine!" And the penny might also have dropped . . . yes - chlorine with different properties, again. The chlorine exists as the chloride ion, again, so it won't have the same effects at all as the sodium chlorite. The hydrogen exists simply as lone protons, having had their one electron "snatched". It's an extremely strong acid, designed to kill germs and bore ways into the food to make it more digestable. All that acid's later neutralised by bile from the gall bladder, so that the bacteria in your gut can get on peacefully with their lives.

Anyway, two of Rhys's threads have been deleted. However, the brilliant JoBrodie got them both off Freezepage! (Please be aware these might expire after 2 weeks.) In one of them he posted the official FDA warning against MMS, and was argued against vigorously on the grounds that conventional medicine also had problems. Rhys remarks that it is unsafe to urge someone whose health is clearly very poor to continue taking MMS despite hideous pain and discomfort, and is accused of "slander". Upon retrieving the conversation, he's accused of "taking the quotes out of context" and informed that "I have requested that you be banned".

In the other, Rhys asks why people on the forum are often so anti-science and anti-conventional medicine: he agrees that there are problems with it, but it's the best we've got. "I made an evidence based posting, not one even from a skeptical point of view, warning people about Miracle Mineral Solution," he wrote. "The forum's response? Trying to silence me, childish name calling and of course, blaming Big Pharma for the lack of medical trials on such unproven non-treatments."

After banning him permanently for his "attitude", both these threads were deleted.

Rhys tweeted: "It's disgustingly irresponsible that they deleted my post which was merely a link to the FDA warning page. They were willfully keeping others ignorant, by doing so." (Said tweets here and here.)

A forum moderator myself, I am stunned. Stunned that safety warnings were hidden; stunned that science was silenced. I can see that, in their uninformed view, Rhys was not being diplomatic; but seriously, the worst he said was "grow up", which is nothing compared to the abuse he's received. I suppose they felt that the majority must be right. But my God, deleting an official safety warning and making sure such vulnerable people remained in ignorance about what they were doing? I am so stunned I don't think I have any words. I don't think I need any, anyway. Rhys and his 30+ commentators say enough here!

He's been extremely active since then, calling Cardiff Trading Standards, who called him back with more information, and hopes to start a campaign to at least raise awareness of MMS even if it doesn't get banned. This bit I don't know much about, so we'll have to wait for that. I've predicted he'll be giving Skeptics in the Pub talks in a year or so, and have his own forum a year or so after that!

Let me just mention one or two more issues. JoBrodie quite rightly pointed out the issue of cliquiness. This often makes forums miserable and annoying, skews issue in favour of opinions that aren't necessarily correct, and if the moderators are involved, certainly leads to injustice. That's one cause - the effect is a lot worse. Another cause may simply be ignorance on the part of the moderators. As pretty well anyone can set up a forum, it must be exceedingly difficult for medics and scientists to keep track of them, let alone make sure that the right information gets out to the right people. Still, as forums grow large, and especially on such a responsible topic, shouldn't we at least try? Or would that mean a lot more regulation and stifling - and could that regulation and stifling indeed lead to more censorship of science, through officialdom rather than cliques? What do you think? Someone like me should know, but sadly I don't!

Another issue is the idea purported by some that MMS will sterelise unwanted organisms within the body. This is about as likely as a homeopathic remedy remembering the presence of arnica rather than whatever else the water has been in contact with over its billions of years of existence. Your digestive tract contains a huge number of microscopic organisms, most of them benign and indeed beneficial. The first place the sodium chlorite gets (apart from the poor throat) is, of course, the stomach, in which the strong acid attacks incoming bacteria. Adding chlorine is totally out of line with what the body's doing, and is at least as likely to attack your insides as any bacteria you don't want in there.

Well, I thought I'd go for the "sciencey" side, since a lot of people have covered this issue now - my favourite blogpost so far is Noodlemaz's (not the same one I linked to earlier). It was all over Twitter the other day - I wish I'd written about it sooner, but I've been a bit distracted - and retweeted by the likes of Ben Goldacre and James Randi. Rhys is famous!

He's done an interview for the Pod Delusion, will be a subject discussed by the SkepChicks, and has been contacted by a video production company in Yorkshire. When he said he was off to London, lots of us assumed it was to the BBC. Well done Rhys, and looking forward to seeing you at Cardiff Skeptics!

Now, who says 15 year olds can't do things?

I survived homeopathic suicide! Because there's nothing in it.

Shortly after 9:30 this morning I set off for the 10:23 overdose event - for the reasons I blogged a few days ago. It had hailed before I'd woken up and the car was covered in make-believe snow.

I'd brought the 30C arnica, and there was time to buy a bottle of water - I was a bit nervous in case I couldn't swallow the wretched things (I don't swallow pills easily and prefer tiny ones). I hadn't had much sleep, mostly because of nerves, though my boyfriend had cheered me up over instant messenger. He'd dutifully gone to bed at about 1am, and was then back about two minutes later saying he'd suddenly felt the irresistable urge to calculate how many glucose molecules there'd be in each pill.

I reminded myself of the molecular mass of glucose: 6 carbons, whose molecular weight is 12; 12 hydrogens, whose molecular weight is 1; 6 oxygens, whose molecular weight is 16. That came to 180. What this actually means is that 1 mole of glucose weighs 180g. 1g of hydrogen would contain the same number of molecules as 180g glucose. A mole is Avogadro's constant, a very specific number of atoms: approximately 6 x 10 to the power 23 (I wish this blog did superscript!). In fact, that's what inspired 10:23's name.

I let my boyfriend finish off the maths. He calculated that for every 1 molecule of arnica (assuming that it is, indeed, a pure substance!), there would be a number of molecules of glucose that ended in 39 zeros! Edd made a similar point: enough molecules for 15,000 solar masses ("Broadly speaking, on a clear night in ideal conditions, with your naked eye you will have around the right number of stars to add up to that much matter. Maybe not quite enough, but not far off").

Of course, there are not this many molecules on the Earth, but this is because every single step of diluting involves adding a new 99 drops of water and dispensing with another 99. Most of the substance gets washed away!

To put it another way, to find a single molecule of arnica in little tubes like mine, my boyfriend worked out, at the price of £5.19 per tube, you'd have to buy enough to fund 2 billion billion billion Apollo programs!

Anyway, I wandered back and forth in front of Boots, and at one point went round the back to check there was nobody on that side. Finally Katy Woodhouse, a lovely lady from the Western Telegraph (my local newspaper), arrived with a big umbrella and a little camera and notepad. Her first question to me was: "Why do you feel so strongly about it?"

I had to answer, "I don't - I'm doing this partly for fun! That is, I think there are more important things to worry about - but I also believe the public ought to know what they're getting when they buy homeopathy." Because many people very clearly don't. I explained to her how it's often confused with herbal medicine, and how homeopaths are apt to advise people to give up vital conventional medicine when they need it - as pointed out in a poignant tweet last night from Josa Young: "I support www.1023.org.uk because consulting a homeopath delayed my mother getting proper treatment for her ovarian cancer. She died at 68."

I told Katy that this was taking place all over England, but I didn't know of any other lone demonstrations, or any others in Wales. If either of these did take place, I'd be so glad to know!

She was writing shorthand, which fascinated me. "It took ages to learn," she told me. She asked me if Boots really actually sold this stuff - since she didn't believe in it, she'd never looked for it! I took her in to see the rows upon rows of weird-named tubes. There was no note about "without approved therapeutic something or other" that I'd thought I'd seen. My arnica box was the only product that explained what it actually did. I showed her the "arsenic alba". At just that point an elderly gentleman needed to get in between us to pick out a couple, swearing that they cured his bruising. "Do they actually work?" asked Katy politely, and he assured her they did. I kept quiet until he'd gone, then said, "Many different testimonies."

By the time we got back outside, it was a minute or two after 10:23! Hurriedly, I put my bag down by the railings and tried to get the vial open. I couldn't. I tried and tried. You have to press the bottom upwards. Then Katy had a go. It was beginning to snow now. After several mintues of talk and feeling exceptionally stupid, I went back into Boots and asked an assistant - the same lady, I believe, who'd sold it to me! - if she could help me get it open! She gave me a strange look, but found that she had to practically stand on it as well. I thanked her profusely and dashed outside. Katy took a couple of photos, one with the river in the background, the other with the Boots sign. Then I settled down again and started clicking the dispenser. Every few clicks, a little white sugary blob skittered into the cap. I started munching them like crisps.

Katy couldn't help looking a bit worried - especially when I explained the symptoms of ingesting arnica! She asked me to give her a ring later to let her know what happened to me, as she had to go on and do other things. I just remembered in time to give her this sheet from Sense About Science, which is terrific. She was really nice, and let me rattle on about the weird statistics calculated during silly hours! The pills were yummy too - with roughly the crunchiness of especially tiny, dense Mini Egg covering, and not too surprisingly tasting precisely like, well, sugar. "And you believe so strongly that you'll be safe . . ." was one of Katy's parting lines. Yup. And I felt no ill effects at all. There weren't even enough to give me a sugar rush. I'd finished almost all by the time she'd gone. And then I went shopping and then I went home!

It didn't take long for the news to appear on the BBC website and a great many wonderful videos and pictures to appear on 1023. This is probably my favourite photo:


People on the Have Your Say BBC forum are beautifully divided. Many are greatly shocked to learn that such an unscientific quackery is even on sale, let alone in Boots. Others seem to be hurling accusations. Here are some FHA (Frequently Hurled Accusations):

"you are in the pay of Big Pharma"
Not this again. For one thing, the fact that that is wrong doesn't make it right. Does the Iraq war make the genocide in Sudan right? And what about the fact that Big Pharma produces homeopathy?

"it worked for me"
Everything works for somebody, or nearly. One chap's depression was cured after he got a mate to hammer a nail into his head as a suicide attempt. Interestingly, the diseases people were describing were stress-related, and the treatments involved extensive consultation following an annoying sort of time. The real treatment was probably getting a bit of attention, and feeling more positive. Anecdotes are where you start your studies, not where you conclude them.

"you are having a tantrum and throwing your dummie [sic] out of the pram"
Well, I had a great time, looked like everyone else was too. We sure educated some of the commentators, if not all.

"scientists used to say the Earth was flat, therefore homeopathy is right"
No, the ancient Greeks measured the lengths of shadows in different latitudes to work out the Earth's diameter.

And many more amount to - "live and let live" (Yeah - we don't want babies to die because their parents refuse to treat them normally . . . as does happen!); "you people have nothing better to do" (Yeah - I came home and ate a damn good meal!) and "I have an opinion; I am Entitled to My Opinion; This makes Me sacred; therefore homeopathy is right."

I meant to write something more serious than that, so I think I'll stop now.

Good on you folks for organising a hilariously funny day. Actually, sometime, I would be interested in taking on "Big Pharma", because I know that in some countries and situations they are pretty dodgy. I predict with some confidence that the homeopaths will go beserk with rage at us for this shameless attempt to undermine the noble, scientific producers of their . . . er . . . opinion-drink.

I'll post the link to the local rag when it comes out!

Anyone up for joining me outside Boots at 10:23 am for a homeopathic overdose?

This Saturday, 30th January - by which time I seriously hope I will have sent off my tax return - if all goes well, you will find a gawky fair-haired woman with glasses and big teeth overdosing on homeopathic medicine outside the Boots in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire.

Now, why am I doing such a damn silly thing?

Well, nationwide - and, even, internationally - a few hundred other people are doing exactly the same thing for the Ten 23 campaign. Their slogan is: "Homeopathy: There's nothing in it."

You can read more on the above link about homeopathy - and I'm sure many homeopaths will be glad to tell you their side of the story. Shelley the Republican also promises miracles from it . . . (sorry, couldn't resist!). Anyway, the basic principle is that a tiny amount of something that causes the symptoms someone is suffering from should be taken, and the more dilute, the stronger it is. When atoms and molecules were discovered, and simple arithmetic points out that it is unlikely that a single molecule of the active ingredient will remain, the homeopaths suggested that "water has a memory". In other words, the water should "remember the ingredient".

As Ben Goldacre points out in his book, water molecules are tiny, and this is rather like expecting several bags of peas to "remember" the shape of a sofa. And as Crispian Jago puts it, let's hope they don't remember all the other things they've surrounded - bearing in mind that water molecules are mostly millions or billions of years old . . . Homeopaths get around the latter point by claiming that beating a vial of said water 10 times against a horsehair something-or-other will "make it forget" everything else. As for the former? Ummmm . . . I think just by getting extremely angry.

At this point several people will say, "But homeopathy worked for me." What is more likely to have happened is that you got better because you were going to get better anyway - this is called "regression to the mean". Also, the act of taking something gave you a feeling that something changed, and lifted your expectations. This encouragement, and feeling of being looked after itself, might boost your feeling of general well-being. This is called "the placebo effect", and study after study finds that homeopathy works no better than this. You can read more about the placebo effect here.

In the meantime, how do they turn this magic water into pills? Well, it appears that they drip it onto sugar and then let it evaporate. I hate to break it to you, but, yes - the water is no longer there. And molecules of sugar fit in between water molecules, not around them so as to take up some weird shape . . .

I can well imagine that a carer or doctor and their patient might well benefit everyone by giving people who are permanently stressed a placebo - their real problem is they are over-tired, not looked after, depressed, or just a general whinger. But this comes at a cost. It avoids dealing with the person's real problem - and it boosts sham science and medicine.

Which brings me to why the Ten 23 Campaign are picking on Boots especially. Boots is a trusted high street chain, supposed to be very knowledgeable of medicine, and to provide customers with the best treatment. Therefore, the campaign is asking them not to sell pseudoscience because it is not in the customer's best interest. As we point out, it is really not the best option, and can indeed be dangerous if real treatment for a real problem is delayed or rejected.

Boots themselves admit that this is pseudomedicine, but they continue to sell it "for consumer choice". That is a classic example of assuming market forces make the best choices. They don't. Everyone wants to sell their product, and will mislead people into thinking that it will do more than it really will. Market forces are routinely manipulated, and Boots is merely taking advantage of this to make more money.

Oh, and for anyone who's reading this and concluding that I'm in the pay of "Big Pharma" - well, for one thing this is not America, and we get all our prescription medicines free in Wales, so I can't see that that makes them a big profit. More seriously, yes, the pharmaceutical industry has plenty of faults (I could go on and on about what some certain people do to doctors trying to publish research they don't like . . . !). But this does not somehow magically make alternative medicine work. Conventional and alternative medicine are not opposites, or black and white in some way. The difference is that conventional medicine passes the scientific tests, and alternative medicine does not.

Returning to the question of "consumer choice": a real choice is an informed choice. To make a guess at what to buy, on the basis of a random person's statement that "Big Pharma is evil" or "homeopathy worked for me, I don't pretend to understand the science but it works" is not much of a choice - and many people do not have the education or the information at hand to sift through the truckloads of different advice. This morning I went to the Boots in Haverfordwest to check out their homeopathic range.

I found it under a big sign that said "Alternative Medicines". Vitamins, herbal remedies, and weird packet soups seemed to appear on the shelves at random amongst the homeopathy. There were an awful lot of 3 for 2 offers, and very little on-shelf labelling, so I had to pick up individual products to see what was homeopathy and what wasn't. There were dozens and dozens of bizarrely-named little vials, such as "Sulphur" and "Nux Vomita" (lovely!) - and no information at all about what symptoms they were supposed to treat. I finally bought the one product that actually did indicate that, namely "Nelsons Arnica 30c pillules".

There is a little logo of a green leaf with a white cross, disturbingly - and obviously deliberately - similar to the green cross on a white background of pharmacies. It describes itself as "Arnica Montana: A homeopathic medicinal product used within the homeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches and bruising or swelling after contusions."

It also contains several warnings. I must not overdose (oh dear!). I must consult a doctor if I do that, and bring the medicine with me. I must also consult a doctor if I use while pregnant or breastfeeding. When taking the medicine I must take extreme care not to touch it with my hands, but must empty the pills into the cap and then into my mouth. If symptoms persist or worsen after 7 days I must consult a doctor. And I must not use after the expiry date has passed.

To be fair on Boots, or more likely the law generally, I think there was a tiny label on the shelf noting that it was "without approved therapeutic something or other" (sorry about that; I thought it was on the product but I now can't find it - I will go back and check on Saturday). But everything else about it suggested that this was a proper medicine.

I took it to the counter and handed it to the nice lady on the other side, and asked innocently, "I was wondering, how do these things actually work?" She opened it up to show me how to open the product, and explained that it was to treat bruises and sprains, so I made a minor remark about getting bruises all the time (which is true - I'm always walking into things). She also advised me to take it before an operation because it would reduce the bleeding. I asked vaguely, "It's this like cures like business, isn't it?" She looked perplexed, but said "Yes". I couldn't go on. I'm a terrible liar. I just bought it and managed to get out of the shop before I doubled up with laughter.

When I got home, my mum read the packaging even more carefully with me, and laughed even harder. She then raced to look up arnica. She knew, of course, that it's a traditional medicine in folklore, rubbed on the skin where there is bruising, and it does seem to have some useful properties. She found out how it works: it encourages vasodilation, the slight enlarging of blood vessels to let more blood through. This is what happens on your skin when, for example, you feel hot or you blush. So it is logical that this would deal with the bruising faster: the blood would take away the waste products and disintegrating blood cells, and bring along the materials to mend it.

The main principle of this, of course, is that this is a product to be rubbed on the skin. Not to swallow. If you swallow arnica in a large enough quantity, why, presumably you get the vasodilation inside your digestive system. In any case, you certainly get severe gastroenteritis and internal bleeding. Now, if I had reason to believe that there was sufficient arnica in this complex glass vial I've spent £5.19 on, I'd be doing something very dangerous indeed.

It doesn't even follow homeopathy's own dogma of "like cures like". If a tiny trace of ingredient which causes the symptoms is supposed to treat them - as I think is supposed to be their philosophy - shouldn't it follow that this medicine is supposed to treat gastroentiritis and internal bleeding? Or, perhaps, that it should cause more bruising on the skin rather than less? Well, I'll let you know after Saturday morning!

I want to thank @irlbinky on Twitter for his huge encouragement and support, and my other fellow skeptics @Zeno001, @JackofKent, @Crispian_Jago and many others. And also hoping to see another fellow Twitterer there on Saturday, if it turns out he can make it (as I don't think he's visited this blog yet he might not want me to give his name.) And I hope to tell you a lot more this coming weekend.

A different sort of sine qua non: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

My post yesterday was about devoted supporters of astronomers, who had a quiet role in an astronomer's discovery or at any rate their ability and inspiration. This morning I was goaded by Marcus Chown - who I couldn't possibly ignore! - into writing about an astronomer herself. She's one I've already written about on the Galaxy Zoo Forum and for She is an Astronomer; this is a copy of the latter, which was written back in October. Marcus Chown tweeted: "My mission in life is to get Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin the recognition she deserves!" And she certainly deserves a lot more than she ever had. So she can go here, too.

Cecilia Payne as pictured on She is an Astronomer.

The Feature of this weekend is the story of one of my favourite historical astronomers, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who is profiled in on our main page here.

I first read about her quite by accident. She made a crucial discovery about the Sun and all stars, which paved the way to realising how stars burn: that they, unlike the Earth, are made mostly of hydrogen. The experts on stars in her day did not believe her until other scientists began to turn up the same results. This was nothing unusual in her life: she studied at Cambridge but could not earn a degree, because they were not given to women; and the same thing happened in America when she completed her doctorate a few years later. Yet she was never put off, and made huge contributions to astronomy throughout her life. Karen Masters, who heads Galaxy Zoo's "She is an Astronomer" project, wrote this for me:

Her career was littered with small frustrations even given her early seminal work (for which any man would have been feted), but she never seemed to think it mattered. She is quoted as saying: "I simply went on plodding, rewarded by the beauty of the scenery towards an unexpected goal."

I first found out about her whilst reading Arthur Miller's "Empire of the Stars", a biography of Chandrasekhar and the long-disbelieved concepts of black holes, and about fights and put-downs between scientists who, he says, "find themselves in thrall to their intellectual endeavours with a degree of intensity and competitiveness that can exact a high psychological toll . . . [so] sometimes act and react in ways which may seem inexplicable to lesser human beings." That's another story. Although this biography states how unkind and sometimes dishonest Eddington could be to other scientists, he was kind to young Cecilia, an undergraduate at Cambridge starting in 1919:

. . . Cecilia Payne recalled how rude the eminent physicist Ernest Rutherford was to her. He often began his lectures, in which she was usually the sole woman in the audience, by looking her straight in the eye and uttering the word, "Ladies", followed by a long pause, ". . . and gentlemen." Rutherford's daughter, Eileen, a friend of hers, told Payne that Rutherford . . . had said to her, "She isn't interested in you, my dear. She's just interested in me." Payne was so offended that she gave up physics and switched to astronomy, a field that had attracted her ever since hearing Eddington lecture. Eddington immediately set her a problem on the structure of stars and was very helpful to her.

I felt like going back in time and telling her not to bother about such pettishness, until I recalled that Rutherford would probably have been the man who, effectively, decided her future - and would not see her scientific ability as a reason to allow her to achieve anything, or even to let her voice be heard. I'm not telling you this to whinge about someting that happened 90-odd years ago, but to show encouragement to anyone who's feeling the same sort of thing now - and, for those who aren't, to show how much things have, on the whole, improved since then.

The Sun, which Cecilia Payne discovered is composed mostly of hydrogen - taken from this interesting link about stars' energy.

Payne's discovery was essentially applying new theories to the Sun's spectrum: its unique signature of light, certain wavelengths of which are dimmed or exaggerated by cool and hot atoms respectively. But this only shows their presence or absence. In 1920, while Payne was still at Cambridge, Megnad Saha worked out how to calculate the abundances of each element, and the theory was completed by Arthur Milne and Ralph Fowler, also at Cambridge.

Payne, later Payne-Gaposchkin when she married, appears on and off in Miller's book. She appears in a similar vein - not an individual story, like Einstein, but a crucial part of so many larger ones - in Marcus Chown's wonderful "The Magic Furnace", where he effectively picks up the next part of her story:

Cecilia Payne had become fascinated by the problem of decoding the message in starlight while still an undergraduate at Cambridge. However, she was forced to go to America to pursue the problem because of the exclusion of women from British astronomy. Payne enrolled for a doctorate at Radcliffe College, which was on the doorstep of Harvard Observatory, the home of the world's richest collection of stellar spectra. She quickly set about applying Milne and Fowler's method to some of the Harvard spectra, obtaining her first results in 1925. Those results contained a bombshell.

Some of the most prominent lines in the solar spectrum were due to the lightest element, hydrogen. This was unexpected, because Payne's calculations indicated that, at the temperature of the sun's surface, only a minuscule fraction of all hydrogen atoms should be in the necessary state to produce hydrogen lines. The only reasonable explanation was that this fraction must still represent a very substantial numbre of atoms. In other words, hydrogen atoms must be extraordinarily abundant on the sun. Similar logic applied to the second lightest element, helium. In fact, Payne's calculations seemed to be implying that the two lightest elements made up an astonishing 98% of the mass of the sun!

This was surprising because astronomers had, for centuries, simply assumed that the Sun was made of iron - even Eddington's bestseller, "The Internal Constitution of the Stars", published in 1926 and still a classic today, makes that assumption. Until the discovery of spectroscopy, scientists had no reason to realise that the proportion of the elements on Earth (i.e. mostly iron, silicon, oxygen, etc.) was any different in the rest of the Universe.

Chown continues:

It was too incredible to be true. In her doctoral thesis, Payne called the result "spurious". She even went so far, in a scientific journal, as to declare, "The abundance of both hydrogen and helium in stars is improbably high and is almost certainly not real." In rejecting what would one day go down as her greatest discovery, Payne was heavily influenced by Henry Norris Russell, the American astronomer who had discovered red giants . . .

Nevertheless, Russell was eventually forced to admit he had made a mistake. By 1929, the evidence for the super-abundance of hydrogen,in particular, was overwhelming . . . A hydrogen sun also resolved a major problem with Eddington's theory [i.e. that an iron sun, to shine as powerfully as the Sun does, would have to be an incredible 40 million degrees in temperature! Eddington, at first, did not believe Payne either.] . . .

The discovery by Payne . . . had implications for beyond the sun . . . [it] . . . indicated that hydrogen and helium were the most common elements in the entire universe.

Not a minor discovery by any means! But because Payne's results were ignored until more came along, from male scientists, she missed her glory. Nevertheless, some of her colleagues did their best to fight or circumvent the system for her. Harlow Shapley, for instance, specially created the Astronomy Department at Radcliffe, because the Physics Department did not allow women to receive PhDs. (The title of her thesis was "Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars". Otto Struve said that it was "undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy".) Shapley also kept her as a "technical assistant", an underpaid position beyond which women could not rise, though in practice she was a working scientist. She was awarded the title of "Astronomer" in 1938; in 1956 she was finally allowed to be called a "Professor"; and, eventually, was the first woman ever to head the department.

A long struggle, but not unsuccessful, so I write this as a message to all of you not to be put off even if things take a long time! Her later work included: high-luminosity stars and the structure of the Milky Way; and variable stars - cataloguing, with her students, over 1,250,000, and then another 2,000,000 in the Magellanic Clouds.

Mira, a variable star, the yellow star just between the two clumps of trees. This picture is from Astronomy Picture of the Day; go there and you can move your mouse over it to see the diagram.

Karen, mentioned above, found me a lovely blog article about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin which is worth a read; and, Googling around, I found parts of her autobiography available to read online (with lengthy introductions from people who knew her; you'll have to scroll down a long way to get to her own words! The book's on my Christmas list though!). Of arriving in America, besides amusing anecdotes about the freer culture she encountered there, and her women friends' amiable mirth over her constrained talk and dress, she writes these beautiful lines:

When I arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I had crossed a gulf wider than the Atlantic Ocean. I had left the world of dreams and stepped into reality. Abstract study was a thing of the past; now I moved among the stars.

Also, you may have been wondering why, since Harvard was such a temple of spectra, an Englishwoman was the one who made use of it. It had long been a place where women could do quite respectable work they enjoyed, and Payne, rather than criticising the culture, simply tells us of its differences in a very wise way:

Miss Cannon [Annie Jump Cannon, who headed the department and left an important legacy] was extraordinarily kind to me. She might well have resented a young and inexperienced student who was preumptuous enough to attempt to interpret the spectra that had been her own reserve for many years. She never gave a sign of doing so. "Do you realise," Shapley later asked me, "how easily Miss Cannon could have chucked a monkey wrench into the works for you?" With my arrogance of youth I had not even thought of it; I had even permitted myself to wonder how anyone who had worked with stellar spectra so long could have refrained from drawing any conclusions from them. She was a pure observer, she did not attempt to interpret. As I look back I see how her work has outlasted my early efforts at interpretation.

The Large Cloud of Magellan, from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Helen has just started a topic about how to get the IAU resolution - to support and encourage female astronomers - to work. To me, this story seems to be not about methods but people: those who are kind; those who accept others who are different, as well as different scientific approaches (Cecilia Payne herself included); those who take on difficult tasks and are willing to break with tradition; those who expect others to achieve highly and set them challenging things to work on; those who look far. In other words, openness, goodwill, and expectations. That's my take, anyway. Please post your ideas.

P.S. From the Galaxy Zoo post - some stars, posted by Citisue and Sophie.

Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Now who shall I write about?