To Be a Scientist: You Need a Little Love

December 19th, 2007

Recently I blogged about the five qualities required to be a scientist. I realized I left one out, thinking the categories of dedication and curiosity covered it in some fashion, but they don’t quite do it. The sixth quality is love of science.

Love of science and your particular chosen field are what leads to the dedication. Moreover love of your field is what drives the curiosity. It’s possible to love astronomy, for instance, but lack the personal curiosity and satisfy yourself by looking through telescopes at well understood objects, or by reading a Stephen Hawking book without a notion of how to ask the next big question. It’s possible to have intellectual curiosity about how a particular measurement is made, but the science lovers are the ones who will lay awake at night or get that thought in the shower about how to improve it enough to make new advances.

I find some students have a desire to be a “scientist” without really understanding what science is about or how it is practiced on a day-to-day basis. It’s similar to how a lot of people want to be “writers” but can’t/don’t/won’t sit down and write. You’ve got to love data and their quirks, and love how to apply the right equation in the right case or derive a new one, or make a pretty good estimate for a number you’ve got to have to put a limit on the nature of the universe. You’ve got to love your project enough that you put up with traveling halfway around the world to sit in an obscure observatory under the clouds for a week before going home, knowing you’ll have to do it again a year later.

You need the love for when you realize academia is full of politics and small-minded people just like the rest of human endeavor (although a little less, I like to think, foolish optimist I am).

It’s a tough thing for a student to realize that while they love the idea of something, being a scientist, a writer, a fireman, a dancer, whatever, that they may not love the reality of the career. That’s okay. Keep up with it as a hobby, and continue the search in another field. And do it sooner rather than later. There’s nothing like an embittered grad student or post-doc who doesn’t really like what they’re doing and doesn’t realize they have other options.

To be a scientist, you really have to love the job.

Permalink | Tags: Education, Science | 5 Comments »

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Top Ten Favorite Facts About the Universe

December 17th, 2007

Neil Tyson’s Ten Favorite Things About the Universe

A few of his are a few of mine.   Perhaps I’ll enumerate and post my own list later.

Permalink | Tags: Education, General, Science | 2 Comments »

Some Thoughts on Peer Review

December 16th, 2007

I’ve refereed a couple of papers recently, and had several papers refereed, with a variety of results that has had me thinking a lot about peer review lately. I personally know the chief editors of a couple of the leading journals in astronomy and have had the chance to discuss the job with them one-on-on at a meeting last summer and get their perspectives. I’ve reviewed piles of telescope and grant proposals over the years, and will be reviewing proposals again for the Hubble Space Telescope this coming spring. I’ve also seen a lot of ignorant, correct-but-biased, and misguided statements about peer review on various internet forums I read, and at the same time a lot of faith placed in peer-reviewed journals above beyond any other sort of report.

I’m an astronomer, and will primarily be discussing the experience in astronomy. Since astronomy is a relatively small field, things are generally a little less cut-throat and the review process smaller and simpler. Some large fields have a lot of exclusive journals where perfectly good papers get rejected for not quite fitting or being cutting edge enough, and journals use multiple reviews per paper as a matter of course.

But first, what is peer review? At its simplest, it’s a process that has experts in a particular field reviewing papers and grants in that field, under the assumption that the experts are the ones best qualified to determine if a particular paper or project is professional and high-quality. From there, it varies a lot. In reviewing telescope/grant proposals, usually the peer review of several to eight astronomers just ranks a set of proposals and draws a line of minimum quality; observatory directors and grant officers do the rest, taking into account funding levels, instrument schedules, and other complicating factors. For papers, and I’ll be focusing on papers here, the journal editor selects a reviewer who is an expert in the field of the submitted paper and generally reliable to provide an opinion about the paper, following guidelines for the particular journal. Here are examples of such guidelines.

Now, I wanted to relate a few personal experiences, good and bad, both as a contributor and as a reviewer (who we usually refer to as the referee). My first submitted paper was a breeze, with two minor comments to address, which we did within a day, and resubmitted to immediate acceptance. My second paper had a lot of small tacky criticisms, a couple of which were just wrong. We fixed the simple stuff, and explained why some of the wrong criticisms were wrong, and resubmitted to immediate acceptance. Most of my early papers were readily accepted, sometimes with a few revisions, sometimes with a lot of small ones taking a lot of work. More recently, probably because I’ve written more papers and the statistics are reaching the extremes of the distribution of reviewers, I’ve had papers essentially rejected for really stupid reasons that I’ve been so mad about it’s taken months to get back to them with a clear head and revise, to papers accepted as is within a day (probably an editor doing the refereeing or having a qualified colleague down the hall). Rejection is harsh, but it’s like writing. It’s part of the job and you get used to it. What is harder to get used to is getting criticized by referees who stridently make incorrect assertions with all the arrogance of anonymity.

Let me take an aside here. Referees can reveal their identity (I usually do) or remain anonymous. Authors are always known to the referees. It’s not practical to make things double blind as authors often refer to their own previous work and it would be obvious anyway too often of the time, but it can cause problems. My old advisor once got a report on a theory-heavy paper that started with “She is not known as a theorist…” which isn’t a valid criticism or bias to betray. In speculative fiction, it would be like Stan Schmidt at Analog rejecting a story by Niel Gaiman starting off with “You are known for fantasy, not science fiction…” It’s critiquing the person, not the story.

One more aside. Refereeing is voluntary and something you do as community service. There’s no pay. There’s no reward, except for the opportunity to think critically and to have some influence on the literature in your field. Similarly, there’s no training. Any asshole scientist out there can be asked to referee a paper. And sometimes they are.

So, a few horror stories from myself and friends. One friend showed me a referee’s report that went on for pages about how he was a terrible scientist and this paper was ridiculous (he isn’t and it wasn’t, but it was full of ad hominems) — the editor apologized profusely, but she really shouldn’t have forwarded the report to him. It didn’t meet a professional level. The problem I’ve been running into more often has to do with referee’s deciding how you should have written the paper, when they haven’t thought as deeply about it. This has to do with things like telling you to spend weeks of work to nail down an uncertainty on a number that isn’t really important in the first place, or deciding that the scope of the paper is too large or too small and should be redone, or nitpicking things like what papers you’ve cited on some minor point and not telling you which ones they think you should cite. They’re what I call “stupid smart people.” They know their field, but they don’t really know how to referee a paper or how to see something from a perspective other than their own, and they’re blind to those facts.

The stakes can be high on the author’s side. Publish or perish isn’t a myth. People tend to get jobs and tenure based on their publications. Astronomy is generous enough that few papers are rejected outright and most get through with some level of revisions, but it can mean a lot of work and a lot of delays. When it’s busy work, it’s frustrating. When the comments are insulting, it hits right at the ego as it can threaten a career.

And since no one teaches people how to referee, there are all kinds of biases. Some people believe some journals are for certain kinds of papers, and only those, and two fair-minded scientists won’t agree. Editors are responsible, ultimately, and the reviews are only to aid them in making their decisions. I had one experience with an editor, and older guy who didn’t even use email, who likely sent a paper to one of his old fuddy-duddy friends, who was a little clueless and dogmatic on some points and showed very poor judgment. The editor wrote in his response that he had also read the paper and had the same poor opinion of it. We revised the paper only by adding a bit of data (a high-resolution spectrum a friend got for us which should not have been necessary) that addressed the critical point in a more direct way that they could understand and the paper was accepted without additional comment. The report and the editor’s letter had both been incompetent on the science, unfortunately.

It happens. Referring and “peer-reviewed journals” are far from perfect.

I had a boss who refereed a paper and recommended it for publication. He thought the results were probably wrong, but his philosophy was that the data and measurements were valid, and the interpretation should and would get hashed out in the literature in following papers. Some old-school editors (e.g. Chandrasekhar) would have held up the paper and been stubborn about publishing it until the interpretation met his satisfaction.

The editors I’ve talked with all acknowledge the imperfection of the system. They also all agree that the end result of the system is that papers are better overall and more likely correct than without it. I try to keep that in mind when I get a referee’s report where the first comment is just flat out mistaken or insulting (it happens).

Like the US legal system, it isn’t very good but it’s better than anything else out there.

Permalink | Tags: astronomy, Science | 3 Comments »

What good is basic research?

November 13th, 2007

There’s an easy answer to this question, and a better but more challenging answer.

The easy answer is that when you’re just poking around, you might discover something important. A number of very important discoveries have been made that could not have easily been anticipated. Plastics and penicillin are two major serendipitous discoveries.

My field, astronomy, is about as basic as it gets, with little likelihood of practical results. The most obvious practical result is the discovery of a near-Earth asteroid a long time before an impact. Less obvious practical results are things like algorithms to detect sources in an image that also apply to things like detecting tumors.

But even aside from these practical applications, astronomy, and other basic research is worth funding.

One of the things that makes human civilization great, in my opinion, is that we care about knowledge for its own sake. Existence isn’t only about food, shelter, and mating. There is an inherent value in determining the nature of the universe and our place in it.

I mean, how do you put a cost on determining the age of the universe? On the discovery of gravitational lensing? On determining the origin of gamma ray bursts?

We’re not just hear to make life easy, to make a profit, to advance a particular ideology. There’s value in basic research leading to fundamental truths. We’re not spending the house on such endeavors. We’re spending a steady small fraction of our money on these things. Certainly less money than we spend entertaining ourselves with frivolous diversions (which I too enjoy, very very much).

The same case can be made for art, humor, anything that we like to do that isn’t for immediate gain. Humans are thinking animals, and that thinking thing really should get us somewhere. We can figure things out. Some of those things will be useful, some won’t, but they’re all worth knowing.

I’m amazed at some of the things we’ve been able to figure out. It’s cool to be a scientist now.

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A Brief History of Dark Energy

November 9th, 2007

There was a time in the 1980s in comic books where superheroes had to be retooled to make them cooler, often by adding “dark” in front of their name. For example, Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns helped revive Batman as a leading character.

In the 1990s, that trend hit cosmology with “dark energy.” Perhaps I’m being a little unfair, since there was a precedent set already with dark matter, but I’m jumping ahead already. Let’s take a few steps back to look at the history of dark energy and what it means in a cosmological context.

The dynamics of the universe, how it expands, contracts, or doesn’t, is governed by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and more specifically by something called the Friedmann equation. This equation is basically just a fancy statement of energy conservation and is the equivalent to the more mundane case of tossing a ball in the air. If you give it a lot of energy, it zooms off into space. (OK, not you in this case, but Superman.) If you don’t, it slows down, stops, and falls back to Earth like the Hulk taking a big but not infinitely super leap (jumping to infinity and beyond would have made that comic/movie pretty damn short).

So what determines the energy and the effective gravity pulling things back together? Well, it comes from a combination of the equivalent energy density of things (e.g., matter and radiation) and their pressure. Matter and energy we under stand, but general relativity allows for other components: a constant term called the “cosmological constant” and a complicating curvature term, since spatial geometry need not be flat necessarily. Sorry if this is getting complicated, but it is, intrinsically, a little bit.

The so-called cosmological constant term expresses in some poorly understood manner the energy density of space, and can act as extra gravity or as a type of anti-gravity. It has negative pressure, that is, it exerts a tension through space, and Einstein called it his “greatest blunder.”

He believed that the universe was static, eternal, and he solved the Friedmann equation with a special value of the cosmological constant that perfectly balanced gravity. This was a decade before Hubble and others discovered the expansion of the universe, which Einstein might have predicted if not for his bias. Einstein’s static universe also suffers from being unstable, since the cosmological constant would be smooth over all space while the effects of matter are concentrated, and locally the balance could never be perfect and the universe would not remain static forever.

With the expansion of the universe confirmed and no other evidence in support of a cosmological constant, the idea was set aside as unnecessary. Alan Sandage, Hubble’s successor, and others, proposed various tests to look for the deceleration of the universe. Even if the Hulk jumped off into deep space, Earth’s gravity should slow him down, a little, over cosmic time.

All it would take, in Sandage’s estimation, was to measure the distances to objects some five billion plus light years away with an accuracy of better than ten percent. Well, it turns out that this is really hard to do. The technique usually employed is that of the so-called “standard candle.” You take objects of known brightness and see how bright they look at such extreme distances. In a decelerating universe, at a given distance they should look a little brighter than you might expect based on a steady expansion rate. Maybe Superman, or Reed Richards with technology unknown in the real world, could see individual objects that far away. For the most part, even with the Keck telescope, we can’t. Best we can do is entire galaxies, quasars, supernovas, and gamma ray bursts.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that we learned to determine the intrinsic brightness of any of these well enough to conduct Sandage’s test.

There were a couple of competing supernova groups then working on the dual problems of the calibration of supernova luminosity and the detection of supernovas at such extreme distances. A young post-doc in California, Adam Reiss, was the first to put together the data with the appropriate calculations and to measure the deceleration. Except it wasn’t there.

The distant supernovas were fainter than expected.

The universe appeared to be accelerating.

In some sense, Reiss was just a person at the right place at the right time to conduct the test and gain fame and fortune for this unexpected discovery (and he has won some big money prizes, been featured in TIME magazine and other places). But in another sense, he has been the right person. Correctly assuming that the community would be skeptical, he performed a tour de force trouble shooting all the possible objections to his conclusions, and they have held up over the last decade. He’s followed up the work and extended the results, and they continue to look real.

So, what’s up with this acceleration? For one thing, it hasn’t surprised everyone. The amount of the acceleration implies an energy density that, together with the known matter, makes the universe “flat.” That is, it obeys Euclidean geometry on large scales. Theorists like Stephen Hawking (and Dr. Stephen Strange, perhaps?) already believed the universe to be flat on other grounds, and with the observers claiming insufficient matter, something like this energy density associated with, well, nothing, fit the bill. Like dark matter, exerting its effects without being seen, this component was dubbed “dark energy.”

And mathematically, the dark energy can be described exactly by the cosmological constant. Even so, we don’t know what it is physically, if that interpretation is correct. It could be vacuum energy, associated with virtual particles appearing and disappearing in such short periods of time that they can’t be seen. Our current understanding of vacuum energy, however, suggests that this explanation is something like 150 orders of magnitude off. That’s pretty wrong for astronomers or the Tick. Even the Dark Tick.

Particle physicists have suggested another component of the universe, something called “quintessence,” that could also explain the acceleration. Quintessence would have similar but not identical effects as the cosmological constant. Current experiments are designed to distinguish between these two possibilities. NASA has recently approved an Einstein Probe, the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) that will focus on investigating dark energy.

Why is it important to figure out what is powering the acceleration? Beyond just knowing the answer, the ultimate fate of the universe depends on the question in a bigger way than even Dark Phoenix could affect.

If the cosmological constant, some form of vacuum energy, is responsible, someday the acceleration will become so large that even nearby galaxies will be moving away from the Milky Way at greater than lightspeed. The extragalactic universe will go dark as we experience the “Great Empty.”

If Quintessence is the dark energy, the results will be more extreme. The accelerative anti-gravity force will become so strong that even atoms themselves will be torn apart in a “Great Rip.”

Cool, huh? Well, Dr. Fate might think so.

I remember reading a Jim Starlin WARLOCK comic book in the late 1970s. Adam Warlock had flown into deep space and when he returned to Earth, he was many astronomical units across. Starlin, brilliant writer and artist but confused layperson, suggested that even within the galaxy different regions expanded at radically different rates. Even though it was amazingly wrong, the notion was mind-blowing and cool and inspired me to look into cosmology more seriously.

Today, as a hard science fiction writer, I’d never let myself make an error like Starlin’s, but the possibilities are as mind-blowing. The dark astronomers like Adam Reiss will continue to let us know what they are.

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Is SETI Worth It?

November 8th, 2007

I really liked this article:

SPACE.com — SETI: Is It Worth It?

This article mirrors my thoughts on basic research and a lot of the points made apply not to just SETI, but to astronomy in general. It behooves us as a curious and thoughtful people to take some time and effort to look around us and see what’s out there. For any species this should be as natural as breathing.

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Five qualities required to be a Scientist…

November 5th, 2007

Here’s one site about becoming a scientist: Cool Careers in Science

What does it take to become a professional scientist? To get into graduate school, persevere, collect a PhD and land a job in the field?

A lot of things, but not all obvious to the uninitiated.

I used to like to tell people that it took three qualities, two of which might not be obvious. I now think it takes five.

First, it takes brain power. Intelligence. Talent. The ability to do the hard work.

This is probably obvious to most, but is sometimes ignored when people want to put down a scientist reporting results they don’t like. Every scientist has some native intelligence above and beyond that of the general population. Perhaps not a lot more, but above average. Scientists get not only through college, but into graduate school and through it. Few graduate programs let in students with GPAs below 3.0, which is pretty good at colleges other than Princeton or Harvard.

Now, I will admit that there are plenty of gradations of intelligence above average, and that there are some stupid smart people and some smart stupid people, but that’s the subject of another, future post. PhD-level scientists are all smart, but plenty fall way short of genius level and fail to apply their brains to every problem before them.

OK, second: stick-to-itivness. You don’t get a PhD for pointing out small things. You have to show that you can produce a significant step in our understanding of the universe, and that requires many months to years of sustained effort to complete. Usually at least three years. If you can’t start, sustain, and finish a project that takes longer than a year, forget about being a scientist. There are plenty of smart people, including geniuses, who can’t be scientists because they’re flighty, lazy dilettantes. We all know them, and most of them make me shake my head. I’ve had a couple of promising, smart students who will never make it for this weakness. They make good points, have good criticisms, but never produce anything of their own all that worthwhile.

Third item: communication skills. Maybe it’s possible to be a scientist without good communication skills, but, oh, wow…how will the career suffer. Scientists must write papers, proposals, and give talks. Referee papers. Review proposals and papers. The ones who can’t communicate clearly and effectively will not get their work considered seriously and will have poor careers, assuming they can even get through writing a thesis and defending it successfully. Staying in science without being able to secure funding is tough. Very tough.

That was my original list, but I finally decided that I had to add two other items.

Curiosity and attention to detail.

Curiosity is what drives any decent scientist. Having a PhD and securing a permanent position means having independence to pursue a line of research. That requires curiosity. Grad students who blow away the GRE but need to be told what to do every step do not make good scientists. They’re technicians at best, which is fine, but a different career. Scientists are curious and need that to do research. There is a scientific method, but there’s no algorithm to how to develop and test the next hypothesis. It does require that spark.

Finally, attention to detail. This was something I was never great about growing up and had to learn myself. It’s amazing how many details must be addressed in bringing a research project to publication. Ideally every journal article describes every project in enough detail to duplicate it. That’s a big responsibility, and anyone who can’t be bothered to get those details right nearly all the time or better can’t be a good scientist. Mistakes are always going to happen, but they shouldn’t be too common. And sometimes in science, the results and their interpretation turn on those details as they do in few other fields.

Summarizing, every would-be scientist needs:

1. Raw brain power
2. Dedication to finish long-term projects
3. Communication skills (writing, speaking)
4. Curiosity
5. Attention to detail

There’s no crime in not becoming a scientist. Not every smart person has these qualities. And there are plenty of smart people who aren’t geniuses who make great scientists. As a professor mentoring students, I see some of the brightest fail on some of these points every year, and others less gifted succeed on their other strengths.

Another day I’ll rant about the stupid smart people who are the bane of the system all too often…

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Who Determines Where the Hubble Space Telescope Points?

October 24th, 2007

So I got another one of those emails today asking me to do some community service. Astronomical community service. It happens all the time and every professional astronomer is expected to contribute semi-regularly. Often the contribution is relatively minor, like reviewing a paper for one of the journals like Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A little less often it’s something more onerous, and more rewarding, like serving on a telescope allocation committee (AKA “TAC”).

So today, it was a request to review proposals for the Hubble Space Telesope (AKA “HST” — this is NASA associated, so expect more three letter acronyms, AKA “TLA”s).

I’m busy now, and will be busy in May when they hold the review, but I’m likely to say “yes.” I said “no” last year, and I’ve said “yes” to HST once or twice over the years. I’ve reviewed for the National Science Foundation (NSF), for the Spitzer Space Telescope, for NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility, for the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and been asked to be on review panels for several other telescopes/programs.

When you first start getting these requests, it’s flattering. You’re a recognized expert in your field and your help is wanted at the national level. And the stakes are high, with the telescope time and analysis funds being awarded worth millions of dollars and sometimes even careers. The process is amazingly educational and worth doing for that reason alone. But boy, is it a lot of work!

A few weeks before a two-day face-to-face meeting (in Baltimore for HST), you get sent about 60 proposals. Each is about eight pages long, with most of those pages dedicated to the scientific justification. You have to read them carefully and critically to discuss with other world experts, and no one wants to look like an idiot. Furthermore, some astronomer, or group of astronomers more likely, has put their blood, sweat, and tears in each proposal, requesting some small portion of HST’s time over the next year (AKA “cycle” since it usually doesn’t match a calendar year). Out of those 60 proposals, about a dozen on average will make it through and be done by HST.

At the two-day meeting, about a dozen panels of about eight astronomers each discuss the strengths and weaknesses of their group of 60 proposals. Well, almost. There are preliminary grades submitted, and usually the bottom quarter is triaged and not even discussed. Experiments over the years have shown that essentially never does a proposal in the bottom of the preliminary rankings get time even after a more thorough discussion. It might seem unfair, but it’s efficient and people are volunteering their time. The proposers do get informed about their low ranking and get comments from primary and secondary reviewers about the pros and cons of their proposal to help them revise it for resubmission later.

Each panel is specialized into a subfield of astronomy, like stars, galaxies, cosmology, etc., and the relative amount of time awarded to each subfield to distribute is goverened by the proposal pressure — how many proposals there are in each subfield. Oh, and there are proposals to use archival data or conduct theoretical research in support of HST science, but these only ask for money, not telescope time. The proposals for telescope time also get money, analysis funds from NASA, to help ensure quality, timely analysis of data obtained.

The discussions sometimes become heated, and sometimes hinge on individual egos or individual biases (which is why there’s a group making the decision). They tend to be fair, but sometimes a little arbitrary; a lot of high-quality projects don’t get done. But essentially every approved program is very worthwhile, and the slate usually includes a range of big, solid projects to small, speculative projects that might have a big payoffs.

There are more details, and it’s more complicated than this, but that’s the gist of it. This year is especially crucial, assuming that Hubble is serviced by the Space Shuttle and its suite of crippled instruments replaced by new ones. The community has been waiting for years for this, and there’s a lot of pent-up ideas about what to do waiting to turned into proposals. I have a few of my own (I’ve had several projects get through the process myself).

So who decideds where HST points?

The answer this year is me, along with another hundred astronomers or so, sifting through about a thousand proposals from around the world.

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Science in my Science Fiction: Literacy

October 12th, 2007

I’d intended to follow-up this month on last month’s entry on dark matter, and do something similar about dark energy. I will do that in the future, either here or on my own website, but I left it a little late (blame a friend of mine for distracting me, and she knows who she is). It’s an easier topic than dark matter, because we know less, but I do want to do it properly.

What I want to talk about is the general issue of scientific literacy. Why is it when people go to see a mediocre drama, they complain about the acting or the unrealistic characters, but when they go see a mediocre science fiction film (”sci-fi”), with bad science, they forgive criticisms with “it’s just a movie!”

Does this bother anyone else?

The only reason I can see that there’s a difference between the two situations is that people are trained on a daily basis about how people behave, but have no expectation or understanding of basic physics/biology/geology, or at least no concern about it.

I think that sucks.

Our expectations are too low. Our understanding is too low. I’m not talking about individuals here necessarily, but as a people. It’s like how at a party it’s forgivable when people admit to math phobia, but admire high culture. I think that’s bullshit, and we should call people on it.

We live in a technological civilization. You’re reading this on a system using the most advanced technology available to our species. Without modern science, we would all begin to starve and start fighting massive wars. To deny this, in even as simple a way as saying “It’s just a movie” is to deny the reality of our world.

There is no modern reality, no existence, without our science and technology. It can be denied locally, but without global acceptance (as demanded by economics), you die. So please, accept it culturally as well. To do otherwise is to deny reality and the intellectual integrity that must accompany the perception of our reality.

Please, think about this when it comes up, where it comes up. And it comes up everywhere, daily, for everyone living on this planet. Certainly anyone reading this. There is not any real literacy anymore without scientific literacy. It’s a part of our existence, a necessary part, essential to our future. Eating, working, loving, are all just as important as they were before, but we now live in a world where the continued existence of humankind depends on technology. Without it, and a continuing commitment to maintaining it, everything falls apart and we descend into chaos and misery.

OK, there’s one scenario where that doesn’t happen. H.G. Wells’s THE TIME MACHINE posits two cultures, one of basement-dwelling IT specialists called “Morlocks” and one of beautiful-people know-nothing “Eloi.” The former eat the latter in his story, so I don’t consider that an acceptable solution.

What do you want to happen to us in the end? It may not look like a major trend today, but let evolution and time pile on and it isn’t so unreasonable.

I know a lot of this post has been abstract and general, but my concern is specific. Math and science are every bit as important as English and history. Ignore them at your peril. Go embrace a nerd today, and pick up a book or a movie that seems too technically challenging. It’s good for all of us.

Permalink | Tags: Science Fiction | 1 Comment »

Free Short Story: The Point

September 28th, 2007

The Point

by Mike Brotherton

“Do you remember the day we met?”

Her question filled his mind, ever so slowly, as his mind spanned several light seconds and their spatial overlap was not perfect. There was also an echo that indicated his photonic synapses were losing coherence faster than he had anticipated.

The end was coming.

“I remember,” he thought so she could hear it.

In a universe that had been nothing but thought for eons, his consciousness floated amidst the microwave pulses that were his memories, and he restored them to his awareness.

He did remember. He remembered everything now with perfect clarity, although it was an early memory and heavily reconstructed numerous times on his 71 million year maintenance schedule.

Eighteen-year-old Cody Justin Taylor, as he had been known then, first met nineteen-year-old Vanessa Amber London, as she had been known then, on Wednesday, November 19, 2008, in their introductory astronomy class.

The professor was wrapping up her lecture. “To summarize our modern understanding of cosmology, the universe began 13.7 billion years ago in an infinitely hot cauldron of creation we call the Big Bang. That initial fireball expanded, cooled, with dark matter and normal matter collapsing under gravity into galaxies, each full of stars and planets, where life like butterflies and bacteria, people and puppy dogs, could arise.”

Students in the lecture hall began fidgeting as they did when the prof grew poetic toward the end of class, as she often did. Unperturbed, she pressed on. “The universe will continue expanding, forever, and now we know that the expansion is accelerating. The future we face could be described as the big empty, when the Milky Way and all galaxies become totally isolated, but it’s also possible that this repulsive, expansive force we refer to as dark energy will increase its power and eventually rip even individual atoms apart. It will be an utterly complete destruction.”

The professor stood there in the ensuing silence, seemingly trying to get the shifting and restless students to consider the philosophical import of these grand pronouncements about the future of everything. “Any questions or comments?”

That was when he spoke up. He hadn’t been fidgeting, shifting, or restless, but uncharacteristically contemplative. “If the universe is just going to keep expanding into nothingness, even destroying itself, then, well, what’s the point?”

“What do you mean, exactly?” the professor asked, frowning but leaning forward.

Turmoil brewed within him, and he suppressed his shyness at speaking out in front of such a large class. “What’s the point of doing anything? My homework, for starters?”

That raised a few chuckles.

The professor stepped back, smiling and appearing to relax. “Your grade, for starters. But this is a question we all have to face. Nothing is forever. We all die, sooner or later. Some turn to religion. Others to, I don’t know, their work, family, partying, something. Myself, I consider how lucky I am to even be alive. Out of all the people that could have existed, and that number exceeds the grains of sand on every beach on Earth, here I am. Me. Getting to be, to live. I’m going to take advantage of that by spending my time doing things I love, and I suggest all of you do as well. And do your homework, too.”

She dismissed them then amidst mild laughter, and as he grabbed his backpack and stood to leave, he found a tall raven-haired girl glaring at him.

“You stole that from Woody Allen,” she said.

“What?” he answered.

“In the face of an expanding universe, what’s the point?” she persisted. “Annie Hall. I’m surprised the prof didn’t call you out on it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, truthfully.

She looked at him hard for a long moment, then tilted her head and smiled at him. “You’re a liar or a little neurotic then. Either way, we’re going to get to know each other.”

“We are?”

“We are. And you’re going to watch Annie Hall with me tomorrow night.”

She was cute, so they did.

And they did more than just that, too. They did the things that young humans do together. They dated, loved, married, and raised children, more or less in that order.

There were good times, and bad times. But more good than bad.

In 2031, they vacationed in a space hotel, and discovered that making love in zero gravity wasn’t all that wonderful. Still, it was an experience that they cherished. It was hard to believe from that unique perspective that the Energy Wars were devastating so much of the world. Earth was a calm, blue swirl as seen from space, and the suffering distant, even invisible.

In 2041, the first in a series of significant life-extension drugs was released to the general public. The fifty-something American couple remained looking and feeling fifty-something, and celebrated the births of several grandchildren.

In 2061, they vacationed on the Moon.

Cody realized that the times, they were a changin’, in a qualitatively profound manner. A lot of the promises of the futurists were coming true, although he still didn’t have a flying car or a jet pack like his retired dad ranted about on occasion. But a man could delay aging, vacation on the Moon, and access all the knowledge of the world in seconds via brain implant.

In 2071, when global temperatures had skyrocketed and the fight to preserve Florida’s coastline was given up as lost, Cody and Vanessa received medical nanotechnology into their bloodstream that restored their youth. Smooth skin, dark hair, with muscle tones and metabolisms to match. It was a tremendous excuse to dance.

Then things got weird.

In the decades and centuries that followed, technology allowed them to change appearance, change sex, even change species to a certain extent. The population alternatively fought and rejoiced over such things.

Intelligent computers thought for people. Intelligent robots worked for people. People lived and loved.

In the 23rd century, Cody and Vanessa moved to Mars and rarely regretted it. The sunsets on Mars were lovely then.

They decided not to homestead an asteroid, and skipped the first several interstellar colonizations. Finally in 2554, they accepted the challenge of taming Tau Ceti III, named Georgia by popular vote.

Those were a few good centuries, and he barely fought with Vanessa at all.

They did separate, however, eventually. Who could stay together for so long with so many opportunities? Cody visited the Orion star-forming region, while Vanessa remained on Georgia for a time before taking the plunge into the Galactic center to study the supermassive black hole there, weighing some three million times the sun, and its exotic environment.

When Cody and Vanessa met again, it was the second age of Cytannus, a regional empire in the Sagittarius arm, in the year 4432, as reckoned by their calendar. They fell together again like no time had passed, even though one was an android and the other was a space mermaid. Sometimes life is like that.

They compromised and settled together as sea leviathans on a water world and sang symphonies to each other for several centuries. Post-human existence had its possibilities.

Together they traveled to watch dwarf novas, novas, supernovas, and hypernovas, all from appropriately safe distances. Explosions were always good entertainment.

They made the trip to Andromeda and met the alien species that had colonized that galaxy from rim to core. The aliens smelled bad, but were very nice people.

Three point seven million years after the astronomy class in which Cody and Vanessa had first met, they shed their corporeal bodies entirely in favor of distributed pan-dimensional intelligences and entered a different realm of existence where even more was possible.

Over the following billions of years, time moved on, and the universe expanded in an accelerating fashion.

They would have cried, if they could have, when some five billion years after their astronomy class, just as their professor had predicted, the sun expanded into a red giant. All life on Earth died in a slow, intense roast.

Billions of years further along, after the Milky Way and Andromeda had merged and galaxies beyond the Local Group had vanished from sight, Cody knew that the game was winding down and it was only a matter of time. But what a grand time!

Cody loved Vanessa in a mental, physical, and emotional way that was incomprehensible in the century that they had met. What is it really like when you can know someone in every way possible, and accept them as you do yourself? Someone you had spent billions of years knowing? No one in the 21st century could have articulated the nature of their relationship. He knew it now, at the end.

“I remember,” he thought, back in the end times of the present.

Vanessa sent him another thought to echo through his extended mind. “Did you get the point?”

“Yes,” he thought, “I got the point,” appreciating what he was and where he had gone, where they had gone.

The universe continued to rip itself apart in its death throes, and together they shared the unique experience.

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Science in My Science Fiction: Come to the Dark Side

September 16th, 2007

This originally ran at www.sfnovelists.com on September 14. Putting it here for my own personal archive. Enjoy!

I’m a scientist, a professional astronomer, who writes hard science fiction. I wish it weren’t called “hard” because that makes it sound difficult, when it’s more fun and understandable than most people think. The “hard” really refers to the notion that results in the physical sciences are reliable, that they are calculated, quantitative, not about how difficult it is. Truth be told, the “soft” sciences like biology and sociology are the hard ones, topics so complicated that we can’t usually provide reliable explanations for observed phenomenon. It’s easier to determine if a particular asteroid is going to hit our planet, and when, than if a dingo is going to wander along and take your baby.

Now, I like hip urban fantasies as much as the next guy, but science is the driving force behind our modern technological civilization (you’re not reading this in goat entrails, are you?). I like science in my science fiction. Call me old school. There’s a lot of really cool things out there in our universe that are real, yet more bizarre than anything you’re going to see on Buffy or Battlestar Galactica. Let’s take the case of dark matter, which features prominently in my forthcoming book, Spider Star.

Dark matter. It’s a cool-sounding phrase, but what the heck is it exactly? The short answer is that it’s matter that doesn’t emit light that helps solve all sorts of astronomical problems, and we really don’t have a clue about what it is. Not exactly, anyway. But we know that most of it is like nothing anyone has ever seen before.

The story of dark matter starts back in the 1930s with Fritz Zwicky, a brilliant but difficult Caltech astronomer, who was studying galaxy clustering. Galaxies group together, apparently under the force of gravity, and between Newton and Einstein, humans seem to have a pretty good idea of how gravity works. There’s a very general relationship between gravity, speed, and size, that governs everything from the orbit of the moon around Earth to how galaxies fly around through the dark voids of the universe. What Zwicky soon realized was this: galaxies in the Coma Cluster were flying around so quickly that the gravity associated with the galaxies he could see with his telescopes was by far insufficient to keep the whole mess from flying apart. So he proposed that there was matter there, dark matter, that he wasn’t seeing. The concept of dark matter, along with many of Zwicky’s other ground-breaking ideas, might have been explored more seriously and more quickly if he didn’t have the bad habit of calling everyone “bastards.”

In the 1960s, a much more personable young astronomer named Vera Rubin started examining galaxies themselves in more details. Using telescopes armed with spectrographs, which split light into its constituent colors, she could measure Doppler shifts indicative of the velocities of stars moving in the galaxies. She looked at spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way, especially ones that appeared to be close to edge on, and saw that one side moves toward us while the other side moves away, just what is expected if these whirlpools in the sky are rotating. More careful examination revealed the same problem that Zwicky had noted nearly 40 years earlier: the gravity associated with the visible stars was insufficient to explain why such rapidly rotating galaxies didn’t fly apart.

Astronomers started proposing different candidates for this mysterious dark matter. One idea is that the dark matter is made up of weakly interacting massive particles, AKA “WIMPs.” These WIMPs could be things we know about like the nearly massless neutrinos, or more theoretical particles like axions, that rarely touch normal matter in any significant way, but do have gravity. Another idea, almost in opposition, is that the dark matter is made up of massive compact halo objects, or “MACHOs.” A MACHO might be something like a neutron star or black hole, very massive but also very dark. Gravitational lensing, a confirmed prediction of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in which massive objects bend and magnify light, has provided observational evidence that MACHOs exist, but the data also indicate that MACHOs aren’t numerous enough to account for but a fraction of the dark matter.

Current observations of gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters indicates cluster masses right in line with what the irascible Zwicky estimated so long ago. Last year there was a new result out from the Chandra X-ray Observatory that provides direct proof for dark matter based on observations of “the bullet cluster,” which is a collision of two galaxy clusters. The majority of normal, baryonic, matter is in the form of very hot gas in clusters. This hot gas emits X-rays that we can see and trace. In the case of the bullet cluster, drag during the collision has impeded the motion of the hot gas. Not the majority of the matter — dark, non-baryonic matter. The weird stuff. That has moved on through just as expected without slowing. And we can trace it by the gravitational lensing of background galaxies. Thus the center of mass of the two clusters has become separated from the center of mass of the hot X-ray gas, which constitutes the bulk of the normal matter. You can’t explain away this result by invoking modified Newtonian dynamics, as some try to do for galactic rotation curves and other indirect evidence of dark matter.

Many of other lines of evidence also support the existence of large amounts of dark matter. The most compelling these days come from cosmology, involving several arcane types of analysis such as the cosmic abundances of the light elements like hydrogen and helium and the pattern of hot and cold patches in the microwave background radiation. Even though we don’t know just want the dark matter is, we think we know how much there is and what it isn’t made of.

While some small portion of the dark matter is made up of MACHOs, and other things like brown dwarfs, rogue planets, and the like, the majority of it is not made up of conventional, baryonic matter, that consists of things made of stuff in those entries on the periodic table. This so-called non-baryonic matter is not made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. It’s made up of stuff we’ve only got the barest inkling about. A fraction is neutrinos, one not-so-massive WIMP. The rest might be any one, or several, of a number of candidates.

One way people commonly hunt for neutrinos and other dark matter candidates is to sit at the bottom of deep mines, far away from sunlight, cosmic rays, and any normal form of radiation from space that might disturb an experiment, and to search for things capable of penetrating through miles of earth. One famous experiment in neutrino detection took place at the Homestake Mine near Lead, South Dakota, for example. The problem, of course, is that anything that can penetrate miles of normal matter is also capable of penetrating experimental detectors. The Homestake Mine experiment made use of some 500 tons of dry cleaning fluid, searching for the rare product of a neutrino converting a chloride atom into a radioactive isotope of argon. Similarly, advocates of different dark matter WIMP candidates predict what rare interactions these particles might have with normal matter, and search for those products in a controlled fashion. One such experiment is the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search taking place in the Soudan Mine in Minnesota. Some claims of dark matter particle detections have been made, but so far none are verified.

The topic of dark matter comes up in conversation in physics departments around the country, in a few supercool coffee houses here and there, and in science fiction book clubs, but it’s talk about a whole bunch of nothing that no one can even touch. Lots of people have put forth their theories about what it is, and who knows? One of people may be right, even if he’s an obnoxious guy who calls everyone else bastards.

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Forbidden Story Themes: Promise and Peril

August 29th, 2007

As an educator, scientist, and science fiction writer, I often look at things from several perspectives. During my years of workshopping stories, I noticed that some otherwise good stories got some strong, negative reactions for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the writing, characters, plot, or setting. It had to do with theme.

You know, what the story boils down to in one sentence: love conquers all, good triumphs over evil, hard work pays off. That sort of thing. Anyone, well any writer anyway, can rattle off a dozen, no problem. We all know them and recognize them. They’re the acceptable, society-approved ones. Turn them around (e.g., love is not enough), and you have your forbidden theme. Sometimes these can work to great effect, making for a surprising story, a memorable anti-hero, or something just a little more realistic.

More often the readers will just reject the whole story out of hand.

The first striking example of a “forbidden” theme I remember seeing in a workshop was at Clarion West in 1994. One of my classmates had written a fantasy story in which the central message was: once a slave, always a slave. Hoo boy, that didn’t go over well. The critiques kept picking around the point that took people a long time to articulate, and that point so many wanted to make was that you aren’t allowed to write a story with this message!

Of course, I’m sure such a story would have gotten a different reaction in a past society were slavery was accepted. Such a theme would have helped maintain the status quo, and would not have been forbidden. In fact, the story of a slave transcending their station would have been the forbidden story.

I’ve seen other forbidden themes crop up in workshops and elicit strong reactions, leading to members quitting, in fact, when they lead to critiques of the writer rather than the story. It makes sense. Critiquing the theme negatively is about as close to critiquing the writer as you can get. You have to say, “you’re wrong to have written this. Your morals/judgement/insight are not what they should be.”

Of course, if you can pull off a forbidden theme, it creates a very powerful story, and there is a range of themes that our society is currently two-faced about. Think about anything that splits society down the middle. Right now our politics split the country, and while I advise against writing polemic stories as they tend to be heavy-handed and suck, there are other things that go with our political split that are ripening now, especially for science fiction.

The extreme right of politics these days is associated with an anti-intellectualism that places faith above science, gut feeling above reason, and determination above preparation. Whether you know it or not, you get a steady diet of stories that reinforce these attitudes. The movie Armageddon, in which undisciplined but determined roughnecks replace well-trained NASA mission specialists to save the world, is one example. Star Wars is another, in which Luke is told to trust his feelings and put away his computer. More recently, the TV series Battlestar Galactica has been doing the same things, with Rosalin leading based on faith, and even the traitor scientist Baltar being turned toward faith over reason.

I’m using those examples from science fiction specifically for a reason. Science fiction, of all genres, should be the one pushing for reason! It’s WORSE in other genres, where science and reason are regularly put down in favor of intuition and gut. Just think about every example of the determined American hero overcoming the criminal mastermind. Science fiction does promote the other side semi-regularly (e.g., the Star Trek episode where Kirk fights the Gorn in the arena, and can only win by using his smarts rather than his heart). “The Cold Equations” is another example, and not surprisingly one that has created strong reactions. Its theme is that ignorance of the laws of physics can and will kill you in a dangerous environment, no matter how cute and innocent you happen to be. That’s a threatening message to a lot of people, who then feel compelled to pick it apart and point out its flaws rather than deal with the actual theme, which they would label forbidden if forced to label it.

I think we as a technological society, with myriad problems requiring science to address (e.g., global warming), need more stories with a few of these forbidden themes, and science fiction is the first place they can and should appear in larger numbers. If we’re to have students really take to science and math they way we want them to, we need to change the messages they get daily from stories. We need to change the underlying memes of our society, and writers are the ones who can do it, or fail. I choose not to fail.

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