Clean Water

I read a link to Wanderings with a comment from Mike Craig on water pasteurization and I would like to add this. At www.solarhealth.net under the "kifaru" project, there is a project pasteurizing water for about 2,000 people every day. I think that is the largest in the world. They use a flat plate collector to heat the water and a Danfoss thermostatic valve to assure the right temperature for the outlet water.

Kind regards
Jonas Nohr

Attention Amateur Meteorologists

Editor,

The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network is a neat-looking project for amateur meteorologists. Among other things, they're using styrofoam pads to measure hail size and hailstone number from storms.

Alan W. Dove, Ph.D.

Christian Thorsten on Laws Affecting Legitimate Amateur Science

Editor,

I know that we as citizen scientists would all like to be able to pursue our experiments and researches without worrying about violating this or that law whose scope originally had nothing to do with us.

Increasingly, though, it seems we're finding the need either to take up our cause as a political issue, or else to give up on some branches of amateur science and admit defeat. I submit that there is really no in-between course of action, because to accept each incremental restriction in the ceaseless ratcheting-down of our rights is really a stepwise way of giving up completely.

Please bear with me, because I'm going to be very blunt in making some points.

Besides the difficulty in obtaining reagents, one of the biggest problems the citizen scientist faces is lack of public understanding about amateur science. In this article I'd like to explore a very real danger posed to amateur science: the unwanted and unfair melding of terrorism and amateur science in the public consciousness.

I must begin by asking the reader: Do you have a vehicle that runs on gasoline? Do you have any glass bottles or jars in your home? Do you wear clothing or own paper towels or rags?

I hate to say it, but if you answered “yes” to these questions, you're in possession of bomb making materials.

I recently saw in a major news magazine an article about the London bombings and the materials that the bombers may have used. The article mentions an explosive whose common ingredients the article makes sure to spell out.

I'm not sure how much public service the article does by telling readers the specific ingredients for a bomb. While the intended effect might be to say that we're never really safe (since terrorists will figure out how to make bombs from anything), I think such articles also foster public mistrust of anyone who might possess the chemicals in the first place. When people suspend their ability to think critically, panic overrides logic. Yes, common materials can be put together to make dangerous things—any chemist knows this. Some non-chemists also know this. What the article fails to mention is that it's not unrealistic to make explosives from one's own urine, given sufficient time.

Let's talk about some of the unsettling fallacies and misconceptions we as amateur scientists may face. Even if you haven't encountered them, it's good to think about them in case they ever pop up in a conversation with some uninformed person.

Fallacy # 1: “You have bomb making ingredients. Therefore you intended to make a bomb.”

This can be two fallacies in one. First, define “bomb making ingredients.” As stated above, your possession of gasoline, rags, and bottles means that you have everything you need to make incendiary bombs. Does this say you were planning to make them? While someone who has half-finished detonators lying all over the place is probably making explosives, it should take this kind of hard evidence to make such an assumption.

For example, let's suppose you have potassium nitrate. Right away, people are thinking “black powder.” Never mind amateur mineralogy, crystal growing, rocketry, metallurgy, metal finishing, general chemistry, or other scientific pursuits. People can't get past the idea of “black powder” and “blowing things up.”

I'll let you in on a secret. Most amateur chemists went through a phase somewhere in adolescence in which they learned that real black powder is extremely difficult to make without huge and costly mills, special types of charcoal, etc. It's essentially beyond the means of all but the most dedicated amateur. While most of us are years beyond the realization that, no matter how much potassium nitrate you have, you're probably going to end up with a slow-burning flare, the average person is back there somewhere thinking, “Potassium nitrate! Call the authorities!” Some people are going to hear only about ten percent of what you say, acting on it despite anything more you tell them.

I recall an experiment I did, many years ago, in which I made a chemical volcano. What budding chemist hasn't done this? (See Cherrier's "Fascinating Experiments in Chemistry" or "Palder's Magic With Chemistry," for example). The goal in my version of the experiment was to produce actual burning of sheet aluminum foil. It worked. It required at least a pound of potassium nitrate to supply the necessary oxygen, and appropriate amounts of sulfur and charcoal to get the burning started. I'm sure some people got the wrong idea—wrong ideas being relatively harmless back then but not so today—as soon as the word “gunpowder” somehow became bandied about.

Hydrogen peroxide is another good example. With fears of explosives being made in bathtubs, an amateur scientist found to have a gallon of 35% H₂O₂ could conceivably fall under intense suspicion (or worse). Like many chemists, I have peroxide around the lab for a number of legitimate uses and would never dream of making explosives with it. In the back of my mind, though, there's the worry that emotional, ill-informed people would be all too happy to assault me with the names “terrorist” or “bomb maker.”

I refuse to accept this world-gone-mad way of thinking.

President Bush said we should still go to ball games and live our lives in spite of the terrorists, and that sounds good. However, I don't go to ball games; I do chemistry experiments. That's how I live my life, and I know many other SAS members do, too.

Fallacy #2: “No normal person would have all these chemicals .”

A variation is: “No person with good intentions would have this much of a given chemical.” Such statements, unfortunately, aren't unheard of. They have passed for logic against accused persons, even in the absence of any indication that an individual was up to no good.

Any reasonably well-equipped laboratory is going to have quite a few different chemicals, with certain ones in abundance. There probably won't be dimethylmercury or diisopropyl fluorophosphate in an amateur lab, but certainly there will be some chemicals that, like gasoline or pesticides, could be dangerous if misused. Sometimes the amateur scientist will buy a large amount of some reagent for no other reason than a perceived lack of future availability (caused by irrational restrictions, litigation against suppliers, etc). There are a few reagents to which “stocking up” might not apply— bromine, for example—because they are unpleasant or dangerous to store in quantity, but having a little extra reagent stored for future use is otherwise well within reason. Bulk purchases also make financial sense, because they are more economical, especially since the amateur scientist doesn't usually have bottomless pockets.

The “intent-by-quantity” fallacy is primarily what convicted Travis Biehn, a Canadian citizen and Pennsylvania high school student, of planning to make “explosives.” While it's outside the scope of this article to determine whether Biehn was guilty of other offenses, his possession of several pounds of potassium nitrate (the exact amount of which the media couldn't seem to get straight, and the possession of which isn't illegal or immoral in the first place) was the central, so-called “fact” that led to his conviction. This finding should worry legitimate, amateur scientists more than it perhaps does.

In the chemical volcano experiment I mentioned above, I used probably ten pounds of potassium nitrate, doing trial after trial of the experiment until I achieved repeatability. I'm glad I never had to explain to a judge or jury what I was doing. The Travis Biehn case tells us that if they can't understand what you're doing, then it must be sinister! Again, I'm not saying Biehn was either innocent or guilty of other charges, but we as a group should keep our eyes on cases such as his. They can hatch irrational and dangerous precedents.

Fallacy #3: “The only legitimate science is done in a corporate or government laboratory. If you have a home laboratory, you must be a crackpot or a criminal.”

This is one of the most patently absurd ideas that we as amateur scientists may face, but it still arises on occasion.

Employment in a government-run or corporate lab is by no means a guarantee that a person has good intent, nor does lack of institutional affiliation indicate malicious intent. Albert Einstein and other luminaries have written praise for the free and independent pursuit of scientific curiosity. They were completely aware of the importance of what we now call citizen science.

Fallacy #3 is actually a huge issue in itself, and we could of course write entire articles devoted to it.

With all this said, it's still true that some people will misuse the principles of science to cause destruction and harm to others. That is nothing new, nor has it ever been. These people are not scientists in any sense. Yes, terrorists should be apprehended and prosecuted. We simply have to be careful that our own, legitimate pursuits don't become casualties in well-intentioned crime-fighting efforts.

Finally, in case anyone still gets the wrong idea from this article, I'll repeat something I've told others before: I strongly believe that amateur scientists actually present a valuable but untapped source of collaboration for law enforcement.

Christian Thorsten, CR Scientific

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