Thanks for another interesting read. I found you via MoA (been hanging out there since 2017 or thereabouts).
I'm currently in the process of a deep dive into Pb after a diagnosis of chronic lead poisoning earlier this year, and I'm alarmed by what I've read thus far.
Sadly, it appears that it will still be a problem in most developed cities for decades to come, as it doesn't actually go away, ever, and is constantly redistributed via ground disturbance, renovations, etc.
I'm aiming to consolidate what I learn about the subject into some writing as time permits.
Thanks again for your writings, and the genuine and unique perspective you provide.
Why not take a seaweed supplement that removes (chelates) lead? Modifilan comes to mind. Pre-Fukushima, this was made of Laminaria Japonica from the Russian Isles (and was superb for removing mercury), but production moved to Patagonia, and unless something has changed, the new stuff is GREAT at removing lead. I have my own data and insights; web info is misleading -- there's no substitute for testing.
Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM) + spirulina + vitamin C.
About to buy a mixed greens powder that came recommended and some zinc amino acid chelate.
Started the detox, and my blood Pb level doubled in 6 months. That means it is being liberated from cells (MSM sulphur content is supposed to massively increase cell permeability), but now I need to focus now on binding and removal lest it do more damage.
Not at all. I think it would be worthwhile if you published your findings. I am obviously out of touch with the matter and I suspect many non chemists are too. On a parallel tack I am posting on prostate cancer on my next but one.
Thanks for your comment and I am sorry to hear of your predicament. I am somewhat out of touch with that matter and somewhat surprised that it was still an issue. It came to the fore in the 1960s, there was a prominent campaigner in London, I forget his name, we had him come to the university to give a talk. He seems to have been swept from the history.
It was absolutely scandalous how the oil giants resisted all demands to remove lead for so long. I am just reading that the UN campaign began in 2002! UK had banned it in 2000, and yet unleaded was available in 1972.
After much reading, and pondering my life since I was conceived, I have determined that there are multiple vectors that likely led to my current Pb levels.
From mum smoking, to going to school on one of the busiest intersections in the country, chewing fingernails as a nervous habit, our home vegetable garden (~50m from one of those roads), lead jointing in plumbing, sanding old paintwork, handling fishing sinkers, hobby electronics, to working as an electrician specialising in solar and batteries.
Quite a list, and many if not most people who grew up in developed urban environments have been exposed at a level hogh enough to cause health complications.
I was amazed when I read that it is absorbed to some degree through the skin, although breathing aerosolised dust and hand to mouth are the two main vectors historically.
lead.org has a bunch of information, but it leads to quite a rabbit-hole.
Today I got a tweet from Tim Howels at Oxford on the French polymath Michael Serres book "The Birth of Physics."
"The Birth of Physics
Michel Serres - Translated by David Webb and William James Ross
The Birth of Physics represents a foundational work in the development of chaos theory from one of the world’s most influential living theorists, Michel Serres.
Focussing on the largest text still intact to reach us from the Atomists - Lucretius' De Rerum Natura - Serres mobilises everything we know about the related scientific work of the time (Archemides, Epicurus et al) in order to demand a complete reappraisal of the legacy. Crucial to his reconception of the Atomists' thought is a recognition that their model of atomic matter is essentially a fluid one - they are describing the actions of turbulence, which impacts our understanding of the recent disciplines of chaos and complexity. It explains the continuing presence of Lucretius in the work of such scientific giants as Nobel Laureates Schroedinger and Prigogine.
This book is truly a landmark in the study of ancient physics and has been enormously influential on work in the area, amongst other things stimulating a more general rebirth of philosophical interest in the ancients. "
I went to the web and found an article in the LA Review of books. I have appreciated their articles over the years.
"A Science of Exceptions: On Michel Serres’s “The Birth of Physics”
Christine Wertheim takes the measure of “The Birth of Physics” by Michel Serres, translated from the French by David Webb and William James Ross.
Here are the second and third paragraph of the article.
"While questions about the birth of language might at first seem out of place in a text ostensibly about physics, such anomalies are the norm for Serres, who has made a career of idiosyncratic textual interpretations and of weaving disparate disciplines together. In addition to five chapters on the topic of physics, Serres devotes one chapter of his book to history, another to morality, and yet another to language, all of which together Serres presents as a reading of the ancient poem De Rerum Natura. Indeed, as we will see, Serres’s views on poetry and language add a much-needed perspective to contemporary linguistic studies; however, in order to understand this, we must begin with the birth of physics.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that the ancient Greeks developed no formally systematized science. Though Aristotle advanced complex theories of the natural world and Euclid formulated a sophisticated mathematics, common wisdom agrees that the Greeks found themselves unable to apply the latter’s breakthrough to the former’s, a frustration that would leave their physical conjectures as mere speculations without experimental validity. By Serres’s account, this fact has achieved a certain status, much like Jane Austen’s declaration about unmarried men of good income; it has become local myth, bound by the prejudiced conceptions of modern science and its history. Serres confronts this myth, proposing that the Greeks did achieve a full-fledged theory of physics to which a mathematics could be, and in fact was, applied. However, as he attempts to show in The Birth of Physics, this ancient practice would hardly resemble the modern science we recognize today, until the discovery of thermodynamics in the late 19th century, and the even later discoveries of information theory and open systems in the second half of the 20th."
The universe is just as much mathematics as anything handled by digital computers.
Chances are the nature of everything actually IS based on some digital computer machinery.
But the data tasks are so prohibitively extensive that there may be limitations to how accurate this digital representation may be performing.
One aspect of the failure of perfect operation may be the quantitative features of quantum science: That energy for rapid oscillations has to be handled in bigger chunks because the calculations could not handle both the speed and magnitude simultaneously for an enormously large number of quanta.
Calculations are simplified if one may treat a quantity of energy like a single entity instead of as an ennurably large number of individual particles with a concomitant set of different coordinates and momenta.
And radioactivity: It could be an effect of the limited computing power.
Thus some essential aspects of physics might be understood as caused by the limitations of any such computer systems.
In that light, the awkward feeling quantum physics has had on many philosophers including those who made groundbreaking contributions, would be expected if it is a consequence of the limited capacity of any mathematical hardware machinery.
One odd aspect of high precision calculations occurrs in the so called QED theory where the scientists have been able to determine certain microphysical phenomena wherein agreement between theory and experiment exists with a large number of accurate decimals.
But in order to get there they have to discard infinities(!) that come out of the calculations.
But this discarding is apparently done in accordence with a kind of rules-based order.
It isnt arbitrary.
A computer would be able to do just that !
Is the physics that runs the universe critically depending on the practical necessity to skip over many calculations?
Imagine what might have happened if that North Sea gas had been used for the good of all. Or even if, like the Norwegians, it had been sold to create an investment fund.
I saw yesterday, somewhere on the net, that Newport and Merthyr are now among the ten poorest communities in the UK- I might have known that you were from South Wales, once a light unto the nations!!
Grand stuff about chemistry, I can almost understand it! I'll read it again and take up a study that I dropped in 1959.
When I went to Norway and Sweden in 1967, Norway was very much the poor neighbour. The tarred roads ceased about 50 miles north of Oslo because they would have been destroyed every winter and they couldn’t afford constant repairs. I never went back but I understand that the situation is long reversed and that outcome was due to intelligent management of its North Sea windfall, unlike the UK.
The poverty in Merthyr is no surprise, it was long so, but Newport, that is a shock. No doubt Port Talbot will join soon, steel making finally ended.
I wonder if I would recognise Wales now. We moved to Devon in 1994 and apart from a fleeting visit for my mother’s funeral in 2012 have not seen it for 20 years.
A friend in Swansea put me on to a daily online newspaper which I scan most days, Nation Cymru. Something I am excited about is the rise in Welsh nationalism, it must have been about zero in polls when I was young but about 33% now and it is said over 50% among the young. That I should live to see it!
Did you lose stuff you had written? I tend to write off piste these days in word or publisher saving as I go as I have had some disastrous losses of text. Nice to hear from you.
That was just wonderful. You've tied together the foundational concepts of chemistry (basically physics as it manifests in matter) and did it in _such_ an engaging manner.
I'm very much looking forward to additional musings on this vector - that is the subject of how chemistry can be used as an intellectual tool to build new products.
Chemistry's track record of new product development - "product" in this context means "a something that solves a human problem" ... chemistry's product contributions include metal, plastic, penicillin, fuels, batteries, paper ... just to name a few of the most obvious.
These are foundational products which have certainly changed the trajectory of human evolution.
There are some that eschew "technology". I endorse technology, because I see it as just "what humans know how to do". Neither good nor bad, but simply "what we know how to do". How we apply that knowledge is a different - and very relevant! - question altogether.
Chemistry has, as you so eloquently point out, enormous forward-potential to solve some really tough human problems. Like what kind of problems?
a. Give us packaging, or plastics, that are have appropriate physical properties, and are fully and endlessly recyclable, safe, and environmentally benign
b. Use (a) above to make us insulation - thermal insulation usable in a building - that is thermally highly effective, and is also easy to use in a construction - and de-construction - setting.
c. Make us a battery that is energy dense, uses widely-available, low-cost (financial and environmental) elements/compounds, and is ... fully and endlessly recyclable, and recyclable on a small, local scale
Why did I mention those particular problems?
Consider the issue of climate change. Where is CO2 load coming from?
Transport and building heat-transfer (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC). Those two "technologies" - transport and HVAC account for somewhere around 60+ percent of CO2 loading.
We need to move from linear once-and-done materials lifecycle to a cyclical materials life-cycle. We need to either better-manage fossil fuels combustion (sequester the CO2) or find a fuel cycle that doesn't produce CO2.
Chemistry is the conceptual framework in which those core human problems are going to get solved.
Thanks for making chemistry so approachable.
We are all really impressed with and appreciative of the scope, range, and insight of your postings. Please be encouraged to continue this great work.
Well thanks very much for that. I really just saw it as a filler between the China offerings, but I do have a rather long piece I could put up in a while, it is something that was presented to a conference last year, the story of the modern hand held breathalyser, I have been involved in for a very long time, not too specialised, I’ll put it in the weekly schedule and it will surface in a while. Thanks again, I feel truly honoured!
I'm looking forward to reading the story of the breathalyzer, especially any insights you might have on the product development process. I have a great interest in expanding the awareness and involvement of all people, all walks of life, in new product development. We humans have a lot of problems that need to get solved ... PDQ. What's a "product"? It's a solution to a human problem. Ergo .. more product devel is useful.
Hi Walt.
Thanks for another interesting read. I found you via MoA (been hanging out there since 2017 or thereabouts).
I'm currently in the process of a deep dive into Pb after a diagnosis of chronic lead poisoning earlier this year, and I'm alarmed by what I've read thus far.
Sadly, it appears that it will still be a problem in most developed cities for decades to come, as it doesn't actually go away, ever, and is constantly redistributed via ground disturbance, renovations, etc.
I'm aiming to consolidate what I learn about the subject into some writing as time permits.
Thanks again for your writings, and the genuine and unique perspective you provide.
Cheers.
Why not take a seaweed supplement that removes (chelates) lead? Modifilan comes to mind. Pre-Fukushima, this was made of Laminaria Japonica from the Russian Isles (and was superb for removing mercury), but production moved to Patagonia, and unless something has changed, the new stuff is GREAT at removing lead. I have my own data and insights; web info is misleading -- there's no substitute for testing.
Thanks for the reply. I'm onto it.
Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM) + spirulina + vitamin C.
About to buy a mixed greens powder that came recommended and some zinc amino acid chelate.
Started the detox, and my blood Pb level doubled in 6 months. That means it is being liberated from cells (MSM sulphur content is supposed to massively increase cell permeability), but now I need to focus now on binding and removal lest it do more damage.
I'll look into your recommendations.
Thanks again for the reply and input.
Cheers.
Not at all. I think it would be worthwhile if you published your findings. I am obviously out of touch with the matter and I suspect many non chemists are too. On a parallel tack I am posting on prostate cancer on my next but one.
Thanks Walt.
I shall document as much of this journey as practicable, and work on publishing my findings. Hopefully it may help others in a similar predicament.
I'll look forward to your next piece.
Thanks again.
Thanks for your comment and I am sorry to hear of your predicament. I am somewhat out of touch with that matter and somewhat surprised that it was still an issue. It came to the fore in the 1960s, there was a prominent campaigner in London, I forget his name, we had him come to the university to give a talk. He seems to have been swept from the history.
It was absolutely scandalous how the oil giants resisted all demands to remove lead for so long. I am just reading that the UN campaign began in 2002! UK had banned it in 2000, and yet unleaded was available in 1972.
I wonder how you came about your exposure?
Thanks for your reply.
After much reading, and pondering my life since I was conceived, I have determined that there are multiple vectors that likely led to my current Pb levels.
From mum smoking, to going to school on one of the busiest intersections in the country, chewing fingernails as a nervous habit, our home vegetable garden (~50m from one of those roads), lead jointing in plumbing, sanding old paintwork, handling fishing sinkers, hobby electronics, to working as an electrician specialising in solar and batteries.
Quite a list, and many if not most people who grew up in developed urban environments have been exposed at a level hogh enough to cause health complications.
I was amazed when I read that it is absorbed to some degree through the skin, although breathing aerosolised dust and hand to mouth are the two main vectors historically.
lead.org has a bunch of information, but it leads to quite a rabbit-hole.
Apologies for the long waffle.
Cheers, from Sydney, Australia.
Today I got a tweet from Tim Howels at Oxford on the French polymath Michael Serres book "The Birth of Physics."
"The Birth of Physics
Michel Serres - Translated by David Webb and William James Ross
The Birth of Physics represents a foundational work in the development of chaos theory from one of the world’s most influential living theorists, Michel Serres.
Focussing on the largest text still intact to reach us from the Atomists - Lucretius' De Rerum Natura - Serres mobilises everything we know about the related scientific work of the time (Archemides, Epicurus et al) in order to demand a complete reappraisal of the legacy. Crucial to his reconception of the Atomists' thought is a recognition that their model of atomic matter is essentially a fluid one - they are describing the actions of turbulence, which impacts our understanding of the recent disciplines of chaos and complexity. It explains the continuing presence of Lucretius in the work of such scientific giants as Nobel Laureates Schroedinger and Prigogine.
This book is truly a landmark in the study of ancient physics and has been enormously influential on work in the area, amongst other things stimulating a more general rebirth of philosophical interest in the ancients. "
I went to the web and found an article in the LA Review of books. I have appreciated their articles over the years.
"A Science of Exceptions: On Michel Serres’s “The Birth of Physics”
Christine Wertheim takes the measure of “The Birth of Physics” by Michel Serres, translated from the French by David Webb and William James Ross.
By Christine Wertheim August 14, 2018"
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-science-of-exceptions-on-michel-serress-the-birth-of-physics/
Here are the second and third paragraph of the article.
"While questions about the birth of language might at first seem out of place in a text ostensibly about physics, such anomalies are the norm for Serres, who has made a career of idiosyncratic textual interpretations and of weaving disparate disciplines together. In addition to five chapters on the topic of physics, Serres devotes one chapter of his book to history, another to morality, and yet another to language, all of which together Serres presents as a reading of the ancient poem De Rerum Natura. Indeed, as we will see, Serres’s views on poetry and language add a much-needed perspective to contemporary linguistic studies; however, in order to understand this, we must begin with the birth of physics.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that the ancient Greeks developed no formally systematized science. Though Aristotle advanced complex theories of the natural world and Euclid formulated a sophisticated mathematics, common wisdom agrees that the Greeks found themselves unable to apply the latter’s breakthrough to the former’s, a frustration that would leave their physical conjectures as mere speculations without experimental validity. By Serres’s account, this fact has achieved a certain status, much like Jane Austen’s declaration about unmarried men of good income; it has become local myth, bound by the prejudiced conceptions of modern science and its history. Serres confronts this myth, proposing that the Greeks did achieve a full-fledged theory of physics to which a mathematics could be, and in fact was, applied. However, as he attempts to show in The Birth of Physics, this ancient practice would hardly resemble the modern science we recognize today, until the discovery of thermodynamics in the late 19th century, and the even later discoveries of information theory and open systems in the second half of the 20th."
The universe is just as much mathematics as anything handled by digital computers.
Chances are the nature of everything actually IS based on some digital computer machinery.
But the data tasks are so prohibitively extensive that there may be limitations to how accurate this digital representation may be performing.
One aspect of the failure of perfect operation may be the quantitative features of quantum science: That energy for rapid oscillations has to be handled in bigger chunks because the calculations could not handle both the speed and magnitude simultaneously for an enormously large number of quanta.
Calculations are simplified if one may treat a quantity of energy like a single entity instead of as an ennurably large number of individual particles with a concomitant set of different coordinates and momenta.
And radioactivity: It could be an effect of the limited computing power.
Thus some essential aspects of physics might be understood as caused by the limitations of any such computer systems.
In that light, the awkward feeling quantum physics has had on many philosophers including those who made groundbreaking contributions, would be expected if it is a consequence of the limited capacity of any mathematical hardware machinery.
One odd aspect of high precision calculations occurrs in the so called QED theory where the scientists have been able to determine certain microphysical phenomena wherein agreement between theory and experiment exists with a large number of accurate decimals.
But in order to get there they have to discard infinities(!) that come out of the calculations.
But this discarding is apparently done in accordence with a kind of rules-based order.
It isnt arbitrary.
A computer would be able to do just that !
Is the physics that runs the universe critically depending on the practical necessity to skip over many calculations?
Imagine what might have happened if that North Sea gas had been used for the good of all. Or even if, like the Norwegians, it had been sold to create an investment fund.
I saw yesterday, somewhere on the net, that Newport and Merthyr are now among the ten poorest communities in the UK- I might have known that you were from South Wales, once a light unto the nations!!
Grand stuff about chemistry, I can almost understand it! I'll read it again and take up a study that I dropped in 1959.
When I went to Norway and Sweden in 1967, Norway was very much the poor neighbour. The tarred roads ceased about 50 miles north of Oslo because they would have been destroyed every winter and they couldn’t afford constant repairs. I never went back but I understand that the situation is long reversed and that outcome was due to intelligent management of its North Sea windfall, unlike the UK.
The poverty in Merthyr is no surprise, it was long so, but Newport, that is a shock. No doubt Port Talbot will join soon, steel making finally ended.
I wonder if I would recognise Wales now. We moved to Devon in 1994 and apart from a fleeting visit for my mother’s funeral in 2012 have not seen it for 20 years.
A friend in Swansea put me on to a daily online newspaper which I scan most days, Nation Cymru. Something I am excited about is the rise in Welsh nationalism, it must have been about zero in polls when I was young but about 33% now and it is said over 50% among the young. That I should live to see it!
enjoyed....wrote much more but it went off into??? The cloud i expect
Did you lose stuff you had written? I tend to write off piste these days in word or publisher saving as I go as I have had some disastrous losses of text. Nice to hear from you.
Walt:
That was just wonderful. You've tied together the foundational concepts of chemistry (basically physics as it manifests in matter) and did it in _such_ an engaging manner.
I'm very much looking forward to additional musings on this vector - that is the subject of how chemistry can be used as an intellectual tool to build new products.
Chemistry's track record of new product development - "product" in this context means "a something that solves a human problem" ... chemistry's product contributions include metal, plastic, penicillin, fuels, batteries, paper ... just to name a few of the most obvious.
These are foundational products which have certainly changed the trajectory of human evolution.
There are some that eschew "technology". I endorse technology, because I see it as just "what humans know how to do". Neither good nor bad, but simply "what we know how to do". How we apply that knowledge is a different - and very relevant! - question altogether.
Chemistry has, as you so eloquently point out, enormous forward-potential to solve some really tough human problems. Like what kind of problems?
a. Give us packaging, or plastics, that are have appropriate physical properties, and are fully and endlessly recyclable, safe, and environmentally benign
b. Use (a) above to make us insulation - thermal insulation usable in a building - that is thermally highly effective, and is also easy to use in a construction - and de-construction - setting.
c. Make us a battery that is energy dense, uses widely-available, low-cost (financial and environmental) elements/compounds, and is ... fully and endlessly recyclable, and recyclable on a small, local scale
Why did I mention those particular problems?
Consider the issue of climate change. Where is CO2 load coming from?
Transport and building heat-transfer (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC). Those two "technologies" - transport and HVAC account for somewhere around 60+ percent of CO2 loading.
We need to move from linear once-and-done materials lifecycle to a cyclical materials life-cycle. We need to either better-manage fossil fuels combustion (sequester the CO2) or find a fuel cycle that doesn't produce CO2.
Chemistry is the conceptual framework in which those core human problems are going to get solved.
Thanks for making chemistry so approachable.
We are all really impressed with and appreciative of the scope, range, and insight of your postings. Please be encouraged to continue this great work.
Well thanks very much for that. I really just saw it as a filler between the China offerings, but I do have a rather long piece I could put up in a while, it is something that was presented to a conference last year, the story of the modern hand held breathalyser, I have been involved in for a very long time, not too specialised, I’ll put it in the weekly schedule and it will surface in a while. Thanks again, I feel truly honoured!
I'm looking forward to reading the story of the breathalyzer, especially any insights you might have on the product development process. I have a great interest in expanding the awareness and involvement of all people, all walks of life, in new product development. We humans have a lot of problems that need to get solved ... PDQ. What's a "product"? It's a solution to a human problem. Ergo .. more product devel is useful.
Well yes that is really what it is about, the development from 1967 close up to the present day. I’ll try not to keep you waiting too long!