The Physics of Popes

In honor of the visit of Pope Francis to the United States, I want to talk a bit about popes and antipopes. But what, you may ask, is an antipope? An antipope is anyone who falsely claims to be the pope. For instance, the papal claimants residing at Avignon during the Great Schism of the 14th century are considered to be antipopes. This leads to a further question: what happens when a pope meets an antipope?

The answer: they annihilate and produce two Protestants. Because you have to conserve Anglican momentum.

Why I Never Liked Ray Bradbury When I Was Growing Up

I grew up in the 1960s.  We were the last generation who could run loose in the neighborhood from Saturday morning until dinner time. Our summers were aimless affairs, devoid of any parental organization, as long as we showed up for school in September. But what does all of this have to do with Ray Bradbury?

Shakespeare and Science Fiction

In class last week, one of the students wanted to know if there were any works of science fiction based on Shakespeare's plays. Only one obvious example came to mind.

Neanderthals, Genetics, and Intelligence: Were our Ancestors Smarter than Us?

You know the stereotype:  the Neanderthals were primitive knuckle draggers -- they might have been stronger than us, but we used our superior intellect to outcompete them and drive them to extinction. Ted Kosmatka, in his short story, "N-words," neatly turns this picture on its head.

Vanderbilt Course on Science and Science Fiction

The semester here is well underway, and I am teaching (with my colleague Jay Clayton from the English Department) an honors seminar on science and science fiction. Each week is based around a different theme (time travel, quantum mechanics, prediction of the future), with corresponding stories assigned. Then we discuss both the scientific issues (Does physics rule out time travel?  Why can't you travel faster than light, and what are the implications for interstellar travel? And what's deal with Schrodinger's cat?) and the stories themselves.  It's a unique blend of hard-core science and literature (as the name of the course suggests).  This is the third time we've taught this course, and I think we're finally starting to get it right.  You can look at the class blog at https://vusf.wordpress.com/.  There's a link there to the class syllabus, if you'd like to see what we are reading.  All in all, it's the most fun class I've ever taught. And of course, this blog itself grew out of my teaching that course.

Computer Nostalgia c. 1970

Growing up in St. Louis, one of my favorite places to visit was the local science museum.  This wasn't the huge St. Louis Science Center that currently straddles I-64 in the heart of the city -- it was just a couple of small buildings in a park in the suburbs.  But to my 10-year-old self, it was a wonderland.  There was the "Hall of Matter" with a UV light to make rocks fluoresce, a microscope to read writing on the head of a pin, and a large mechanical eye that could be distorted with a lever to illustrate myopia. And one day, some time around 1970, my family showed up at the museum to find a travelling exhibit with lines snaking across the room.  What marvel could have attracted such huge crowds?

Good News Everyone! The Earth Won't Go Flying Out of the Solar System

One of the most memorable science fiction stories I read as a child involves a family holed up in a makeshift shelter after a passing star has flung the Earth out of its orbit. One of the children has to go out every day with a bucket and bring back the day's supply of frozen oxygen to be thawed out in the shelter. Despite remembering the story so vividly, I completely forgot the title and author, but an Internet search reveals them to be: "A Pail of Air," by Fritz Leiber.

But this is just fiction, right?  The Earth couldn't really be flung out of its orbit, leaving us to freeze to death in the icy blackness of space. Or could it?  Well, it's complicated....

Let me digress a bit before getting to the punchline. The laws of physics mostly boil down to collections of differential equations, but these come in two flavors: linear equations and nonlinear equations. Linear equations are, in the parlance of physics, "well behaved."  They are the obedient children who do their homework on time and don't talk back to their parents. But nonlinear equations are the bad boys of physics. They smoke. They drink. They probably carry switchblades. More to the point, they exhibit "chaotic" behavior -- a tiny change in one place can quickly grow to produce huge consequences somewhere else. The classic example is the "butterfly effect": a butterfly flapping its wings in California could theoretically alter the weather so much that five years later, a hurricane strikes Florida. And here's where things get interesting. The equations governing the motion of the planets around the Sun are nonlinear and could, in principle, exhibit just this kind of chaotic behavior. The planets could orbit the Sun happily for billions of years until a small change in their orbits gets larger and larger and expels one or more planets entirely.

The Peculiar Writing Style of Scientific Journals

Most scientists I know are very good writers. But you'd never know it from the articles they publish in scientific journals, where the prose is turgid, convoluted, and downright scary. I'm not talking about popular science magazines like Scientific American -- I mean the journals where scientists publish their latest results -- places like Nature and Science, or, in my own field, Physical Review and Astrophysical Journal. These journal articles are the currency in which scientific research is measured -- they get us tenure, government grants, and an unrealistically inflated sense of our own importance. And the writing style in these journals is very, very odd.

Evading the Speed of LIght: Karl Schroeder's Lockstep

Just when you thought there was nothing new to be said about evading the speed limit imposed by relativity, science fiction comes up with a completely original possibility. I just finished reading Karl Schroeder's Lockstep, which proposes yet another way to get around Einstein's cosmic speed limit. Lockstep was serialized in Analog about a year ago and has recently been published as a novel.

The Wacky Names that Scientists Give Their Experiments

One way in which science fiction falls short in depicting "genuine" science is in the names that scientists give their experiments. Experiments in physics or astronomy are often labeled by whimsical acronyms that spell out the names of animals or cartoon characters, or that produce clever puns. You won't see this very often in science fiction, because science fiction writers' hands are tied -- if their fictional scientists emulated real life and gave their experiments silly names, the readers would automatically assume that the story was intended to be humorous. This is one time that truth really is stranger (or at least funnier) than fiction.  (One exception is Larry Niven, who somehow manages to give his planets and alien races playful names in otherwise serious stories).

I was reminded of this at the physics conference I attended last week. One of the speakers presented a new experiment, called "Project 8." It's designed to measure the minuscule mass of neutrinos by detecting radiation from electrons ejected with the neutrinos in radioactive decay. But why "Project 8"?  Were the first 7 projects abject failures? It reminded me of a bizarre Japanese cartoon that I used to watch as a kid: Tobor, the 8th Man, which played endlessly on after-school TV when I was growing up in the days before Sesame Street came along and ruined children's television. The 8th Man was a superhero cyborg, who, when he got into trouble (which happened in every episode), would smoke "energy cigarettes" to recharge his powers. Energy cigarettes??? What was he really smoking? You can check out the unforgettable theme song (which I still can't get out of my head) here.

But back to the issue at hand. After the director of Project 8 finished his talk, I asked him where the name of the experiment came from. He told me that he made it up out of thin air! He was tired of names of experiments composed of silly acronyms. I have to admit that it certainly sounds cool.

What are some of the other whimsical names of physics and astronomy projects? Here are just a few:

Science Research Funding: A Story

I was at a physics conference at the University of Michigan last week, and, sadly, I spent more time thinking about research funding than about the research itself. But it reminded me of this story of mine, which appeared in the April, 2008, issue of Analog. It's the only science fiction story I know of that hinges on the topic of research funding! That's what happens when scientists write science fiction -- you learn what really obsesses them. One of the characters is loosely based on a real person who spent time at the National Science Foundation -- those of you familiar with my own research field should be able to spot him.

If We Blew up the Earth, Would Anybody Else Notice?

That question was raised last week in a scientific paper by Adam Stevens, Duncan Forgan, and Jack O'Malley-James. They're really interested in the opposite question: if a distant civilization destroyed itself, would we see any evidence of it? This question arises because one of the answers to the Fermi paradox (why don't we see any other civilizations out there?) is that advanced civilizations tend to destroy themselves, either accidentally (oops, I dropped my hammer on that big red button) or on purpose (I've genetically engineered a virus that kills only annoying people....)

As You Know, Bob: Conveying Information in Science Fiction Stories

One of the fun things about venturing into a completely new field is learning all of the jargon. Physics, of course, has lots of it, but so does science fiction writing. And one of the first phrases that a neophyte writer discovers is "As You Know, Bob."  What's that all about?

Classical Mechanics: an Experiment You Can Try at Home

Classical mechanics is the branch of physics that deals with bodies in motion: velocity, momentum, forces, acceleration. And it can be pretty boring. Let's face it --  none of us went into physics because we fell in love with blocks sliding down inclined planes, with or without friction. We went into physics to learn about black holes, quantum mechanics, or the fate of the universe. But classical mechanics is the basis of all of the rest of physics, so it's what everyone studies first. And, unfortunately, for many people it ends up being their only formal contact with physics.

But even in classical mechanics there are interesting byways and surprising results that most people are unaware of.  Here's a cute experiment you can easily do at home that illustrates one of these unexpected results.

Scientists who Write Science Fiction

Gregory Benford, the science fiction writer and physicist from UC Irvine, will be presenting our physics colloquium at Vanderbilt in October -- the talk is free and open to the public, so drop in if you are in the area. Benford belongs to that rare breed of active research scientists who have also carved out a career in science fiction. "But wait!" you say, "What about Isaac Asimov -- he had a Ph.D. in chemistry. And Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke both had technical backgrounds." All true, but all of these guys, and many others like them, left science to pursue a writing career. In fact, the most famous of these is probably Michael Crichton, who is actually "Dr. Crichton" (with an M.D.) He was conducting postdoctoral biomedical research while launching his writing career. The fact that many people don't think of him as a scientist turned science fiction writer is probably because many SF purists would not consider his work to be "true" science fiction (and some physical scientists would not consider biomedical research to be true science!)

Conversely, many scientists have dabbled in science fiction, writing a few short stories or one or two novels, without ever intending to make a career out of it.  I would certainly put myself in that category. In my own field of astrophysics, there's Don Clayton, who's famous for his work on nuclear reactions in stars, and Craig Wheeler, who works on supernovae.

All of which makes Benford's parallel career as a scientist and science fiction writer all the more remarkable. In fact, I know of only one "Nobel-Prize class" scientist who also had a major science fiction writing career. Can you guess who? The answer is after the break.