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This chapter uses a historical case to engage the theoretical framework of the routines literature. The example is that of Motorola, a multinational, Fortune 500 company, and its start-up Iridium, and their response to 1980s and 1990s globalization. The historical actors saw this condition as transformative, leading to a range of organizational inventions, including the methodology of Six Sigma and the founding of Motorola University. In concert, notions of process, culture, and individual agency became central in conceptualizing corporate operations that spanned developed and developing countries, a circumstance still shaped by postcolonial inequalities. Routines, in this context, were not just about ways of doing within a corporate function or relation of functions but representative of modes of thought that sought to connect, at different scales, the complex realities of a global world.

The total number of satellites ever launched is about 2000. The operation of satellite networks, Iridium in particular, is described. Iridium has 66 satellites in orbit, enabling it to send messages from any point on Earth to any other point. Satellites past their useful life are disposed of in graveyard orbits. Geostationary satellites do not move relative to the Earth but being far away have the disadvantage of delaying the signal they process. Low Earth orbits have no noticeable delay but each one is available for relaying information for no more than 15 minutes. There was a disaster when launching one of the satellites when all three astronauts died instantly. Another notable accident was a collision between two satellites. No human life was lost but it resulted in debris that has since posed further threats to orbiting satellites.

In geological time, the human life span is almost immeasurably brief. The seventeenth-century archbishop James Ussher famously calculated from biblical events that Earth was formed in 4004 BCE; scientists now estimate that the planet is 4.6 billion years old, and that the six millennia since the apocryphal Creation have probably contributed less than 10 millimeters of sediment to the geological record. Geological eras are unfathomable by ordinarily temporal measurements, such as the daily spin of the planet or its annual orbit, leading some scientists to adopt the galactic year—the 250 million terrestrial years it takes our solar system to rotate around the center of the galaxy—as a standard time unit. On that scale, Homo sapiens has been around for less than a week. Yet as the technology to study the planet has improved, so too has the technology to alter it. Earth increasingly disproportionately bears our imprint, as if geological time were being accelerated to the beat of our biological clock, with the consequence that the planet seems increasingly mortal, its legacy and ours entangled. In geological terms we are in the Holocene epoch—a designation formulated from Greek roots meaning “wholly recent,” officially adopted at the 1885 International Geological Congress—and have been in the Holocene for the past ten thousand years. The question, given all that we’ve done to the planet, is whether the label remains valid, or whether we’ve now buried the stratum of our Neolithic ancestors beneath our own rubbish. The atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen was the first to effectively challenge the conventional geological thinking. In a 2003 interview with New Scientist he recollected the circumstances: “This happened at a meeting three years ago. Someone said something about the Holocene, the geological era covering the period since the end of the last ice age. I suddenly thought this was wrong. In the past 200 years, humans have become a major geological force on the planet. So I said, no, we are not in the Holocene any more: we are in the Anthropocene. I just made up the word on the spur of the moment.

Someone killed the mayor of Chatsberg using a makeshift pipe bomb in Kid Glove Killer (1942). It was connected with a wire to the electrical system of the mayor’s automobile and exploded when he turned the ignition key. The two members of the Chatsberg police forensic team, supervisor Gordon McKay (Van Heflin) and his assistant Jane “Mitchell” Mitchell (Marsha Hunt), visit the crime scene to collect clues such as a coat fiber caught in the garage door, the exploded bomb fragments with attached wire, and the burlap bag beneath the automobile. Their hypothesis is never stated, but it is clear from their actions they are using Locard’s exchange principle: “Every contact leaves a trace.” McKay and Mitchell focus their subsequent efforts on finding physical evidence on suspects that connects them with the material collected at the crime scene. In forensic science, crime scene reconstruction is the “thought experiment,” the documented crime scene is the “effect,” and the evidence is used to establish “cause.” In the case of murder, “cause” equates to who did what to whom. An examination of the chemistry in detective and spy movies shows they fall into the two main categories of elemental analysis or qualitative analysis. Most qualitative analyses fall under the category of forensic toxicology, the identification and quantification of drugs and poisons. Toxicology also happens to be one of the oldest branches of forensic chemistry. None of the movies shows the creation or even improvement of a chemical procedure. Instead, chemistry plays an infallible supporting role in solving a crime or mystery. For instance, in Kid Glove Killer, elemental analysis determines that vanadium was present as a tracer in the gunpowder but is not under the fingernails of the prime suspect, thereby decisively eliminating him as a suspect in the eyes of the forensic experts. The actual proof linking the killer to the crime scene does not involve chemistry but, rather, repetitive routine testing coupled with good guesswork. Even though the ability to detect arsenic in body tissues in 1815 gave chemical forensics its start (see “Limits of Detection,” below), the next advances in forensics were philosophical.

Instrumental analysis has become a mainstay in the study of provenance of artifacts and their materials. A veritable "alphabet soup" of acronyms shorten the often ponderous names of the large number of techniques available today: XRF (x-ray fluorescence), XRD (x-ray diffraction), NAA (neutron activation analysis), AAS (atomic absorption spectroscopy), PIXE (proton-induced x-ray emission), ICP (inductively coupled plasma spectroscopy), FTTR (Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy), EMP (electron microprobe), RIS (resonance ionization spectroscopy), ESR (electron spin resonance), CL (cathodoluminescence spectroscopy), STM (scanning tunneling microscopy), AFM (atomic force microscopy), NSOM (near-field scanning optical microscopy), and SEM/TEM (scanning/transmission electron microscopy).

The elements to be treated in this chapter may be considered to be of three types. All of them show one species which dominates the water domain in the E–pH diagram. The dominant species in the E–pH diagrams and the elements which display it are as follows: (1) an insoluble oxide: Ti, Zr, Hf (Group 4B) and Nb, Ta (Group 5B), (2) a high-oxidation-state anion: Mo, W (Group 6B) and Tc, Re (Group 7B), (3) a noble metal: Ru, Rh, Pd, Os, Ir, Pt (Group 8B). These five elements all show highly stable inert oxides which occupy the majority of the water domain in their E–pH diagrams. This can be seen in Figures 13.1 through 13.5. The three 4B oxides (TiO₂, ZrO₂, HfO₂) are insoluble in HOH, dilute acids, dilute bases, and concentrated bases, but are soluble in strong concentrated acids to give TiO+2, ZrO+2, and HfO+2. The two 5B oxides (Nb2O5, Ta2O5) are insoluble in HOH, dilute acids, and dilute bases, but Nb2O5 dissolves in concentrated bases whereas Ta2O5 does not. All the elements in their highest oxidation state are hard cations and therefore will be particularly attracted to the hard atoms F and O. a. E–pH diagram. The E–pH diagram in Figure 13.1 shows Ti in oxidation states of 0, II, III, and IV. In the legend of the diagram, equations for the lines between the species are presented. Table 13.1 displays ions and compounds of Ti. The metal appears to be very active, but a thin refractory oxide coating renders it inactive to all but extreme treatment. Ions and compounds in oxidation states of II and III are unstable with regard to atmospheric O₂ and also with regard to HOH except for Ti+3 in strongly acidic solution. b. Discovery, occurrence, and extraction. Ti, named after the Titans, the mythological first sons of the earth, was discovered by Gregor in 1791 in the mineral menachanite, a variety of ilmenite. The major sources of Ti are the minerals rutile TiO₂ and ilmenite FeTiO3. They are treated with Cl2 and C at elevated temperatures to generate gaseous TiCl4 which condenses to a colorless liquid at 136°C.

Once crystals of a macromolecule are obtained there are many circumstances where it is necessary to change the environment in which the macromolecule is bathed. Such changes include the addition of inhibitors, activators, substrates, products, cryo-protectants, and heavy atoms to the bathing solution to achieve their binding to the macromolecule, which may have sufficient freedom to undergo some conformational changes in response to these effectors. In fact, macromolecular crystals have typically a high solvent content which ranges from 27-95% (1, 2). Although, part of this solvent, ‘bound solvent’ (typically 10%) is tightly associated with the protein matrix consisting of both water molecules and other ions that occupy well defined positions in refined crystal structure it can be replaced in soaking experiments, at a slower rate compared to the ‘free solvent’. In this chapter we will consider the relative merits of various methods for modifying crystals, the restraints that the lattice may impose on the macromolecule, and the relative merits of soaking compared to co-crystallization. The size and configuration of the channels within the lattice of macromolecular crystals will determine the maximum size of the solute molecules that may diffuse in. The solvent channels are sufficiently large to allow for the diffusion of most small molecules to any part of the surface of the macromolecule accessible in solution except for the regions involved in crystal contacts, although in some cases lattice forces may hinder conformational changes or rearrangements of the macromolecule in crystal. In other cases, the forces that drive the conformational changes can be sufficient to overcome the constraints imposed by the crystalline lattice leading to the disruption of intermolecular and crystal contacts resulting in the cracking and dissolution of the crystals. Some lattices may be more flexible and capable of accommodating conformational changes, and while crystals may crack initially, they may subsequently anneal into a new rearrangement and occasionally improve their crystallinity. In general small changes are easily accommodated and many macromolecules maintain their activity in the crystalline state. This is exploited in time-resolved crystallography to obtain structural information of transition states of enzymes.

What is a pebble? It is a wave-smoothed piece of rock, and a complex mineral framework, and a tiny part of a beach, and a capsule of history too. All these guises have their own stories, and these we shall come to. But from yet another viewpoint the pebble is a collection of atoms of different kinds—of many, many atoms—and that might be the best way to start. Considering it at this level, it is a little like taking the equivalent of a large sack of mixed sweets and separating them out into their different types. How big a sack, though? Or, to put it another way, how many atoms in our pebble? There is a simple formula for estimating the number of atoms in a piece of anything. The basic idea was first glimpsed by Amadeo Avogadro, Count of Quereta and Cerreto in Piedmont, now Italy: scholar, savant and teacher (though his teaching was briefly interrupted because of his revolutionary and republican leanings—a little impolitic when the king lives nearby). Avogadro was interested in how the particles (atoms, molecules) in matter are related to the volume and mass of that matter. Years later, his early studies were refined by other scientists and the upshot, a century or so later, came to be called Avogadro’s constant. Thus, in what is called the mole of any element there are a little over 600,000 million million million—or, to put it more briefly, 623—atoms. A mole here is not a small furry burrowing quadruped, or a minor skin blemish, but the atomic weight of any element expressed in grams. For oxygen a mole would therefore be 16 grams, as 16 is its atomic weight, an oxygen atom having a total of 16 protons and neutrons in its nucleus. The kitchen scales tell us that our pebble weighs some 50 grams. About half of it is made up of oxygen, and much of the rest is silicon (atomic weight 28) and aluminium (atomic weight 27) with a scattering of other elements, most somewhat heavier. A judiciously averaged atomic weight might therefore reasonably be something like 25.

Developing a methodology is everything in a science. Once you have it, you can go on to extract information, facts—a narrative—from the natural world. To human scientists and non-scientists alike, the use of fossils as evidence of past events on Earth is now taken for granted, is indeed ingrained into popular culture. Dinosaurs, for instance, stalk through our TV screens and cinemas and shopping malls, as virtual animations and plastic models and soft fluffy toys and comic book covers. An Age of Dinosaurs is widely accepted as a long-vanished era, a world lost within deep time. Our extraterrestrial investigators will, at some stage in their studies, be ready to try to recreate for themselves the eras of long-vanished animal and plant dynasties on this planet, to construct a coherent history out of the scattered relics preserved in the Earth’s abundant strata. By coming to understand the Earth’s marvellously regulated heat-release engine, that drives the tectonic plates, they will appreciate the continuous creation and preservation of strata. By getting to grips with the more subtle puzzle of how sea level has risen and fallen, they will have some idea of the finer controls on the preservation of the stratal record. And, as they grapple with these problems, they would undoubtedly try to put the strata themselves into some sort of order, just as did our Victorian and pre-Victorian predecessors. These pioneering geologists, after all, could recognize a prehistory when they saw one, even as they were still far from divining the workings of the Earth machine that lay at the heart of the story they were pursuing. What kind of strata will be available for study, one hundred million years from now? Many, if not all, of the classic fossil localities that we treasure today will have gone forever, eroded into scattered grains of sedimentary detritus that will ultimately accumulate on sea floors of the future. The Solnhofen Limestone of Germany, that yielded the archaeopteryx, will likely be gone. The Burgess Shale of British Columbia, with its wonderful array of early soft-bodied organisms from the Cambrian Period, half a billion years back, is almost certain to disappear, perched as it is high up a fast-eroding mountainside.