Galileo and the Dolphins Read online

  GALILEO AND THE DOLPHINS

  Amazing but true stories from science

  by

  ‘We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to a mile!’

  ‘Have you used it much?’ I enquired.

  ‘It has never been spread out, yet,’ said Mein Herr. ‘The farmers objected. They said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight. So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’

  , and

  1996

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to , editor of the Literary Review, for his kind permission to reproduce my article ‘Backward Britain’, which first appeared in his journal. I would also like to thank Steven Young, managing editor of Astronomy Now, and Pole Star Publications Ltd., for permission to reproduce several articles which I wrote as my contributions to my column in that journal.

  Grateful thanks are also due to the many features editors and others at the Daily and Sunday Telegraph - and Pam Spence, editor of Astronomy Now - for their help in spotting errors before they could get into print: Harry Coen, Seamus Potter, Robert Cowan, Veronica Wadley, Mark Law, David Johnson, Dr Roger Highfield, and Gulshan Chunara.

  I alone am responsible for any errors that remain.

  Part One: IN SEARCH OF THE PAST

  Galileo and the Dolphins

  A quartet of dolphins has caused amazement by rescuing a party of fishermen from shipwreck off the coast of France. The skipper called their action ‘barely credible’.

  The animals positioned themselves, two at the stern and two at the bows, lifted the stricken boat from the water and spent half an hour pulling it away from the rocks towards which the wind was hurling it. Their task over, they turned and swam out to sea.

  The episode came as no surprise to scientists who study dolphins and regard them as serious contenders for the title of the second most intelligent mammal on the planet.

  Some dolphins are trained to guard American Navy Trident submarines against frogmen saboteurs. There are well-authenticated cases of their rescuing swimmers from sharks, who are admittedly their natural enemies. Others help in treating children suffering from autism and Down’s syndrome - and one dolphin became famous by falling in love with a Norwegian ferry boat.

  The latter, a 13-foot lover known as Hanna, made repeated sexual passes for 10 days at the Voksa, a 150-foot car and passenger boat plying the islands off Norway’s west coast. She even followed the boat into port, where she gently rubbed herself against its cold steel hull.

  ‘There’s no proof that she was really in love with the boat,’ says , a dolphin expert retired from the University of California at Santa Cruz. ‘Her amorousness may have been a pretence, to delight and amuse the passengers. Nobody knows what a dolphin is really thinking.

  ‘Yet they can carry on complex conversations with each other by noises and bodily rhythms, and they have amazing memories. I once witnessed a group of untrained dolphins watching a complex acrobatic performance by a trained group. Three years later, without any training or rehearsal, the untrained group repeated the performance in almost exact detail.’

  Mentally handicapped children are being treated, often successfully, by being taught to swim with dolphins. The psychologist , of the Dolphin Research Centre in Miami, believing that the main impediment to learning in these children was an inability to pay attention, thought that games with dolphins might absorb them. He was remarkably successful: one three-year-old British boy, who had failed to respond to efforts by leading speech therapists to persuade him to talk, uttered his first word. It was ‘’, the name of the dolphin he had been playing with.

  But the most extraordinary dolphin story concerns not their behaviour but politics and the history of science. It tells how a dolphin - or rather the emblem of one - is believed to have been responsible for the trial of Galileo.

  This theory, propounded in the Scientific American of November 1986 and increasingly accepted by scientific historians, turns on a fact that has hitherto been barely credible - that a harmless 70-year-old man should have been threatened with torture and the stake merely for saying that Jupiter had moons and that the Earth orbits the Sun.

  It is said that the inquisitors, obsessed with the printer’s emblem of three dolphins on the title page of his Dialogue of the Two Chief World Systems, became convinced that Galileo was a Protestant political agent. The year was 1632. The Thirty Years War was raging and there was a paranoid feeling among Catholic religious bureaucrats who were addicted to narrow scholasticism.

  Dolphins? The very name might have been calculated to enrage them. Dolphins were associated with the shrine of the god Apollo at Delphi. In ’s Iliad, Apollo was the chief divine supporter of the Trojans. One of the Trojan survivors, Francus, was the legendary founder of the French royal house. ‘Dolphin’ also meant ‘dauphin’, the heir to the French throne. , at this time, was supporting the Protestant cause. Hence, to a Catholic, the image of a dolphin was treasonable.

  We may find dolphins fascinating. In the end, Galileo’s feelings are likely to have been more mixed.

  Our Improbable Existence

  The existence of the human race is a far more improbable event than anyone has imagined. In fact, the chances that we are here at all are about one in two billion.

  A paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters discloses extraordinary information about the asteroid which crashed into Earth 65 million years ago, killing the dinosaurs. It was not the impact itself that destroyed them, but the region where it happened.

  For the 20-kilometre-wide object struck the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico in a place called Chicxulub, where it made a crater 300 kilometres wide under the sea - which explains how difficult it has been to find and examine the site since the first evidence for the catastrophe was found in 1980.

  Chicxulub, the authors say, is an area very rich in sulphur. It is clear that the asteroid gouged out the sulphur, filling the lower atmosphere with sulphur dioxide and creating sulphuric acid haze at higher altitudes. This event, by blocking sunlight, is likely to have triggered a short Ice Age of several decades. It used to be thought that this was caused by the sheer volume of dust and soot that flew into the sky, remaining there for many years and bringing about a ‘cosmic winter.’ But it is now clear that this would not have happened. The dust would have fallen back to the ground within six months - too short a time for global darkness to have killed so many animals.

  Instead, computer simulations suggest that the sulphuric acid particles, being lighter than dust, would have stayed in the sky for up to 30 years and created a dense haze that would have covered the planet. Throughout that time, temperatures would have dropped below zero, killing most of the plants which sustained the herbivorous dinosaurs.

  ‘If this asteroid had struck at almost any other place on Earth,’ said one of the scientists, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, California, ‘it wouldn’t have generated the tremendous amount of sulphur that was spewed into the atmosphere to create a devastating worldwide climate change.’

  Indeed, it is only because of the disappearance of the dinosaurs that we are here at all. ‘We human beings owe our existence to the uniqueness of this impact region,’ Baines said. For, while flesh-eating dinosaurs roamed the planet, it was impossible for our ape-like ancestors to evolve. To be intelligent, animals must reach a certain size - and long before reaching it we would all have been eaten.

  Now sulphur is a comparatively rare element. It is only the ninth most abundant in the universe, and a mere 0.06 per cent of the Earth’s crust is made of it. Consider, therefore, the extinction of the dinosaurs in the light of statistical probability.

 
; Nobody knows how often a 20-kilometre-wide asteroid is likely to strike the planet, but an estimate of once in 100 million years might be reasonable. Let us say that if one does strike, the chances of it hitting a sulphurous region are quite long. Baines estimates that these might be one in twenty.

  Sulphur deposits are not caused by volcanic activity as many people imagine, but by long-dead life which leaves traces of calcium sulphate. It is estimated that only a twentieth of the Earth’s 500-million-square-kilometre surface, whether land or sea, has such deposits. Therefore, to calculate the chances of a sulphurous cosmic winter, we multiply one in 100 million by one in twenty. From this we see that the odds on it happening are about one in two billion.

  If this particular asteroid had not struck Chicxulub, would there be any intelligent life on the planet? Some science-fiction writers have speculated that various sub-species of the dinosaurs themselves might have evolved to the extent that they could have mastered high technology. But this appears doubtful. If they were capable of such advances, why did they not show that ability during their 140 million years of existence?

  The improbability of Chicxulub-type events may also help to explain why we have found no signs of intelligent life in our Milky Way galaxy. Nobody knows what the chances are of dinosaurs coming into existence, but if the chances of their subsequent extinction are very low, then it becomes extremely unlikely that intelligence will have emerged on alien planets that are otherwise congenial to life. We are very fortunate animals.

  A Divine Scam

  A unique scandal has been uncovered. Two senior civil servants embezzled a huge fortune, bribed other functionaries and undertook vast secret construction works. Nothing so odd in that, you may think - except for their aim. They wanted to make themselves gods.

  This extraordinary scam to hijack divinity happened in ancient Egypt some 4,000 years ago, according to a team of archaeologists who have found the evidence among the pyramids of Saqqara.

  The plan of the two miscreants was simple and, as far as they can ever have known in this life, entirely successful. Afterwards, however, it may have been another matter . . .

  According to the Egyptian state religion, dead pharaohs automatically became gods. This was because any bodies that lay in the royal tomb were assumed by visiting spirits to be royal and were at once promoted to divine status. The two officials, senior priests named Ihy and Hetep, were responsible for ‘servicing’, or guarding, the divinity of the pharaoh Teti (2325-2310 bc) who had died and been deified several centuries before.

  With great stealth, they began constructing their own tombs within the precincts of Teti’s royal tomb. They did not go so far as to built their own pyramids - that would have made the matter too obvious. But they apparently stole the gifts which worshippers brought to Teti’s tomb and bartered them to employ quarry-workers and decorators to build their own tombs and a secret corridor leading to them.

  Egyptian experts have never made a discovery like this before. There have been cases of would-be gods trying to deceive the spirits by carving their own names on other peoples’ tombs, but faking one’s own tomb is a case without precedent.

  The desire to enjoy a royal Egyptian afterlife was very different from our familiar ‘burial snobbery’ in which prominent people ‘pull strings’ to secure their interment in Westminster Abbey. Ihy and Hetep did not want everlasting fame in this world but everlasting pleasure in the next.

  ‘Every Egyptian expected a reasonably comfortable afterlife, but the afterlife of a king was beyond anyone’s wildest dreams in splendour and luxury,’ said one of the archaeologists, of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. ‘It was one of perpetual feasting and love-making, or whatever else you had most enjoyed while you were alive. But you never got indigestion or a hangover or a disease. You never got old and you never got fat.

  ‘You might enjoy the glorious role of a warrior in battle, like in his struggles with his brother . But you were never killed or wounded, and your image was always heroic, leading the charge or slaying dozens of enemies single-handed. You were always winning.’

  But the life of an Egyptian super-god did have one drawback, said , a museum curator at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. ‘It could come to a stop at any time if the priests in this world stopped worshipping you.

  ‘This happened in two cases. The pharaoh Akhnaton (1353-1335 BC), and Queen (1473-1458 bc) were both considered after their deaths to have disgraced the monarchy. Akhnaton introduced Sun-worship and tried to abolish all Egypt’s other gods, while the successors of poor Hatshetsup decreed that she should never have reigned at all because she was a woman. Worship of these two gods was officially stopped, and they thereupon ceased to be gods.’

  Similarly, Ihy and Hetep would have had the ‘plug pulled’ on them. They made one fatal but unavoidable error. The assistants whom they employed to build their corridor and the tombs, and to make copies of the ‘royal texts’ to place in the tombs (to deceive the god-seeking spirits), had to know the whole story.

  The two men might have been wise to have had all of them assassinated, but they could not do this, for who otherwise would carry out their burials} The result, Freed believes, was what might have been expected. The would-be gods behind the ‘sting’ were themselves posthumously stung. The assistants, knowing the whereabouts of the tombs, plundered them as soon as their masters were dead.

  In this ‘gangsters in wonderland’ mythology, the two newly divine conspirators, together with Teti their long-dead lord, would have been deprived of the fruits of worship and instantly undeified.

  The Trees that Killed

  Tall evergreen trees, generally viewed as benevolent protectors against winter avalanches in the mountains and an agreeable part of nature, were once ‘killers’ -responsible for repeated mass extinctions that wiped out most life on the planet.

  This happened during the Devonian period - named after the unique character of fossils and rocks first found in what is now Devon and Cornwall - that lasted between 400 million and 350 million years ago.

  The history of Earth is filled with mass extinctions, when all or most animals suddenly vanished. The best known of these is the destruction of the dinosaurs by the impact of a giant asteroid or comet 65 million years ago.

  But there were many earlier ones hitherto wrapped in mystery which do not seem to have had any such violent cause. It is almost as if a giant invisible hand had descended from the skies or risen from the depths and extinguished our primordial ancestors, leaving behind no clue to its nature.

  The Devonian period came long before the reign of the dinosaurs which were not to appear for another 100 million years. But the great ‘radiation explosion’ of life of the Cambrian period 500 million years ago had filled the seas with coral and a vast profusion of other primitive marine creatures.

  The world was very different from today. The Moon was closer than it is now, making the Earth rotate so fast that days lasted about 21 hours, with each year thus lasting about 400 days - a fact that significantly increased the rate of land erosion.

  Europe and North America had collided. The consequent upthrust of mountains, which were also expanded by frequent volcanic eruptions, caused a great swelling of ocean waters that covered 85 per cent of the planet, compared with only 70 per cent today. The cause of the Devonian ‘crises’, which according to the New Scientist recurred eight times, was the evolution on land of tall evergreen trees, the first ancestors of today’s pines, spruces, firs and larches. They proliferated on the shores of the huge oceans and above the banks of the rivers that flowed into them.

  ‘The trouble came when they evolved from small creeping plants to tall trees,’ said , a geochemist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. ‘Their roots spread deeply and colonized previously barren areas. They did not have the stabilizing influence on the soil that tree roots do today. The more deeply the roots delved into the ground, the more they broke up the surface and its rocks, making the soil more vulnerable t
o weathering and erosion.’

  Rainfall brought innumerable landslides. Soil particles and dissolved nutrients poured down the hillsides, washing into the rivers and oceans, where they caused an explosive growth of marine algae and bacteria.

  When these organisms died, their decomposition used up the oxygen in the deeper oceans and the marine animals literally suffocated. This theory fits well with all that is known about the evolution and spread of primordial conifer trees.

  Each extinction was followed by a population explosion of trees which led to the next extinction. Algeo also points to black shale rocks, which were formed during the Devonian epoch and which are filled with algal material.

  But were these and later mass extinctions a disaster or a blessing? Did they delay or advance the coming of intelligent life? Algeo is convinced of the latter case. ‘Every time you have a mass extinction, it enables new life to spread, replacing the habitats of the old. The trees themselves which had caused the extinctions spread inland, causing more lush plant life to colonize the barren lands and appear all over the planet. This in turn created an environment in which large land animals could eventually exist.’

  As for the much later extinction of the dinosaurs, that in turn made possible the coming of man (see Our Improbable Existence, p. 14), enabling our primate ancestors to fill the void they had vacated.

  We have every reason to be grateful for the conifers that now fill Earth’s cold and mountainous regions with their melancholy beauty.

  The First Grand Nationals

  Horse racing fans may not be aware that the sport was taking place at least four thousand years ago, when the ancestors of Europeans built the first chariots.

  Even certain modern phrases like the ‘turning point’, were first coined in the chariot races of these people who spoke the ancestor of most European languages. Known as the Sintashta-Petrovka people, after the area in Kazakhstan where many of their remains were found, they became so successful that their descendants came to dominate both Europe and Asia.*