The Last Word On Nothing

In October, 2006, I wrote a story that began like this . .  .

“In a hangar-sized building at the University of Maryland, Dan Lathrop is playing God. He and his students are cobbling together a three-meter titanium ‘earth’ that—when spun—they hope will give birth to a magnetic field similar to that generated by the larger sphere beneath our feet.”

I was in graduate school for science writing then, and the story was an assignment for my news writing class. My professor, NPR’s David Kestenbaum, had arranged a field trip to see Lathrop’s sphere. My classmates and I spent a few hours nosing around his lab. We called an outside source or two, and wrote our best approximations of a news story. To the best of my knowledge, our stories were never published. I never even sent a pitch. I was too scared.

Even then, Lathrop’s sphere wasn’t exactly hot news. Naomi Lubick wrote a story for Geotimes magazine in 2004. “Dan Lathrop is building a planet in his lab. He custom-ordered a 3-meter-tall metal sphere, which will perch inside a metal box built in his brick-walled lab at the University of Maryland in College Park,” she begins.

In June 2008, I stumbled across a story about Lathrop’s sphere on NPR by our professor, David Kestenbaum. This was the part of that caught my attention: “Something in the center of the earth is generating the magnetic field, but it’s been devilishly difficult to recreate in the lab. Dan Lathrop has been trying and trying. He’s a geophysicist at the University of Maryland and now the owner of a huge stainless steel orb.”

Popular Science and Discovery News ran essentially the same story a few months later. When I visited Lathrop’s lab, he was still in the construction phase. When Kestenbaum visited for NPR, the researchers were conducting a test spin. But the sphere was filled with water, not the combustible liquid sodium they’ll use to (hopefully) generate a magnetic field or “dynamo.”

A couple of days ago, Erin Wayman, one of my classmates at Hopkins sent me a link to a Nature story about Dan Lathrop’s sphere. “The 3-metre-tall ribbed sphere looks like a ‘visitor’ from another planet, dramatically lit and encased within a sturdy steel box. In fact, the giant orb, housed in a cavernous warehouse at the University of Maryland, College Park, is meant to approximate Earth’s core,” Nature’s Susan Young writes.

Wayman included a note with the link: “Will this story ever die?”

Here’s a better question: Will this story ever be born? Over the past seven years, no fewer than five articles have been written about Dan Lathrop and his ginormous metal sphere. And this whole time, Lathrop has been basically setting up his experiment.

In journalism, we’re taught that there is a right time and a wrong time to tell a story. Our articles should hang on news pegs. But this story, as yet, has no news. Young reports that the sphere is three-quarters full of sodium, and Lathrop is awaiting the last shipment. In other words, he still hasn’t tested the bloody thing.

What makes the story so appealing? First, Lathrop is a really enthusiastic guy. He gave our class at least two hours of his time. He willingly answered every question we asked in language we could pretty much understand. Second, Lathrop has a massive object that journalists can see and touch and describe. They can watch it spin. Third, he’s trying to solve an interesting puzzle that is (bonus!) really easy for people to grasp. He’s trying to recreate Earth’s magnetic field in the laboratory. That’s pretty cool.

Lathrop’s story is compelling. And I appreciate an article that’s not driven by results. But it strikes me as odd Lathrop and his sphere keep popping up. Yes, progress in science is incremental, but journalists don’t usually feel compelled to report on every twist and turn.

Maybe I’m just jealous. I like to write about infectious diseases, but the researchers studying dengue and chagas don’t have shiny spheres. Then again, we’re storytellers. We shouldn’t need them.

**Incidentally, the title of this post, “Waiting for Dynamo,” is the same title that one of my classmates used for his 2006 article on Lathrop. Kestenbaum advised him to be careful referencing Waiting for Godot. Because in that play, Godot never arrives.

Image credit: Dr. Gary A. Glatzmaier – Los Alamos National Laboratory – U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons