Much Ado About (Practically) Nothing: a History of the Noble Gases

Much Ado about (Practically) Nothing Books by David E. Fisher Novels Crisis Compartments A Fearful Symmetry The Last Flying Tiger The Man You Sleep With Variation on a Theme Katie’s Terror Hostage One The Man Nonfiction The Creation of the Universe The Creation of Atoms and Stars The Ideas of Einstein (Juvenile) The Third Experiment The Birth of the Earth A Dance on the Edge of Time: The Birth of Radar The Origin and Evolution of Our Own Particular Universe Fire and Ice: The Greenhouse Effect, Ozone Depletion, and Nuclear Winter Across the Top of the World The Scariest Place in the World Tube: The Invention of Television (with M. J. Fisher ) Strangers in the Night: A Brief History of Life on Other Worlds (with M. J. Fisher) Mysteries of the Past: Companion to the NOVA series (with M. J. Fisher) A Summer Bright and Terrible DAVID E. FISHER Much Ado about (Practically) Nothing A History of the Noble zGases 1 2010 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fisher, David E., 1932– Much ado about (practically) nothing : a history of the noble gases / David E. Fisher. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-539396-5 1. Gases, Rare. I. Title. QD162.F57 2010 546'.75—dc22 2009054365 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Jackson Henry and Louis Samuel What is the path? There is no path. On into the Unknown! —Niels Bohr, loosely translated from Goethe’s Faust Acknowledgments You do this, and you do that, and suddenly that’s your life. —Bernhard Schlink y gratitude is due to alex zucker and z MJohn Pinajian, who taught me science, to Ollie Schaeffer and Ray Davis, who introduced me to the noble gases, and to Tommy Gold and Cesare Emiliani for expanding my horizons. I am indebted to Neta Bahcall, Grenville Turner, Rob- ert Fleischer, and Norbert Porile for their suggestions regarding this book, although they must be held blameless for the fi nished product; it should be clear that all opinions expressed herein are mine alone. Conversations reported with these and others over the past fi fty years are accurate to the best of my recollection, but just as space is warped by mass, memory is warped by time; some slack must be cut. This page intentionally left blank Contents 1. Philosophy and Apology 1 2. In the Beginning 4 3. Helium 9 4. Argon and the Rest 18 5. Helium and the Age of the Earth 33 6. The Strange Case of Helium and the Nuclear Atom 48 7. Interlude: Helium, Argon, and Creationism 59 8. Meanwhile, Back at Brookhaven 66 9. Cornell, the Ten-Minute Experiment, and Back to Argon 77 10. K/Ar and the Irons 90 11. Interlude: The Spreading Oceans 100 12. Dating the Spreading Seafl oor 112 13. The Argon Surprise 124 x S contents 14. Primvordial Helium and Argon and the Evolution of the Earth 136 15. Xenology 144 16. The Coldest Place on Earth 158 17. Back to the Stars 178 18. The Neutrino Revolution 193 19. Life and Death on Mars and Earth 209 20. Radon and You 229 21. L’Envoi 241 Notes 245 Index 261 A photo gallery follows page 122. Much Ado about (Practically) Nothing This page intentionally left blank one Philosophy and Apology The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. —Albert Einstein o paraphrase the first advertisement for my zTfi rst book (“Crisis is a terrifying novel. But don’t let that scare you”), this book is about the noble gases. But don’t let that scare you. It’s really about how science works. There is a gen- eral misapprehension about this. Most people, without thinking about it, visualize the universe as a railroad track disappearing into the distance, and science as the locomotive slowing wending its way along the track, learning year by year more and more about this universe in which we live. Not so. It would be more realistic to visualize the universe as a black forest hidden on a cloud-obscured night, with science as a lost child trying to fi nd its way home, feeling blindly the branches of the trees, occasionally being slapped in the face by one, trip- ping over the roots of another, stumbling on a path and taking it eagerly only to fi nd it branching or, worse, precipitately ending. Nothing to do then but turn around and go back, fi nd another branch, another path, or, worse luck, with no path to be found, try again and again to feel your way through the dark trees striving to fi nd some light, somewhere, anywhere. 2 S much ado about (practically) nothing The only thing wrong with this analogy is that being lost in such a forest would be terrifying, whereas science is fun. What is right about the analogy is that science does not run along a straight path like the locomotive but bumbles to the right and left, some- times backwards, and every once in a while takes a step closer to home, to the ultimate goal, to an understanding of our universe.1 The last part of that sentence, if you think about it, is astound- ing. Despite being born naked and ignorant of everything around us we have learned from solely our own efforts that this fl at ground we walk on is actually curved, part of a spheroid, that the stars we see are suns, that everything we touch and hold is made up of a hundred or so different particles, that our world has existed not forever but for four and a half billion years, and that many of the stars are billions of years older, in fact that the entire universe is just under fourteen billion years old. This and so much more we know; a truly amazing feat, expressed best by the quote which opens this section—but another quote (by J. B. S. Haldane) serves to balance it: “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”2 Somewhere between these two statements we stir and stumble around, trying to make sense of it; this is what I’m trying to write about, and a most excellent illustration of it all is the story of the discovery and uses of the noble gases, a group of elements van- ishingly rare on our planet, which do not react with anything, which in fact do nothing. You can’t feel them, hear them, see them or smell them. Thus their names: the rare gases, for their rarity; the inert gases, for their inability to form compounds; fi nally, the noble gases, for their ability—like the nobility—to exist without doing any work. But for all this, starting with the discovery of the rarest of these invisible and seemingly useless gases, they have turned out to be 1. I say “our” universe because we don’t even know if there are others. 2. A slightly more pessimistic view was expressed by Woody Allen: “Nothing worth knowing can be understood.” philosophy and apology S 3 instrumental in understanding our universe, from determining its age to learning what makes the stars shine and perhaps to the origin of life itself. Thus the title of this book: much ado has been both caused by and focused on a group of somethings which are practically nothing—and which illustrate the ebb and fl ow (and the occa- sional tsunami) of the tide of science. Finally, an apology. It is not possible to write a comprehen- sive, in-depth review of all the uses to which the rare gases have been put. For example, if you want to read about recent advances in the fi eld of geo/cosmochemistry alone, without the historical stories, there is an 844-page book available, plus several chapters in another. If instead you just want to read about the discovery and uses of liquid helium, there’s a fi ne book of just under 650 pages, plus another (500 pages, packed with equations) with the intrigu- ing title The Universe in a Helium Droplet, which uses the proper- ties of supercooled helium to “give an insight into trans-Planckian physics and thus helps in solving the cosmological constant prob- lem and other outstanding problems in high-energy physics and cosmology.” Or you might want to spend 135 dollars for a book on just two of the noble gas isotopes. Other books abound on the astronomical relations, the environment, the age determinations, the past and the future. This book is an attempt to portray the most important aspects of the story in a readable (i.e., jargonless) manner, along with an account of my fi fty years with the gases and people met along the way.

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