Best. Comic Book. Superhero. Ever.

Many years ago, when I was still working at Ohio State, I had the opportunity to have lunch with Steven Weinberg.  For those of you not familiar with his work, Weinberg is one of the towering figures of 20th century physics.  He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for his role in the development of the unified theory of electromagnetism and the weak force, a key component of what is now known as the Standard Model of particle physics (yes, it's capitalized).

During lunch, the conversation turned, as it so often does among Nobel laureates, to the subject of comic books.  Weinberg opined that when he was young, parents wouldn't let their kids read comic books, because they were "trash," but these days most parents would be thrilled if their kids read anything at all, including comic books.

So are comic books a form of science fiction?  Of course they are, because they draw on many of the same ideas and themes as mainstream science fiction.  And of course they're not, because a science fiction snob like me will never admit that books with pictures and conversation bubbles should be placed among the pantheon of science fiction.  Yes, I know that comic book conventions regularly outdraw science fiction conventions by factors of 10 or 100 in attendance  Let's not talk about that.

Random Thoughts on The Martian (the Movie, not the Book)

I saw The Martian over the weekend and enjoyed it a lot. I particularly appreciated the fact that the plot did not lurch from one heart-stopping crisis to another. I won't belabor the science issues in the movie, since those have already been widely discussed on the Internet. The biggest one has to do with the Martian "storms." The atmosphere on Mars is so thin that it wouldn't be capable of the kind of death and destruction you see at the beginning of the movie.

Also, the gravity on Mars is much lower than on Earth, but this only becomes apparent near the end of the movie, when Matt Damon begins bouncing around a lot more. Or maybe he just lost a lot of weight from his starvation rations.

Fantasy Physics League

Fantasy sports leagues have been in the news lately, and not in a good way. There have been scandals involving "insider trading," and Nevada is in the process of classifying fantasy sports as gambling. So what should you do if the Feds shut down your fantasy sports league? Try fantasy physics instead!

College Admissions: A Story

I have an Op-Ed out in today's Wall Street Journal on the subject of college admissions -- I was driven to write it by my experiences with the admissions process as child number three has reached that stage. When my oldest child applied for college, my exasperation took the form of a short story, "The Common App", that was published in Nature.  If you'd like to read it, follow this link.

Physics Nobel Prize Trivia

The Nobel Prize in physics was announced today, so this is a good time for Nobel Prize trivia.

What Nobel laureate was sentenced to prison for war crimes?  Hint: he has an "effect" named after him.

Gregory Benford Talk at Vanderbilt this Thursday

I wanted to remind those of you in the Nashville area that noted science fiction writer and scientist Gregory Benford will be presenting our physics colloquium this Thursday, Oct. 8, at 3:00 in Stevenson 4327. The title of his talk is "Our Next Century in Space." The talk is free and open to the public.  Parking at Vanderbilt, however, is very much not free and barely open to the public. There are pay parking spots on the ground floor of the 25th Avenue Garage, and also metered parking on the street in front of the VA hospital (both a short walk to Stevenson Center). The metered parking has a two-hour limit. I believe that there is also free on-street parking once you get far enough east of campus, but I don't know how far east you have to go. Maybe Knoxville.

Cosmology in Science Fiction

Almost everyone loves to hear about cosmology. Public lectures on the subject pack in large and enthusiastic audiences.  And what's not to like?  Cosmology deals with the deepest questions in science: the beginning of the universe, the end of the universe, and everything in between. Recent years have seen numerous breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, and yet the remaining mysteries, like dark matter and dark energy, provide tantalizing clues that much remains to be discovered.

So cosmology ought to figure prominently in science fiction, right? Actually, not so much. And I think there's a very good reason for this.

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.