Cocktail Party Physics

tour de force

We are all aflutter this afternoon with the news that US bicyclist Floyd Landis has continued the Lance Armstrong tradition by winning the 2006 Tour de France (or as Jen-Luc Piquant prefers to call it, "La Grande Boucle"). The Tour hasn't garnered much attention this year -- nothing like that generated by the FIFA World Cup, particularly in the absence of the now-retired Armstrong -- and was further tarnished early on by the suspension of several favored contenders in a major doping scandal. Nonetheless, as an avid bicyclist -- solely for pleasure, mind you, as I find any kind of competitive emphasis takes all the fun out of a nice sunny day's ride-- I've been following the saga off and on. (Jen-Luc only cares because she's such a diehard francophile.)

It's a shame everyone's been so disinterested, because this year's Tour turned out to be quite the saga. Sure, the doping scandal threatened to turn La Grande Boucle into La Grande Debacle, but the remaining riders pulled themselves together, and the US pinned its hopes on the 30-year-old Landis to keep the Armstrong torch burning. Landis rode well in the beginning, and was in first place when disaster struck last week: he faltered badly on a steep Alpine climb and dropped to 11th place. Rather than giving up, Landis proved he had not just the athletic ability, but also the heart, to take up Armstrong's banner. He fought back, and gave a stunning performance last Thursday to retake the lead, winning the grueling final mountain stage of the event by nearly six minutes. That didn't make him a shoo-in for winning the whole shebang, but he's done just that. Kudos to Our Boy Floyd!

In honor of Landis' historic achievement -- along with his dazzling comeback on the Col de Joux-Plane, he is also only the third American to win this prestigious international event -- we've decided to devote the bulk of this post to a brief summary of the science behind cycling. We are making it brief because it turns out there's a lot of science involved: everything from neuroscience and biomechanics, to gravity, aerodynamics, thermodynamics, and even a hint of materials science in the equipment and other related cycling gear used by top-of-the-line athletes. (Jen-Luc can't believe some enterprising scientist hasn't yet written a book on the science of cycling. In fact, she's considering slapping together her own book proposal, so if you've got a manuscript about this gathering dust under the lab bench, you might want to pop that off to your agent toute suite for consideration.)

Common sense indicates that the best place to start is how the machine itself, the bicycle, actually works. But frankly, although I love my Cannondale Bad Buy, I am far less interested than I should be in the nuts and bolts of how that Bad Boy works. (I get very interested when something goes wrong, of course.) Gear-heads who just can't get enough of those sorts of details can find out everything they need to know here. By far my favorite online resource on the science of cycling, however, comes courtesy of San Francisco's Exploratorium, which has an excellent Web exhibit exploring that subject.

I particularly enjoyed the section on aerodynamics and the discussion of wind resistance. This is something I routinely experience biking along Washington, DC's Mount Vernon trail. The wind is not my friend. Somehow it always seems like the wind shifts direction just to ensure that I must always bike into a head wind. It slows my speed, forces me to burn more energy (perhaps a good thing from an exercise standpoint, but irritating, nonetheless), and hurls a variety of flying insects into my face; some get in my eyes, or get caught in my teeth and once I accidentally swallowed some poor wayward gnat when I opened my mouth to warn a jogger I was passing on the left.

Admittedly, I really didn't need the Exploratorium to tell me that "the human body is not optimally designed to be aerodynamic," or that cycling into a head wind can be exhausting. But I found the exhibit fascinating, nonetheless, because even though most of us have experienced the fundamentals of concepts like wind resistance firsthand -- who doesn't "know" that the faster you go, the more wind resistance you encounter while bicycling -- that doesn't mean we've given much thought to what is specifically happening from a scientific standpoint. So let me indulge my Inner Pedant for a moment and point out the obvious.

There are two components to aerodynamic drag: air pressure drag, and direct friction (also known as surface or skin friction), and of those two, air pressure drag is the biggest factor slowing down competitive cyclists like Landis. It's similar in concept to the differences in air pressure that produce aerodynamic lift, except in this case, a "blunt irregular object" ("Hey! Who you callin' irregular?!?" blusters Jen-Luc Piquant)  moving through the air at a given speed produces air pressures that are higher in front than in back. The cyclist is literally pulled backward as a result. There's even a handy chart that lets you calculate the aerodynamic drag and propulsive power for a bicyclist, although there is also a careful disclaimer stating that the chart is necessarily simplified, as there are numerous variables that can come into play. It would hardly be user-friendly to the target lay audience to take all those possibilities into account, so I applaud the Exploratorium's decision to Keep It Simple.

Thanks to the good people at Exploratorium, I learned that on a flat road, wind resistance is the greatest barrier to speed, accounting for 70%-90% of all the resistance a cyclist feels when pedaling. Gravity trumps it, though, when it comes to biking uphill. The effort needed to pedal uphill against the force of gravity "far outweighs the effect of wind resistance."  I'm guessing Landis knows all about the strength of gravity, since it caused his near-collapse and precipitous drop in the standings. Even the mighty Armstrong has been known to fall victim to gravity's relentless pull on an uphill stretch. In the 2000 Tour, on the Cole de Joux-Place (the same leg of the race where Landis made his miraculous comeback), Armstrong nearly collapsed, losing a full two minutes to arch-rival Jan Ulrich. Being Armstrong, he recovered and pushed his way to the top.

We can relate, on a tiny scale, since the final stretch of the trail leading to Mount Vernon is largely uphill for a good two miles (trust George Washington to build his estate on a hill). Unless one is careful to monitor one's pace, it's easy to blow out your legs on that hill, which makes for an uncomfortable ride back to DC. Sure, Treehugger reports that the Worldwatch Institute has conducted a study and found that bicycles are the most energy efficient vehicles. Nonetheless, they are not perpetual motion machines, and they do require varying amounts of added energy drawn from the cyclist, who must in turn draw that energy via caloric intake.

If exercise-related calculating charts fill you delight, you'll find plenty of them via a simple Google search. My favorite calculates the energy requirements of bicycling, and can be found here. It's pretty in-depth and complicated, though, geared toward serious athletes who are obsessive about measuring and calculating every aspect of their performance. If you're looking for something a bit simpler, this calculating chart will help you determine the caloric intake required to power your forthcoming bicycle trip. (For a 125-pound woman, the caloric needs for a 30-mile ride are distressingly small, but I'm hardly pushing myself as hard as, say, Landis and Armstrong; I only average about 15 MPH. Did I mention I'm not a competitive cyclist?)

Finally, if it's the complex interaction between brain and body that interests you, head down to your local IMAX theater and check out Wired to Win: Surviving the Tour de France. Filmed in 2003, the film "explores the cutting-edge brain science through the story of the centenary Tour de France." The Web site includes all kinds of educational and outreach resources tied into the science behind La Grande Boucle. And there's lots of snazzy visuals, too. The folks at IMAX know their trade.

Cycling fan though I am, I missed the film's debut three years ago (some lame excuse about writing a couple of books). But I was handed a promotional packet about it when I participated last week in an NSF-sponsored workshop for public information officers responsible for generating coverage of scientific R&D, titled "Let's Hook Up: Connecting to Make the Best of Your Research Success." I was there as a panelist in a discussion on science communication. The gist of my little "presentation" was based on an earlier post I wrote on something I've dubbed "Mediagenics"; you can read it here. But I added a couple of elements, culled from the recent discussions taking place on various science blogs about the ongoing tension between scientists and journalists, not just the general public.

For instance, Orac at Respectful Insolence pondered the implications of a new survey by EurekAlert and the American Association for the Advancement of Science that found the second biggest challenge or frustration that reporters covering technical topics face is finding an "expert" in a given field who can describe their work in plain English. I agree with Orac that the dearth comes about because it is, in fact, quite difficult to boil down the complexities of cutting-edge scientific research in any field down to a level the general public can understand. I agree that scientific jargon serves a useful purpose when communicating with one's scientific peers, serving as a kind of "shorthand" to communicate complex ideas quickly. And I appreciated the fact that he recognizes his own tendency to unconsciously lapse into medical jargon simply because it requires less effort and he's feeling a bit, well, lazy. (For the record, I find Orac's blog eminently readable, with a very low Jargon-to-Plain-English ratio, so he's clearly doing something right. We need scientists like him speaking to the press, so I hope he overcomes his reluctance.)

One of my pet peeves as a science writer is researchers who can't be bothered to return my calls, or who schedule a time for an interview and then don't show up for it, etc. Sure, I know they're busy, but frankly, so am I, and there's no law of physics that states that a researcher's time is innately more valuable than that of a non-scientist. A bigger problem -- certainly from the perspective of the PIOs attending the workshop -- is that scientists are generally unwilling to undergo any kind of media training in order to publicize their findings. The reluctance seems to stem in part from an innate suspicion of the few scientists who do work to publicize their research in the media. 

This is, to borrow a platitude, cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. One PIO I chatted with at the workshop told me about a disastrous attempt to set up an interview with an eminent scientist at her university. Said scientist was rude, condescending, even downright insulting to the reporter assigned to profile him for the local paper The story ran, nonetheless, but a year later, when the same scientist won a major award, the PIO contacted the newspaper again, and the reporter declared, "I don't care if he won the Nobel Prize, there is no way I'm writing another word about that asshole!"

Petty? Absolutely. But the eminent scientist's behavior wasn't any less petty and immature. Scientists need to get over this notion that it's somehow disgraceful or beneath them to be featured in any kind of popular media outlet -- i.e., anything that isn't a science journal. That's going to require a major paradigm shift in the culture, though, since education, outreach, or other forms of popularizing science aren't valued as much as research when it comes to crucial decisions like tenure. I have hopes that the situation will improve, since the number of scientists writing popular books about their work keeps growing. As Orac said in his post, "We don't all have to be Carl Sagan, but more of us should at least try to emulate him."

Of course, the onus shouldn't be placed entirely on the overburdened shoulders of the poor, non-communicative scientists. The other new element to my presentation came courtesy of "Dr. Freeride," who writes Adventures in Ethics and Science. She wrote recently about what non-scientists can do to improve communication between the public and scientists (relevant posts are here and here). To wit: "They have to listen to what the scientists are trying to explain. They have to ask questions when things aren't clear.... The nonscientists have to start being active participants engaged in a dialog rather than a passive 'audience' waiting to have the relevant facts poured into their skulls."

This is indisputable, except it brings us full circle to the fundamental problem: how do we get them to engage in this discussion with us? One solution: through providing a real-world context, like the Tour de France. (And here you thought I'd gotten completely off-track.) That's what's so great about links that the ones above: they use a sporting event to elucidate scientific concepts. So do books like Timothy Gay's The Physics of Football, or James Kakalios' The Physics of Superheroes (or my own forthcoming The Physics of the Buffyverse, for that matter).

So I think the solution to the problem is, conceptually, very simple. It's just extremely difficult to put into practice. For instance, often what scientists consider "lay language" doesn't quite cut it for the general public And it's far too easy for things like demos or films that emphasize the "wow!" factor of science to become mere entertainment, with students and laypeople having a good time and learning very little of lasting import. Still, I'd argue that even then, it's useful in terms of sparking interest to pursue something that intrigues them in greater detail. Education and outreach is an ongoing process, after all, not something that can be accomplished in the time it takes to watch an IMAX movie, for example. In the words of Dr. Freeride, "Like weeding a garden, you are never done." That's the challenge; I invite scientists and nonscientists alike to take it up.

experience preferred

"A wise man learns through the mistakes of others. Only a fool learns by experience." At least that's what I was taught growing up; I think it's from the Book of Proverbs. I distinctly recall self-righteously parroting this adage at the ripe old age of 15, as if it was some profound insight that explained everything about the world. What can I say? I was young and naive. I was also the progeny of born-again fundamentalist Christians. Pat Robertson's 700 Club was a weekday morning staple over breakfast, and I witnessed my first exorcism at the age of 10 -- it scared the hell out of me, quite literally. I was dragged to Pentecostal prayer meetings, faith healing sessions, James Dobson seminars, and educated on "the four Christian temperaments" by Tim and Beverly LaHaye (basically a reworking of the medieval concept of the four "humours"). While other kids my age were discovering the Marvel and DC Comics universes, I was reading the schizophrenic rantings of Jack Chick comics (amusing parodies of Chick comix can be found here).

Needless to say, it was not an environment that fostered intellectual independence or critical thought. Religion is the opiate of the masses precisely because it discourages thinking for oneself. (Since people's hackles tend to rise at the merest hint of any god-related criticism, let me state quite plainly that this comment pertains to organized religion as a social -- and these days, political -- infrastructure, not to private, personal beliefs.) Conformity was (and is) the rule du jour, and believe me, the Bible-thumping community is ruthless when it comes to squelching opposing viewpoints. Yet somehow, I developed those attributes in spite of myself, thanks to voracious reading habits and an insatiable curiosity about the world around me  that my upbringing couldn't quite dampen. I may have been outwardly docile to avoid attracting negative attention, but even back then, Jen-Luc Piquant was lurking in the background of my psyche with her sharp, snarky tongue, healthy skepticism, and common sense -- just waiting for me to wake up and acknowledge her.

By the time I was 17, I'd figured out that personally, I preferred to learn by experience, the proverbial "school of hard knocks." I've been following that pedagogical model ever since. Sure, sometimes it hurts a bit more than mere book-larnin', but the lessons learned, and knowledge gained, is much more concrete and lasting. There's a difference between knowing something is right in an intellectual, abstract sense because you've been told, and knowing something is right because you've tested it in the real world. The entire scientific enterprise is based on learning through experience: forming abstract hypotheses, making predictions, and testing those predictions through rigorously designed experiments.

Yet somehow, when it comes to actually teaching math and science in our schools, the element of experience is often overlooked in favor of cramming abstract knowledge into students' brains so they can pass the requisite standardized tests. That's the gist of a fascinating article in the new issue of SEED by Jonah Lehrer (available online), entitled "How We Know."

Lehrer opens with the story of Cambridge math teacher Bob Moses, who took it upon himself in 1982 to instruct his daughter and her junior high school class in algebra because her public school didn't offer such a course. Frustrated that most of the students couldn't grasp the basic concepts, Moses realized it was because his pedagogical approach was, well, just plain wrong. And it inspired him to create a new curriculum called the Algebra Project that grounded the lessons of algebra in the real world: for instance, "a ride on the T became a lesson in coordinate graphing and negative numbers.... The first rule of Moses' math class was that students always had to 'participate in a physical event.'"

Gosh, I wish I'd had Moses as my teacher for high school algebra. As mentioned in a prior post, I consider myself functionally innumerate, despite having performed very well, academically, in all my math and science classes. Just because I got straight As didn't mean I took away much lasting knowledge. Mostly, I was just crunching out rote answers, with very little comprehension of how it all fit together. I've been highly suspicious ever since of the standard metrics used to measure academic achievement. What was lacking in the classroom was a real-world context. Most of us just aren't abstract thinkers, so it helps to have something concrete that illustrates in some way the concepts we're supposed to be learning. Experience is definitely preferred when it comes to acquiring true understanding of a subject; indeed, I'd argue that it's essential.

According to Lehrer's article, my instincts on this issue are pretty accurate. Moses found that students responded beautifully to his innovative pedagogical approach; not only were they learning, they were retaining the new knowledge, precisely because they could relate their lesson plan to real-world experiences. Quoth Moses: "What you're really doing is developing a new way of thinking. Instead of just trying to memorize these strange equations, you're busy relating the math to your own experiences. All of a sudden, you're finding math spilling over into other areas of your life."

Nor is his success merely anecdotal; the numbers back him up. Some 92% of those who graduated from the Algebra Project went on to take upper-level math courses, which Lehrer reports is twice the rate of those students not in the program. The Algebra Project's success was even more noticeable at Lanier High School inJackson, Mississippi, where the percentage of students receiving a passing grade on the state math exam went from close to zero to 55% within two years. Alas, despite its demonstrable success, apparently the Algebra Project has been discontinued, yet another victim of the pressure to conform to standardized testing requirements and the ill-conceived No Child Left Behind legislation.

It's worth quoting from Lehrer's article at length on this point: "Bob Moses' insight was that the math curricula these schools follow misunderstand the mind. The same abstraction that many educators celebrated... stifled learning for many students.... He realized that the brain wasn't designed to deal with abstractions it doesn't know how to use, or to solve variables while sitting at a desk. Our knowledge, Moses intuited, is a by-product of activity. What we end up knowing is what we can learn how to use. We learn by doing."

That's probably not news to Jeff Francis, the 25-year-old southpaw pitcher for the Colorado Rockies, who was a physics and astronomy major at the University of British Columbia before hitting the major leagues. Francis is profiled in the latest issue of Symmetry magazine, focusing specifically on his understanding of the Magnus force, so named because it was first demonstrated in 1852 by the German physicist Gustav Magnus. Magnus showed that a spinning object moving through a fluid (like a baseball moving throgh air) experiences a sideways deflection in its path (like a curve ball).

The article goes into the physics behind pitching and hitting in a bit more detail, but I was most intrigued by Francis' comment that good pitchers and hitters are natural, instinctive physicists, even though most have never heard of the Magnus force. They learn "by just being around baseball and observing," says Francis. "For example, you'll always see hitters tapping their bat with their hand and then listening to it like a tuning fork, knowing that a higher sound means a higher frequency, which means harder wood, which, in turn, means the ball will jump off the bat more." In other words, first-hand experience counts.

Perhaps some of you are still a bit skeptical -- especially those who do happen to perform well at abstract thinking, and therefore do just fine with the way math and science is traditionally taught. And being trained to be skeptical, why should you trust my intuition -- or Moses' anecdotes, or Francis' first-hand view from the mound -- on the matter? Well, according to Lehrer's article, studies in modern neuroscience back us up. So there. Learning by doing turns out to be how the human mind functions best, thanks to the presence of so-called "mirror neurons": brain cells in the motor cortex that -- in the case of an Italian study involving monkeys -- enable the brain to combine the reason we are moving with the actual movement itself. Mirror neurons "translate our ideas into action," because, says Lehrer, "The human mind understands the world by interacting with it."

The Francis profile also illustrates my earlier comment about different styles of learning. It's a myth that math and physics phobes aren't capable of understanding the basic concepts; they simply aren't drawn to the way it's traditionally taught. But "different" does not automatically equate with "inferior." This point is especially relevant to the perennial debate about supposedly innate gender differences in math and science abilities. Yet another round in the ongoing battle has been playing out in the blogosphere this past week, sparked by a New York Times article about transgender biologist Ben A. Barres, who has a commentary in Nature on the question of gender in science.

There's been a lot of truly eloquent blogging on the subject, so I don't feel the need to expound at length about it here. My favorite take comes courtesy of Joanne Hewitt at Cosmic Variance, who dismisses the gender argument as, well, complete bullshit, listing at random a dozen or so gifted women just in her own field of high energy physics that defy the stereotypes. I happen to be a woman who fits the prevailing stereotypes: my talents lie more in writing and communication than in math and the hard sciences. But I am far from incapable in those latter fields, even if they aren't where I truly shine. I would add that there are plenty of men who also excel more at the humanities than in math and science. What's the gender-based excuse for their supposed "shortcomings"?

That men and women are different in many ways is indisputable -- although whether or not those differences relate to math and science ability remains unproven -- and I'm one of those people who relish the differences and find them enriching and rewarding. I only get testy if someone insists that one set of innate abilities (or style of learning) is somehow inferior (or superior) to another. We are different, yet equal, bringing complementary strengths to the table; it's that simple. Experience has taught me that.

down to earth

We are in mourning this melancholy summer evening for our faithful MacIntosh Power Book G4 -- appropriately nicknamed Picard -- which gave up the ghost yesterday afternoon a mere 36 hours after we returned from Buenos Aires. There was a strange and ominous clicking sound (never a good sign), then the screen froze, and numerous attempts to reboot proved fruitless. A trip to the local Apple Store Genius Bar confirmed our worst fears: the hard drive was fried, the data irretrievable, and Picard was no more. True, it is just a machine -- an outdated one at that, given the pace of advancements in computer technology -- and easily replaced. Indeed, a spiffy new MacBook Pro is on its way. But one can't help feeling a twinge of regret at its passing. I did, after all, write my first two books on Picard, and Jen-Luc Piquant's moniker was partially inspired by the thing as well.

The Genius Bar technicians attempted to cheer me up with an impromptu rendering of Monty Python's famous "Dead Parrot" sketch: "This computer isn't dead, it's just pinin'!" But Picard wasn't pinin', it had passed on. It had ceased to be. This was an ex-Picard. Taking a moment to reflect on its passing seems appropriate. Picard was a trooper, plain and simple, and it will be sorely missed. We will be blogging from our iMac desktop until the aforementioned replacement arrives -- which will most certainly not be a slug, a la the Python people, even if it doesn't talk. (Jen-Luc is hard at work this evening composing "Requiem for a Laptop" in the late Picard's honor -- a bit too modern and atonal for my musical tastes at first listen, but what can you expect from a tone-deaf avatar?)

Add in the sweltering heat wave sweeping across the nation and turning the greater DC area into a tropical rainforest, and it hasn't been the best of days. So I was thrilled to come home from my meanderings to read that Space Shuttle Discovery had landed safely this morning after a successful 13-day mission in space. Its July 4 launch -- the first shuttle to go into space on the US Independence Day -- was a bit controversial: several NASA engineers had advised postponing the mission to make more repairs to the shuttle's fuel tank. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin opted to go ahead with the launch anyway, deciding the risk was minimal, although he admitted at the time to "playing the odds."

There was reasonable cause for concern. The shuttle fleet has been plagued by chunks of insulating foam breaking off the external fuel tank during launch, which can cause trouble during re-entry into the earth's atmosphere if the heat shield is damaged. In fact, a chunk of falling foam during re-entry caused the 2003 Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts. NASA has only had one other successful shuttle launch since then, and was anxious to prove the continued viability of the space shuttle program.

This latest Discovery mission did just that, successfully completing all its in-orbit tasks -- even the simplest of which poses a serious challenge in the harsh environment of space. And it was the cleanest re-entry and landing in recent memory, with almost no damage to the orbiter's skin from launch debris. Buoyed by the success, NASA plans to launch Atlantis around August 27th, which will be entrusted with the even more daunting task of hauling a massive building-block beam into space and attaching it to the International-Space-Station-in-progress.

It's easy to forget, after more than 30 years of manned space flight, that such missions always carry a certain degree of risk -- they are never merely "routine" -- and astronauts are prepared to take those risks. Of course, one would prefer not to risk human life needlessly, and I had some misgivings about that judgment call. But it's telling that the entire crew on this most recent Discovery mission publicly voiced their confidence in Griffin's decision. And in this instance, the risk paid off handsomely.

The entire shuttle fleet is, to put it kindly, "of a certain age."  I remember walking out of a screening of Apollo 13 several years ago, and marveling to my companion about how antiquated the rocket ships of the late 1960s/early 1970s seemed to a modern jaded eye: "We went to the moon in a souped-up Buick! That takes some serious cojones!" The space shuttle fleet isn't quite that advanced in years, but NASA is quietly making arrangements for their retirement. The three remaining shuttles will be phased out around 2010 to make way for new space exploration ships with all the latest technological bells and whistles, capable of transporting astronauts to the moon -- and, possibly, Mars, if the whole "Moon-Mars Initiative" ever takes off.

Continued improvements to recycling air and water is deemed critical for future possible US missions to the moon and Mars. It's a nontrivial task to bring sufficient oxygen into space for long-term missions, since the human body needs about 1.5 pounds of the stuff per day to survive. Currently, shorter (under three weeks) missions use containers of liquid oxygen, but problems arise for more extended flights, since the oxygen must be kept below 297 degrees F. Plus, the darn things are heavy!

To that eventual end, Discovery's mission had its own new stranger-than-fiction technology in the form of a new Oxygen Generation System (OGS), a device that uses electrolysis to turn purified astronaut urine into oxygen. We are not making this up; we read about it on the Internets. It reminds me of another scene in Apollo 13, where a crew member pees into a plastic baggie, then flushes it out into space, creating a zero-gravity Golden Shower. (Urine has many useful properties, it seems. Jen-Luc Piquant stumbled on this fascinating celebrity item, in which actor Michael Douglas admitted that he'd asked his five-year-old son to pee on his back to alleviate a jelly fish's sting during a recent vacation in Majorca Spain. Apparently the chemicals in urine neutralize the poison. I'm sure this knowledge will come in very handy should space shuttle astronauts ever be attacked by Giant Jelly Fish From Outer Space.)

It's actually not a new technology; Russia has been using a similar system, called Elektron, aboard the space station for at least six years. It's about the size of a scuba tank. The electrolysis process splits the urine ito hydrogen and oxygen (and, one assumes, other waste products). The astronauts ditch the hydrogen, and the oxygen is funneled into the crew cabin.

Yes -- NASA's plucky astronauts are willing not only to risk life and limb to essentially haul building materials into outer space, but they also are prepared to breathe their own recycled urine. That strikes me as downright heroic. NASA has its naysayers, particularly when it comes to funding priorities, but there's no arguing with the commitment of its astronauts. Perhaps Jen-Luc should put side her nascent requiem for Picard and instead compose an ode to the brave men and women of the space program.

shakabuku

Hola, mis amigos! Jen-Luc Piquant and I have returned from our South American sojourn, well-rested, and a bit too well-fed, thanks to great, cheap food and those tasty little alfajores -- dulce de leche sandwiched between wafer cookies -- that one can purchase on practically every street corner. (Argentines are diehard meat and potatoes and pastry people; we barely saw any fresh vegetables at all during our stay, save for some wilted iceberg lettuce and one pale excuse for a tomato, together gamely attempting to masquerade as a "salad.") Mega-kudos to guest-blogger Lee Kottner for filling in so ably and eloquently in our absence; she'll be posting at least once more in the future with an update on the space elevator story, so sci-fi fans, stay tuned.

We are, needless to say, a bit out of touch with what's been going on the last 10 days in the dear old U.S. of A. (The first thing that caught Jen-Luc's gourmand eye this morning is the news that scientists have created a hybrid form of chocolate that won't melt to a sticky goo in the heat.) Among other things, Internet access was sporadic at best: once a day we repaired to the corner locutorio to use one of the public broadband connections, and there really wasn't much time for leisurely perusal of our usual feeds.

But that's okay. Because there's something about being in a foreign country that shifts one's perspective -- in a good way.  We all need to view things from a different angle now and then, intellectually, emotionally, and physically. A trip to a different hemisphere can be just the ticket. It reminds me of a scene in one of my all-time favorite films, Grosse Pointe Blank, in which John Cusack's amoral (but reforming) hitman is having drinks with the lost love of his life, former high school prom date Debi. "You know what you need?" she tells him. "Shakabuku." She describes it as "a swift, spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever."

I was reminded of shakabuku while perusing a tome of deep profundity on my vacation: Huw Price's Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point. (Yes, we know it's hardly light summer reading; blame it on Jen-Luc's pernicious influence. Left to my own devices, I mostly read about pirates.) Price is a philosopher by trade, with an abiding interest in physics, and in this instance he tackles the problem of entropy and time's arrow -- why time only moves forward into the future, not backward into the past, in our everyday reality, even though mathematically, there is no such distinction between past and present -- from the perspective of philosophy. The entire book essentially deals with how scientists can be limited by their constrained perspectives, particularly when it comes to the knotty problem of time, and emphasizes how useful it can be to look at familiar subjects from a new vantage point. (For all his redundancy and tangled "academese" -- which makes for a rather labored prose style -- Price is not lacking a sense of humor; his preface opens with a quote from Groucho Marx: "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.")

Archimedes, you may recall, was a natural philosopher (a.k.a., early scientist) in ancient Greece who famously offered to move the Earth, provided someone would supply him not just with a big enough lever, but a broader perspective -- a vantage point outside his earth-bound reality from which he could, for instance, view both a pebble and the earth as exactly the same kind of thing, "differing only in size." Archimedes called this the "view from nowhere."

Price contends that when it comes to time's arrow, physicists need to take a "view from nowhen," being more vigilant about taking their own embedded perceptions about time into account when constructing theories about the universe. Per Price: "We are creatures in time, and this has a very great effect on how we think about time and the temporal aspects of reality.... [I]t is very difficult to distinguish what is an aspect of reality from what is a kind of appearance, or artifact, of the particular perspective from which we regard reality."

Price is the first to point out that this notion of a fresh vantage point is not a new one, in philosophy or science. In fact, that's what often leads to revolutionary breakthroughs -- the most obvious example being the heliocentric (sun-centered) cosmology of Copernicus, which eventually toppled the earth-centric view of the solar system espoused since the days of Ptolemy. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution impelled a similar perspective-shifting breakthrough in biology.

When it comes to entropy and time's arrow, the prevailing modern view dates back to an Austrian physicist named Ludwig Boltzmann. The son of a taxation official, Boltzmann earned his PhD in physics from the University of Vienna under the tutelage of Josef Stefan. He moved around a lot in his academic career, partly due to his mercurial mood swings: he joked that these were due to his being born (in 1844) during the dying hours of a Mardi Gras ball, but there is some evidence that he suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder. He also engaged in numerous intellectual feuds with his fellow scientists, most notably with Ernst Mach.

Boltzmann's doctoral thesis was on the kinetic theory of gases, and this ultimately led to his invention of statistical mechanics, which connected the properties and behavior of individual atoms and molecules with the macro-scale properties and behavior of the substances made of those atoms and molecules -- substances like, say, a gas. Boltzmann is the one who derived, statistically, the second law of thermodynamics,  namely, that entropy always increases. We experience this every day: heat cannot flow from a colder to a hotter body; a cup of coffee cools at room temperature, rather than the other way around. Shatter the cup, and it won't miraculously self-assemble, either. That's entropy, the basis for the arrow of time. Entropy also has important ramifications for cosmology: entropy increases because our universe began in a state of extremely low entropy, but physicists still can't explain how that highly unlikely low-entropic state came about to begin with.  (We have no deep thoughts on this particular conundrum, having not quite finished Price's rather dense tome -- besides, cosmologists themselves are still trying to puzzle it out.)

Before Boltzmann, entropy was deemed to be an absolute law of physics. But when viewed from a statistical viewpoint, an increase in entropy in any given system is merely the most likely probability. There is a tiny, infinitesimal chance that entropy could decrease in a system. The best analogy is to envision a glass container filled with a gas. Uncork the container, and the atoms and molecules that make up the gas will be released into the atmosphere at large, gradually dissipating among all the other atoms and molecules. It is highly unlikely, statistically speaking, that we could get each and every original molecule of gas back into the container, any more than we could toss a glass of water into the sea and then retrieve the same exact glass of water.

This statistical, probabilistic view is also the basis for a famous 19th century thought experiment by British physicist James Clerk Maxwell, dubbed "Maxwell's Demon." Maxwell envisioned an imaginary microscopic creature able to wring order out of disorder to produce energy, chiefly by making heat flow from a cold substance to a hot one in (apparent) violation of the second law of thermodynamics. The imp guards a small hole in a wall separating two compartments of a gas-filled container, and can open and close a small shutter covering the hole at will. The gas in each compartment begins in a state of statistical equilibrium, with the average speed and temperature of the molecules being roughly the same.

But this equilibrium doesn't last. Whenever the demon sees a fast-moving molecule in the right-hand compartment approach the pinhole, he opens the shutter briefly to let it through the left side, and he does the same to enable slower-moving molecules on the left to enter the right-hand compartment. So over time, the gas on the left gets hotter while that on the right gets colder. (Physics students will recall that this temperature difference creates potential energy, which can be converted into kinetic energy and harnessed to perform "work.") The demon wrings order out of disorder, almost as if time were "flowing" backwards. Maxwell himself insisted it was essentially a trick question: the demon is putting energy into the system, and itself requires energy in order to do so, ergo, entropy is not violated.

This statistical approach was hotly debated among Boltzmann's scientific contemporaries, and these and other clashes took their toll on the physicist's already fragile mental state. In 1906, while vacationing with his wife and daughter near Trieste, Italy, Boltzmann hanged himself while said wife and daughter were out swimming. His equation for entropy adorns his tombstone (pictured at right). There's quite a bit of speculation as to why Boltzmann chose to end his life; it may or may not have been to growing depression over the non-acceptance of his ideas by the scientific establishment. If so, his despair was premature. Boltzmann's statistical approach to thermodynamics gave birth to quantum physics, thanks to the work of Max Planck in 1900 on black body radiation.

In physics, a "black body" isn't necessarily black -- it's just a term to describe an object that is a perfect emitter and absorber of electromagnetic radiation. When German scientists first studied the problem experimentally around 1900, they expected that as the temperature of the object rose, the amount of emitted radiation would rise accordingly, essentially into infinity. And this was indeed the case, at least until they hit the ultraviolet regime -- at which point the emitted radiation suddenly began to get smaller and smaller again. They dubbed this the "ultraviolet catastrophe." (The average layperson considers, say, a major earthquake to be an actual catastrophe, but physicists really, really hate it when experiment fails to agree with theory -- it's on a par with being hit with an unexpected tsunami.)

Science historians have dubbed Planck a "reluctant revolutionary," because he initially resisted a statistical approach when grappling with the problem of black body radiation. But it proved to hold the key to solving the riddle, and this new perspective on an old problem gave rise to the notion of quanta: namely that atoms can only absorb or emit radiation energy in little packets of fixed amounts, much like currency only comes in fixed monetary units. We won't go into the specifics of how this solved the problem, except to say that infinity is primarily a mathematical concept; in the real world, there always seems to be a limit or threshold of sorts. Planck's quanta effectively placed a cap on how much the emitted radiation of a black body could increase, and once it hit that threshold, it would start decreasing again -- in keeping with experimental observation. And the quantum revolution ensued. That's the power of shakabuku.

No discussion of scientific shakabuku would be complete without mentioning Albert Einstein. Legend has it that his notion of special relativity -- specifically, that there is no fixed frame of reference -- was inspired by a train trip in his youth. As the train pulled out of the station, he pondered how his experience of motion as a passenger on a moving train would be different from the perspective of someone standing on the platform. Years later, he remembered that experience as he was formulating his theory of special relativity, which (among other things) merges three-dimensional space with a fourth dimension of time. And with general relativity, he brought a fresh perspective to gravity, viewing it as the result of curved spacetime caused by the mass of celestial objects. We simply can't see that curvature from our limited perspective, any more than we can feel the curvature of the earth on a cross-country drive from Washington, DC, to, say, Los Angeles. As far as we're concerned, from our limited perspective creeping along the earth's surface, we're driving in a fairly straight line.

These days, string theory is all the rage, having captured the popular imagination with its notion of even more extra dimensions of space -- nine (or ten, if M theory is your hobby horse) spatial dimensions and one dimension of time. (Offering an alternative fresh perspective, Stephen Hawking has also introduced the notion of a second temporal dimension, dubbed "imaginary time," that essentially runs perpendicular to linear time, giving it a kind of "surface area.") As string theory's growing number of naysayers are fond of pointing out, the problem with this extra-dimensional perspective is that physics has yet to figure out a good way to test the theory, however mathematically impressive it may be. Einstein, for instance, predicted that light would be bent by curved spacetime, and this could be (and was, in 1919) observed during an eclipse. But modern technology has yet to catch up with the mathematical theories of string theory, although some physicists hold out hope of finding evidence of extra dimensions once CERN's Large Hadron Collider is up and running.

Whether or not that turns out to be the case, regardless of whether string theory is proved right or wrong, I think we can safely say that if nothing else, it has served to offer a fresh perspective, which will in turn lead to yet another new vantage point -- and one of these is bound to give rise to yet another unprecedented revolution.  It's all about fostering scientific shakabuku. Jen-Luc and I are waiting on tenterhooks to see how it all turns out.

spec fic: a little history

One of my favorite books, one I go back to again and again, is Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast. I've probably read it a half-dozen times, at least, over the last twenty years since I first picked it up in my first year of graduate school (now you can calculate what an old fart I am, if you care to). Heinlein wrote the book late in his career, and many of his fans and critics think it's one of his weaker books: rambling, confusing, bizarre, or just plain bad. One of my lit crit friends in grad school dismissed it as the beginning of Heinlein's decline.

More fools they.

One of the reasons I go back to it over and over again is that it is one of those books that, besides being a ripping good yarn, rewards its readers richly every time it's revisited. In the same way that you often notice something new when seeing a movie for the second time, I guarantee you'll learn something new, understand an allusion you didn't before, or find a new in-joke that you'd missed in previous readings. Despite the number of times I've read it, I can now see I"m going to have to give it another look. There is so much going on in this book, at so many levels—spec fic in-jokes, reactionary social theory, an exploration (literal and theoretical) of multiple dimensions, discussions of architects, linguists, information theory, physics, biology, engineering, economics, con artistry—that I hardly know where to start. (Oh, yes, and a lot of skin and sensuality. Lots of puritanical criticism of that, which would only make Heinlein scornful.) In many ways, it's also the most brazen fan fiction ever written, even a meta-fan fiction, as Heinlein revisits and adds to the stories and characters he loves: the Oz books, the Lensmen, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books, Alice in Wonderland, and his own Lazarus Long and Jubal Harshaw. In a brief essay posted on the Heinlein Society's pages, fan David Potter describes the book as "a MANUAL [sic] on How To Write Good Fiction, written on several simultaneous levels—and people get out of it what they put INTO it."

Too true, in the sense that there's almost every kind of possible plotline incorporated into one book. As I said, you can view the book from any number of angles. One of them is  as something of a guidebook to famous personages in science, by direct reference or inference. Heinlein's four protagonists—Jake Burroughs, Hilda "Sharp" Corners Burroughs, Zebediah John Carter, and D.T. "Deety" Burroughs Carter—are extraordinarily smart folks. Three of them hold doctorates (and the fourth, Hilda, might as well), though Zeb hardly counts his, as it's in education and he purposely faked his way through it to prove it could be done. Jake, the patriarch (only in age), is an all-rounder in mechanical engineering, physics, and math and the theorist/builder of the multi-dimensional time twister that is the book's technological star. His daughter Deety (her initials stand for Dejah Thoris, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Princess of Mars) calls herself a "software jockey." Hilda is the resident biology expert by dint of having a magpie mind and having once majored in biology before being kicked out of college during her senior year (I identify with Hilda, for some reason), Zeb the athlete, resident butt-kicker, former Aerospace Force officer, and mechanical adept who pretends to be a lot dumber than he actually is.

Number of the Beast takes its title and premise from the idea that 666 was not just an ordinary number but possibly exponents: six to the sixth power with the result raised again to the sixth power = 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056. This turns out to be the number of universes accessible through Jake's time twister, which somehow manufactures not just a tesseract, but a superhypertesseract. (Again with the gateways to other dimensions! Calling all String Theorists!) And off they go, when it becomes clear that Jake is being hunted by aliens who don't want his new invention falling into humanity's hands. It's not long before they discover that they've fallen "down the rabbit hole" and into a set of universes that were previously thought only to be fiction, created by the smallest indivisible particles of imagination that Heinlein calls "fictons."

Woven thoroughly into the story are nods of appreciation to those who came before. At one point, Deety describes her father as another Paul Dirac, which meant next to nothing at the time I first read it. I think I knew Dirac had been a physicist of some sort, and that was about it. I learned much later what this comparison meant, when I worked at AIP's Niels Bohr Library. Though Dirac started in electrical engineering, he's best known as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Quantum Mechanics, with Erwin Schrödinger (of the famously uncertain cat), building on Werner Heisenberg's work. Dirac, however, was notoriously modest, where Jake is hardly shy and retiring, though perhaps equally opinionated.

When Deety accepts Zeb's proposal of marriage, offered half-jokingly after little more than a tango, she explains that, among other things, she likes his "hair-splitting games with words—you sound like Whorf debating Korzybsky with Shannon [one of the fathers of information theory] as referee." When I first read the book, I had no idea what a clue this was to Heinlein's deviousness because I hadn't yet taken any linguistics classes (and didn't even know information theory existed), Whorf's linguistic theories, for instance,

primarily dealt with the way that language affects thought. Also sometimes called the Whorfian hypothesis (much to Whorf's disapproval) this theory claims that the language a person speaks (independent of the culture in which he or she resides) affects the way that he or she thinks, meaning that the structure of the language itself affects cognition.

Hilda, who speaks Russian (told you these folks were smart) reflects at one point that Russian is a wonderful language for thinking paranoid thoughts, which is as good an example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as any. AT that point, I started wondering if the flexibility of English, and its ability to borrow and adapt from other languages, and its love of neologisms was one of the factors that helped influence the spread of technology and scientific discovery in a way, say, Latin hadn't and German, with its cumbersome compounds, couldn't.

Alfred Korzybski (chalk up the spelling differences to being in a universe not quite like ours), in the meanwhile, is responsible for a theory known as General Semantics (not related to semantics in general). One of its primary features is language as "time-binding": "The human ability to pass information and knowledge between generations at an accelerating rate." This is certainly true of information theory and, say, the Internet, and of Jake's time twister, which allows for travel along axes where time does not pass when viewed from another axis. This gets Zeb thinking about "re-engineering the [solar] system":

"The urgent problem, Jake, is to seed Venus, move atmosphere to Mars, put both of them through forced aging [by anchoring Jake's time twister to their crust]. Then respot them [at] Earth-Sol Trojan points?"

Observing something like this forced geological aging by hopping back and forth from one's own time on a different dimensional axis would drastically decrease the effort and time one spent gathering knowledge, let alone passing it on, as becomes clear by the end of the book.

Of course, books themselves greatly added to this ability to pass on knowledge, and so have microprocessors, as Claude Shannon anticipated at some level early on in his formulation of information theory.

In 1948 Shannon published his landmark A Mathematical Theory of Communication. He begins this pioneering paper on information theory by observing that "the fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point." He then proceeds to so thoroughly establish the foundations of information theory that his framework and terminology remain standard.

By outlining the upper limits of communication rates, Shannon's work provided the basis for the 1s and 0s that make it possible for you to read this right now, thousands of miles away from where I've written it, and for Typepad to store it on their servers until, well, Jen stops paying them to do so, or Doomsday arrives. Jake's educational history, by the way, is modeled on Shannon's. If you know anything about Shannon and read this book, Jake seems awfully darn familiar.

Likewise, a smart (or knowledgeable) reader would realize by the early invocation of three such theorists that the ride to follow would be a wild one, semantically, at the very least.

And so it is. By the end section, at the First Centennial Convention of the Interuniversal Society for Eschatological Pantheistic Multiple-Ego Solipsism (look 'em, kids; it'll do you good), you're not sure whether "Isaac" is Dr. Asimov or Dr. Newton, "Arthur" is  C. Clarke or C. Doyle, and the mysterious "Bob" is Heinlein himself, Robert Asprin, or possibly, Dr. Oppenheimer. But imagine all of them, all at once, plus every great scientist who's ever lived, whether "fictional" or "real" (and that's purely dependent on your point of interuniversal, pan-dimensional reference), and an equal pile of spec fic writers, and perhaps even some science writers thrown in, all together in one place, at one time. Think of the speed of databit transfers. Think of the mental sparks igniting. Think of the number of desecrated cocktail napkins! It makes the AAAS meetings look like a dog and pony show. It's as much fun as Spider Robinson (himself a huge Heinlein fan) resurrecting Nikola Tesla, curing him of his neuroses, and setting him loose in time to develop things even stranger than his death ray. And more instructive.

rhyme schemes: science poetry

This was a post I hadn't planned to write. It leaped out at me while I was trolling the back issues of the science blog carnival, Tangled Bank, catching up and looking for other topics. There, I stumbled across the blog Science Creative Quarterly, run by David Ng, Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia. The blog is an odd and charming mix of science information, educational pieces, and humor. What attracted my interest was a side project Ng is promoting called Haiku Phylogeny. I thought, Great! Two of my major areas of interest in one! Better than Doublemint Gum.

This is not such an odd combination as you might think. The things science explores are generally pretty awe-inspiring, and that's just the kind of subject poets gravitate toward. If you're not familiar with the history of poetic science and scientific poetry, click on over here [pdf] and read a nice capsule summary of the subject, which dates back at least to the Romans, if not the Greeks. Frankly, it's probably gone on as long as people were making up poems and wondering about the world around them. The urge to study and explain resides in most of us, and the urge to write about those discoveries, or just the questions, in beautiful, formalistic language coincides more often than one might suspect. There are a couple of interesting interviews with poetic scientists and poets of science over at Qarrtsiluni (which, wonderfully, takes its name from the Inuit word for sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to burst), where science and poetry is an occasional subject.

There's also a forthcoming anthology that's a collaboration between scientists and poets, soon to be published by Oxford University Press. I'm looking forward to this, as it's a true collaboration: each poem is introduced by the scientist whose work inspired it. "Readers can see how a poet and a solar physicist may share working assumptions; how poetic insight may inform psychiatric practice; how a poet's encounter with an MRI scanner leads to a fresh neurological experiment." The project is meant in part as an antidote to C.P. Snow's prevailing "two cultures" argument, where never the twain shall meet. I'm not very hopeful about one book bridging that gap, but at least it's a start. It could only be a good thing if the literati were more literate in science and the scientists became more acquainted with why the other subjects are called "humanities."

All kinds of poets mine science for images and ideas, without even mentioning the uncountable hordes of nature poets and their subdivisions. Some, like Lavinia Greenlaw, are well known and even commissioned for it. Diane Ackerman, who took astronomy from Carl Sagan at Cornell, is another of these. Emily Dickinson wrote a number of poems about contemporary scientific discoveries. Robert Browning did a snide little piece on the laboratory and e.e. cummings had the same take on it too. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote eloquently about the behavior of comets and Amy Lowell about the fish in her aquarium.

The chosen subjects range from living creatures to the strange and vast realms of the physical sciences, to the tools of the sciences themselves. The life sciences probably get the most play, but astronomy gets more than a fair share. Astropoetica an on-line journal launched in 2003, publishes nothing but astronomy-related poetry. (You can read one of mine there, in their debut issue.) In the latest issue there's a series of poems commemorating Dr. Harald Alexandrescu,  "of the greatest personalities in Romanian astronomical history, [who served] as coordinator of Admiral Vasile Urseanu Municipal Observatory in Bucharest between 1984 and 2005. . . . [I]n 1998 he invited the Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy-SARM to hold astropoetry galas at the observatory, making it one of the first opened for such events. In November of 2004 he officially became “the Friend of Honor”of SARM’s Cosmopoetry Festival." Isaac Newton is commemorated in another poem by Scottish poet James Thomson. And there's one of my favorites, Robert Frost's wonderful "The Star-Splitter." Of course, poets can be a bit cranky about all the facts too, like Walt Whitman in "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer."

Then there's the flip side, the scientist-poets, a bit fewer and farther between, unless you want to count the APS limerick contest. In that same spirit, there's good old Anonymous's "The Astronomer's Drinking Song" collected and published by English mathematician Augustus De Morgan, which was apparently sung at least once at a meeting of the Mathematical Society of London. Among the more contemporary is Paul Board, and his ode to Benzene, complete with footnotes, without which no scientific document is complete.

There tends to be a vast difference, not in quality, but in method between the two camps. The poets, unsurprisingly, are less concerned with absolute accuracy, by and large, and drawn more often to the big questions and overarching theories, and the most spectacular discoveries: the Big Bang, splitting the atom, evolution. The poems of scientists more often delve into the minutiae of research and the fine details of whatever they're studying, echoing in their structure the composition of a lab report. These are actually the kind I find most fascinating to read and to write, because it can be such a challenge to take the jargon of scientific discipline and employ the usual tools of poetry to weave it into a meaning larger than itself, without distorting the facts. And science has such wonderful words with lovely sounds to toss around: quark, gluon, nudibranch, silicate.

So I was really delighted that someone was putting together a book of haiku on phylogeny. Then I read a sample of the submitted haiku. And wept. The one that brought me to tears was this:

E.COLI IN MY BUTT
I learnt this today
there’s e.coli in my butt
also in my gutt

~Henry James

The author's namesake, though no poet, is surely rotating at high speed in his grave. I know it sent me running for my copy of The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass, where I found two appropriate beauties from Basho within less than a minute:

First winter rain—
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.

A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.

In the first you have a perfect metaphor for the genetic similarities of primates. In the second, you have an illustration of the interesting fact of molting. C'mon people! It's only 17 syllables! It's not that hard! Truth and Beauty, shake hands here!

It used to be that a liberal arts education would give one a concentration in one subject and a smattering of everything else. But the pursuit of a science degree is now such an intensive course of study that there often isn't much room for anything else, certainly not anything as frivolous as poetry (or even a good writing class). And yet, when you mix the two cultures up—pull back the curtain on the lab and what goes on there, embrace the use of metaphor and simile in the correct context—it makes both disciplines richer and easier for the other to understand. To use a scientific metaphor: cross-pollination only makes for more robust offspring. Science and poetry are both creative human endeavors and can only enrich each other.

spec fic: ringworlds wobble but they don't fall down

. . . Yeah, that ring city.

Books have this bad habit of talking to each other when we're not looking. Worse, they go off and breed, like hangers in your closet or dust mastodons under the bed. I suspect that science fiction books actually multiply like amoebas, merely splitting in two and going their merry ways somewhat thinner but containing the same essential parts. I think this might have happened with Larry Niven's Ringworld, that it somehow spawned Clarke's Fountains of Paradise. And this is not, let me make it clear, the same as plagiarism. (Jen warned you that was one of my hot buttons.) It's just another manifestation of the scientific zeitgeist of the 1970s.

 In 1970, nine years before Clarke published The Fountains of Paradise, Niven published Ringworld, about  a technological wonder that was even more audacious than Clarke's space elevator and required, strangely enough, very similar types of materials. Unlike Fountains though, it's a little easier to document Ringworld's effect on the larger culture because he tells charming stories about just that in the preface to its latest sequel, Ringworld's Children.

After the first book (of an eventual four) came out, a grade school class in Florida spent a semester studying it. One of their conclusions was that the lack of natural tectonic activity would leave the oceans filled with topsoil in a few thousand years. In the sequel, Niven "fixed" this problem with the invention of a drainage system that piped the erosion effluent from ocean floors to the rim and made spill mountains down the inside of it. At the 1970 World Science Fiction Convention, a band of MIT students who'd pushed Niven's own rotational calculations a little further, roved the halls chanting, "The Ringworld is unstable!" Niven added attitude jets in the next sequel, The Ringworld Engineers. To hear Niven tell it, the books became almost a collaborative project, at least in tech development if not in plot devising.

This is because Ringworld books are sprinkled with a vast number of casual references to alien and future technology. Ringworld's civilization is old, consisting of multispecies humanoids, and has mostly fallen back into pre-metals technology. They've lost more tech than humans have developed. Not surprising, since they seem, in all their wild genetic variety, to be related to us, toolmakers that we are. Then there's the two alien species doing the exploring along with Niven's human protagonists, Louis Wu and Teela Brown. Niven covers a wider variety of tech than Clarke, from biology to physics, and spends much more time on consequences and the social organization of this enormous, fascinating world. The tech is still the star of the show, but in a more oblique way, since the problem is not one of the structure's development (except in the author's head) but of exploration and escape from it.

And what a structure. I'll let Niven describe it:

The Ringworld is about the same mass as Jupiter. Its shape is that of a ribbon a million miles across and six hundred million miles long, which makes it a bit larger than Earth's orbit, and few miles thick. . . . Its spin, at 770 miles/second, is enough to give it about Earth's gravity of centrifugal force. Walls along both rims, standing a thousand miles high, are enough to hold an atmosphere for millions of years. [Preface, Ringworld's Children]

Talk about wow factor. Just the scale alone! With a marble representing the size of the earth, you'd need a ribbon five feet wide and a half-mile long to show the Ringworld to scale.

And again, because of that, we have some materials science problems of an advanced nature. While Niven isn't anywhere near as technical as Clarke is, being only the proud owner of a B.A. in math, he's clever enough to calculate the forces such a structure would be subject to, and realize that it, like the space elevator's cables, would need to be constructed of an unknown (in 1970) material of far more tensile strength than ordinary steel. Again, sound familiar? (Hint: the acronym is CNT). So Niven invents scrith, also known by his more smartassed fans as unobtainium.

Maybe it is, maybe it ain't. Whatever it is, it's pretty tough stuff with some remarkable properties. It's impervious to about 40% of neutrinos (as a light year-worth of lead would be), transparent to magnetic fields, and absorbs close to 100% of other radiation and subatomic particles. It's impervious to any weapons but antimatter and rapidly dissipates heat. A big, fast meteor can punch a hole in it, but not without leaving behind a god-sized mountain in the landscape that extends out of the atmosphere. These are all precautions the Ringworld Builders thought necessary to protect the life on their structure. But oddest characteristic of all perhaps, is that scrith is virtually frictionless. Louis Wu discovers this the hard way, stepping from his crashed ship onto the bottom of a furrow it's plowed down to the ring floor. Whups!

Frictionless surfaces don't occur in nature, but they've been developed by materials scientists at Argonne National Laboratory. They're an offshoot of CNT research, but differ in a significant way. Like CNTs and standard carbon coatings, the initial carbon matrix is laid down in a flat sheet on the object being coated. The difference from usual coatings procedures is that this takes place in a plasma chamber from which air has been evacuated and replaced with hydrocarbon gases. The plasma arc breaks the usual bonds on the flat layer of carbon atoms and allows them to attract hydrogen atoms. One of the coating's developers, Ali Erdemir of Argonne's Energy Technology Division, believes "the hydrogen atom loses its electron to the carbon atom's outer shell, leaving the positively charged hydrogen nucleus exposed. Some carbon atoms could even support two hydrogen atoms. This may explain the super-slick properties of the coating, especially when two NFC-coated parts come in contact: The hydrogen atoms' positive charges repeal each other. The surfaces are essentially gliding past each other like maglev trains."

The development of near-frictionless carbon (NFC) coatings was dubbed one of the 100 most important tech advances of 1998. Still expensive and difficult to produce and apply in mass quantities, the films are just now finding commercial applications as possible coatings for bearings and other high-wear parts, since it's extremely wear-resistant—a characteristic highly desirable in an artificial world substrate.

So a frictionless surface isn't as far-fetched as it was in 1970. Nor is Niven's shadow square wire, the stuff that strings together the squares of material orbiting between the Ringworld and its sun, making artificial nights fall over vast swaths of real estate. Niven describes a huge snarl of the wire falling from the sky after his ship has clipped it in the same crash that dug down to scrith. It sounds suspiciously like filament made of the same carbon nanotubes Clarke envisioned, right down to the fact that it's nearly invisible (except in such a large pile), and terribly, terribly sharp.

So why wasn't his ship sliced like a piece of cheese when it ran into the shadow square wire? Ah, that's because it's a General Products hull, made by the non-humanoid Pierson's Puppeteers, who are so cowardly cautious that their leader is called the Hindmost. If it's possible to plan for any danger, the Puppeteers (so called because they look a bit like two-headed sock puppets and their mouths do double duty as hands) have done so. The General Products hull, though perfectly clear, is impervious to anything but light and gravity. Even better, it comes with a stasis field that stops time inside should anything threaten the hull's integrity. Time remains stopped until the stress on the hull ceases. Okay, the stasis field might be a little far-fetched, but the hull isn't quite so exotic as it first seems.

In another of the his Known Space books (forgive me, I can't remember which, except that it's not Flatlander, like Wikipedia claims), Niven explains that the General Products hull is "a giant molecule with its inter-atomic bonds artificially strengthened." This is another way of describing artificial polymers, the most familiar of which are plastics. Polymers are characterized by repeating straight or branched chains of a basic molecule and the bonds within and between these chains can be incredibly strong (just recall how hard it is to get a toy or a halogen bulb out of one of those infernal clear, molded plastic packages. Arrrgh!) Polymers are both organic (silk) and manufactured (Kevlar), so they have applications in everything from wastewater treatment to the enhancement of ceramics production (like the tiles for the space shuttle). Depending on the composition of the polymers and the extrusion method, an entire polymer structure with the properties of a General Products hull seems at least plausible at some time in the future. It would sure solve a lot of the shuttle's problems.

And that's just one of the odder items and technologies in Niven's Known Space. There's lots more where that came from, some with real world counterparts, some still just wishful thinking, some eerily familiar but strangely changed. For instance, there's Louis Wu's freaky droud, which appears in the second sequel, the Ringworld Engineers The droud is a fist-sized box that drops an electric charge right into the pleasure center of Louis's brain, a little like Neo jacking into the Matrix. The droud is the ultimate addiction. Who needs food, drugs, sex when you can plug your head in and get instant, constant pleasure for less than it costs to run your air conditioner?

Niven's model for the droud was undoubtedly a set of experiments with rats in he 1960s that illustrated just the situation he describes. The wireheads in Niven's Known Space are another example of predicting the traffic jam. More sinister and lifelike is a little joystick Niven calls the tasp, which does the same thing as the droud, without the surgery and from a distance. It makes a great defensive weapon, as Louis demonstrates against the ferocious Kzin, Chmee (imagine a bipedal, intelligent tiger, one and a half times normal size).

While directly wiring the pleasure centers is an ethical no-no in human beings, something similar to the tasp has recently been rigged up, called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). In rTMS treatment,

[r]epeated pulses of electric current are sent through a metal wire, which is usually round or figure-eight-shaped. This electric current generates a perpendicular magnetic field. (Remember the right-hand rule from physics class.) The magnetic field, in turn, generates another electric current in nearby material--in the case of rTMS, the current runs through brain tissue just below where the coil is placed on the scalp.

This disrupts neural electrochemical communication paths already in place in brain cells beneath the stimulated area, and over repeated applications, seems to yield steadily improving results. This makes it a possibly ideal treatment for drug-resistant forms of depression, though testing is still in its early days. It's also just one of several new electromagnetic treatments. It's certainly a better alternative to traditional electroconvulsive therapy, which can have broad-ranging effects on personality. Unfortunately (or fortunately), pleasure centers are too deep within the brain to stimulate in this manner, but just lifting depression isn't a bad substitute.

Then there's Louis Wu's impact armor, which just now made it onto ski slopes for the latest Winter Olympics. UK-based d3o Labs is a bit secretive about the exact composition of their product, but the material is made of another polymer (handy things!), which bonds loosely enough under normal conditions to be extremely flexible but bonds rigidly within 100th of a second of impact deformation, kind of the way one's muscles lock in reaction to a good scare. Niven's version is a combination of something like this and Kevlar, which isn't that far fetched either. A company called Pinnacle Armor makes a flexible body armor called Dragon Skin that utilizes a safety coating rated to repel explosives shrapnel and AK-47 rounds alike (although the U.S. Army refuses to let its troops buy it or use it even if they pay for it themselves; they use another contractor). The trouble with armor of this type is that it still deforms with the energy of the projectile, inflicting blunt force trauma on the body behind it. But combining it with d3o's impact armor, that could be prevented.

There's much more in the Ringworld books to spark the imagination in a way dry scientific papers can't for the general reader. As Niven says in the introduction to his latest Ringworld adventure, "The Ringworld is a great, gaudy, intellectual toy, a playground with the gates left wide open. . . . It's a puzzle too, a maze. Question every turn or you'll get lost. When you've finished the book, remember not to lock the gate."

spec fic: elevator going up

Good science magazines were few and far between in the boondocks where I grew up, so most of my early contact with new scientific ideas was in fiction. I first encountered science fiction in Madeline L'Engel's A Wrinkle in Time, which makes use of the concept of the tesseract (a four-dimensional cube) as a gateway between dimensions (something I later learned was more like a wormhole). The idea that science could do things like this—maybe not now, but in the future—gave me chills of excitement. I quickly looked for more books with these cool ideas, and wound up plunging right into the hard stuff, thanks to my dad, who was a long-time reader of the pulps. Before long, I had a shelf full of hard Science Fiction from the Golden Age.

For the uninitiated, the term hard science fiction refers to SF that takes pains to get the science right, often at the cost of characterization, unfortunately. But what hard SF lacks in character development, it makes up for in wow factor, tackling big ideas and making concepts like space travel and colonization seem plausible if not inevitable. In the days when science magazines for the public were limited to Scientific American and Popular Mechanics, this was a service of some magnitude.

Many writers of hard SF have degrees in the hard sciences or engineering themselves (Isaac Asimov, Ph.D. in biochemistry; Larry Niven, B.A. in math; Poul Anderson, B.A. in physics; Gregory Benford, Ph.D. in physics; Hal Clement, B.S. in astronomy, M.S. in chemistry; Joe Haldeman, B.S. in astronomy, Dean Ing, aerospace engineering; Jerry Pournelle, degrees in statistics and engineering, etc., etc.), so they do care about the science behind their ideas. But they're also interested in exploring not just the how but the social consequences of an invention or new technology—something scientific research rarely takes into account. Not just what if? but, what then? As Frederik Pohl said, "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."

Still, all that extrapolation and speculation is just pipe dreams if one doesn't get the science right—not necessarily the fine technical details, but at least the theory, and enough details to lend verisimilitude. Among hard SF writers, this is paramount, so much so that the resulting fiction is sometimes not just predictive but prescriptive. Take Arthur C. Clarke's body of work as an example. Clarke, who has a first class degree in math and physics from Kings College, London, is probably one of the most recognizable and influential authors to tackle hard science fiction. Clarke's Three Laws are often viewed as the recipe for formulating new technology:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Cute, you might think, but Clarke's own track record should be impressive enough to prompt a further pondering. For instance, you may not know that a geostationary orbit (where an orbiting object remains over the same coordinates, following the earth's rotation) is also called a Clarke orbit. This is because Clarke was one of the first people to realize how useful this particular orbit could be for the placement of communications satellites. This observation influenced the Intelsat and Telstar programs, almost twenty years after his original paper was published in 1945.

 Now we're on the verge of seeing yet another of Clarke's popular predictions come true: the space elevator (also called a skyhook or beanstalk), described in his 1979 novel, The Fountains of Paradise. While Clarke is certainly not the first writer to describe this idea, he's one of the most eloquent and well-known, and the one most instrumental in putting the idea in the public eye. The original space elevator, as Clarke acknowledges, was first described by Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov in 1960, in an article in Pravda called "To the Cosmos By Electric Train." Since then, it's apparently been independently "reinvented" at least three times: by a team from Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (1966); in 1969 by A.R. Collar and J.W. Flower in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society; and by Jerome Pearson of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (1975). It was hinted at, though not fully developed (for lack of a large enough envelope for calculations, he claims) by Clarke himself in 1963 in an essay for UNESCO on communications satellites.

No matter who's describing it though, the concept remains roughly the same. I'll let NASA's PR writers do the, uh, heavy lifting:

A space elevator is essentially a long cable extending from our planet's surface into space with its center of mass at geostationary Earth orbit (GEO), 35,786 km in altitude. Electromagnetic vehicles traveling along the cable could serve as a mass transportation system for moving people, payloads, and power between Earth and space. Current plans call for a base tower approximately 50 km tall -- the cable would be tethered to the top. To keep the cable structure from tumbling to Earth, it would be attached to a large counterbalance mass beyond geostationary orbit, perhaps an asteroid moved into place for that purpose. Four to six "elevator tracks" would extend up the sides of the tower and cable structure going to platforms at different levels. These tracks would allow electromagnetic vehicles to travel at speeds reaching thousands of kilometers-per-hour.

In Clarke's vision, the elevator could also be used as a "cosmic sling" to send payloads off into space without the use of rocket power.

The engineer in Clarke's novel calls it both a vertical subway and "a bridge to the stars." There are numerous advantages to lifting space-bound payloads this way, instead of using rockets or shuttles. In comparison, the space elevator uses relatively little power to move even the largest payloads, keeping costs low. Bradley Edwards, of HighLift Systems (part of the LiftPort Group; see below), estimates the cost could be as low as "about $100 a kilogram" while a shuttle lift costs "$10,000 to $40,000 per kilogram." The elevator's descending cars, in fact, can be designed to feed power back into the system, so it's virtually self-contained. Because it uses electromagnetic power, there are no environmental effects from any chemical rocket exhaust. It's quieter than rocket launches or re-entry, and both adaptable and expandable. The trick is building the thing.

The only places on the earth's surface suitable for this type of project lie roughly along the equator, where satellites line up correctly in geostationary orbits, and where there are few hurricanes or tornadoes to give a 35,786 km cable whiplash. Check a map and you'll see that much of this area is deep ocean. So finding a suitable chunk of land, or engineering a stable ocean-going platform for the anchor is the first problem.

The next is one of logistics. Moving the counterweight into position requires rockets that, in 1960, were only being developed for the Russian and American space programs, or better yet, by a space shuttle that wasn't quite a gleam in anyone's eye. There's also the difficulty of herding structures of this size through space. The construction of the space station (and fixing the Hubble Telescope) taught us a fair amount about working in space, but controlling something as enormous as these structures is a leap in magnitude. Even once the American, Russian, and European space programs were in full swing, the problem of materials remained. What do we make the cable out of?

At the time Artsutanov's article was published, there was no material strong enough to withstand the tensions inherent in the design of such a mode of transportation. Steel would snap under its own weight if spun into a cable this long, and the means of making a cable of that length didn't exist. To solve this problem, Clarke's engineer introduces, cannily enough, a "pseudo one-dimensional diamond crystal" with some trace element impurities for strength, grown in zero-g labs. Sound familiar? It should. The clever Ms. Ouellette and her faithful sidekick, Jen-Luc, have written about it here. The real-world equivalent is another form of carbon called graphene, which looks to be the best carbon nanotube (CNT) material for the job. The tensile strength of CNTs is enormous—making steel and even diamond look positively brittle in comparison—but only graphene has the requisite electromagnetic properties, i.e., the consistency of size necessary to produce consistent conductivity. Other forms of CNTs (Clarke mentions the Buckminsterfullerene) might also be suitable, depending on the final design of the elevator.

Still sound like a pipe-dream to you?  Keep in mind that there's a consortium of companies working on the project right now, the LiftPort Group. Their goal is liftoff by April 12, 2018 and they're gearing up for it by beginning commercial production of carbon nanotubes for other industries at a plant in Millville, NJ. There's also Elevator 2010, the annual space elevator contest, patterned after similar engineering competitions like the X Prize. This year's competition is coming up on October 20th, with two types of entries: one for tether strength and one for the "climber" or elevator car, based on speed and payload weight. And NASA is fully behind the idea.

It's hard to say how many people now involved in the space elevator project first heard of it in Clarke's book, but The Fountains of Paradise certainly captured the imagination of readers when it was published, me included. To my mind, the real difficulty is not the technology or the cost, both of which are factors humans have overcome before to make great technological leaps, but the raison d'être. In Clarke's book, Earth already has space colonies and industry in space. Rockets make a racket lifting expensive payloads to them. The time has clearly come for better, faster, cheaper. But here and now we're still taking tentative steps into space. What do we need this thing for?

Mars. And the Moon. More on this in another post.

The beauty of fiction is that there's frequently a happy ending. (Spoiler alert: read no further if you want to read for yourself how it turns out.) Clarke's engineer's dream comes true and by the Epilogue, Earth is encircled by a ring city stabilized by several space elevator structures, the lower halves of which have become vertical cities themselves. Here, indeed,is not just the automobile, but the traffic jam.

And that ring city . . . hmmm . . .

temporary bartender

Greetings, Earthlings. Lee Kottner, Stylist to Jen-Luc Piquant, here. While the owner of this blog is off debauching herself taking a well-earned vacation in Buenos Aires, I'll be filling in for her, so let me introduce myself. I'm a writer, editor, book artist, and all-around geek grrrl currently living in the Bronx, and owner of Spawn of Blogorrhea and LeeKottner.com. Jennifer and I met lo these many years ago when we both moved to New York at roughly the same time, and both eventually ended up working for physics organizations: she for APS, and I for AIP. While we both share an interest in science, mine tends more toward biology and its strange and sometimes creepy interfaces with AI. My geekiness stems from a childhood fascination with marine biology, an almost-double major in bio and English (English won, but just barely) as an undergrad, and a stint teaching science writing as a grad student. While I'm not a professional science writer (nor do I play one on TV), I'll occasionally stick my nose in a peer-edited journal article in Nature or Science, and I'm a current subscriber to New Scientist (which puts out new issues way faster than I can read 'em all).

I'm also a big science fiction freak. It's thanks to writers like Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Ben Bova, C.J. Cherryh, Ursula LeGuin and, of course, Star Trek, that I got interested in science at all. Most of the non-professional science geeks I know will tell you the same thing (I suspect many of the professional geeks would too, if I promised not to tell), and yet I've always felt that SF got scant credit for helping to popularize science. So I'm planning to subject you all to a little popularizing of my own in this august forum. Check back over the next ten days if you're interested in reading a bit about the space elevator and nanotubes in SF, or Spider Robinson's resurrection of Nikola Tesla, or what Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson can teach us about going to Mars, and where you can read about what life might look like on a neutron star or a red supergiant, for starters.

Heck, let your kids read it. It might inspire them, too.

v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n

First, a very happy Fourth of July holiday to all my US compatriots. Second, au revoir, mes amies! Jen-Luc Piquant and I are taking off this evening for 10 days in Buenos Aires. Yes, that city in Argentina. It's my first "real" vacation in roughly 12 years because, well, I'm a freelancer, and when we don't work, we don't get paid. Since a freelancer's work is never completely done, I'll be lugging my trusty laptop along with me so I can tie up those few nagging loose ends while Jen-Luc soaks up the fabulousness of South American continental living.

I'm sure I'll manage to find the time to wander the city streets, take in some museums, visit the odd cemetary,  browse in a few funky boutique shops, and sample those little submarinos -- steaming mugs of hot milk, into which one drops a chunk of chocolate, which sinks to the bottom and slowly melts, turning the beverage into fresh hot cocoa -- that MondoBob loves so much. He and his partner, the urbanely sardonic El Finster (pictured at right), will be my long-suffering hosts during my stay.

What I won't be doing is blogging; even notorious workaholics need some respite. Still, one can't just let the cocktail party chatter die down completely. So I've asked my good friend, Lee Kottner, to fill in as guest blogger in my absence. She's already known to you in a way, being Jen-Luc's "personal stylist," and she's also been known to weigh in with the occasional comment.

I have no idea what she'll blog about, but I guarantee it'll be interesting, possibly even a bit controversial. She's the outspoken type. One of the best things about Lee is that she's got this hair-trigger temper. That, combined with her good-hearted idealism, means she's easily baited. So if you want to set her off on a rant, try tweaking her on a few of the following subjects: lawyers and copyright law, science vs. religion, plagiarism, and snide remarks about fanfic. Then sit back and watch the fur fly. Try it. It's fun!

Sadly, the other thing I won't be doing is watching Argentina compete in the FIFA World Cup finals. Germany ousted them from the tournament last week, dashing an entire country's hopes and dreams. Argentines can console themselves with the knowledge that Germany's Microsoft Hellhounds team only placed third in this year's four-legged division of the international Robocup competition, held June 14-20 in Bremen, Germany. The competition -- with participants hailing from about 67 different countries -- pits teams of various types of robots (humanoid, the now-discontinued SONY Aibos, even matchboxes on wheels) against each other in soccer games.

As always, there's a serious objective as well: the goal is to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can beat the human world soccer championship team by 2050. Germany's robotic nemesis proved to be Australia: two teams hailing from Down Under placed first and second. No doubt all those Ozzie techno-geeks are raising their vats of Foster lager in celebration as I type. But Germany can take further pride in the fact -- gacked from the NanoPublic blog -- that their country's scientists have just created the world's first nano-sized soccer field; 20 of them can fit on the tip of a hair. Can tiny self-assembling nanorobotic players be far behind?

I will leave further contemplation of futuristic technology in Lee's capable guest-blogger hands. For me, it's mate and mojitos for the next 10 days. Adios, amigos!