Cheeses, Chartreuse, Owls and a Synchrotron, Part II

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We appreciate Dr. Wilkinson, one of our issue advisors for the soon-to-be-released Issue 119 on The Wonder of Creation, allowing us to make use of some excerpts on this blog from his article “Cheeses, Chartreuse, Owls, and a Synchrotron: Some Thoughts from France on Science and Taste,” Crux 42 (Spring 2006): 9–16. Read part one of his thoughts on science, faith, God, creation, monks, and cheese here.

And stay tuned for Christian History issue 119. it's going to be gorgeous!

A few weeks later Mary Ruth and I  had a chance—through a friend who works there—to visit the synchrotron (more precisely: the “European Synchrotron Radiation Facility”)  in  Grenoble France.  Grenoble is an ancient city in a spectacular location.  It was founded by the Gauls, fortified by the Romans, and  lies at the confluence of the Drac and Isere rivers, where they flow out of the high Alps  that tower above the city.  Downriver,   the  Isere flows on  toward the Rhone through rich farms which make up  Europe’s premier walnut-growing region.

Grenoble—the site of several universities—has also become a European centre of high-tech research.  Near  the point where the  two rivers come together  is the half-mile-round circle of the synchroton. ( It is placed on  its  narrowing beak of land precisely like the vast eye of a giant heron) . With an annual budget of 60 million Euros, the synchrotron is supported by 17 nations, from Israel to Finland, and the conversation in the halls and laboratories is a collage of languages.   At any given time dozens of research projects are going on there. Competition for the privilege of using the facility is intense.

Inside the 844-metere  storage ring  of the synchroton, electrons (first boosted to an energy-level of 6 billion electron volts) circle  in a vacuum at just under the speed of light.  The beams are bent around the circle (actually a 40-sided polygon) by  huge magnets, and at every bend they change direction and lose energy in the form of x-rays.  These “leaking” x-rays are the whole reason for the synchroton.  They are focused into some 40 “beam-lines”, tangent to the circle. Each of the lines of x-rays is directed into a lead-lined room,  filled with very precise robotic arms, cameras, and other recording devices, where the work of the synchroton takes place.  

That work is a vastly enhanced kind of  exploration by the senses:  it allows human beings to see fine detail inside of solid matter.  The synchroton is,  in effect, an enormous x-ray microscope—or rather a whole set of such microscopes, using the x-rays given off by the rapidly circling electrons in the storage ring. These are not the kind of x-rays we are exposed to when we go to the dentist or have a broken arm: they are  (roughly) a trillion times more powerful: “brighter,” as the scientists put it, with considerable understatement.   (It would be fatal to be in the lead-lined laboratories when the beam is unshuttered and the focused x-rays scatter off their target). Unlike normal medical x-rays—which only cast a  vague shadow—the synchrotron’s x-rays can be finely focused to reveal microscopic detail.  

The object being analyzed is moved in the beam precisely so that its structure is revealed in a series of very fine slices; each “slice” photographed,  stored by a computer, and the whole solid object, digitally reassembled so that its fine three-dimensional structure is  revealed.   Shortly before our visit one of the uses of the one of beam-lines of  the synchrotron was by a paleontologist examining a  fossilized egg.  It was, of course, impossible to explore the contents of the egg by ordinary means.  The synchrotron however precisely showed the hundreds of tiny bones and fragments  inside the egg (which had been broken before fossilization), and allowed reconstruction into an image of the unhatched creature from the past.  Perhaps  it was a small dinosaur;  perhaps a very early bird, a distant cousin  of the owl I had held in Provence a few weeks earlier.

On our visit, a French woman was sitting in the observation room outside one lab watching a series of slightly changing images on  computer screens.  The specimen in the beam-line was a small cube of limestone.  The purpose of the experiment was to determine the inner structure of the cube’s cracks and cavities. Afterward the limestone would be subjected to CO₂ under pressure, and  the cube  again would be examined by  the synchrotron’s x-rays.   How would the CO₂ penetrate the limestone?  How would it change the limestone? Those  were the questions--interesting questions in themselves— but also deeply relevant for schemes to sequester CO₂ out of the atmosphere by pumping it back underground.  And though assembling the portrait of the interior of the stone was tedious work, it was undergirded by the excitement of seeing something that had not been seen before.

About 80% of the use of the synchrotron’s 40 beam-lines is academic—the acquisition of “pure knowledge.”  As the glossy booklet describing the facility explains (evoking the opening of Aristotle’s Physics), “All men by nature desire knowledge”). . .

The thirst for knowledge drives us to explore the world around us. What is our planet made of? What are the processes that sustain life? How can we explain the properties of matter and develop new materials?  Will it one day be possible to conquer viruses, predict natural catastrophes, or eliminate pollution?

Most of these questions cannot be answered without a profound knowledge of the intimate details of the structure of matter.  To help in this quest, scientists have developed ever more powerful instruments. . . .

“The thirst for knowledge”: It is a good phrase, taking us back again to the senses,  but it is not quite accurate, for the thirst is not  primarily for the abstraction “knowledge”: it  rather about a desire  to touch, with augmented  senses, things which have been hidden.  It is a thirst to “taste and see.”

Thus the synchrotron, of which there are now about 50 in the world.  Universities—at least  professors and their doctoral students (particularly useful  for staffing the  night shift on the 24-hour schedule which synchrotron research requires)—make up most of the use of the facility.  But about 20%  of the capacity is rented (at a fee of roughly 1000 Euros per hour) to business and industry, to answer questions like,  “can this soap be made to fill its mold more efficiently?”  and “Can we achieve a tastier distribution of  nuts and bubbles in this chocolate bar?”   The answers of these questions are good for business,  and good for the attempt to make more things available to more people, some of whom are hungry for any food at all.  Yet ironically, inevitably,  some of the new knowledge, when put to use,  may threaten the very tastes and textures of creation in which it was born. 

It’s not easy to separate “pure knowledge”  of creation from the use of that knowledge.  But  there is nothing sinister about this wedding of knowledge and use—of science and technology.   Nor is that wedding—despite its vast acceleration over the past decade—a sinister thing, though all of us can think of technologies we regret.  The use of knowledge for power and pleasure is an ancient, inseparable part of our humanity.   This was reinforced on the afternoon of our synchroton visit when we entered quite a different world.

When we left the synchroton—having surrendered our visitor’s badges and retrieved our driver’s licenses at the security gate—we crossed the Isere river and drove up—and up, and up—a narrow road above Grenoble, into the regional park of the mountain massif known as the Grand Chartreuse.  Soon there was deep snow on either side of the road.  Just below the village of St. Pierre de Chartreuse we passed two white-robed monks with skis on their shoulder, tramping along the slushy verge of the road. (The lower part of their robes were no longer very white). They were headed towards the monastery of Grand Chartreuse,  the mother-house of the Carthusian order, which has other monasteries throughout Europe and in North and South America.  It is a contemplative order (no visitors are allowed at the monastery itself), and near the monastery (unseen above us in its snowy meadow) we passed a sign announcing that we were entering a “zone of silence”.   Above the road and the snowy forest the limestone peaks were silent indeed.

Several centuries ago,  so the story goes,  some of the monks of the order succeeded in translating a medieval grimoire containing a recipe for an “elixir of life.”  (It is worth noting in this context that a grimoire  is a book of spells and potions,  associated with the tradition of magic—an older, less successful, way of using knowledge to achieve power. )  The elixir, based on  130 plants,  was first distilled in 1605  by the apothecary of the order, a father Jerome Maubec.

The recipe—almost lost during the French revolution—is now held by only two Carthusian monks at a time.  They oversee the gathering and blending of  the carefully guarded variety of  plants from the surrounding countryside (and perhaps from further afield).  Soaked in alcohol,  the mélange of plants is eventually distilled, aged, and produces a light green liqueur which eventually gave the name of the order (and the mountain) to a colour,  chartreuse.  It has also delighted the taste of millions of people. (As it had delighted us the night before when our host, the engineer from the synchrotron, had served some to us.).

Down the mountain we went on a tour of the  vast cellar where today the liqueur is produced, aged (in hundreds of  enormous oak barrels, and distributed around the world.  

We bought a bottle and brought it home and served it a few days later to some of the Arocha interns with whom we had banded owls a month before.  They too were delighted and intrigued by the flavours of Chartreuse, and we engaged in a sort of competition to name as many as we could. Pine? Rosemary? Cinnamon? Orange? Vanilla?  Lavender? Perhaps all of these.  Perhaps none.  But whatever it contains, Chartreuse (whose sale continues to support both  the Carthusian order and its various relief projects around the world) is a witness both to the flavours of creation,  and to the human delight in tasting and tinkering with them. 

Stay tuned for the third and last part in a few days! 

Image by Bertrand93 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29871714