Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

GERONTOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS SUPPORTING EINSTEIN AND MA O HENRY R. HIRSCH* Lest I appear presumptuous, it is best to start with a disclaimer. Once upon a time, I was a physicist and understood a little bit about the equivalence ofmass and energy. That was long ago. As for the cultural revolution, I never understood much about it. Nevertheless, I would like to report a series of unprecedented observations which have arisen to challenge my modest knowledge of these subjects. The basis of Mao Tse Tung's cultural revolution was the concept that manual labor could enhance and even replace specialized study in the pursuit of such arcane academic studies as physics. My initial reaction to this was negative. To quote Lenin, "I wouldn't believe it if it were true." However we change as we age. I will say more about that later. Observations extending over the past quarter century have led me to conclude that Mao may have had a good point in addition to the one that he sometimes covered by wearing a hat. The first observation in the series which I wish to report was made in 1971, when I was 38 years old. In that year, I bought an electric train for my sons for myself. The tracks were nailed to a 4 ? 8 foot piece of 3A inch plywood board. Its weight was somewhere around 60 pounds. (Metric measurements supplied on request.) Since it was awkward to maneuver, I had help in moving it, but I could easily lift the entire weight on my own. I made several more observations of this sort in the next three years. I moved the board from our old house to an apartment and from the apartment to a new house. In 1974, with my wife's enthusiastic approval, the train was removed from one of the bedrooms and dismembered. The board was left standing on edge in the garage. No one will be suprised to learn that its mass seemed to remain approximately constant throughout this period. I could still lift it quite easily. *Department of Physiology, College of Medicine, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40536-0084.© by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/97/4003-1018$01.00 562 Henry R. Hirsch ¦ Gerontological Observations The first really remarkable observation took place 10 years later in 1984. I was 51 at the time. My wife had returned home to France for a visit, and I decided that it was now or never. I reassembled the train and put it back in the bedroom in her absence. Perhaps I hoped that after a month in France she would not retain enough of her English to say anything about it. In fact her comments were too lengthy to record here but were irrelevant to the physics of the situation. What I discovered in moving the board was that it had gained significant mass! It was not so easy to lift anymore. I knew that mass need not be conserved, that energy could be converted to mass, but I had always thought that any such conversion must be negligible with respect to macroscopic objects. The observation had to be a fluke. Perhaps it arose from hidden variables. That is where the situation stood until a short time ago. Twelve years later, at age 63, I entered my second childhood and lost interest in some of the toys of my first childhood. I decided to put the train back in the garage and was astonished to find that the board had at least doubled in mass. I could barely handle one end of it. My younger son, who is 34, took the other end and is convinced that my observation is in error, but I am sure he will come around to my position in time. What is the explanation of this strange increase in mass? If Einstein is correct, the mass can only have come from energy, but what is the source of the energy? In the above disclaimer, I noted that I had once been a physicist, but I failed to mention that I am now a gerontologist, a person who specializes in the study of aging. How...