Dr. Lewis Thomas on the wonder of the sky (#50)
Dr. Thomas reminds us of the miraculousness of our atmosphere
Usually, you’re one or the other.
You’re Jobs or Woz. More Luke or Spok. You have the playful, artistic, architects’s mind of a Watson, or the humorless, engineer-based brain of a Crick. Rare is the hybrid.
But sometimes there is.
Sometimes, we get lucky. Sometimes, we get a theoretical physicists brain with a poet’s heart, like Carlo Rovelli. We get the marine biologist who moonlights as a scribe and environmental keeper, like Rachel Carson. We get an oncologist with a Pulizter’s pen, like Siddartha Mukerjee. They have the calculated research enlivened with flesh and flare.
Dr. Lewis Thomas is of that second sort.
So artistic was the former Dean of Yale Medical School and and President of Sloan-Kettering, that the Rockefeller Center now awards an annual prize to scientists and physicians for artistic achievement, 1 in his namesake.
Thomas’ best moment was The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, a National Book Award Winner. Reading it, is sort of like being transported to Ms. Frizzle’s magical bus. Only, imagine The Friz, as a poet, rather than a 4th grade teacher.
One of the more thought provoking essays in that thin book is The World’s Biggest Membrane—the subject of today’s OGT. In it, Dr. Thomas points our attention towards something that most of us—certainly I—have never fully appreciated, but is, as he puts it, possibly the “grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.”
It is the sky.
“A Miraculous Achievement”
Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.
Ah, but from whence does such exuberance arise?
Dr. Thomas’ theory doesn’t necessarily contemplate origin, but possibility. Something needs to hold all of this stuff together, he observed, and, being a biologist, appropriately used the analogy of a cell’s membrane.
It takes a membrane to make sense out of disorder in biology. You have to be able to catch energy and hold it, storing precisely the needed amount and releasing it in measured shares. A cell does this, and so do the organelles Inside. Each assemblage is poised in the flow of solar energy, tapping off energy from metabolic surrogates of the sun. To stay alive, you have to be able to hold out against equilibrium, maintain imbalance, bank against entropy,2 and you can only transact this business with membranes in our kind of world.
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When the earth came alive it began constructing its own membrane, for the general purpose of editing the sun. Originally, in the time of prebiotic elaboration of peptides and nucleotides from inorganic ingredients in the water on the earth, there was nothing to shield out ultraviolet radiation except the water itself.
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It is another illustration of our fantastic luck that oxygen filters out the very bands of ultraviolet light that are most devastating for nucleic acids and proteins, while allowing full penetration of the visible light needed for photosynthesis. If it had not been for this semipermeability, we could never have come along.
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Now we are protected against lethal ultraviolet rays by a narrow rim of ozone, thirty miles out. We are safe, well ventilated, and incubated, provided we can avoid technologies that might fiddle with that ozone, or shift the levels of carbon dioxide.
Then, as he seems to do in all of his essays, Dr. Thomas somehow ties together the human and the grand. He brings our attention to those things to which we pay little attention, but confer the largest benefit upon us.
He makes us not only marvel, but care.
It is hard to feel affection for something as totally impersonal as the atmosphere, and yet there It is, as much a part and product of life as wine or bread. Taken all in all, the sky is a miraculous achievement. It works, and for what it is designed to accomplish it is as infallible as anything in nature. I doubt whether any of us could think of a way to improve on it, beyond maybe shifting a local cloud from here to there on occasion. The word "chance" does not serve to account well for structures of such magnificence. There may have been elements of luck in the emergence of chloroplasts, but once these things were on the scene, the evolution of the sky became absolutely ordained. Chance suggests alternatives, other possibilities, different solutions. This may be true for gills and swim-bladders and forebrains, matters of detail, but not for the sky. There was simply no other way to go.
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We should credit it for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature. It breathes for us, and it does another thing for our pleasure. Each day, millions of meteorites fall against the outer limits of the membrane and are burned to nothing by the friction. Without this shelter, our surface would long since have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even though our receptors are not sensitive enough to hear it, there is comfort in knowing that the sound is there overhead, like the random noise of rain on the roof at night.
The OGT
The essay reminded me of one thing: almost all great things require one of Dr. Thomas’ semipermeable ‘membranes.’
An art project, a home, a country—all of them must “catch energy and hold it.” They must “store…the needed amount and release it in measured shares.”
And, similar to the cellular membrane, you want them to be semipermeable. You want them to be able to allow in, say, the influence and inspiration of the outside world, a view of the stars. But to also block out the radioactive rays of chaos and disorder.
On Thomas’ larger point, they essay—and entire 160 page book—also reminded me to be amazed. To appreciate the actual magic of this container we live in.
To “feel affection” for the sky.
Not surprisingly, Mukerjee and Rovelli have won this award (other winners here), and Carson surely would had she not died 30 years prior to its founding. I like to just select people from the list and buy their books or essays.
Entropy is the universal law that things tend towards disorder. The membrane helps fight against this. For a fascinating video on entropy, and maybe one of the best channels on geek YouTube, watch this one.