Alan Vanneman 2, MIT 0

A month or two ago, I acknowledged an email from an old Oberlin classmate, Larry Piper, remarking on a number of issues, including a dispute between Larry and myself as to whether anthropogenic global warming is something we can live with. Basically, I say we can, and Larry says we can’t. I noted at the time that since Larry has a Ph.D. from MIT in chemistry while I have a BA from Oberlin in English, some readers might be inclined to value Larry’s opinion more highly than mine.

Well, that’s certainly reasonable, but I would like to point out that, on occasion—on at least one occasion—an Oberlin English BA beat not one, but two MIT Ph.D.s! Have stranger things happened? I doubt it.

The story goes like this. Back in 2004, MIT very sportingly put a number of its introductory courses online, including videos of the lectures. Now that it’s 2015, it would be nice if we had the 2014 edition, but, as far as I can tell, we don’t. If you want that, you have to get into MIT. But the 2004 set for introductory biology, available here, is pretty damn good, and at least 96% intelligible to an ignoramus like myself.

Main man for the 2004 lectures is Prof. Robert A. Weinberg. Being a biology prof at MIT is clearly not for the faint-hearted, because Bob is sporting a broken arm in the early lectures, perhaps picked up in a fracas over lab space. Somewhere in the early lectures (I confess I’m too lazy to watch them all again, so if you want to track it down you’ll have to do so yourself), Bob tells a story about an encounter he had, as a lowly MIT bio grad student with a lordly full professor of physics during a joint project involving the two departments. Bob had written up the results of some experiment, giving the length of some object as so many “angstroms”. During his review, the physics professor changed the term to “angstra” without explaining why. Bob was mystified, but of course dared not question the change and, clearly, was still mystified when he recounted the story perhaps thirty years later.

I was both amused and shocked that Bob didn’t know that he was right and very amused that the august full professor of physics was entirely full of it. The physics dude was led astray by such academic plurals as “curriculum/curricula” and “criterion/criteria”, not realizing that the first is a Latin plural, as signaled by the shift from “um” while the second is a Greek plural, signaled by the “on”. But the kicker, of course, is that “angstrom” (or, more correctly, “ångström”) is not really a word at all, but a name, the name of Swedish scientist Anders Jonas Ångström, who “invented” the measurement one ten-billionth of a meter. I learned this in high school, and I bet both Bob and his physical nemesis did too.¹

Words, of course, are slippery, imprecise, and irrational, while science seeks to be none of these. In his first lecture, in fact, Bob says that over the past 50 years, biology “has become a science”—that is, has become mathematical rather than descriptive, finally catching up with physics. Even though that’s the case, it’s also amusing that Bob, in his lectures, frequently uses language in a naively, not so say luridly, metaphorical way, most particularly when he talks about hydrophilic molecules, which “really love water,” versus hydrophobic molecules, which “really hate water.” The love/hate relationships that various molecules have with water is, very largely, the stuff of life, but how about “attracted” versus “repelled”?²