A Harp With No Strings

Harp not on that string, madam, that is past. —William Shakespeare, Richard III

You can harp not on that string at the Glasgow Science Centre, because the harp on display has no strings. It replaces them with thin beams of infrared light. Break a beam and a note plays. It's a bit like the sophisticated alarm systems you see in jewel-heist movies—you know, the ones in which the star has to wriggle and contort his way through a cross-hatch of infrared rays to reach the diamonds. Playing the infrared harp is considerably easier, though it's an odd experience to create music by plucking thin air.

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Infrared radiation also can create funky photos. This is a shot of my parents taken at the Glasgow Science Centre with a camera that—like night-vision goggles—can detect infrared waves given off by our bodies. Certain snakes can sense the infrared radiation given off by warm-blooded prey, and use that when hunting. The snakes detect the radiation through holes in their faces called pit organs.

That's my mom, who studied piano at Juilliard, skillfully playing the stringless harp in Glasgow in the video (top). This was the second harp-related moment of our British Isles trip. The first came in London, when we visited the former home of George Frideric Handel, the German-born Baroque composer. (Jimi Hendrix later lived in the adjacent flat.) Handel had a beautiful harpsichord, an instrument that got its name from the way it creates sound: Its strings are plucked, like those of a harp, rather than hammered, like those of a piano. Which raises the question: Shouldn't a piano be called a hammerchord?

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An interactive element of the Handel House museum is its wardrobe. My dad and I tested out replicas of the composer’s wig—reminded me of the mad-scientist wigs we have at the Notebook. Pamelia looked quite dashing in Handel’s blue jacket.

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But returning home is always enjoyable too. This was the first Maine sunrise we saw, while driving north from Boston.

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Back in Maine: A young cormorant at dusk on Saturday on Jordan Pond.

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The Notebook hosted a fun birthday party yesterday for 7-year-old Max and 14 of his friends. The dinosaur cake was an especially big hit.

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Here’s a peek inside a brown paper bag full of the dinosaurs and dino bones (carefully planted in advance) that young partygoers dug up on the Seal Harbor beach. Is that a cool party activity, or what?

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The Mount Desert Island Marathon made its way through Seal Harbor this morning in the cold rain. The runners very much appreciated our yells of encouragement.

One more illusion, from the Glasgow Science Centre:

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No, I am not actually standing on the chair. See next photo…

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A camera shoots the image from a spot outside the left edge of this picture, with the legs and the chairback lined up to create the illusion. In our photo, Pamelia stood closer to the camera, by the two chair legs, while I stood on the seat in back, making her appear larger.

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This explains the science behind it.

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O.K., one FINAL last illusion, again from the Glasgow Science Centre. As you might have guessed, I was lying on the floor when this photo was taken.

Otherworldly Dry Ice Art

The display had drawn a crowd—and it was easy to see why. In the wondrously interactive learning arcade at the Science Museum in London, the entire universe seemed to have come alive beneath the glass top of a simple black table. Pamelia and I stood at the edge of the table, looking down at what appeared to be spiral galaxies, supernovas and comets, all moving as if in a super-high-speed astronomy film—a film that, in reality, would have taken billions of years to shoot.

The mesmerizing, living artwork was in fact a display of chemistry and physics. The table was covered with a thin layer of water onto which pieces of dry ice—frozen carbon dioxide, temperature minus-109.3 degrees Fahrenheit—were being automatically dropped at regular intervals. As soon as the dry ice hit the water, it would start swirling and shooting across the surface while emitting a whitish fog. We were watching a solid object turn directly to gas in a process scientists call sublimation. Water speeds up the sublimation of dry ice. Those of you with platform shoes and love beads in your closet may recall seeing the fog of dry ice sublimation created by disco smoke machines.

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Each piece of dry ice changed from solid to gas in less than a minute.

Dare I label the images on the tabletop as art? Sure I do. It's not exactly the pure art of nature in the sense that cloud formations and sunsets are. Oh, wait, did someone say that human pollution helps makes sunsets spectacular? Scratch that example. Oh, and jet contrails sometimes contribute to the gorgeous skyscapes we see? Hmmm...let's see, flowers...no, those are often human-created hybrids...wave patterns...maybe, if they're not created by speedboats...um, the multi-hued geological layers of canyon walls?...O.K., those will do, since they predate us and our meddling hands.

Anyway, my point is, somebody built the Science Museum display; it didn't sprout naturally in a field. So it certainly is a planned, creative piece, even if its beauty and depth come from a natural process (dry ice turning to gas) that is out of the hands of the display-builder. But since when do artists always control everything they're creating? Doesn't art often emerge spontaneously, unpredictably, as materials and colors blend in unforeseen ways, as the subjective human eye and the unsteady human hand and the unfettered human brain spin concepts and textures and emotions into something previously unimagined?

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Here's how the installation worked: Pieces of dry ice fell from an elevated runway (right) onto the water and immediately reacted by spiraling and rocketing across the surface in a vivid release of energy.

Now here's another twist: Dry ice does not occur in nature on planet Earth. It can be found on Mars, and no doubt on other frigid planets in the cosmos, but here it is an artificial creation used mostly to preserve food and wow kids in science class. In fact, I might argue that it is but one sub-zero piece of the most world-changing artificial technology ever devised: refrigeration. Think of how the face of the Earth would be different—where humans would be living (and in what numbers), what they would be eating, what their buildings would look like—if nothing could be air conditioned, and few foods could be shipped long distances or kept from spoiling. The all-important automobile might not have created the same United Sprawl of America if, for example, huge swaths of the Sun Belt were too hot for office buildings and daily living.

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Like the works of Andy Goldsworthy, the patterns were gorgeous but ephemeral; the image changed constantly, then dissolved to plain black.

But I digress. The visual expression of carbon dioxide—at least as seen in the piece masquerading as an educational exhibit at the Science Museum—is a lovely addition to the oeuvre of nature-linked and naturally revealing art. That is, it's truly cool.

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Some of the pieces at the edges looked like comets.

Drop 'Em!

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Why would oak, Japanese maple and rugosa rose leaves all fall off en masse on the same morning?

We've had a late fall here in Maine. At our house, the leaves held on a few weeks longer than normal. This week, oddly, many of the trees went bare on the same morning. I looked out the window and saw leaves raining down from our Japanese maple, our many oaks and our brilliant yellow rugosa rose bushes. What was up with all these leaves going down?

I'm guessing that some rain the night before had started the process, and a touch of morning breeze was finishing the job. But the true cause could only be seen with a microscope. As days grow shorter and colder, trees start forming tiny "abscission" cells at the points where leaf stems connect to branches. The trees in effect start cutting their own dead leaves off by building a wall of cells that breaks the leaves' connection to the trees.

Chemistry and physics are part of that process too, of course. And perhaps a touch of Shakespearean tragedy. If disloyal Brutus's stabbing of Julius Caesar was "the most unkindest cut of all," as the Bard wrote, then the oak's callous shedding of its steadfast photosynthsizers must be the most unkindest cut of fall.

Holiday Hours
As previously mentioned, we've decided to open The Naturalist's Notebook for some holiday fun and shopping. Below are the days and hours. Hope we see you!

Friday, Nov. 25 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday, Nov. 26 from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 3 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 10, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Off to England

History can be measured in years or in feet. It can speak to us through the height of ceilings in old buildings, the depth of archaeological digs, the breadth of empires and the length of cannon barrels.

A week into our English travels, Pamelia and I are standing 12 feet—or 2,000 years—below modern street level in the city of Bath. We are touring the ancient Roman baths. The stone floor beneath us lay at street level during the Roman Empire, but then the empire collapsed and for more than 1,000 years the baths were buried deeper and deeper under layers of new building. The baths didn't sink; 12 feet of medieval and early modern world simply rose on top of them. The once-sacred pools were largely forgotten until one day in the late 1800s, when a Bath resident found water in his basement, complained to authorities, and inadvertently launched the dig that unearthed the baths and eventually turned this city into a spa-centric tourist attraction.

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Bath sits on the River Avon—or rather, on one River Avon; Britain has at least five others, including the one on which Shakespeare lived. The popularity of the name has a simple explanation: Avon is a Celtic word that means river.

Pamelia and I are here in England to relax, explore, lay groundwork for Sports Illustrated's 2012 London Olympic coverage and do research for future editions of The Naturalist's Notebook. We are bouncing between London and Bath, with side trips to spots such as the rustic Watermill Theatre, where we attended a lecture by one of our favorite naturalists, Mark Carwardine. We've spent many hours at the British Museum of Natural History and the Royal Geographic Society, where we attended the world travel-guide awards ceremony put on by Wanderlust magazine and featuring one of our favorite authors, Bill Bryson.

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We visited the former home of William and Caroline Herschel in Bath and stood on the spot (in a raised backyard garden) from which William—the greatest astronomer most Americans have never heard of—looking through his homemade, 7-foot-long wooden telescope, discovered Uranus. He called it the Georgian planet, after King George III, but other European star-gazers won the battle to officially christen it, and named it after the father of Saturn and grandfather of Jupiter in Roman mythology. Herschel later used a piece of crystal glass from a chandelier in the house to split the sun's rays and discover infrared light.

Pamelia lived in England as a child and I've spent three or four months in the British Isles over the last 30 years, so we feel at home on this side of the Atlantic. We could probably spend three or four months just in the London's Museum of Natural History and its Darwin Centre, but I'll save any discussion of our visits there for a blog later in the trip.

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An hour's drive took us from Bath through postcard-perfect farmland to wind-blown Stonehenge. What you can't see in the photo are the surrounding fields of sheep and the busy motorway that runs past. Many crows were flying around the nearly 5,000-year-old formation, adding a bit of spookiness. The scene (apart from the highway) is really quite beautiful, and the light plays off the sandstone and bluestone blocks in interesting ways, highlighting their character and color. A botanically-minded British guide informed us that more than 90 types of lichen—which she pronounced litchen—grow on the stones.

Bryson, one of the most entertaining travel writers of our era, has noted how acute our senses become when we're traveling. We pay more attention to street signs and people's clothing and the types of flowers growing in window boxes. I have enjoyed sitting at breakfast at our hotel watching diners dig into blood sausage and toast heaped high with baked beans. At the local supermarket (an enlightening stop in any foreign city) we noticed that eggs were sold unrefrigerated (with the breed of hen listed on each carton) and that soda shelves included a number of drinks made from botanical ingredients such as dandelions, burdock root and elderflowers.

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Unexpected sign on the road to Stonehenge.

In a future post I'll show you some of the unusual waterfowl and other natural sights we've seen... and let you in on a few British secrets. My computer has been acting up lately, so I better get this posted before I lose it.

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Don't sweat the small things? That apparently wasn't a common phrase (translated into Latin) in ancient Rome. This is one of several curse tablets on display in the Roman baths museum. People who were upset at somebody would inscribe a curse on a sheet of lead or pewter, fold the sheet and drop it into the sacred spring for the gods to act upon. One typically peeved individual whose gloves had been stolen wrote a road-rage-worthy curse instructing the gods that the culprit should lose his mind and his eyes.

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In some of the fields outside Bath, elephant grass is being grown to be turned into biofuel. With its vastly superior mass transit system, more fuel-efficient cars and willingness to address environmental problems such as global climate change, Britain seems a large step ahead of the U.S. in trying to protect the planet.

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We liked the green-minded topiary in a park in Bath.

I'm pasting in below a link to a video of the song Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, simply because we yesterday we passed Solsbury Hill, which overlooks Bath. Gabriel has lived in the area for portions of his life.

Thanks (And Stay Tuned)
The Naturalist's Notebook is now closed for the season, though we hope to open for a couple of Saturdays right after Thanksgiving for anyone who wants to holiday shop. Give us a call if you have any special requests. And keep reading the blog—it has no off-season!

How Cold Is It Where You Are?

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At low tide on extremely cold days, ice forms on the exposed bay floor in six-sided disks more than a foot in diameter. Not coincidentally, these hexagons are the same shape as snow crystals, honeycombs, the patterns on turtle shells and pineapples, and other forms found in nature.

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Yesterday the black ducks and mallards that had gathered under our feeder took off en masse when startled. Hawks and bald eagles have been out in force, causing panic among the ducks, the crows and other birds.

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The snow has created a revealing landscape of animal tracks. These are from a fox.

A small flock of these golden-crowned kinglets showed up a few mornings ago—the first time we'd ever seen them. They weigh only half as much as a chickadee and are particularly vulnerable to the sort of cold temperatures we're having. Though no one is sure, some scientists believe that these kinglets become hypothermic, letting their bodies chill to near-death levels, to conserve energy on bitter nights. That strategy is used to an even greater extent by certain other small animals, including wood frogs, who let much of their body freeze to survive the winter.

Music Quiz Answer:
Using only the notes of the musical scale (A through G), the longest words you can make (I think) have seven letters: acceded, baggage, cabbage, defaced and effaced. Did you come up with any others?

Today's Quiz:
What are the only two common vegetables that keep growing and producing for several years (meaning from the same plant, not new plants that might sprout up from fallen seeds)?

Birthdays:

This weekend Sir Francis Bacon, the Englishman who's often credited with inventing the scientific method of inquiry, would have turned 450 years old. Though occasionally embroiled in scandal (he allegedly accepted bribes when in political office), Bacon was so gifted in so many areas that Thomas Jefferson called him one of the three greatest men who ever lived (along with philosopher John Locke and physicist/astronomer/mathematician/genius Isaac Newton) and some in the literary world have argued that he is the one who actually wrote Shakespeare's works. We all might benefit from remembering one of his many famous lines: "A prudent question is one-half of wisdom." Perhaps fittingly, as I write this on a cold day, Bacon died as a result of a wintry experiment he was conducting. He wanted to see if snow would preserve meat, so he went out and stuffed a fowl with it, in the process getting cold and wet and soon developing a fatal pneumonia.

If you're wondering, this Francis Bacon is in fact related to the famous 20th-century Irish-born painter Francis Bacon, who was a direct descendant of Sir Francis's brother. If you've never seen any of the younger Bacon's abstracted figurative paintings (some love them, some hate them), check out a gallery of his work at: http://pinkfreudian.tripod.com/archivebacon.html

Sir Francis Bacon. The esteemed philosopher, scientist and statesman would no doubt be honored to know that he is still remembered today by the makers of the Sir Francis Bacon Halloween mask. It is is a pig's head with this style hat on top.

Andrija Mohorovicic, the Croatian meteorologist, geologist and earthquake expert who was a founder of modern seismology, would have been 154 today. His greatest achievement was establishing (through experiments—the scientific method!) that the Earth is made up a core surrounded by layers. Specifically, he found that the Earth's crust (the thin outer layer of rock) is separate from the Earth's mantle (the layer of denser rock that is farther down, makes up 85 percent of the planet's volume and surrounds the Earth's molten core). Mohorovicic is one of the most important scientists you've probably never heard of.

Andrija Mohorovicic

Desmond Morris, the British zoologist and surrealist painter who in 1967 wrote the best-selling scientific history of humans called The Naked Ape, turns 83 today. A former curator of mammals at the London Zoo, Morris tried to make science more accessible to the general public. The title The Naked Ape refers to the fact that homo sapiens is the only primate species not covered in hair.

Desmond Morris's landmark book

Morris has combined nature, science and art in his long career.