The Physics of Christmas: From the Aerodynamics of Reindeer to the Thermodynamics of Turkey
320
The Physics of Christmas: From the Aerodynamics of Reindeer to the Thermodynamics of Turkey
320Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780316366953 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Little, Brown and Company |
| Publication date: | 11/01/1999 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 640,862 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.38(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
CHRISTMAS AND
THE SCIENTIST
AN INTRODUCTION
There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas.
Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz
Christmas is a time for the crunch of snow, spiced wine, and tinseled trees. Christmas is a time for giving, meeting friends, and feasting. Christmas is a time for carols, family gatherings, gaudy greeting cards, and all the jollity of the seasonal spirit. Christmas is also a time for science.
Chemists are hard at work in the Christmas kitchen. Experts on thermodynamics have drafted equations to help us cook turkeys to perfection, scanners have scrutinized steaming plum puddings, and pharmacologists have traced the baroque metabolic pathways of the brain to explain why chocolates can be so addictive.
Meteorologists study every aspect of the snow cycle that provides a seasonal sprinkling, from the seeding of an ice crystal high in the sky to the traces of past Christmases buried deep in the snowpack.
Climatologists are plundering this record to help predict white Christmases far into the future. A handful are even concocting outlandish schemes to guarantee that each and every Christmas is white.
Psychologists tease out the hidden agenda of the Christmas card and what it reveals about our social status. The same goes for presents. The price, the nature of the gift, and even the way it is wrapped say a great deal about the giver and his or her relationship with the recipient. All the while, anthropologists hunt for the foundation of the celebration in pagan rituals that took place before the birth of Christ, during long winter nights when our ancestors feared that the sun would never return.
The origins of the holiday in the darkness of prehistory emphasize perhaps the most fundamental aspect of Christmas: everyone's invited. The seasonal message of hope and charity is a message for all -- Christians, Jews, Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, and, yes, even scientists and engineers.
I have been investigating the science of Christmas for more than a decade. When I first began to take an interest in the subject, I was unprepared for the breadth and depth of the insights that would eventually emerge. Take those flying reindeer, Santa's red and white color scheme, and his jolly disposition, for example. They are all probably linked to the use of a hallucinogenic toadstool in ancient rituals.
I can add that Santa was born with a genetic propensity to become obese and now suffers from diabetes. He does not live at the North Pole, preferring the warmth of an island off the coast of Turkey. There, panting at his side, you will find Rosie -- not Rudolph -- the reindeer.
I was at first puzzled by how Santa could fly in any weather, circle the globe on Christmas Eve, carry millions and millions of presents, and make all those rooftop landings with pinpoint accuracy. The answer lies in his unprecedented research resources and expertise across a range of fields, spanning genetic engineering, computing, nanotechnology, and quantum gravity.
My experience of writing this book undermines the idea that the materialist insights of science destroy our capacity to wonder, leaving the world a more boring and predictable place. For me, the very reverse is true. I can still remember the day when, as a child, I first became convinced that Santa did not exist. Now, by refracting the Santa myth through the prism of science, he seems more real than ever.
I believe that science and technology can even shed a little light on a deeper question: where did Christmas come from in the first place? Peel back the wallpaper of centuries, and you will find that the festival is an amalgam of influences -- German, Dutch, English, American, and other traditions, both religious and pagan -- that emerged over the millennia.
Even today, the traditional Christmas hoopla is far from a homogeneous phenomenon, taking place alongside Kwanzaa, an African-American harvest holiday, and the eight-day Jewish celebration of Hanukkah. Together they constitute the annual celebration.
Part of the reason winter festivities went global can be found 150 years ago, at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution. It was then that "Christ's Mass" (Cristes maesse in Old English), the church service that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, along with a wealth of other traditions, entered the scientific age of mass communications, transport, and other technologies.
This collision between ancient tradition and the age of science and technology was particularly significant in Victorian Britain, where, during a single decade, there was a striking coincidence of events of significance for science, the annual celebrations, and this book.
The 1840s saw a dizzying rate of change in society due to efforts across a proliferating range of disciplines. In the world of science, there were Darwin's ideas on natural selection, Joule's work on thermodynamics, and Faraday's studies of magnetism, light, and electricity.
In the sister disciplines of engineering and technology, there were developments in factories, machine tools, and information technology. Babbage was hard at work on his difference engine, and a web of telegraph lines spread across the nation. All the while the old certainties seemed to have been squashed flat by the steam hammer, steamboat, and steam train. The resulting turmoil in society made the traditional Christmas message of charity more relevant than ever.
Emerging communications technologies, from speedy railways to the telegraph, paved the way for that message to be disseminated and homogenized for mass consumption, forging much of what we think of today as the traditional festivities.
The tumultuous 1840s also saw an important token of the rising influence of science: the birth of a specific label for the burgeoning army of individuals at work in this field. William Whewell, a polymath who was a Fellow of the Royal Society, coined the word scientist in earnest in his two-volume book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. The word was of dubious legitimacy in philological terms, a hybrid of Latin and Greek, and was attacked (wrongly) as "an American barbarous trisyllable." But the pressure to put a name to this increasingly influential group was overwhelming.
That same decade saw the introduction to Britain of one component of the German Christmas that remains very much a part of the celebrations today. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert set up a Christmas tree for the first time in Windsor Castle in 1840. She recorded that this German custom quite affected dear Albert, who turned pale and had tears in his eyes! Eight years later they appeared beside the tree in the Illustrated London News, one of the magazines established that decade to exploit advances in illustration technology. This would become one of the most famous nineteenth-century Christmas scenes of all.
At the same time that scientist was born and Albert gazed upon his tree, an eminent and extraordinary individual, Henry Cole, decided to reduce the burden of writing Christmas greetings letters by taking advantage of another development he had had a hand in: the introduction of the penny post in 1840.
His invention, the first Christmas card, was published in 1843 and cost a shilling, the equivalent of a day's wages for a laborer. After two decades the price fell dramatically thanks to one of the technological innovations of the day, cheap color lithography, and Christmas cards entered the mass market.
Cole regarded the card as the folk art of the Industrial Revolution, and it ultimately became the greatest popularizer of now-standard Christmas iconography, with designs ranging from bizarre characters with pudding heads to mannequins in period costume, as well as the more conventional mistletoe, robins, holly, and fireside scenes. Not only were the cards printed on paper, but they were also gilded, frosted, and dressed with satin or fringed silk. Some were even made to squeak.
Through the evolution of one of the card's most familiar characters, it is possible, in the wake of the pioneering contributions of Cole, Prince Albert, and Whewell, to trace the influence of scientists, engineers, and technologists on our way of life. I am, of course, referring to the many depictions of that fat man with the white beard.
A silk-fringed card published in 1888 reveals how, by then, Santa had resorted to the latest communications technology to improve links with his market. The figure shown on the card seems to be engaged in what can only be described as a conference call, listening to the simultaneous demands for presents from an assortment of children. Only the previous decade, Alexander Graham Bell had patented the telephone that made it all possible.
By the 1890s Santa had decided to give up his sleigh and reindeer, preferring to haul his gifts around by "the new monstrosity from France," the automobile. As a result of the development of the internal combustion engine, the silent night, holy night now throbs to the sound of traffic. The stillness of the snowy landscape shown on so many Christmas cards is marred by the groan of the snowplow and the susurrus of chains on wheels. The search for the Bethlehem star is now obscured by a haze of photochemical smog.
Another newfangled device, the wireless, appears on one 1929 Christmas card, which features a Santa apparently mesmerized by the crackling message it is receiving over the ether: "You're in my Christmas circuit / And on the waves of thought / A Happy Christmas and New Year / To you is gladly brought." Radio would become the first mass medium to reinforce the tendency for Christmas to be a festival held behind closed doors.
When Santa reached for a cool soda pop in a Coca-Cola advertisement that appeared during the Christmas season of 1937, he was again a technological pioneer. The source of his refreshment was a refrigerator, even though iceboxes were still being used by most American households that year.
Santa can now be found in cyberspace. The last time I checked, there were hundreds of Santa home pages for children's e-mail. Digitized images of Santa now scud about the web of international computer networks every Christmas.
One day these images may even supplant the traditional Christmas card. However, I believe that an e-mailed Santa, spouting digital "ho, hos" and seasonal greetings, would still honor the spirit in which Henry Cole first dreamed up the card -- as a practical way to marry mass communications and art.
Cole would be amazed and gratified by the extent to which his little invention has caught on today. The significance of the 1840s does not end there, however. As Cole sent out his first cards, the greatest and most influential of all Christmas books made its first appearance in a crimson and gold binding.
A Christmas Carol was published by Chapman and Hall on December 19, 1843. By Christmas Eve it had sold six thousand copies, the most successful publication that season. Within two months eight pirated theatrical productions had been staged.
The genesis of this work of popular genius dates back to around 1840 and Dickens's correspondence with the philanthropist Lord Ashley. Dickens was horrified by the impact on society of the age of machines, notably the appalling conditions endured by children working in coal mines and factories. He started work on the book to make a sledgehammer blow against these evils of the industrial age.
One newspaper described the book as "sublime." Thackeray said that it was a "national benefit." Lord Jeffrey told Dickens that it had "prompted more positive acts of beneficence than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom since Christmas 1842."
Thus the 1840s saw a striking convergence: the first scientist, the tree, the card, and the Christmas book to top all Christmas books. A century and a half later, science is still altering the very nature and fabric of the celebrations through the introduction of new technology, whether cloned Christmas trees, the Internet, or those infuriating cards that play carols over and over again.
And so on to the science of Christmas.