Made by Hand (24 page)

So far, the bees seem to have adjusted to their new home, and they are consuming a couple of bags of sugar water each week. It bothers me a bit to think that I am feeding them sugar to keep them going, instead of having them get all their nourishment from nature, but Kirk assures me they will be able to find plenty of pollen and nectar when blossoms reappear.

I haven’t fallen in love with beekeeping yet. For one thing, I have never been a fan of any activity requiring a suit—that’s why I never went scuba diving again after getting my certification and why I don’t like working in an office. Bee suits are hot and uncomfortable. And I don’t feel emotionally attached to the bees the same way I do to my chickens. Bees are much more inscrutable than chickens; they have no personality. And frankly, they scare me a little. But I’m not giving up on my bees yet. The club members who have gone through a full year or more with their bees—who have harvested honey and seen how the bees pollinate their gardens and trees—are in love with the little creatures.

I hope that by this time next year I’ll feel the same way.

9

LEARNING HOW TO LEARN

“Every one of us knows, if we stop to think about it, that the most valuable lessons we have learned are not what we ‘learned in kindergarten,’ nor what we learned in courses later on. They are, instead, the lessons that we learned when we allowed ourselves the luxury of following through on our own interests and our own drives to play, fully and deeply.”

—PETER GRAY, “LEARNING REQUIRES FREEDOM”

 

 

 

 

Years ago, I read Ken Silverstein’s bizarre and wonderful article in
Harper’s
called “The Radioactive Boy Scout,” about Eagle Scout David Hahn’s attempt to build a nuclear breeder reactor (a machine that produces radioactive fuel faster than it consumes it) in his backyard garden shed. In 1994 the seventeen-year-old Hahn collected radioactive material for his breeder by driving around towns with a Geiger counter in the front seat. When the counter started clicking rapidly, he’d stop his car and enter the nearest store (usually an antiques or junk shop) and ask the proprietor to show him all the old clocks he had for sale.

Hahn was looking for clocks made prior to our understanding of the dangers of radioactivity, some of which had radium painted on the hands so they would glow in the dark. He would buy the radioactive clocks and then scrape the radium paint off for his experiment. He also collected radioactive materials from smoke detectors (they contain a speck of the synthetic element americium-241, which changes the electrical charge of smoke particles to make them trigger the alarm) and camping lantern mantles (some contain thorium to make them glow more brightly). One time Hahn hit the jackpot when he bought an old clock and found a small jar of radium paint in it, which was probably stored there to refresh the hands.

In the end, Hahn collected enough radioactive material in his mother’s shed that a Geiger counter could detect it from five houses away. In 1995 an unrelated encounter with the local police resulted in the discovery of the goings-on in the garden shed. The find triggered a Federal Radiological Emergency Response. Both the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were called in, and Hahn’s mother’s property was declared a Superfund cleanup site. The chemicals and other contaminated materials were placed in thirty-nine barrels and taken to a dump facility called Envirocare in the Great Salt Lake Desert, where other radioactive waste is kept.

Afterward, Hahn graduated from high school, attended community college, and served in the military. But his fascination with radioactive materials apparently had a long half-life: In 2007 he was arrested in Michigan for stealing sixteen hallway smoke detectors from the apartment building he lived in. His mugshot was truly frightening: His face was completely covered with red and black sores, which authorities thought to be radiation burns. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ninety days in jail.

Silverstein’s article mentioned that Hahn had been inspired to practice chemistry after reading
The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments
. Published in 1960, the book is long out of print. Since reading the article, I’d wanted to own a copy, but I didn’t want to fork over the $200 or more that used copies go for. One day, on a lark, I searched the BitTorrent sharing sites and found a PDF version. The experiments in the book include making chlorine, ammonia, hydrogen, and ethanol. I was astounded. In today’s litigious environment, few publishers would dare publish a book like this for fear of getting sued—teaching kids how to make their own alcohol? Even if a publisher were willing to take the risk, the chemicals and lab equipment necessary to perform the experiments are not easy to obtain, not only because they are considered dangerous but because the Drug Enforcement Administration doesn’t want anyone using them to make methamphetamines. Today’s chemistry sets are all but useless, because they don’t contain any chemicals that might be dangerous.

So if kids are no longer able to learn chemistry at home, at least they can learn it in school, right? Unfortunately, real chemistry labs are disappearing from schools. Robert Bruce Thompson is an amateur chemist and the author of
The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments
(published by
Make
). According to Thompson, No Child Left Behind is killing high school chemistry because schools are overly concerned with making sure students do well on standardized tests. “You can’t really blame the teachers and administrators,” he told a reviewer. “Their jobs depend on students scoring well in reading and math, so guess what they focus all their attention on teaching?”

If book publishers, chemistry set manufacturers, and schools aren’t providing the materials and information needed to experience chemistry, does that mean young people (and curious adults) are out of luck?

Absolutely not. As Thompson has pointed out, amateurs have been practicing chemistry since long before the first chemistry set was made (around 1930 or so). His book features more than four hundred experiments, along with suggestions on how to obtain the chemicals and lab gear needed to conduct them. (For example, chemicals that have been banned from chemistry sets are often available in the form of solvents or reagents that can be picked up at any well-stocked hardware store.)

Amateur chemistry is just one facet of the amateur-science movement, which has been around in one form or another since people started wondering about the way the universe and the things in it work. But it has been enjoying a renaissance recently, thanks to the idea-transceiving power of the Internet. A quick Google search will lead you to communities of microscope and telescope builders, instructions for making DNA-replicating equipment, guides to blowing your own chemistry glassware—thousands of science-based Web sites.

You might say the Internet saved amateur science from an ignominious death. A hundred and fifty years ago, the practice was thriving.
Popular Science
ran columns like “Adventures with Your Microscope” and “Home Laboratory Chemistry.” They offered experiments to study luminescence and crystal formation, recreate famous bridges and other architectural structures out of toothpicks, make a tiny oil refinery, and superheat steam to a temperature high enough to light a cigarette. As late as April 1964
Popular Science
was singing the praises of DIY science, running an article calling for ten million amateur scientists to advance the fields of astronomy, meteorology, and oceanography.

In 1928,
Scientific American
launched its “Amateur Scientist” column, which detailed such projects as constructing an electron accelerator, making amino acids, photographing air currents, measuring the metabolic rate of small animals, extracting antibiotics from soil, culturing aquatic insects, tracking satellites, constructing an atom smasher, extracting the growth substances from a cantaloupe, conducting maze experiments with cockroaches, making an electrocardiogram of a water flea, constructing a Foucault pendulum, building a Geiger counter, and experimenting with geotropism. Who knew you could have so much fun at the kitchen table?

One might argue that building an apparatus to measure the speed of light is a wasted effort, since someone else figured that one out a long time ago. But to construct the device and take the measurements yourself is a deeply rewarding experience. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing for yourself the speed of light, or the size of the Earth, or the distance from the Earth to the Moon, or the acceleration of gravity. (This must have been what Ronald Reagan meant when he said, “Trust, but verify.”)

As I browsed issues of
Popular Science
through the decades, I found that coverage of amateur science petered out in the 1960s, to be replaced almost exclusively by articles about Big Science, the kind that costs billions of dollars and requires an army of Ph.D.s to oversee. And even though
Scientific American
continued to run “Amateur Scientist” until 2000, its focus, too, shifted away from do-it-yourself science toward passive edutainment. Perhaps these magazines were forced to keep up with the shifting interests of their readers. In the 1970s many amateur scientists, and those who might have become ones, turned their attention to personal computers, shifting their hobby from the real to the virtual universe. And when the World Wide Web appeared in the early 1990s, the same types of smart and curious people flocked to it, eager to discover what could be done with this new and awesomely powerful form of mass media.

By 1980 the era of science-as-hobby was dead. And it stayed that way for a good long while. But in the last five years, amateur science has returned. It’s as though the folks who have been spending all their time creating the Web and everything on it suddenly looked up from their monitors and realized that the world itself was the ultimate hackable platform. In other words, for these creative DIY folks, the Internet stopped being an end in itself and became a tool to get things done in the real world. The early rush of creating the Web was over, and now the smart, creative geeks who built it were spending more time in the physical world.

The Internet inspires and accelerates amateur scientific research by making it possible to share reports, videos, blueprints, data, and discussions. Amateur scientists are using the Internet exactly as its architects first envisioned it forty years ago—as a scientific research facilitator, replacing snail mail, print-based peer-reviewed journals, and conferences. It has brought far-flung researchers together in a shared space where communication is instant and ideas flow at nearly the speed of light.

Who better to explain this new explosion in amateur science than Forrest M. Mims III? Mims is the editor of
The Citizen Scientist,
an online newsletter published by the Society for Amateur Scientists. The sixty-five-year-old Texan is known chiefly for two things: writing a series of extremely popular electronics hobby books for RadioShack in the 1980s and cofounding the company that developed the Altair 8800, widely regarded to be the first personal computer. Mims has no advanced degree in science but has written for peer-reviewed journals like
Nature
and is frequently hired as a consultant by the U.S. government and other institutions.

Mims’s curiosity is wide-ranging; he conducts experiments in biology, geology, astronomy, botany, and meteorology. Nothing in the natural world escapes his interest. His recent articles and experiments have explored flint tool-making techniques, jellyfish, owls, moss that grows on trees, windmill technology, planetary meteor scarring, helium production, tree rings, the ozone layer, mosquito infestations, volcanoes, plant fibers, rat snakes, spear grass, and water vapor. The December 2008 issue of
Discover
magazine included him among the “50 best brains in science” (which caused a minor media furor, thanks to Mims’s assertion that Darwinian evolution is hogwash and his stated doubts that CO
₂
levels significantly affect global warming).

I e-mailed Mims and told him, by way of introduction, that I still owned the copy of his
Getting Started in Electronics
that I bought for $2.95 at RadioShack in 1985. I asked if he’d be willing to be interviewed, and he e-mailed me back immediately with his telephone number, telling me to call after he’d finished taking his daily backyard measurements of ultraviolet radiation and ozone levels with his homebuilt apparatus. I waited an hour or so and rang him up. After we exchanged pleasantries, Mims launched into an attack on the traditional education system as a destroyer of the DIY spirit.

“I probably would have been diagnosed with ADD as a kid,” he said, “because I didn’t pay attention. I was bored to death by conventional education. My mind was wandering all during class, inventing things or traveling to foreign countries or whatever. That didn’t mean I was stupid. It meant I thought a little bit differently than my neighbor. If they’d put me on medication, maybe I’d be on welfare today. Who knows? We are totally dumbing down the country by not fully understanding these things.”