YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: MATHEMATICS-AND-PHYS-SCIENCES

CHEMISTRY Chemical Nomenclature. Responding to criticism from chemists around the world, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 1995 decided to reconsider the definitive names that it had announced the previous year for elements 101-109. The decision was unprecedented in the history of IUPAC, an association of national chemistry organizations formed in 1919 to set uniform standards for chemical names, symbols, constants, and other matters. IUPAC's Commission on Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry had recommended adoption of names for the elements that, in several cases, differed significantly from names selected by the elements' discoverers. The extremely heavy elements were synthesized between the 1950s and 1980s by researchers in the U.S., Germany, and the Soviet Union. Although the discoverers had exercised their traditional right to select names, the names never received IUPAC's stamp of approval because of disputes over priority of discovery. The conflicting claims were resolved by an international commission in 1993, and the discoverers submitted their chosen names to IUPAC. An international furor ensued after the IUPAC nomenclature panel ignored many of the submissions and made its own recommendations. IUPAC's rejection of the name seaborgium for element 106 caused particular dismay in the U.S. Discoverers of the element had named it for Glenn T. Seaborg, Nobel laureate and codiscoverer of plutonium and several other heavy elements. In response, IUPAC's General Assembly decided that names for elements 101-109 would revert to provisional status during a five-month review process scheduled to begin in January 1996. Chemists and member organizations were to submit comments on the names for IUPAC's reconsideration. The American Chemical Society (ACS) directed its publications to continue using the recommendations of its own nomenclature committee for the duration of IUPAC's review. All of the ACS's names for elements 104-108 differed from those on IUPAC's list. Inorganic Chemistry. People treasure gold mainly because it resists tarnishing and discoloration better than any other metal. Iron rusts and silver tarnishes when in contact with oxygen in the air. Gold remains bright and glistening, however, even in the presence of acids and other highly corrosive chemicals. Scientists have never fully understood gold's inertness. It is not a simple matter of gold's inability to form chemical bonds, since it does form stable compounds with many elements. The real mystery is why gold does not react with atoms or molecules at its surface, at the interface with gases or liquids. Bjork Hammer and Jens Nrskov of the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, used calculations run on a supercomputer to explain gold's stature as the noblest of the noble metals. Those elements, known for their inertness, are gold, silver, platinum, palladium, iridium, rhodium, mercury, ruthenium, and osmium. The Danish scientists found that gold's surface has electronic features that make reactions energetically unfavourable. Molecules form very weak attachments to gold's surface and quickly lose their tendency to break up into reactive chemical species. As a result, they simply slide away without forming long-lasting electronic or molecular attachments. Hammer and Nrskov studied a simple reaction involving the breakup, or dissociation, of molecular hydrogen (H2) into its constituent atoms on the surface of gold and other metals. Of all the metals studied, gold had the highest barrier for dissociation and the least-stable chemisorption state--i.e., the least tendency to take up and hold atoms or molecules by chemical bonds. The properties result, in part, from an overlap of the electron orbitals, the clouds of electrons that surround atoms, between gold and the adsorbed molecule. The overlapping orbitals oscillate out of phase with each other, a situation that makes bond formation unlikely. PHYSICS Confirmation of the discovery of a long-sought elementary particle delighted physicists in 1995, while the possible identification of another, unexpected type of particle gave them pause for thought. Cosmologists and astronomers were pleased with the finding of strong evidence for dim, small, starlike objects called brown dwarfs, which represent some of the so-called dark matter that is believed to make up perhaps 90% of the universe, but were baffled by conflicting determinations of the age of the universe. In the strange world of quantum physics, an intriguing proposal was made for an experiment using DNA, the molecule of life, in a modern version of a famous thought experiment outlined 60 years earlier. The biggest development of the year was the confirmation of a claim tentatively put forward in 1994 that the top quark had been detected in particle-collision experiments at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago. Data in 1995 from two separate detectors at Fermilab's Tevatron proton-antiproton collider provided what appeared to be unequivocal evidence for this last piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the so-called standard model of particle physics. The standard model explains the composition of all matter in terms of six leptons (particles like the electron and its neutrino) and six quarks (constituents of particles like protons and neutrons), five of which had already been detected. Results from one detector indicated a mass for the top quark of 176 GeV (billion electron volts), with an uncertainty of 13 GeV; results from the other detector gave a mass of 199 GeV, with an uncertainty of 30 GeV. The two values were consistent with each other, given the overlap in their uncertainties. Further experiments were expected to pin down the mass of the top quark more precisely, which in turn would provide insight into the nature of a theoretical entity called the Higgs field. The Higgs field is thought to pervade all of space and, through its interaction with all the matter particles, to give the particles their masses. A major shortcoming of the standard model is that it does not account for the way in which the quarks and leptons come to have the masses that they do. Confirmation of the existence of the top quark by no means closed the book on the mysteries of particle physics. In mid-1995 researchers working with the HERA accelerator at DESY, the German national accelerator laboratory in Hamburg, announced that they had found something completely different. Their work built on earlier evidence that mysterious showers of particles are sometimes produced in so-called soft collisions, wherein a proton and an electron, or a pair of protons, strike each other a glancing blow rather than colliding head-on. Almost tongue in cheek, physicists had suggested that one of the colliding particles might emit a new kind of particle, dubbed a pomeron, that is actually responsible for the effects observed in a soft collision. The problem has been that the standard model, which relies on the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to explain the strong force that binds the quarks in the protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus, is inaccurate for low energies. QCD is much less useful for calculating what happens in soft collisions than in the more energetic collisions like those used to search for the top quark. Nevertheless, the results from HERA did suggest that pomerons are involved in soft collisions. When, for example, an electron and a proton approach one another, the proton emits a pomeron, which then interacts with the electron to produce a shower of other particles, while the proton itself proceeds unscathed. The questions to be answered were whether the pomeron indeed does exist, what it is made of, and what its properties are. Physicists found the possibility of a particle like the pomeron exciting because it was something not predicted by theory. On the other hand, two teams of researchers were no less excited by their success in obtaining a new form of matter that had actually been predicted 70 years earlier, as a result of theoretical work by Albert Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Bose. The old calculations had predicted that if atoms in the form of a dilute gas could be made cold enough, they would merge and become, in a quantum sense, a single entity much larger than any individual atom. The challenge was to produce the phenomenal cooling required for achieving this state, called the Bose-Einstein condensate. The atoms must be chilled to less than 200 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, -273.15 C (-459.67 F). The trick was at last achieved during the year, first by scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colo., and the University of Colorado and then by a team at Rice University, Houston, Texas. Both used similar techniques of slowing the atoms down with laser beams, trapping them in a magnetic field, and allowing the hottest, fastest individuals to escape. The resulting Bose-Einstein condensates were made up of several thousand atoms in a ball about 30 micrometres (0.001 in) across, behaving as a single quantum entity thousands of times bigger than an atom. The first experiment to achieve this state cost only about $50,000 for the hardware, plus months of intense and skillful effort, and opened up a whole new area of investigation of the predictions of quantum theory. Investigations of quantum phenomena like Bose-Einstein condensation gained new importance from recent work highlighting the baffling nature of quantum physics. Sixty years after the quantum theory pioneer Erwin Schrdinger devised his famous cat paradox to illustrate his dissatisfaction with the more absurd aspects of the standard interpretation of quantum theory, two Indian researchers went one better. They conceived a version of this thought experiment using DNA, which is particularly apposite since Schrdinger's book What Is Life?, written in the 1940s as an attempt to use quantum physics to explain the stability of genetic structure, was instrumental in setting Francis Crick on the trail that lead to his identification of the structure of DNA with James Watson in 1953. The absurdity that Schrdinger wished to emphasize was the part of quantum theory that says that the outcome of any quantum experiment is not real until it has been observed, or measured by an intelligent observer. He scaled an imaginary experiment up from the quantum world of particles and atoms to a situation in which a cat exists in a 50:50 "superposition of states," both dead and alive at the same time, and definitely takes on one or the other state only when somebody looks to see if it is dead or alive. Whereas carrying out such an experiment with a real cat would present tremendous difficulties, the experiment proposed by Dipankar Home and Rajagopal Chattapadhyay of the Bose Institute, Calcutta, really could be done. To bring out the quantum measurement paradox in sharp relief, they picked up on a comment made by Alastair Rae in his book Quantum Physics (1986) that a single particle is all that is required for producing a mutation in a DNA molecule. In the proposed experiment a gamma-ray photon (a particle-like packet of electromagnetic energy) is directed into a cesium iodide crystal, producing a shower of photons with wavelengths in the ultraviolet (UV) range around 250 nanometres (billionths of a metre). The photon shower then passes through a solution containing DNA and an enzyme known as photolyase. Any DNA molecule that is damaged by absorption of a UV photon changes its shape in such a way that molecules of photolyase bind to it. In principle, an observer could then measure the enzyme binding. The point of the experiment is that absorption of a single UV photon, a quantum event, causes a microscopic displacement in the molecular structure of the DNA, which in turn produces a macroscopically measurable (i.e., a nonquantum, or classical) effect through its chemical interaction with the enzyme. The standard interpretation of quantum theory says that each DNA molecule should exist in a superposition of states, a mixture of being damaged and not damaged, until an intelligent observer looks at it. On the other hand, common sense says that each molecule is either damaged or not damaged, and that the enzyme is perfectly capable of telling the state of the DNA without assistance from a human observer. In a Bose Institute preprint, the two researchers came down on the side of common sense, arguing that an individual DNA molecule could be regarded as definitely either damaged or not damaged "regardless of whether or when an experimenter chooses to find this out." Thus, in their view some other interpretation of quantum physics was required. Sixty years on, Schrdinger would be delighted to see which way the quantum wind was blowing. One of the more eagerly anticipated discoveries of relevance to cosmology was made by researchers using the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, one of the Canary Islands. They found the best evidence yet for a brown dwarf, a small, extremely faint substellar object, in the Pleiades star cluster. It has only a small percentage of the mass of the Sun and less than 100 times as much as the planet Jupiter. Because they are so small, brown dwarfs could exist in the Milky Way Galaxy in huge numbers without contributing much to its overall mass. The new discovery suggested that about 1% of the mass of the Milky Way (and, by extension, other galaxies) is in the form of brown dwarfs. That value still leaves plenty of scope for other, as yet unidentified, entities to make up the rest of the "missing mass" of the universe, the dark, or nonluminous, matter whose presence is suggested through its gravitational effects on the observed rotation of galaxies and their movement in clusters. (See EARTH AND SPACE SCIENCES: Astronomy.) In another tour-de-force Earth-based observation, astronomers at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile discovered the most distant supernova--an explosion of a dying star--yet seen. It lies in a galaxy about six million light-years from the Earth. Because supernovas, depending on their type, have much the same absolute brightness (they are "standard candles," in astronomical terms), if more can be found at such great distances, it may be possible to use them to measure how quickly the rate at which galaxies are moving apart is decreasing--i.e., how fast the expansion of the universe is decelerating. If the absolute brightness of a supernova is known, then its apparent brightness can be used to calculate its true distance. This value then can be combined with the red shift of the supernova's parent galaxy, which is a measure of how fast the galaxy is receding from the Earth. This ability would be a great boon because it is one way to determine the time that has elapsed since the big bang--i.e., the age of the universe. The age is calculated in terms of a number called the Hubble parameter, or Hubble constant (H0), a constant of proportionality between the recessional velocities of the galaxies and their distances from the Earth. H0 is the rate at which the velocity of the galaxies increases with distance and is conventionally expressed in kilometres per second per megaparsec (a parsec is 3.26 light-years). The reciprocal of H0, 1/H0, yields the time that has elapsed since the galaxies started receding. Various techniques for making the galaxy-distance measurements that were needed to calculate H0 had seemed for some years to be converging on a value for H0 that yielded an age for the universe of 15 billion to 20 billion years, and it had been anticipated that measurements for distant galaxies made with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) would give a definitive value. To the surprise of many, measurements with the HST in late 1994 determined a value for H0 that implied an age of 8 billion to 12 billion years. In 1994 and 1995 other determinations made with the HST or ground-based telescopes gave a range of values for H0, some indicating a relatively young universe and others an old one. The new measurements put clear water between two sets of numbers that were, at face value, impossible to reconcile. Apart from the embarrassment of the disagreement itself, some of the measurements implied that the age of the universe is less than the accepted ages of the oldest stars, which are at least 15 billion years old. Clearly something was wrong. A major consolation, however, was that some of the most significant progress in science eventually comes from investigations in areas where theory and observation are in conflict rather than in agreement. (JOHN GRIBBIN) This updates the articles Cosmos; quantum mechanics; physical science, principles of; thermodynamics; subatomic particle; physics.