light on the earth, although their source
was the collapsing core of a massive,
young star 160,000 light-years away.
The theorists had forecast it amazing-
MILLERSVILLE UNIVERSITY
ly well. A dozen or two neutrinos were
caught from the million million million
that crossed both house-size detectors,
ßowing up through the solid earth from
the south. (Of course, you yourself, like
all the rest of us, were pierced through
and through by trillions of the super-
nova neutrinos: no damage.) The neu-
trino ßash from that single star collapse
was, for a second, more powerful than
the steady optical light of all the stars
in all the galaxies we can see!
An inferno at the supernovaÕs dense
imploding core, only a few miles across,
became several thousand times hotter
than the center of the sun. From it a tide
of neutrinos poured out, able to leave
the star, though not without interac-
tions in that enormously thick enve-
lope. The high temperature made neu-
trinos by heat alone, two at a time, neu-
trino and antineutrino together. Myriad
Þerce encounters between hot photons
or between electron pairs within the
core made neutrinos only rarely, but,
once made, the neutrinos promptly left
for the cold world outside, taking with
them more than 99 percent of all the
energy released in the starÕs collapse.
So much is well supported. One more
wonder may also be true. There are
strong signs that the cosmos we inhab-
it is Þlled with unseen matter, whose
gravitational pull is the only evidence
we have. We do not know what it is.
Surely the simplest conjecture is worth
tentative trial against the unknown.
This missing matter, 10 or more times
as copious as all the ordinary matter
that comprises stars and galaxies, may
be thermal neutrino pairs. The hot, ear-
ly cosmos could have made them, al-
though like photons they will cool in
the universal expansion.
The rest mass of neutrinos is not
known from experiment or theory. If
they have any, they can cool only so far.
Some part of their energy cannot be tak-
en away, allowing them to be the miss-
ing mass of the cosmos, as once before
they were the missing energy for the
Òradioactive ladies and gentlemenÓ
Pauli had saluted in his letter of 1930.
The mass of any neutrino (we now
know of three kinds of neutrinos, not
just the beta-decay ones) is a major
open question; watch for news.
Neutrinos may be what the cosmos
is made of. Our own kind of complex
atomic matter, all those electrons and
quark-built nuclei and the photons that
build stars, planets and life, may be
only a small impurity by weight in a
wonderful universe of neutrino pairs.
Copyright 1995 Scientific American, Inc.
CONNECTIONS
by James Burke
The Silk Road
T
his is the Þrst of my monthly col-
umns for ScientiÞc American. It
is entitled ÒConnectionsÓ (a name
I have also used for books and two tel-
evision series) because I aim to look
at the way the great web of change con-
nects events, discoveries, inventions,
personalities, politics, the arts and 1,000
other components that can be involved
in the act of innovation. Reductionism
simply does not begin to describe this
complex, serendipitous process, in
which even apparently trivial elements
have the most important eÝects. Take,
for instance, the case of shot silk.
In the mid-17th century, one of the
few mills in northern Europe producing
high-quality products such as shot
silkÑa Þne, iridescent and expensive
weaveÑwas in SpitalÞelds in London. So
in 1668 a Dutch draper called Antonie
Thonisoon went there to see the latest
English designs. He was astounded to
come across drawings of silk Þbers
magniÞed to a much greater extent than
was possible by means of the draperÕs
glass he normally used to examine cloth.
Fired by this amazing discovery, he
returned to his hometown of Delft,
changed his name to the more aristo-
cratic van Leeuwenhoek, took up lens
grinding (the 17th-century equivalent
of computer chip design) and began to
mingle with the local scientific elite. On
Christmas Day, 1676, the result of his
new interest burst upon an astonished
Royal Society of London in the form of
a long letter containing illustrations of
what Leeuwenhoek had seen through
one of his 500-power lenses.
What shook everybody was his claim
that the minute objects were alive, be-
cause he had seen them moving. With
this Þrst sight of rotifers and their wav-
ing cilia, protozoan cells rupturing,
hair emerging from its roots, wriggling
spermatozoa and organismsÑ30 mil-
lion of which Leeuwenhoek estimated
would Þt on a grain of sandÑa new
world opened to science.
For one German passing through Hol-
land, the microscopic organisms also
served as proof of the ÒGreat Chain of
BeingÓ theory. This theory held that all
life-forms, from the simplest slime all
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN November 1995
the way up to humankind, had been
designed by God into a series of succes-
sively more complex species that dif-
fered from one to the next only by inÞ-
nitely small graduations. The German
in question, Gottfried W. Leibniz, had a
vested interest in things microscopical-
ly small, having recently developed an
inÞnitesimal calculus with which to
work out the rates of acceleration of
planetary bodies. Leibniz saw Leeuwen-
hoekÕs organisms during a visit to Delft
in 1678 and asserted that they showed
the diÝerences between species might
be so tiny Òthat it is impossible for the
senses and imagination to Þx the exact
point where one begins or ends.Ó
L eibnizÕs philosophy, which was based
on the existence of such inÞnitesi-
mally small, fundamental elements of
existence, or Òmonads,Ó turned out to be
exactly the universal substrate for which
the 18th century was looking. Jean-
Jacques RousseauÕs call for a return to
the life of the noble savage and the gen-
eral disenchantment with the social ef-
fects of the industrial revolution had
spurred the search for a way to reunite
human beings with nature. In Jena, the
hotbed of this new Romantic view of
life, Friedrich SchellingÕs Naturphiloso-
phie brought together recent scientiÞc
discoveries (of opposite magnetic poles,
positive and negative electric charge,
and chemical acids and bases) into a
uniÞed theory of nature as a product
of the dynamic resolution of mutually
conßicting forces.
It was in 1820, while attempting to
apply this ÒconßictÓ view to electricity
and magnetism, that a Dane called Hans
Christian ¯rsted forced more electrici-
ty into a wire than he thought it would
take. The wire became incandescent,
convincing him that electricity and light
were related, so he extended his inves-
tigations and discovered that current
would aÝect a magnetized needle at a
distance.
Twenty-one years later this electro-
magnetic principle brought Samuel F. B.
Morse to develop the telegraph. In 1842
Morse helped Sam Colt, the inventor of
the revolver and MorseÕs neighbor in
109
New York CityÕs Washington Square, by
providing him with the electromagnetic
means to detonate one of ColtÕs new un-
derwater mines, so as to demonstrate
their power to President John Tyler by
blowing up a ship on the Potomac. ColtÕs
other aim was to impress the Russians,
who were also interested in his inven-
tion. But Colt was unwilling to explain
exactly how he detonated the mines, so
the Russian contract went instead to a
Swede called Alfred B. Nobel, whose
mines needed no electrical signals to
trigger them. When a shipÕs hull hit No-
belÕs mine, it distorted a lead casing,
breaking a glass tube inside, releasing
its sulfuric acid contents onto a mix-
ture of potassium and sugar, causing a
ßame that ignited gunpowder.
At the time of the Crimean War, the
Russians sowed these new Nobel mines
in the port of Sevastopol, forcing the
Allied supply ßeet to ride at anchor
outside the harbor. The ships were left
disastrously vulnerable to the great
hurricane of November 14, 1854. In the
course of the storm, the ßeet was dev-
astated, and with it the winter supplies
for the army ashore. The deprivations
that winter were so dreadful that Flo-
rence NightingaleÕs subsequent investi-
gations would bring down the British
government and inspire Jean-Henri Du-
nant to found the Red Cross.
B ut it was the loss of the warship
Henri IV, pride of the French navy,
that had the biggest eÝect. The sinking
caused a sensation in France. The next
day Emperor Napoleon III called for the
establishment of weather forecasting
services throughout the country. By
1860 daily telegraphic weather reports
were being published all over Europe.
One leading Þgure in the new science
was a young American naval oÛcer
named Matthew Maury, who for nine
years collated reports from all over the
U.S. and amassed the equivalent of a
million daysÕ observations, from which
he was able to prove that storms were
all either circular or oblong.
By the 1930s the U.S. Weather Bureau
had been going for more than 60 years,
and nobody had yet attempted to ana-
lyze all the data it had collected. So a
young physics teacher by the name of
John W. Mauchly, who as a student had
worked summers at the Weather Bu-
reau, decided to attempt the task. The
problem with analyzing the massive
data set was the time it would take to
do so by conventional methods.
Then Mauchly discovered that re-
searchers studying cosmic rays were
counting their particles using a vacuum
valve, because it could be turned on
and oÝ by particle strikes very rapidly,
110 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN November 1995
up to 100,000 times a second. Mauchly
realized that vacuum valves might au-
tomate the business of calculation by
acting as data storage devices.
Before he could do much about the
idea, World War II broke out. Mauchly
was conscripted and soon found anoth-
er mathematical problem that was also
taking too long to solve. This was the
matter of calculating artillery tables,
used to instruct a gunner how to aim
and Þre his piece under all conditions.
Early in the war, at the U.S. Army Ballis-
tic Research Laboratories in Aberdeen,
Md., dozens of female mathematicians
were each taking up to 30 days, work-
ing around the clock, to complete one
artillery table for one gun. A single
shell trajectory (that took into account
all the possible variables aÝecting its
ßight) required 750 multiplications, and
a typical table for one gun involved
3,000 trajectories. By 1942 the labora-
tory was being asked to calculate new
tables at the rate of six a week, bringing
the situation close to crisis.
Mauchly put forward his vacuum
valve counting idea, and the army ac-
cepted it. The process basically involved
switching on or oÝ vacuum tubes, ar-
ranged in sets of 10, and using the to-
tal of each setÕs on/oÝ state as a num-
ber. MauchlyÕs machine was operative
by 1946, too late for the war eÝort but
not too late to calculate how to cause
an atomic explosion. Known as ENIAC
( Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer ), the machine was eÝective-
ly the worldÕs Þrst electronic computer,
so named after the term commonly
used for the female mathematicians at
Aberdeen.
ENIAC was fed data by means of
punched cards, adapted by inventor
Herman Hollerith for use in the 1890
U.S. census. That approach had been
suggested to him by his brother-in-law
in the textile industry, who knew about
an automatic weaving system involving
sprung hooks pressed against a paper
card with holes in it. Where there was a
hole, a hook would pass through and
pick up a thread. Hollerith replaced the
hooks with electriÞed wires and made
each wire represent a piece of census
data; where a wire passed through a
hole, it would make electrical contact
and cause a dial to move forward by
one number. The system greatly sped
up the census, counting 62,947,714
Americans in one twentieth the time
taken ( for a much smaller population)
by the previous census.
The weaving technique Hollerith mod-
iÞed had been used to automate the
production of cloth made of a material
too expensive to make mistakes with:
shot silk.
Copyright 1995 Scientific American, Inc.