Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
FOUR
MAGNETIC
MOMENTS
Joe Kirschvink adores magnets. You might say he's irresistibly drawn to them. In fact, that's just the sort
of crummy joke that Joe would probably make. Even now, in his late forties, he loves to act the clown,
with his bright button eyes, and brows that periodically shoot high into his forehead. He's compact of
build, and fizzes with energy and ideas. His unruly hair and neat moustache are the colour of wet sand.
Joe is a professor at the California Institute of Technology, an august institution that lies among the
villas of Pasadena in southern California. Caltech professors are hard-nosed people. It's one of the most
fiercely competitive academic establishments in the world, filled with some of the most gifted scient-
ists. They work long hours, know how to sell themselves, guard their patches jealously, and make sure
they stay ahead. You don't often come across a Caltech professor like Joe, who constantly describes his
own ideas as “nutty”, and invites you to call him a nut. “Honestly,” he says. “I don't mind.”
In truth, Joe Kirschvink is one of Caltech's most brilliant brains. His strength lies in his ability to
look at old problems in a new way. He delights in topics that other scientists shun, ones that have a
whiff of the weird about them. Joe often does his work away from the scientific spotlight, but he tends
to make the kind of discovery that swings the spotlight over to him. And then he moves on to something
else. His motto could be “never dismiss, never assume”. In his introductory geology class, he has each
student write a “nut” paper, in which they have to consider an offbeat hypothesis, ideally one that has
been ridiculed by the scientific establishment, and then describe how they would rigorously test the
idea. His students love it.
Joe first began experimenting with magnets when his father inadvertently wrecked the family mi-
crowave with an exploding golf ball. (He had been told that warmer golf balls travelled further and was
attempting to heat the ball up quickly.) Joe got the machine parts to play with. Later, as an undergradu-
ate at Caltech, he used his genius with magnets to good effect in a tradition called “stacks”. At one point
in their final year, all the seniors are supposed to create elaborate locks for the doors to their rooms and
challenge junior classmen to break in. Joe's particular one is legendary. From the outside, the door was
blank—there were only a few magnets and some written clues. But on the inside of the door, Joe had
rigged up a series of magnetic switches that had to be tripped in exactly the right order to open the door.
Standing outside, the hopeful lock-breakers had to move a magnet to different points in the blank door
using only the written clues as a guide. Each wrong move was punished with a loud blast of “The Ride
of the Valkyries”. The stack proved too inventive even for Caltech students. Nobody managed to break
the lock and claim the two gallons of ice cream waiting inside.
Around the same time, in the mid-1970s, Joe began to experiment with naturally occurring magnets.
While on a trip to Australia, he heard that “north-seeking” magnetic bacteria had been discovered in
Massachusetts. These creatures had achieved a clever evolutionary trick. Bacteria usually find their
food in the depths of ponds and puddles, so they have an incentive to know which way is down. In the
