Cocktail Party Physics

China report

  I've been back from China for about a month and I'm still processing the experience, but I thought I'd tell you all a little about some of my observations in and out of the classroom. I was hired to teach English language and culture but really, in three weeks, there's not much language teaching you can do, so it mostly winds up being an English culture summer camp and conversation program. Which is great. There's a lot more learning of language that goes on in informal sessions than formal ones, and it was really a pleasure to get to know both the students and faculty of the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT).

Harbin is an industrial city in the north of China, with a population around the same size as New York's. As Chinese cities goes, it's pretty new, springing up in the late 1800's when the Russians built a railroad from Vladivostok to a sleepy fishing village on the Songhua River for trade purposes. Russian Jews migrated there and helped build the city, giving Harbin its first hospitals, schools and libraries as well as two synagogues and a sizable cemetery that's still lovingly cared for by the Chinese. At one time the city housed an international, multiethnic population and was called the Paris of China, and passed through both Russian and Japanese hands before becoming wholly Chinese. Now, its population is almost exclusively Chinese, with a few Japanese and Korean residents. (If you're interested in pictures, you can see what I took at my Flickr account, or our fearless leader, Marcy Bauman's. You can also take a look at my blog posts about the trip.)

The city has a number of universities and top-notch schools. HIT is the third-best university in China, on par with our MIT and like MIT, focused on science and technology fields. The students are chosen from the top 2.5 percent of those taking the national admissions exam, so they are smart, smart kids, and HIT tends to promote from within its graduate population. One thing the language barrier often does is disguise just how darn smart folks are, and I know I was underestimating the intelligence of most of the people I was talking to. The few technical conversations we had were as much hampered by my lack of technical vocabulary as their lack of English vocabulary. I met aerospace, civil, environmental and all other kinds of engineers, materials scientists, chemists, computer scientists and new media specialists, economists and architects, and people specializing in technological innovation, with research areas as diverse as composite materials, solid oxide fuel cells, optical thin films, and microporous and mesoporous materials. Many of my students were studying alternative energy technologies and environmental sciences.

These last two subjects are big issues for China, and you can see the need for them all over Harbin itself. The weather was beautiful during the first week of my stay: warm and dry and windy. I was really puzzled when people kept asking me if I found Harbin's air dirty. And then the next week we had a temperature inversion and I understood the question. You can see the difference in the two photos I took from my 15th floor window on campus:

There's blue sky underneath that smog, believe it or not. And that's the way it was for most of my visit. It's not eye-stinging or smelly like the air in Pittsburgh was when I lived there in the late 70's, but it makes New York on a bad day seem edenic. Ozone shmozone. Most of what's in the air is not car exhaust but coal smoke. There were several coal-fired electricity plants on campus, and that's where most of China's power comes from. At least in Harbin, cars are a relatively small part of the problem because there just aren't that many per capita yet (not so for Beijing and Shanghai). That doesn't stop the traffic from being completely insane, but that has more to do with the total disregard for signs (if there are any) and rules of the road than numbers. And the donkey carts don't help, either, I'm sure. Especially the ones on the expressway. Or the massively laden trikes.

If Harbin is any indication, one of China's biggest priority has got to be infrastructure. I'm used to not being able to drink the water when I go somewhere out of the country, but in Harbin no one drinks the water. You can wash in it, and wash your clothes and dishes, but you can't drink it because there are no purification plants and largely unregulated wastewater dumping. Cooking and drinking water is all bottled, which adds its own problems in recycling (that's what the guy on the trike is hauling, incidentally). In one of the first conversations I had with the faculty when school started, I spoke with a prof whose specialty is construction materials and engineering and we talked about the lack of regulation in China, not only in building materials and codes but in industry as well. Where we have legislation like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (however badly they're enforced), China has nothing but local committee oversight, which is subject to bribery and corruption. (Interestingly, while I was writing this, the New York Times published the first of a series called "Toxic Waters: America's Growing Pollution Problems." So it's not like we're doing such a great job either. But the major difference is that we have the legislative framework to deal with it.) There seems to be a major push in Harbin, to correct some of these issues, at least on the wastewater front; streets all over the city were torn up both for new sewage and water lines and for a new subway the city is putting in. And many of my students were keenly interested in environmental issues and abatement technology. I got a lot of questions from both faculty and students about how pollution is managed in the States (and was grateful for 10 years of editing environmental impact statements to give me the background to answer them).

But the two issues that really struck me as an educator and a science geek were the attitude toward education in general and how different it is talking about science without religion getting in the way. I was teaching mostly incoming freshmen and sophomores, and not only were they some of the brightest students I'll ever have the privilege of teaching, I've never had students who were so eager or so respectful. This program was basically a three-week summer camp and still there was nothing my students balked at doing. Homework? Sure, no problem! Write in class? No problem. Ask me awkward questions about Tibet? Sure, happy to. Eat lunch with you? Absolutely. Students were on time, every day, or almost humiliatingly apologetic if they were late. They stood up to answer me in class. And thanked me after each one. After day one, I was reeling with culture shock. This is not to say my students here are not hungry or grateful, but in a completely different way. My students here know they've missed out on something and want to make up for that so they can get good jobs and support their families. The intellectual hunger in Chinese students is just that: intellectual hunger for new ideas, new ways of thinking, new information.They have a visceral love of learning you see in some of the best schools here and with individual students even at third tier U.S. schools. In part, that's because getting into college is so competitive, even more so than here. The major difference, and something I missed, was that Chinese students won't often argue with you. They're so respectful, and often used to learning by rote, that disagreeing with a professor seems rude to them. Teachers are really important people in China, and paid accordingly. We could really learn something from that.

And yet, one of the faculty and I had a conversation about this and he insisted that U.S. schools were still superior because we taught students to think independently. Gosh I wish that were still true. As I recently said in another conversation over here, our schools are leaning more and more toward shaping students for particular careers and offering them skill sets, rather than the ability to learn quickly and think for themselves, which can be applied in any career. (I'm not saying you don't need skill sets, especially in the sciences, but along with that, you need critical thinking skills and imagination, rather than just the skill sets. It's what sets a technician apart from a scientist.)

The unit that I taught was about science in the U.S. and covered a little history of science (the development of the scientific method, major discoveries, major players); the two-way exchange between science and culture; women in science; science in entertainment (thanks, Jen!); communicating science; current controversies; and how the public views science. We watched a couple of CSI episodes, Minority Report and The Matrix, and a couple of clips from Babylon 5. Some of the entertainment was familiar, and some not, but the references that went right over everyone's head were the religious and mythological allusions in The Matrix—not surprising, since that same stuff goes right over my head in Chinese opera. More confusing for them, though, was the whole idea that people would actually disbelieve scientific fact in favor of religious teachings or myth. When I described the controversies about teaching evolution in public schools and what ID and creationism were, they were clearly boggled. When I asked how many of them had some sort of spiritual belief, whether Buddhism, Confucianism, Islamic, or Christian, not one hand went up. (Just to clarify, each of those religions is legal in China; there is an active Buddhist temple in the city, some of the faculty are Buddhist, and though the Jewish population is long-gone, their synagogues were not razed during the Cultural Revolution as were most of the Christian churches. So this wasn't fear of reprisal that kept them from professing religious belief. It was simple lack of interest.) For the Chinese, if anything plays this role in forming or deforming scientific thought, it's politics, and I think that's less true now than it was during, say, the Cultural Revolution.

And these two facts, if anything, are what's going to allow the Chinese to roll over us economically in ten or twenty years. Not their sheer numbers, but their respect for education and their lack of muddying religious issues. They're intensely proud of their country and their accomplishments, which are indeed impressive, and that pride and ambition and ability will carry them a long way. Unless the US gets its priorities straight (more money for education, better pay for teachers, more access to quality education for everyone), we're soon going to be buying more than cheap tchotchkes, outsourced electronics, and pirated movies from China. We'll be importing technology we should have invented and produced ourselves.

assume a spherical zombie

Physicists often use 'model systems', which are systems that share properties with more complex systems.  We try to gain fundamental insight into the more complicated system by studying the model system.  For example, an alloy with seven elements in it might share some subset of properties with an alloy made from only two elements.  You might be able to learn something about the seven-element alloy from studying the two-element alloy because there are simply fewer variables.  The information you learn from your model system can give you a stepping stool for trying to understand the more complex system.

Biologists also have their own types of model systems, called model organisms.  Model organisms serve the same purpose - they are easier to deal with and share some of the features of more complex organisms that we don't yet understand.  There is a field of mathematics called biometry, biostatistics or biometrics that combines math and biology to study everything from epidemiology to ecological forecasting.  When you asked your math teacher "what am I ever going to use math for", this is the field that provides some really interesting answers.  Biometrists usually focus on real systems, but a recent paper in Infection Disease Modelling Research Progress 2009 features a very underutilized model system.

Zombies. 

In particular, the "classic zombie" as typified by Night of the Living Dead, as opposed to the more modern zombie.  Modern zombies are a little smarter and move a little faster than classic zombies and thus are harder to model.  As an experimentalist, I question the choice of zombies for a model system, as zombies are notoriously ill-behaved.  They physically decay on very short time scales (often losing limbs without notice), they are mindless, make annoying noises and have as their sole purposes eating people or turning them into zombies. (Now that I think about it, I'm questioning whether a couple of my colleagues might fall in that category...)

This is more than just a cheap shot at getting your research on NPR.  Maybe we don't have a zombie problem in real life, but we do have AIDS, river blindness, West Nile, malaria and a host of other diseases that spread as individuals make contact with either infected individuals or carriers (such as mosquitoes).

The paper was written by three students (Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea and Joe Imad) and a professor from the Department of Mathematics and Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa Robert J. Smith?. No, the question mark is not a typo.  It's actually part of the professor's name.  Being a statistics type, he knows how many "Robert Smith"s there are in the world and thought he might distinguish himself through creative punctuation.  He notes

"Not that the question mark actually solves that, but at least it differentiates me from that guy from The Cure. It's been twenty years now and sadly his career shows no sign of drying up."

One of the things I like about this paper is that is demonstrates how you start with a relatively simple model and gradually add elements to make the model more complex - and more capable of modeling reality.  It also reminded me that every field has its own particular notation that makes no sense to people not in the field.  I'm going to depart a little from the notation used in the paper because I personally found it confusing to represent the number of dead people by the symbol "R".  But that's just me.  Stat mech taught me that anything representing a number is N with a subscript.

The first model in the paper assumes three classes of beings:  Humans, Zombies and Dead.  I'm calling the number of humans N_H, the number of zombies N_Z, and the number of dead N_D. We're interested not so much in the actual numbers in each category, but in how these numbers change with time. If the number of zombies gets bigger faster than the number of humans being born, we've got problems.  So we don't care as much about N_Z as we do about the rate of change of N_Z with time.  Just as speed is how fast your position changes and acceleration is how fast your speed changes, the rate of change in zombies is the net increase or decrease during some period of time.

To calculate this number, you have to understand the zombie rules.  A human becomes a zombie when bitten or otherwise infected by a zombie.  A dead person can also be resurrected into a zombie.  Let's say we had 6 humans turned into zombies every hour and four dead people resurrected into humans every hour, so there would be 10 zombies created every hour.

Much to my surprise, you can kill zombies, so calling them the 'undead' is technically wrong.  You can kill a zombie by removing their head or destroying their brain.  So let's say 3 zombies per hour are killed every hour.  Then the rate of change in the number of zombies is:
 

For those of you scoring along at home, this is a translation of the middle equation on page 135 of the paper into English. 

All that was just to calculate the rate of zombie number change, so we also have to write equations for how the number of dead and the number of humans change.  To make the interconnectedness of the numbers clear, I've taken the liberty of reproducing the diagram on page 135 and putting a translation into English immediately below it.

So the rates in the problem are the birth rate and death rate of humans, how many humans become zombies, how many zombies become dead and how many dead become zombies.  Mathematicians call the resulting equations a coupled system of ordinary differential equations.  It's a system of equations because we have to write three equations to describe the system - one for how the number of humans changes, one for how the number of zombies change and one for how the number of dead change.  Remember from seventh grade algebra that in order to be able to solve a system of equations, you have to have one equation for each variable.  They're coupled because the same variables appear in multiple equations.  For example, the number of zombies that become dead will appear in the equation for the rate of change in the number of dead and the equation for the rate of change in the number of zombies.  They're differential because we're looking at rates, which are derivatives.  They're ordinary because we're looking at the rate of change with time for all three equations. This isn't a pejorative designation: F=ma is an ordinary differential equation, too. 

Using this model and assuming that the infection occurs quickly (meaning we can ignore the birth and death rates because they are small during the time over which the infection occurs), the paper authors show mathematically that zombie-human coexistence is impossible.  The infection will spread and zombies will infect everyone in pretty short order.  Bummer.

But the reality, as they go on to point out, is that most infections are latent:  that is, people don't turn into zombies immediately, but they walk around (for about 24 hours, according to The Zombie Survival Guide) looking normal even though they are doomed to become zombies.  This means we have to introduce another box in the diagrams above to represent people who will, but have not yet become zombies.  The researchers call this group 'Latents' which they represent by "I".  (I know, I shouldn't be smirking since my discipline represents momentum by "p" and angular momentum by "L".)  In addition to a fourth box, you'd have to include arrows from Human to Latent, Latent to Dead and Latent to Zombie, which gives you a system of four coupled ordinary differential equations to solve. I didn't bother drawing it because the authors show that, even with a latency period, we are doomed and zombies win in the end.
 
A null result is less interesting that a non-null result.  If there is no way for us to defeat the zombies, do you think NPR would care?  So the researchers asked themselves "what would happen if we were able to quarantine some of the Latents or Zombies?"  OK, now we've got a mess because we have five boxes, some Zombies or Latents would be killed trying to escape quarrantine and they also include the possibility that some dead people would become re-animated as 'free' zombies.  The results from this analysis are that stopping the zombies depends critically on getting infected people and zombies into quarantine.  If you don't get enough of them into quarantine fast enough, the zombies win.  Again.

Next, the researchers allow the possibility that a cure for zombie-ism is developed.  The cure transforms zombies into humans, but it doesn't protect them from becoming re-zombified.  If a zombie who was resurrected from the dead is cured, he becomes human again.  Got all that?  Well, if you don't, don't worry about it because we get only marginally better chances of survival:  Humans are not entirely eradicated, but not many survive.  At some point, the individual humans left are going to realize that curing the zombies is not statistically worth the chance.

Finally, the researchers consider a "brute force" method - what if we just killed as many zombies as we possibly could as fast as we possibly could?  When they solve the system of equations, they find that this model provides a much higher probability of human survival, but only if you kill zombies really aggressively.  The slower you kill the zombies, the higher the likelihood they win.

I love the tongue-in-cheek discussion section:  "The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life".  They do point out that there are plenty of real-world cases in which this model might apply, like modeling people's allegiance to political parties.  I've got to find some way that nanomagnetism might relate to zombies, because I'd love to see whether one could get something like that into Phys Rev.

I realize that these are students, but I do have to raise a quibble with their results. Given what we know about zombies, they really should have extended their final model (the one that gives us humans a chance of survival) to include a latency period.  I haven't worked through the math, but my gut-level instinct is that if you assume a 24-hour latency period, the zombies have a much better chance of winning unless we start aggressively killing off not only full-blown zombies, but people we suspect have been infected as well.  What a great plot for a movie...

IMPORTANT GUY AT CDC:  Well, Dr. Smith?, I don't care how right you think your model is, we're not taking action until it's been peer-reviewed in a major journal. 

GENERAL:  I don't pretend to understand anything having to do with math - never did get into that 'number thing', but if the numbers say we need to start killing millions of people to save the country, let's get going.

SMITH?: Um... did I explain the concept of a model system to you guys?

Really, this would be a great plot:  scientists develop a method for saving civilization and it hinges on whether the survival of the world is worth killing some number of people who aren't infected?  Uh, don't laugh.  Ethiopia ordered all pigs in the country to be killed as an approach to prevent the H1N1 virus from spreading.)  There's a good twist:  let's put the zombie invasion not in Los Angeles, but in Libya or Iran - somewhere a significant number of Americans might not feel so bad about invading wiping off the map. 

OK, that was a fun and fluffy piece of science - the paper got enough coverage that people are griping about why the Canadian government would fund such a thing. (For the record, it was a student project and the professor was acknowledging the agencies that fund him in general.)  But there is a serious issue here about science journalism that gets back to the 'science popularizer' vs. science journalist dichotomy.

You can't argue that the research results were being reported for the sake of science, so besides being cute, what was the message here?  I could come up with a couple slants on reporting on this that go beyond 'humans vs. zombies, ha ha'.  For example, this is a great case study of graduate students learning about communicating science beyond their own subdiscipline. For example, from canada.com

"If you look at it in a more realistic way, zombies are about the same as any other major infectious disease — they get out and we try to eliminate them," said Joe Imad, a University of Ottawa mathematics student and one of the paper's co-authors. "Modelling zombies would be the same as modelling swine flu, with some differences for sure, but it is much more interesting to read."

But the even bigger story -- which I haven't seen in any of the stories I've found is that Smith? and his students do work with important problems.  After I came up with the idea of setting my zombie vs. scientist movie in a less-developed country, I looked at some of Smith's other work.  One paper about to be published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved points out that there are a slew of neglected diseases, such as leishmanaisis and dracunculiasis that don't get as much attention (or funding) because they: affect less-developed countries, and aren't as fatal, but do have long-term impacts on large numbers of people not so much by killing them, but by socioeconomic effect and long-term suffering.  Diseases with high mortality rates attract a lot of attention (and funding), but chronic diseases can actually have a much greater impact on cost of care, lost days of work and social ostracism.  These diseases are much more like the zombie scenario - where the infected don't die, they live and can transmit the disease to others.

The graduate students who contributed to the paper are unlikely to specialize in zombie studies, but if they pick up their advisor's obvious passion for using math to make the world a better place one or all of them just might be the person(s) who make a difference in the lives of people who don't have the ability to lobby NIH or Congress. And if they pick up his sense of humor as well, they'll probably have an easier time getting in the door of those institutions as well.

does science fiction matter? at all? even a little?

Oh, cool! My favorite topic. And somebody asked me to write about it! Peggy Kolm, over at Biology in Science Fiction, sent the Cocktail Party an invitation to blog about science fiction for ScienceOnline09, an annual science communication conference that brings together scientists, bloggers, educators, and students to discuss promoting public understanding of science. She and Stephanie Zvan of Almost Diamonds will be moderating a session on science fiction as a tool for science communication and are looking for input on the topic and to start an online conversation between science fiction writers and science bloggers. Since the primary function of Cocktail Party Physics is to communicate science to the masses (and here you thought it was virtual drinking), I'm biting. Besides, who can resist answering lists of questions about oneself? Not I! Since one of my first posts for CCP was about Arthur C. Clarke's space elevator, it seems only appropriate.

I will now proceed to bloviate. Or expound. Pick your verb.

• What is your relationship to science fiction? Do you read it? Watch it? What/who do you like and why?
  
  I'm a long-time science fiction fan who dabbles in writing it, and I occasionally teach it in literature and writing classes. I cut my teeth on the original Star Trek in the 60s and quickly moved on to harder drugs in the 70s: Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Cherryh, Norton, Pohl, Niven, Clarke, Frank Herbert, and reluctantly, Philip K. Dick. I read it wherever I could find it, and watched it when I could (in our one-channel household, that wasn't often; now I have no TV at all). I still think Babylon 5 is one of the finest pieces of TV science fiction ever made, though Firefly is certainly interesting and could have been a close rival had it gone on longer. Networks have a bad habit of canceling stuff just when it gets interesting, which is why I've always been more of a fan of SF (or specfic) in print than on TV or in the movies. That said, Star Wars hooked me when it first came out and deeply disappointed me later (though I'm an undying fan). I also saw Silent Running at about the same time and still think of it fondly. It kind of rode in on the cusp of the ecology movement and the thought of that orbiting forest was just heartbreaking. I still hope it wasn't prophetic. And, of course, there was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I didn't see until several years after it came out. That just reinforced my interest in astronomy, cosmology and space travel, Hal or no. "It's full of stars!"
  
  What attracts me to science fiction and its various subgenres is not just the hardware or the science but the world-building: how that science fits into the larger scheme of things, how it shapes society, how society interacts with it, how society shapes science in turn. I've been at least as fascinated by the interaction as I've been by the science itself. I think scientists sometimes unconsciously think of their research as occurring in a vacuum; it's pure and righteous because it's the search for knowledge. But history is full of boxes that were opened too early, or that couldn't be slammed shut again and I think that's one of the useful checks and balances of science fiction. It asks those questions about consequences.
  
  Currently, I'm following Iain M. Banks, China Mieville, Melissa Scott, Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, Connie Willis, and William Gibson, among others. Banks is uneven and can be extremely obtuse, but his conceptions of AI and a far-reaching, far future galactic society are fascinating, when they work. Melissa Scott brings some interesting twists to the hacker culture envisioned by William Gibson, who's gone far beyond that into more culturally interesting and less sciencey questions in his recent books. I like Gibson for his ability to anticipate or ride the culture and technology wave the way he does in All Tomorrow's Parties and Idoru. He and Bruce Sterling have really helped turn contemporary science fiction into futurism, and as a result driven some of the science itself, at least in computers. Neal Stephenson just leaves me in awe; even his not-quite-successes are provocative and thoughtful. I like that he's not afraid to ask big questions or use science in outrageous ways. Ditto with Dan Simmons. Did he actually coin the term Post-human? I don't know quite what to say about Mieville except he's a fascinating world-builder. I also have a deep fondness for Spider Robinson, who is one of the most humanist of contemporary science fiction writers, but because he's funny as all hell, gets little credit. He's the guy who first got me interested in Tesla. How could I resist someone who carries lightning in his pockets?


• What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any? Can it do more than make people excited about science? Can it harm the cause of science?
  
  Science fiction's job, first and foremost, is to tell a good story. That's the job of any kind of fiction. The science is a tool for telling the story and of course, tools get bent and broken when they're used. But the beauty of science fiction is that, because it's fiction, it's allowed to go out on a limb and stretch the facts, to extrapolate wildly, and take science down paths it might never go. Personally, I think the popular press does far more to mangle science communication than most science fiction does, precisely because it presents itself as definitive fact. We expect facts to be correct, and if it's someone not versed in science writing about  a new development, sometimes it's disastrously misleading. Fiction, not so much. It's a story. The important point is that science fiction can't be the only way of communicating science. It's a jumping-off point, not a primary source. And its job is not to promote science, though it can be a great vehicle for that.
  
  What science fiction can do that science journalism can't (or just doesn't, often) is not just elide the boring stuff, the drudgery of lab work, the negative results, the scratching for grants, but gussy up that process. For SF, it's usually the technology that's in place, or as in Geoff Ryman's novel Air, one that's about to go online, that's exciting. Sometimes, as in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise, it's all about the process too. Fiction is great at communicating the sense of possibility and the excitement of discovery. It humanizes the scientific process. People do science, and sometimes they do it imperfectly, or for other motivations, or hoping for other results. It's good to remind us all of that fact.
  
  As for harming the "cause" of science, I think you have to define what that is first, before you decide whether fictional portrayals can harm it. If the cause of science is to discover how everything works, to advance human knowledge, I doubt that much said about it in science fiction would stop or harm that. Humans are too curious to let much stop them from asking "Why?" and "How?" If the questions aren't asked now, they will be eventually. The mad scientist has been an archetype in the culture at least since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, if not Prometheus, and that hasn't stopped or hindered anything. Politics and ignorance do far more damage in that area than sketchy science in SF ever will.
  
  What stories like, say, A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Road or even Dr. Strangelove do is make us think about the possible consequences of new or old technologies. That's never a bad thing. If science journalism picks up the story there, and helps the public explore and make decisions about the use of those technologies in an honest and rational manner, so much the better. But sometimes a story can reach people where "just the facts" can't. Even if it's not entirely factual or absolutely correct in every detail, SF is serving science. Ask those engineering geeks who went around WorldCon chanting "The Ringworld is unstable!" at Larry Niven. Asked to derive those same equations for some other unstable system, they'd have been bored stiff. Sometimes those mistakes are just as important as the absolutely correct science facts.
  
  But if the cause of science is simply to go its merry way unquestioned by the muggles, that makes science fiction, even SF with bad science in it, even more important.  It's important that the questions get asked, even if they're the wrong questions. At least a discussion gets started.
  
  Then there's the question of what bad science is in this context. And who gets to define that? Is it "impossible" science? Science whose details are a little sketchy? Is it science that dead ended, like Steampunk, or failed science that transformed into legitimate science, like alchemy? Once you insist that science fiction stick strictly to the known facts, you've cut the heart out of it and you've cut the heart out of science's primary driver: curiosity. Should only scientists write science fiction about their fields? Oh, hell no! Save me from (most) scientists writing SF!
  
  One of the problems I noticed pretty early in my exploration of science fiction was that in "hard" science fiction, especially that written by people who were either scientists or extremely knowledgeable about science, the characters were often 2-D instead of 3-D. The writers were more interested in the hardware and tech than in creating strong characters. But you can't have a good story without good characters. Tech alone will not drive a storyline (one of the problems with the later Star Wars movies: they're too caught up in the special effects and props). And if you don't have a good story with good characters, you have few readers or viewers.


• Have you used science fiction as a starting point to talk about science? Is it easier to talk about people doing it right or getting it wrong?
  
  Absolutely. Not only here at CPP and on my own blogs, but in the classroom. For a couple of years, I taught a freshman composition course based on writing about science. We used one of Stephen Jay Gould's essay collections and a couple of science fiction novels each semester to both illustrate the difference between writing factually and writing about science and to ask questions about science itself.  One of the novels we used was Frank Herbert's The White Plague. Herbert did a lot of research about the availability of equipment and plausibility of developing deadly microbes in your basement if you had the knowledge, and was careful to be as correct as possible when describing the science and the construction of the underground lab. I still have my doubts about whether it would be possible for one person to construct a deadly microbe with his own resources in his basement, but my class swallowed it whole. The lesson I learned from this is that most people don't notice whether the science is wrong or right when it's a good story. They suspend disbelief, which is what writers want. What matters is that the plot seems plausible. What the book did do is start a conversation about research on biological warfare agents, long before the Sarin gas attack in the Japanese subway, or the anthrax scare over here. A number of students ended up writing research papers about it.
  
  I think worrying about "wrong science" or "bad science" in science fiction is something of a red herring, truthfully. I don't think it has that much influence, even on TV. As a literary genre, it's finally being taken more seriously than it ever has been before, but it's still not highly regarded or the type of entertainment that people take very seriously, unless they're already geeky.
  
  It's a kind of self-perpetuating cycle. When I recently tried to add "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler to the syllabus of a class I'm teaching, my supervisor's response was "Oh, take that out; the students don't like it and don't understand it." I suspect one of the reasons they didn't like and it and didn't understand it was because so many academics don't teach it well, and don't like it themselves. Which is odd, because it's a story all about communication, as well as about neuroscience. But it's a typical response to science fiction, sadly.
  
  The audience for SF is largely self-selecting, and while we're pretty passionate about it, it's not until someone like Cormac McCarthy writes a post-apocalyptic novel like The Road, or Margaret Atwood writes a piece of feminist specfic like The Handmaid's Tale, that people pay attention to the genre. Gaming is changing some of that, as have shows like Firefly, Andromeda or Farscape, but I don't think the non-geeky public at large pays much attention to SF, or, sadly, to science. And it's the non-geeky public that science needs to reach most.


• Are there any specific science or science fiction blogs you would recommend to interested readers or writers?
  
  Science Fiction blogs:
  
  I highly recommend Feminist SF--The Blog! and the carnival associated with it. And of course, IO9, but everybody's going to say that. More feminist SF at Ambling Along the Aqueduct.  And there's Lablit.com, which has the same aim that the NAS's new Science and Entertainment Exchange (headed up by our own Jennifer Ouellette), to encourage the realistic depiction of science. And, well, Eat Our Brains. What else would you call a group blog by SF writers?
  
  Science blogs:
  
  I love Deep Sea News for the critters and politics; Thus Spake Zuska's take on gender issues in science; Beyond Stone and Bone because I'm a history/archaeology geek too; and Cosmic Variance keeps me up to date on the physics end of things. Both BLDGBLOG and Pruned have a lot more science in them than you would think at first glance. And Bruce Sterling's blog over at Wired.

heads will blog

Fans of BloggingHeads.TV can now watch my latest diavlog with Big Daddy Chad (Orzel) of Uncertain Principles. We talked about dancing like a monkey, True Lab Stories, why choosing a small teaching college doesn't mean you're a "failure" in the Ivory Tower hierarchy, what's wrong with Neal Stephenson's Anathem (i.e., confusing Many Worlds with the multiverse, per Chad), and whether Cosmic Variance has sold out to The Man by moving to Discover magazine, among other topics. We only had an hour, so we did not discuss the "ghost muons" of Fermilab (neither of us being high energy physicists, how much could we have said?), or the direct observation of a new planet (announced right in the middle of recording the diavlog), nor did we explore the burning question of What the Hell Was Going on With My Hair. (The simple answer: it was a Bad Hair Day. Static cling is nobody's friend.) Next time, I hope Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna, makes a cameo appearance.

We also talked about a new major development in my life that I haven't had a chance to blog about until now. It's jumping the gun by a few days, but since it came up on BloggingHeads: as of Monday, I'm the new program director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange (SEE), a fledgling initiative of the National Academy of Sciences to serve as a liaison between writers, producers, directors and so forth in Hollywood in need of technical expertise, and the scientists best able to provide that valuable input. I'll write more about it in the future, once we're fully underway, but here's a snippet from the "official" description of the program on the Website:

The portrayal of science – its practitioners, its methods, its effects – has often posed a challenge to the entertainment community. Though it has inspired some of the most intelligent and compelling storylines, science’s many complexities have confounded even the most talented writer, director, or producer, time and again pitting creative license against scientific authenticity and clarity.

Likewise, the scientific community has struggled to find an effective conduit through which it can communicate its story accurately and effectively. Though many of the world’s biggest problems require scientific solutions, finding a way to translate and depict scientific findings so that reach a wide audience has required a sounding board that has often been missing.

The Science & Entertainment Exchange bridges this gap and addresses the mutual need of the two communities by providing the credibility and the verisimilitude upon which quality entertainment depends – and which audiences have come to expect. Drawing on the deep knowledge of the scientific community, we can collaborate on narrative and visual solutions to a variety of problems while contributing directly to the creativity of the content in fresh and unexpected ways.

Regular readers know I have a long-standing interest in the intersection of science and popular culture, especially film and television. And now I have the opportunity to be involved with a program that I think has real potential to make a difference. There's never been a better time, given the plethora of prime-time TV shows with scientific content and themes. The biggest indicator of how strongly I believe in this, is my willingness to set aside a thriving freelance writing career that I spent 15 years building up, in order to embark on this new adventure. I'll still be blogging, of course -- with the obligatory disclaimer that anything appearing on the blogs is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the NAS or SEE -- and will finish writing the calculus book, but my primary focus for the foreseeable future will now be science and Hollywood. (Jen-Luc Piquant feels so fabulous by proxy.)

Let's face it: ragging on the depiction of science in film and TV is a time-honored tradition on the Interwebs. There's an entire Website devoted to Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, and io9 just put up a poll asking readers to vote on which technical inaccuracies in science fiction annoy them the most. "Nuking the fridge" has a pretty high ranking, as does, say, performing delicate brain surgery in the back of a speeding van, but my pet peeve is the way science is often treated like magic: voila! Science saves the day! It's a miracle! I think real science is so incredibly cool in and of itself, and often stranger than fiction, as evidenced by io9's new list of the best real-life science fictional inventions of 2008. You really don't need to make anything up, or extrapolate very far from the truth.

That said, I'm convinced that while the constant snark directed at science in movies and TV might be entertaining to those in the "geek clique," it is not, in the long run, constructive, or conducive to fostering change in how science is portrayed in Hollywood. It's easy to point fingers and toss off zingy crowd-pleasing one-liners; it's a lot more difficult to actually offer well-considered workable alternatives in a format that is easily accessible to those in the entertainment industry. It should be a "win-win" for both science and Hollywood in terms of fostering creative cooperation between the two groups. I think the Science and Entertainment Exchange has the right idea, and I'm delighted to have the chance to put the hypothesis to the test.

prime time science

[A note from your AWOL blogger: I got stuck with jury duty last week, plus, I am supposed to be working on the new book, ergo, blogging has been a bit infrequent of late. As penance, here's another monster post on a subject near and dear to my heart.]

For those with zero interest in the first presidential debate, Friday night's network lineup included a re-airing by CBS of its brand-new series The Mentalist. Like Phil Plait, who raved about it over at Bad Astronomy, I think this show is easily the most promising of fall's network debutantes, precisely because it overtly espouses what one might call the "rationalist mindset" -- and it does so via an especially dreamy (and sympathetic) mouthpiece: Aussie actor Simon Baker, who stars as Patrick Jane (a.k.a., "McSleuthy"), a former stage psychic turned police detective. (Jen-Luc Piquant sez: *swoon!*)

The pilot makes no bones about the fact that Jane's past "career" of "speaking to the dead" was a scam. He's just very observant and adept at reading people via their mannerisms, personal photographs and so forth, and was able to leverage this skill into a convincing act. He was pretty darned successful, too, until he made the mistake of insulting a serial killer during a TV appearance; the killer took revenge by murdering Jane's wife and daughter. Jane quit the psychic gig and became a detective, as well as a fervent antagonist of his former profession. And now he's the anti-Ghost Whisperer.

In one telling exchange, he coolly tells a gullible young policewoman who asks how he reacts when he meets "real" psychics, "There are no such things as psychics." She persists, arguing that her own sister has "the gift" and has been "right" about things she couldn't possibly have known. He counters by pointing out the combined phenomenon of selective memory and wishful thinking: people tend to remember the "right" guesses and forget the wrong ones, thereby shoring up their propensity to believe in psychic phenomena. Cognitive psychologists call this confirmation bias. It's a very real phenomenon, but you're certainly not going to hear about it on The Ghost Whisperer.

That makes The Mentalist a refreshing departure from what used to be the usual prime time fare. I use the past tense because The Mentalist isn't the only show on network and cable television that unapologetically espouses a pro-science rationalist worldview. My inner geek thrills to a mix of science, compelling narrative, strong characters, and good writing; there are so many series now with these elements that said inner geek is positively intoxicated by the sumptuous feast laid out before her: the C.S.I. franchise ("follow the evidence"), House, Bones, Numb3rs -- and those are just the ones with the best ratings.

Here's why I think this is significant. Networks aren't altruistic; they're out to make money by appealing broadly to their viewers (not that there's anything wrong with that), and the kinds of shows, therefore, that become breakout hits reflect the preferences of the general public. The fact that so many successful science-themed shows are resonating with viewers is an encouraging sign that there is a significant fraction of folks out there who are interested in science and at least willing to listen to a rationalist viewpoint. Science is not only perceived as marketable -- it is perceived as cool and hip. I won't go so far as to call this a cultural paradigm shift, but as someone who cares deeply about science, culture, and communication, I find the current trend heartening.

The USA Network, for example, offers Psych, a light-hearted comedic version of The Mentalist, in which a young, brash private detective passes himself off as a psychic to help the police solve cases -- using many of the same powers of observation and "tricks" employed by Patrick Jane. (The premise is that he does this to get around the legal technicality of not having a PI license.) Psych strategically airs new episodes during network "off seasons," when much TV fare consists of reruns, which has helped it garner a healthy audience -- plus, it's a terrific, entertaining show.

Hearts and Minds

Most of the other prime time science-y series are rolling out their season premieres. Bones was first out of the gate a couple of weeks ago with a two-hour episode that found Booth and Brennan in Merry Olde England, on the heels of an explosive finale in May in which a major character turned out to be in league with a serial killer. This surprising development played into one of the show's central themes: the search for balance between head and heart, thinking and feeling, brain and brawn, personified in the various cast members. For instance, Booth evolves from sneering at the "squints" and their academic, cloistered view of the world, to appreciating their expertise and single-minded devotion to uncovering the facts -- even if it means accepting that one of their own is the guilty party. Brennan, for her part, started out as a coldly analytical scientist who squelched her emotions (although not her sex drive), learning through her collaboration with Booth to cut less-brilliant folks a little slack, and that it's actually okay to be human and just a little bit vulnerable.

In that sense, Bones follows in the footsteps of C.S.I., whose main character, Gil Grissom, constantly exhorts his team to "follow the evidence," put their emotions aside and rationally assess the facts of the case. But even Grissom has had to face the head/heart conflict, first by letting down his walls to fall in love with team member Sarah Sidle, and -- in the explosive season finale -- by losing a beloved team member. The season premiere promises to be a doozy as everyone deals with the fallout from the shooting death of a major character. [I am trying very hard to avoid major spoilers, although the truth is out there on the Internets for those who wish to know more details.]

Monday night was the season premiere of last year's breakout sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, which proved to be something of a lightning rod for controversy when it debuted last year, at least within the physics community. (My own take in Symmetry magazine can be found here.) Normally, scientists content themselves with nitpicking various aspects of the science in movies and TV shows, but in this case, the science is largely correct, thanks to the efforts of technical consultant David Saltzberg, a physicist at UCLA. So most of the complaints about TBBT have been of the "negative stereotype" variety.

As I've said before, such criticisms might have an element of truth but they are entirely missing the point: these characters appeal to viewers. They are likable just the way they are, and that is a Good Thing for Physics. If the goal is to make physicists feel good about themselves, then okay, maybe this isn't the best approach. But if the goal is make physics and physicists more palatable to the general public and win their hearts and minds, these characters are fantastic ambassadors. I vote for the latter.

Granted, the pilot episode painted the characters with the broadest possible strokes, but as I predicted, those characters have evolved into far more complex versions.  It's no longer just about the nerdy physicist Leonard longing for the unobtainable pretty blonde, Penny. Turns out she might not be unobtainable. In Season 1, they became friends, as they learned to look past appearances, their own stereotypes, and the inevitable culture clashes. And in the season premiere, Penny and Leonard go on their first official date, with disastrous results. (C'mon, there's a long-standing tradition in TV to drag out the romantic suspense.)

They are now grappling with the unavoidable gaps in their respective educations, in an interesting role reversal from the first season. Penny confides in Sheldon (of all people) that she feels insecure about not even graduating from community college, worried that Leonard will grow bored with her because he's always dated women with PhDs. Once he finds out, Leonard blows it by handing her a brochure for college classes, thereby reinforcing this impression -- when he's really only trying to help address the issue. It's an entirely believable point of contention, and I'll be interested to see how it plays out.

Ambivalence Abounds

I was a hard-core fan of The X-Files, but I have mixed feelings about FOX's new series, Fringe. On the one hand, it's got a couple of great characters, most notably Walter Bishop, a brilliant scientist whose unethical (more accurately, criminal) experiments landed him in the loony bin for 15 years. He has a delightfully loony, macabre sense of humor, which balances out the sometimes over-heated plot lines. Much of the "science" goes well beyond speculative and slips into the realm of the silly and implausible, but this is the prerogative of science fiction, so one can't criticize that overmuch. On the other hand, it could be argued (and has been)  that the best science fiction is speculative but doesn't cross that critical boundary. Furthermore, for all his charm, Bishop is literally a "mad scientist," and several of the plots thus far have involved the fallout from his earlier research -- he's kind of cleaning up his own mess.

Among the converts to the show are the irreverent folks at io9; a recent post listed four reasons why they think it is the "most reassuring show," at least when it comes to science fiction on television. Reason #1: "Everything weird can be explained away," with science, no less. Perhaps, but that doesn't mean it's a convincing explanation. I was especially struck by Reason #2, which I suspect cuts to the core of my ambivalence about Fringe:

Science is Magic and Can Do Anything. Need to see the last thing a dead person saw before they died? Need to psychically project your own mind into a coma victim's? ... It's all possible, with science! Yes, science can make the dead walk again (literally, as long as you do it within six hours) and fulfill all of your wildest ambitions.... So now there's quite definitely nothing that we can't do if we just put our minds to it."

Uh, no. That is not what science is about; it's what science fiction is about. I love both, but let's not confuse the two. By all means, confess your love for Fringe; we all have our guilty TV pleasures. I recently confessed my affection for the highly uneven, yet strangely compelling short-lived series Witchblade (about as supernatural and non-scienc-y as you can get, and more than a little silly at times), and I wrote a whole book about physics in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. But I would never claim that science is like "magic."

Fringe isn't anti-science, but it's not pro-science either. It's far more ambivalent, and thus potentially more interesting, depending on how the show develops. I definitely don't find it "reassuring." A prior io9 post described the science depicted therein as "out of control and scary." In fact, writer/producer Jeff Pinker is on record saying that he thinks science "doesn't seem to have a goal anymore." Of the kind of research being done today, Pinker observes, "Some of it seems to be morally good and some of it seems to be morally a little bit careless. But anything that we can imagine be it good or bad, seems like the real world is already two steps ahead of our imagination." I'm reserving judgment on Fringe -- it has yet to win me over -- but the scientific community should be paying attention to Pinker's sentiments. I suspect they reflect the mixed feelings of lots of other people when it comes to the brave new world of science.

The World is not Magic

The io9 folks applaud Fringe for being the antithesis to Lost: "removing paranoia and showing that there's no such thing as a magical time-traveling island anyway.... After all, House can't do it all alone." Say what? Comparing Fringe to House? (Quoth Jen-Luc, that faux-gallic hothead: "Oh, no, they didn't!") Look, Fringe has its way-out-there sci-fi charms, and House is a clearing house for the most bizarre, rare medical conditions imaginable, but the two are apples and oranges in terms of their worldviews. A more apt comparison would be with Eureka: it has the same near-term futuristic, "Ooh, isn't science kooky and kinda scary" vibe to it -- and the same charming flashes of dark humor. (The Website Notcot has an amusing interview via Twitter with S.A.R.A.H., the "smart house" on Eureka, in which S.A.R.A.H. dishes on the selection of beers on her premises.)

House has far more in common with The Mentalist than with Fringe. In fact, it could be argued that Patrick Jane exists because Gregory House proved such a popular, compelling character -- despite being an unhappy, embittered atheist who likes to manipulate people and pops way too much Vicodin than is good for him. This understandably bothers some atheists, but as with The Big Bang Theory and physicists, if the audience doesn't love the character, the show simply doesn't work. Audiences love Greg House, precisely because he's so nastily outspoken, saying and doing things we often fantasize about ourselves (except in the real world, he would be so fired). Which means there are plenty of folks out there for whom his stark rationalism resonates.

One of my favorite episodes is "You Don't Want to Know," when a magician's heart stops mid-performance for no apparent reason, and he ends up under House's curmudgeonly care. House's first theory is the magician faked his illness because he's a hack who botched the trick. The magician counters by performing a trick House can't explain (even though he dabbles in a bit of sleight of hand himself, we discover).

The magician refuses to explain how he did it: "Oh, if I explain it becomes mundane, and you lose the actual magic." This prompts a typical House observation: "Magic is cool. Actual magic is oxymoronic. Might not even be oxy..." The magician claims that the fun is not knowing; for House, the fun is in knowing. He demonstrates by making a series of astute observations about the patient's diet, dental care, and sleep habits, then explains how he deduced these facts. "That was way cooler before you explained it," says the magician. "It was meaningless until I explained it," House retorts. The magician explains, "People come to my shows because they want a sense of wonder. They want to experience something that they can't explain." But once again, House isn't buying it: "If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder." Now that's a fantastic exchange that cuts to the heart of the Great Divide between scientific thinking and wanting the world to be magic.

Culture Clash

At least Fringe and its creators aren't openly hostile to science, unlike rising Hollywood player Mark Millar (Wanted and Kick-Ass), who recently penned the following screed on his message board, calling for a "jihad" on those involved with the Large Hadron Collider:

Am I the only person who thinks God Particle, possible Black Hole on the French/Swiss Border, Recreating the Big Bang, etc. are all phrases I only want to read in New Gods? ... These freaks genuinely risk ending the world!!! And for what? To see how the universe might have begun? Who gives a fuck? ... Get outta here, egg-head! I don't care about dark matter, dark energy or even other dimensions. Best-case scenario is we're sucked into a black hole, every atom in our body screaming as we die in a nanosecond. ... Europeans creep me out, but none more so than Euro-SCIENTISTS. I declare a Jihad on all these boffins who risk reality in the name of their curiosity. No wonder Pol Pot killed everyone with glasses.

I hope Mr. Millar managed to wipe all the spittle off his monitor after that sadly uninformed, xenophobic rant -- and then went back on his meds. He's pretty much Exhibit A for why we need some sort of long-term cultural exchange program between the scientific community and Hollywood. Granted, Millar and his ilk are a lost cause -- you can't reach out to teh crazy, they'll bite your hand off and then claim you attacked them first -- but I think the creators of Fringe, for example, would benefit from interacting with the real-world scientists who are actually conducting this "scary" research they find so interesting and yet unnerving. We fear the unfamiliar, so obviously, one of the best ways to allay people's fears is to better acquaint them with how science is actually done. And the Fringe guys could return the favor by enlightening scientists to how TV shows are actually made. Much of the criticism leveled at how science is depicted in Hollywood is a bit off the mark because scientists have no clue about the inner workings of television, or the criteria for what makes a hit series.

When I invited Saltzberg and TV writer David Grae to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara for a workshop on science in Hollywood (streaming video is here), one of the most illuminating moments for the assembled scientists came when Grae laid out the standard framework for a one-hour TV drama. Metaphorical light bulbs went off all over the room: "Oh, there's an underlying theory!" Like physicists, TV writers have their models, and their work has to fit within those boundaries. For his part, Grae was enthralled by the KITP atmosphere of open inquiry, and excitedly took a picture with his cell phone when he saw two physicists arguing vehemently and scribbling equations on a chalkboard: "Oh my god, they really do that!" See? We need more cultural exchange.

For Saltzberg and his pals at The Big Bang Theory, it really is like a cultural exchange. Saltzberg brings a visitor to the set every week during taping of a new episode -- he calls it "the geek of the week." The Spousal Unit and I were featured geeky guests last year, and got to hang out with the cast and writers (a fun, creative bunch) afterward. It was a wee bit tentative on all sides, and we didn't all instantly become best friends, but as a first step in bridging the gap between two very different worlds, it served a useful purpose.

Saltzberg also influenced the set and wardrobe staff as the series was being developed, inviting them out to his lab at UCLA so they could see actual scientists working in their native habitat. You'll notice that Leonard mostly dresses like a typical physics grad student (a wee bit exaggerated for comic effect), and there is nary a white lab coat in sight. The wardrobe mistress came back from the visit and told her underlings, "No lab coats! I didn't see a single lab coat while I was there!" Set designers were astonished to find the equipment old and out of date, with researchers blocking laser beams with grubby business cards, and they designed their sets accordingly. As a result, when Leonard asks out female physicist Leslie in the lab one day, it looks far closer to an actual physics lab than one might expect from a TV sitcom. And Leslie is preparing a meal using liquid nitrogen. What grad student hasn't done that, given the chance?

Many scientists I encounter seem to incorrectly think that the scientific details are all that matter. While those are important for lending verisimilitude -- particularly for procedural dramas like C.S.I., Bones, or House -- network television isn't an educational vehicle. Hollywood's purpose is not to teach viewers about science, and TV shows are not documentaries, and should not be held to the same exacting standards -- although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, provided both sides are willing to compromise a little. Good television is ultimately about igniting the imagination with a truly kick ass story. If we can enhance the appreciation of science (and by extension, scientists) in the bargain, so much the better, but that is not the industry objective.

True story: a year ago, I met one of the writers for Bones at Grae's birthday party. He was initially pleased to find that I really was a fan of the show, and not just being polite. (I knew all the characters and plot twists -- a dead giveaway.) But when I mentioned I was a science writer, he suddenly became guarded and defensive: "Yeah, yeah, I know, we take liberties with the science, DNA test results never come back that fast...." I reassured him that I wasn't one of those sorts who compulsively nitpick the writers to death, and he relaxed a little. But the exchange saddened me a little. Here was this very smart, really nice guy who loves his work and finds the scientific elements fascinating. Yet his personal encounters with actual scientists have been unilaterally negative and alienating -- so much so, that he physically recoiled upon first learning about my science writing credentials. That has to change, or the cultural gap will just continue to widen.

Don't Blow Up Your TV

One last point: Scientists (and frankly, academics in general) need to get over their disdain for television. Honestly, I am so bored already with listening to folks insist they "never watch TV," or only watch NOVA (the Discovery Channel is just a bit too populist for them), etc. -- as if this somehow makes them morally superior to the rest of the unwashed lumpenproletariat. In reality, by ignoring such a hugely influential popular medium, you are cutting yourself off from a highly significant aspect of American (and, increasingly, global) culture. And that makes it far more difficult for working scientists to connect with the public at large.

Writing for The Smart Set, Morgan Meis (whom I know through 3 Quarks Daily) offers an apology of sorts to novelist/essayist David Foster Wallace, who recently committed suicide. Meis cites an essay by Wallace called "E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction" (it can be found in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), in which the author grapples with his ambivalence towards TV and popular culture. Per Meis:

"Bravely, he begins the essay talking about television. He likes television. Goddamit, we all like television. He will not join the ranks of those who simply dismiss the boob tube as nothing more than that. ... For Wallace, the central problem is not whether television is good or bad. Television, he wants to say, is constitutive of who we are, and that which is constitutive of who we are is beyond simple value judgments -- it has become the necessary ground from which we proceed.

"You can't be a writer, you can't write about how the people around you experience the world, without taking into account that simple but massively important fact. You have to deal with television and other aspects of American popular culture, truly deal with it. And yet, Wallace doesn't want to be reduced to television. He is confused about just how much he should accept it and how much he should reject it. He is trying to find the right balance in the midst of his confusion."

It's okay to be ambivalent about television, provided one doesn't ignore it. It's time for the scientific community to start grappling with that ambivalence and make its peace -- because there has never been a more auspicious time to reach out to the fine folks in Hollywood. Science-themed shows are a hot commodity. Scientific expertise is thus suddenly in demand, provided it's the right kind of expertise: a true collaboration, with no hint of condescension, and mutual respect between the two worlds. It's not an easy thing to achieve, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. The long-term benefit of doing so is influencing millions of TV viewers, assuring them, in the words of Gregory House: "Trust me -- it's way cooler to know."

[Comic gakked from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, an excellent site!]

the toad and the pufferfish

One day in 1980, a man claiming to be called Clairvius Narcisse showed up in a rural Haitian village. This came as something of a surprise to the villagers, since Narcisse had supposedly died in 1962, and was subsequently buried. The new arrival claiming to be Narcisse said he'd been turned into a zombie after his "death," forced with other zombie slaves to work on a sugar plantation at the behest of his "master," a voodoo priest. He claimed his own brother had put the plan in motion, since the two had quarreled over land ownership. The brother had since died, so the sudden reappearance of Narcisse to claim the inheritance raised a few suspicions, to say the least. Yet the newcomer knew certain facts of the dead man's life that only Narcisse himself, it seemed, could have known. He claimed he'd been drugged into submission, and when the master died, and the drugs wore off, he regained his memory and sanity.

Narcisse was a rare case, but not the first such occurrence of purported zombification. In 1937, novelist and scholar Zora Neale Hurston was researching Haitian folklore when she came across the case of Felicia Felix Mentor, who died and was buried in 1907 at the age of 29, and was rumored to have been zombified. Hurston heard rumors that zombies in Haiti were created using strong drugs, but couldn't verify them. Still, she predicted, "If science ever gets to the bottom of voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony."

Enter Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who made a pretty strong case for the pharmacological basis of zombification in his 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, which I devoured (figuratively) in high school in a single night. It was that fascinating. (Also, as a child, zombies scared the hell out of me, along with werewolves. Somehow, reading a science-y book placing it within the context of reality dissipated any lingering anxiety on that score. Davis also penned a more scholarly tome, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, in 1988.)  He investigated the strange case of Narcisse, and in the process somehow gained unprecedented access to the secret voodoo rituals involved in creating zombies. (This also raised some ethical questions, since he apparently observed the desecration of graves.) But Davis did discover that voodoo priests relied on complex powders in their rituals. The ingredients differed according to region, but of seven of the eight samples he managed to collect contained pufferfish, a marine toad, a hyla tree frog, and human remains. The first two are the most pertinent, since both animals secrete powerful neurotoxins.

Neurotoxins are chemicals that change the way the neurons in the brain function, either by inhibiting the release of certain neurotransmitters or enhancing them to harmful levels. There's around 100 billion neurons in the brain, controlling muscle contractions (motor neurons) by carrying electrochemical signals from the central nervous system to the muscles, or conveying sensory signals from the outer parts of the body to the central nervous system (sensory neurons). Interfere with this complex communication system, and you can interrupt speech, thought processes, motor function, even respiration. That's why neurotoxins provide such a useful hunting mechanism for creatures like the blue-ringed octopus, Australian paralysis tick, Japanese pufferfish and numerous snake and spider species.

The blue-ringed octopus' approach to feeding is especially gruesome: its venom is maculotoxin, which paralyzes but doesn't kill the prey, so said prey is fully conscious (inasmuch as one would consider the creature to have consciousness) as it is being eaten. We hope the octopus is, at the very least, quick, rather than choosing to slowly savor its meal. The good news, for the prey at least, is that the paralysis spreads rather quickly to the respiratory system and causes it to fail. Usually, human victims don't survive unless they receive oxygen immediately.

Maculotoxin is the venomous form of tetrodoxin, the neurotoxin of choice for the pufferfish (a.k.a., fugu), a gourmet delicacy because daredevil diners really like the tingling sensation the remaining traces of poison produce on the lips and tongue. Despite a stringent certification requirement for chefs to prepare fugu, a few people die each year from consuming it. Because accidents happen.

And here's where the zombies come in, because tetrodoxin is a key ingredient in Haitian zombification rituals. The other key ingredient is toxins produced by the sea toad (bufo Marinas) as a defense mechanism. Davis' book details the process by which the zombie poison is created. The toad is placed in a jar with a stinging sea worm and the ensuing conflict causes the toad to produce a lot of toxin, which is mixed with a bit of tetrodoxin from the pufferfish. A voodoo priest (boko) will poison a victim, causing him or her to become catatonic, and often mistaken for dead. Said victim is buried, the drug wears off after a few days, and the boko can exhume the "zombie." Ah, but how to get the victim to do the boko's bidding? Apparently, this is achieved via regular doses of datura stramonium (more commonly known as jimson weed), an extract of the thorn apple, which makes the victim docile and biddable.

Davis' theories are a bit controversial, however. True, when he applied his collected samples of the powders to the shaved skin of rats and a rhesus monkey, they became lethargic and immobile, but eventually recovered completely, and critics question whether these experiments were sufficiently controlled. (A few even believe Davis' research was fraudulent.) While the ritualistic practices he documents were further confirmed by British researchers in the 1990s, they didn't find any examples of real zombies. Usually, people labeled as such were suffering from mental diseases, such as catatonic schizophrenia or an organic brain disorder. In other cases, it was as simple as mistaken identity. In 2005, there were some sensational tabloid headlines about University of Pittsburgh scientists creating "zombie dogs," but in truth, the work was in cryogenics and suspended animation: the scientists successfully revived dogs who had been in suspended animation after three hours had passed, and two-thirds of the subjects suffered no brain damage. Still, they weren't "zombies." (And no, suspended animation and resuscitation for humans isn't even close to becoming a reality just yet. Suspending the animus can be done; it's the resuscitation part that's tricky.)

But there does seem be a living example of zombification in Nature. Via Zooilogix, we learned last week that scientists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel have figured out how a certain species of wasp (the emerald cockroach wasp/jewel wasp, or Ampulex compressa) managed to turn poor, innocent cockroaches into their willing "zombie slaves." Lots of venomous creatures stun their victims before devouring them, but this particular species of wasp will sting its roach-y prey, so that the prey is able to walk, but can't do so of its own accord.

The predator-wasp literally has to grab the roach's antenna and lead it back to the wasp nest, much like leading a dog on a leash. There, instead of eating the roach, the wasp lays an egg on its belly, Eventually a larva hatches and devours the still-docile roach. It's not exactly laboring in the fields, but it is a handy solution to the problem of providing an ultra-convenient food to one's offspring. Nor is the roach-corpse wasted about the eating: the larva weaves its cocoon inside the corpse, eventually bursting out as a full-grown Ampulex compressa, eager to go out into the world and create its own zombie-roach horde. 

Okay, but what's going on, exactly, to achieve such a subtle control of the victim's behavior? BGU researcher Frederic Liberstat and his colleagues knew the secret lay in "a rich cocktail of toxins" that the wasp injects into its victims. And they also knew that the wasp makes two injections: once to subdue them, and then again delivering a more precise sting directly into the roach-prey's brain -- specifically, a section called the protocerebrum, which controls the escape reflex. The stinger has sensors along its side to guide it to the appropriate brain section.

The Ben Gurion scientists theorized that the venom blocks a key chemical messenger in the brain called octopamine. This chemical is what makes insects alert, motivates the to move and perform physical tasks. It serves a similar purpose as noradrenaline, a chemical messenger involved in the "flight or fight" response.

To test that hypothesis, they managed to replicate the effect by injecting cockroaches in the lab, and even figured out how to "un-zombify" the bugs by following up with an antidote injection. Many a New Yorker plagued by roach infestation might be tempted to buy a roach trap that makes use of the wasp's venom -- except then they'd just have a bunch of lazy zombie roaches lying about the apartment, having to led around by the antenna all the time. We'd need to figure out how to get one to behave like a bellwether, leading his catatonic cronies out into the street much like the Pied Piper led all the rats (and, later, the children) out of Hamelin.

Ironically, the same day I read about the zombie roaches, reminding me of the unfortunate Narcisse and the first time I read The Serpent and the Rainbow, I also noticed a post on BLDGBLOG entitled  "The Husband Who Would Not Die." A man named John Darwin went out canoeing some five years ago, and never returned, although eventually authorities recovered the wrecked canoe and a paddle. Five years later, John Darwin returned -- as a zombie! Um, okay, not really. Nor was it amnesia, kidnapping or anything else that makes for a good potboiler. Turns out he just didn't want to pay his bills, so he faked his own death and spent the next five years living in a secret passageway that connected his old master bedroom to another room next door. He and his wife had purchased adjoining properties 15 months before his disappearance. The entrance was through a closet, hidden by a wardrobe. Perhaps Darwin was a Narnia fan. At any rate, being dead wasn't all it cracked up to be, so he turned himself into the authorities. They've since sold those properties, no doubt to pay those long-overdue bills. We are so jealous of the new owner. There's nothing cooler than having your own secret passageway.

The upshot is, apart from the victims of the jewel wasp, though, it seems our fascination with zombies owes more to legend and superstition than actual science. (As a Monday morning diversion, take this fun little zombie quiz at Discovery Channel Website; you should score pretty well, provided you've absorbed the science in this post, and have seen the major zombie movies.) But just in case, the How Stuff Works page on zombies offers a few helpful hints on surviving a zombie attack along with classic mistakes to avoid -- like entering a zombie-infested building, leaving potential weapons about for zombies to wield, or locking yourself in a cellar without adequate supplies. I know I felt better after hearing I could probably outrun a zombie... provided I wasn't surrounded.

REPOST: wonder woman and the invisible man

[Original posting at Cocktail Party Physics is on hiatus, due to a temporary absence due to honeymoon. In the interim, we are offering a few leftovers. A few minutes in the microwave and you'll hardly notice they weren't made fresh this morning. For today's offering, we were reminded of one of our earliest posts in March 2006 on plasmons, by this recent item in Physics News Update describing a plasmon version of Thomas Young's seminal two-slit experiment to investigate whether light is a particle or wave.]

True confession time: I idolized Wonder Woman growing up. Strong female role models were in short supply for die-hard tomboys like me. It's been said that nine-tenths of the law of chivalry is the desire to have all the fun, and that certainly seemed to be the case to my young-yet-jaundiced eye. So I thrilled to the sight of live-action Lynda Carter defying the girlie stereotypes and kicking bad guy butt on TV, and rejoiced when the character later emerged as a proud member of the Justice League. For many little girls like me, Wonder Woman was the epitome of female empowerment in the pre-Buffy era.

(Needless to say, ultra-fangrrrl Jen-Luc Piquant is beside herself with excitement that none other than Joss Whedon -- known to her simply as "Joss the Great," the creative genius behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel -- will be writing and directing a new Wonder Woman movie.)

Wonder Woman had all the usual super-powers -- uber-strength, the ability to fly -- plus an uncanny knack for accessorizing her skimpy All-American outfit with all manner of nifty gadgets, including the lasso of truth, unbreakable silver bracelets, and a razor-sharp golden tiara that doubled as a deadly weapon. She could also create invisible vehicles at will, most notably her signature invisible plane. In fact, she could stretch any such invisible vehicle to construct a complete transparent fortress, dubbed the Wonderdome.

Sometimes science fiction intrudes on the real world in surprising ways. It turns out that there is a bizarre physical phenomenon (electrical waves that travel along the surface of some metals) that could one day lead to a kind of "cloaking" technology capable of making airplanes "invisible" -- at least to radar detection systems.

When light strikes a metallic surface -- silver, gold, or whatever strange metallic material is native to Wonder Woman's Amazonian homeland and used to make her spiffy plane -- it generates electron waves, called plasmons. Last year scientists at the University of Pennsylvania discovered they could potentially use plasmon coatings as a cloaking device to render objects invisible by creating a kind of "shell" around the object. Yes -- just like Wonder Woman's plane. It's risky to indulge in unfounded scientific conjecture, especially about a fictional heroine, but it seems like the Amazon princess could generate those same electron waves at will. Now that's what I call a super power.

Plasmon waves limit light scattering off an object because they resonate at the same frequency as the light striking them -- the two are literally on the same wavelength, so they cancel each other out. This makes the object in question very difficult to detect, since we see things in our environment by detecting the light that bounces off those objects.

Sadly, we won't be riding around in Wonder Woman's invisible jet any time soon, in part because the cloaking effect only works with wavelengths of light that are about the same size as whatever object one is trying to render "invisible." Anything bigger would have to be visible because it would disturb the light, causing it to scatter. An airplane is many, many times larger than the range of wavelengths for visible light, so it would still be visible even with a plasmon cloaking shell, although it might be undetectable to radar systems, which rely on radio waves with much longer wavelengths. Shape is equally critical: to date the effect has only been observed in small, perfectly cylindrical or spherical shapes. Only really tiny objects that cancel out scattering from visible light would be rendered "invisible" to the naked human eye.

Metaphorically speaking, however, plasmons seem to have rendered one scientist invisible, at least in terms of broad recognition: Robert W. Wood, a physics professor at Johns Hopkins University who first observed so-called "field emissions" -- charged particles emitted from a conductor in an electric field -- in 1897. (This effect became the basis for field-emission microscopes, used to study atomic structure.) Wood was also the first person to unwittingly record the energy lost as heat by plasmons skimming along the surface of metals in 1902, although he couldn't explain the effect at the time. It took 40 years for Italian physicist Ugo Fano to provide an explanation: metals are not perfect conductors, as had been previously believed. Fano found that a conducting surface could guide light as a 2D surface wave (which is why plasmons are also known as two-dimensional light). Those waves absorb energy, which explains Wood's anomalous observations of energy loss in the light reflected from metallic surfaces.

So technically, Wood "discovered" plasmons; he just didn't realize it. And while he was internationally known at the time for his many achievements in optics and spectroscopy, nowadays, his name is hardly a household word, even within the physics community. He's more of a historical curiosity, a footnote to the many scientific papers now being published on plasmon-related research; Wikipedia only has him listed as a "stub." Personally, I blame those mischievous little plasmons. They have cunningly shielded him from the recognition he so richly deserves. To me, Wood is physics' Invisible Man.

That's a shame, because he certainly had an interesting and varied career. Black lights are sometimes known as "Wood lights" in his honor, since he is considered the father of infrared and ultraviolet photography. Using a glass filter that would transmit only UV light, he photographed the moon, demonstrating that the darkest area in UV light is the Aristarchus Plateau. The Wood crater on the far side of the moon is named after him. He was the first to publish infrared photographs of landscapes in 1910, which were later exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society. And in 1919 he published the first ultraviolet photographs of the human body. 

Unlike most modern physicists, Wood's research involved almost no mathematics; he thought math was boring, and preferred to focus on pictures and showy demonstrations during his class lectures, sometimes involving small explosions or flames. He never earned a bona fide PhD, and funded his early post-undergraduate studies by working part-time as a bottle-washer. His well-known fondness for pranks paid off around 1906, when he famously debunked Henri Blondlot's claim to have discovered a new form of invisible radiation, "N-rays."  (This was just a few years after Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays, so the public was inclined to be a bit more credulous about the existence of invisible radiation.) Blondlot claimed the N-rays could only be detected with his own machine. Wood secretly removed the inner workings of the machine -- specifically, a prism -- and when Blondlot repeated the demonstration, he still claimed to see his N-rays, unaware his "detector" no longer worked. Wood was highly amused; one assumes Blondlot was not.

As if those accomplishments weren't enough, Wood also invented the method for thawing frozen street water mains by passing an electric current them; the frosted glass bulb; even a method for detecting forged documents that was very cutting edge in his day. He experimented with aerial photography by attaching a camera to a kite. And during a trip to Germany in August 1896, Wood photographed a few test flights by famed aviator Otto Lilienthal -- literally one week before Lilienthal plunged to his death during another test flight when his glider stalled out. He even published a children's book of nonsense verse in 1907, How To Tell the Birds from the Flowers.

Plasmons are back in the science news this year, thanks to several papers presented at the APS March meeting in Baltimore last week on the emerging field of plasmonics. To date, it's proven difficult to combine photonic components -- such as fiber optic cables -- with electronic components like wires and transistors because of their mismatched capabilities and size scales. Photonic components can carry a lot of data -- witness the explosion in broadband data transmission rates -- but are bulkier than electronic components, which in turn can carry less data. The Holy Grail is to be able to combine the best features of both onto a single chip. Plasmons might be the key to achieving it, since they operate at optical frequencies -- typically 100,000 times greater than the frequency of even the most cutting-edge microprocessors -- and the higher the frequency of the wave, the more information you can transport over it. Yet they take up much less space because their wavelengths are much smaller than the light used to create them.

This makes plasmons extremely promising for a wide range of applications -- not just to make things "invisible," but also to enable scientists to see fine details that were previously undetectable. For instance, a team of scientists at the University of Maryland are developing a two-dimensional plasmon microscope, ideal for imaging living cells, that could operate much like a point-and-shoot camera and reveal much more detail that currently available with existing imaging techniques. Other researchers are exploiting plasmons to create "super lenses," relying on tiny nanoparticles to amplify and focus the light shining on a given sample. Scientists at the University of Texas, for example, have built a "super lens" and used it in a device to take pictures just below the surface of thin material substrates.

And at Rice University, researchers have created rice-shaped particles of gold and iron oxide, called "nanorice," that they hope to attach to the probe tips of scanning microscopes to map out the surfaces of biological cells. To my eye, the Rice University nanoparticles (pictured below) look as much like worms or maggots as grains of rice, but "nanomaggots" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, and also lacks the handy institutional tie-in. As group leader Naomi Halas says, "How often do you get the chance to name a nanoparticle after your university?"

So people are talking about plasmons a lot these days. What they aren't talking about is Robert W. Wood, the physicist who first observed plasmons over a century ago. It reminds me of the classic film, "My Man Godfrey," in which spoiled Bright Young Things in socialite New York go on a scavenger hunt and must bring back a "forgotten man." Carole Lombard's character happens upon a vagrant named Godfrey (played by the incomparable William Powell) and ends up employing him as a butler. He turns out to be a bit more than he appears. Wood, too, is an unjustly forgotten man. Perhaps, as plasmons begin to shed light on the fine details of living cells, some of that light will spill over and illuminate the once-living man who first noticed their existence.

a cabinet of curiosities

I've long held an arguably unhealthy fascination with the 17th century proliferation of so-called "cabinets of curiosities," a.k.a. wunderkammers ("wonder-rooms"). Unhealthy in the eyes of various pals over the years who didn't share my somewhat morbid interests, that is. Historically, the cabinets were pretty much random collections of strange-yet-fascinating stuff, combining collected specimens from natural history (it must be said that sometimes these were faked, but heck, it's all in fun), archaeological artifacts, religious or historical relics, the odd work of art, and any other quirky item that caught the cabinet-creator's fancy. Those doubting Thomases aside, lots of people share my fascination with idiosyncratic collections.

Initially, the term "cabinet" referred to entire rooms, not large pieces of furniture, so such cabinets are actually the precursors to the modern concept of museums. That early eccentric eclecticism is still evident in such places as the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, for example, or Seattle's Olde Curiosity Shop -- one of my favorite childhood destinations. Given my love for that hodge-podge approach, and given the fact that I'm still (still!) traveling, and finding it difficult to write coherent blog posts, I thought I'd assemble my own bloggy version of a cabinet of curiosities (or, as Jen-Luc Piquant uncharitably calls it, "lazy linkage"). Besides, I've collected all manner of fascinating little links over the last couple of weeks -- "Ooh! Shiny!" -- and this lets me clear the fodder files a bit by highlighting the following octet of Cyber-curiosities (like the historical cabinets, an odd mix of fact and fiction).

1. There's one question that keeps getting asked every time I show up for a talk or reading for the Buffyverse book. (Other than, "So, exactly what kind of hallucinogens were you taking when you decided to write this book?") I thought I'd lay the matter to rest once and for all here: I am not writing a book on the physics of Firefly The Series So Cool We Must Not Speak Its Name (TSSCWMNSIN). I know, I know, it's a nifty idea, and I'm definitely a fan of Firefly TSSCWMNSIN. But there's already an incredibly useful online Wiki devoted to the series, including the scientific and technological aspects. Really. Here's a little discussion arguing that the series honors, for the most part, Einstein's light speed limit. There's also extensive discussions of the weaponry ("Mmmm, weapons," Jen-Luc murmurs appreciatively), and diagrams of the various types of aircraft/spaceships. Someone give these folks a book deal already! They've pretty much done all the preliminary research.

2. It's been a good week for pop culture physics, actually. Chad over at Uncertain Principles points us to the blog of Terence Tao, the young mathematician who won the Fields Medal last year, but is still hip enough to (a) have a blog, and (b) write killer posts like this one, providing his take on quantum theory, illustrated via Tomb Raider. (Lara Croft's impressive mammaries would be another fascinating subject for a future post on anti-gravity.)

3. As for my beloved Buffyverse, allow me to direct your attention to a podcast of a panel discussion at the 2007 South by Southwest Festival, exploring the real-world possibilities of building a "pleasurebot." (Hat tip to the folks at SuicideBots, bringing you daily doses of "hot bot on bot action!") Notably absent from the proceedings was Warren Meers, head of The Trio in Buffy Season 6, who built April the perfect girlfriend, and the much beloved and mourned Buffybot, with her latent Spike adoration and fondness for silly knock-knock jokes. Jen-Luc shrewdly points out that Warren's absence was probably due to the fact that (a) he was flayed alive in the season finale, and (b) he's, um, entirely fictional.

4. Since we're on the Buffy bandwagon, whenever I give a talk someplace that has A/V capabilities, I love to open by showing the pivotal scene in the Emmy-nominated Season 4 episode, "Hush," in which Buffy's scream causes the monsters' heads to explode. I use it as an example of forced oscillation resonance -- which most of us would recognize instantly as what's happening in those old Memorex commercials when Ella Fitzgerald shatters a crystal wine glass with her voice. But I was surprised to learn this week that there's also a medical phenomenon called "Exploding Head Syndrome." Great name, but a bit misleading for literal-minded types like me. The patients' heads don't actually explode; the condition causes them to awaken frequently in the middle of night by the sound of a very loud bang -- painless, but weird, in that it seems to occur only in the sufferer's head. And it's still something of a mystery, since neither patient cited in a 1988 Lancet study had anything physically wrong with them at the time. Hindsight is golden: it would have been fun to include mention of that in the Buffyverse book. If I had only known....

5. Another inadvertent omission: a discussion of the physics behind the crossbow, a common weapon used by Slayers and their Watchers throughout Buffyverse history. (Confession: I covet my very own wooden crossbow -- illogically, because really, there's no place in Los Angeles where it would be safe enough to fire one. And I doubt Future Spouse is keen on having one around the home.) It's a fascinating cross between a bow-and-arrow and a rifle (it has a trigger and stock). While it operates on similar mechanical principles as the former, it's easier for a smaller person (like Buffy) to use, because it doesn't require nearly as much upper body strength. Once the string has been drawn taut, you can hold it in place indefinitely by cocking the weapon, storing all that potential energy until you need to shoot the pointy wooden stake at an approaching vampire.

6. If hardcore Whedon fans are puzzling over what to get the Series-Creator-Who-Has-Everything for his birthday (there's still a few months left for shopping, people, at least according to the IMDB!), perhaps they can pool their resources and bid on this handy-dandy 19th century Vampire Hunting Kit, offered by a Swedish dude named Thomas Sandberg, who's created his own online Cabinet of Scientific Curiosities. (Behold, the tenuous connection!) These things don't come cheap: a similar kit apparently sold at Sotheby's a couple of years ago for something on the order of $18,000. For that price, you get a revolver with silver bullets, garlic powder, a silver dagger, an ivory cross, a mirror, a wooden stake, and a bottle of Professor Ernst Blomberg's Vampire Serum (Jen-Luc suspects it's common holy water), all stored in a handsome mahogany box. Did we mention the helpful pamphlet (circa 1851) on how to hunt and kill those pesky bloodsuckers?

7. Both the exploding head syndrome and the vampire hunting kit items came to my attention via The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, whose entire reason for being is to "perpetuate the spirit and sensibilities of the late Athanasius Kircher. Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible." The Society held its inaugural meeting just this January at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. (There's a "highlights reel" of those inaugural proceedings at the Society's Website, for those who are interested.)

Kircher was indeed a fascinating historical personage, who has only quite recently begun to be unearthed from relative obscurity. Not only does this humble 17th century Jesuit scholar/priest now have his very own eponymous society, but in 2002, New York University sponsored an entire symposium in his honor. There's also a permanent exhibit on Kircher at the Los Angeles-based Museum of Jurassic Technology -- very much in the spirit of a cabinet of curiosities.

Why do people love Kircher so much? His scientific reputation was a bit sketchy, in that he had a tendency to blend "traditional Biblical historicism and the emerging secular scientific theory of knowledge." For instance, while he published on magnetism, astronomy, optics, archaeology and linguistics (including Egyptian hieroglyphics), he also wrote treatises on the Tower of Babel and Noah's Ark. Sure, he conducted scientifically sound experiments , including one that essentially disproved Johannes Kepler's speculation that the sun was a giant magnet whose rotation around its axis caused the earth and planets to stay in their orbits. But he also took what he learned from that investigation and used it to invent a "magnetic oracle," a divination device that he dubbed "magnetic hydromancy."

Still, one certainly can't doubt the man's passion for scientific inquiry, nor his boundless curiosity about how the world works. Even while tending to the sick when the bubonic plague hit Rome in 1656, he still took time to observe micro-organisms under a microscope in hopes of finding a cure. He didn't find one, but he did advance the germ theory of disease that was way ahead of the medical orthodoxy of his day. Fans of Charles Babbage, take note: Kircher came up with his own machine for answering mathematical problems, although it was far from perfect, in that it required memorizing long poems in Latin in order to perform the most elementary functions, according to Michael John Gorman of Stanford University, one of the emerging scholars who are studying this fascinating personage. Fortunately there was also a cheat sheet for those with faulty memories: an 850-page instruction manual that makes the average Microsoft User's Manual seem like a model of concise clarity by comparison.

And what an adventurous life the man had -- a regular Indiana Jones of the 1600s. He skirted death on numerous occasions, beginning with a boyhood leg injury that turned gangrenous -- which he claimed, was miraculously healed by the Virgin Mary when he visited one of her shrines while at seminary. (She also threw in healing of a herniated disc for no extra charge.) He was shipwrecked on an island while traveling to Austria, and was nearly hung by overly-ardent Protestant cavalrymen on another of his many travels. Just before Adolph, the Protestant king of Sweden, invaded Franconia and Wurzburg, Kircher fled his teaching post at a college in the latter town and eventually landed in Rome. For his last great adventure, he traveled to southern Italy, Sicily and Malta, where he witnessed the eruption of Aetna and Stromboli, and even had himself lowered into the active crater at Vesuvius. Lowered... himself... into... an... active... volcano. The A-Man had some serious cojones. Naturally, the experience reminded him of eternal damnation:

"The whole area was lit up by the fires, and the glowing sulphur and bitumen produced a intolerable vapor. It was just like hell, only lacking the demons to complete the picture."

Perhaps realizing he'd never top that experience, Kircher soon retired to a quieter life of scholarly contemplation, but he was just as prolific in his writing as his wandering, producing 11 full-length books in 20 years. Oh yes, he also established his own museum of strange artifacts (including a stuffed aardvark and an automaton) in Rome, one of the earliest recorded cabinets of curiosities. He died in 1680, and we're delighted that, more than 400 years later, he's finally getting the recognition he deserves. Athanasius Kircher -- don't let the sissy first name fool you, he was a manly man of science, and just enough of a mystic to keep things interesting.

8. Finally, I spent most of yesterday en route from Los Angeles to Chicago, where I'm appearing tonight at the Women and Children First Bookstore. (Chicago residents, feel free to stop by! It starts at 7:30 PM.) As such, I missed a couple of wonderfully quirky occasions. First, it was Pi Day, celebrating that most irrational of numbers -- usually by eating pie (duh). Second, it was Albert Einstein's birthday, which I'd planned on officially making an annual "Talk Like a Physicist" Day. Alas, I was remiss in following up on that. But there were so many other birthday wishes for Albert floating about the blogosphere, that I didn't worry too much about my dereliction of duty; with or without my birthday wishes, Al was definitely feeling the love. There's always next year. And in case you missed it, as one final curiosity, let me direct you to BuzzSkyline's most excellent poem celebrating Einstein's "miracle year" in 1905. Happy belated birthday, Al! At least I posted in time for the Ides of March, bane of Julius Caesar.

the people that science forgot

Margaret Wertheim is my new personal hero. She's the author of Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars, among other things, and she gave a terrific lunchtime talk today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting here in San Francisco, calling for some radical changes in existing strategies for communicating science (all in a charming Australian accent). It's a familiar, well-worn issue, but Wertheim has a take that resonates at the same frequency as my own thoughts on bringing science to a much broader audience.  Ergo, she is a true Sister in Solidarity, and I really must get around to reading the aforementioned book, which has been languishing on my "To Read" shelf for the last six months. (No slight to Wertheim -- I've just been too busy to read much of anything of late.)

Specifically, Wertheim maintains that much of the focus in scientific communication is on the transmitter (scientists and public information officers, for example), but the question of who is actually receiving this information tends to be ignored. Hence the title of her talk: "Who is science writing for?" If the numbers are to be believed, science writing is predominantly for prosperous, well-educated, white males over 40 with healthy incomes who already have a solid foundation in science. That didn't come as a great shock to me. What was a shock was just how disproportionate the readership numbers really are for the top eight science magazines in the country.

Wertheim took the trouble to gather the actual circulation numbers and readership demographics from those leading science magazines (which carefully track such things because those numbers impact their advertising revenue): Popular Science, Scientific American, Discover, Wired, Natural History, Science News, Astronomy, and Science. (SEED is a relative newcomer to the market, and Wertheim's data is from 2002.) Taken together, these publications reach about 21 million Americans every year. Seventy-eight percent of them are men; 21.8% are women. Median ages range from 41 to 49. The high end of that range belongs to Scientific American, which is actually very good news for them, since it wasn't so long ago that their median readers' age was 62. (No doubt there are some grumpy old-timers  still out there complaining about the overhaul of the magazine to target a younger demographic.) The audience demographic numbers for radio and TV science are less readily available, but Wertheim asserts that the same trends are evident there as well.

Arguably, 21 million people reading about science on a regular basis is nothing to sneeze at, but the gender divide is nonetheless distressing -- even more so when one considers that the top eight leading women's magazines combined reach as many as 70 million readers (one assumes most of those are women). Cultural gender stereotypes and social conditioning once again rear their ugly heads. So Wertheim set out to reach those readers, writing a regular science and technology column for Vogue Australia, something she describes as "one of the hardest things I've ever done." It required capturing and holding the readers' attention -- no small feat when the competition is a shocking photo of Britney Spears' newly shaved head -- as well as explaining the science science in the simplest possible terms while using no jargon, and doing it all in 900 words or less.

I feel her pain, particularly since she has experienced the same kind of criticism frequently lobbed at my two books: that the science is simplified far too much, making it inaccurate, potentially misleading, and downright insulting to the reader's intelligence. In fact, one retired scientist sent in a 21-page letter detailing every instance in Black Bodies and Quantum Cats where he perceived there to be a misleading or inaccurate or incomplete statement -- including the Preface and Acknowledgements. (You heard me: he claimed to have found errors in the acknowledgments. Jen-Luc Piquant wonders why he didn't just write his own book in the six months it took to compile his list of my alleged writerly sins.) This might be because I lack a science degree, and am quite open about my former English major background; I might as well just plaster a "Kick Me" sign on my back. But Wertheim holds degrees in both math and physics. This still didn't save her from being bawled out by a prominent scientist for eliding over what he felt was a crucial point in an article she'd written in The New York Times. Imagine what he would have said about the pieces she wrote for women's magazines. (I can't believe she convinced Vogue Australia to run such a column in the first place -- a truly impressive achievement.) 

Invariably, these criticisms come from  older white males with strong backgrounds in science, and they object the most strenuously to simplification of their particular area of preferred knowledge or expertise (where they clearly have a lot invested emotionally). Again, there's nothing surprising about this. That's the traditional demographic for popular science books, you see; and it's also the predominant demographic for the hard sciences, like physics. But those critics completely miss the point, because they're operating in an outdated paradigm. What about all those potential readers who are interested in science but, to cite Wertheim's example, couldn't get past Chapter 1 of A Brief History of Time? Who is writing for them?

These are the people that science writing forgot, but if we're truly serious about communicating science to a general audience, we've got to bring it down to their level. They won't come to us -- I know tons of highly intelligent, well-educated people, of both genders, who would rather be tortured than pick up a popular physics book -- so we must go to them. We need every weapon in the arsenal to do this. More importantly, says Wertheim, we can't just rattle off easy answers; we must provide the broader context, helping them to see why a particular question matters enough for scientists to spend countless hours and millions of dollars to find the answer. Amen. Speak it, sister!

I try to provide a broader context by weaving in pop culture, history, literature, sports, and personal anecdotes to illustrate science. In addition to her stories for women's magazines and mainstream publications like the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, Wertheim founded The Institute for Figuring. It doesn't have much of a physical home: she runs the operation out of her living room. But its activities are very real indeed, including publications, lectures, and museum exhibitions aimed at a broad general audience. For instance, they've sponsored public lectures on the physics of snowflakes (which I blogged about here), tiling and tesselation, knot theory, and the mathematics of paper folding.

The IFF also developed a museum exhibit on the Invention of Kindergarten. It was supposedly was invented by a 19th century German crystallographer -- I didn't catch his name -- around 1850, and featured activities such as paper cutting and folding to rigorously demonstrate abstract geometrical concepts with roots in crystallography. That German scientist believed kids were perfectly capable of understanding abstract ideas -- more so than adults. "Nowadays one must go to grad school to learn about abstraction," Wertheim noted. Not surprisingly, the children from that model, which dominated Europe until 1900, grew up to become innovative scientists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, as well as pioneers of the modern art movement, such as Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian.

Most recently, Wertheim has been working on a project to create a crocheted coral reef -- a miniature replica of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which is in serious danger of extinction within 30 years. It turns out that many marine creatures exhibit some form of hyperbolic structure, since they need to maximize their surface area in a very small volume. (A woman named Daina Taimina came up with the first crochet models for hyperbolic space, but nature has been doing it for hundreds of millions of years.) What I found interesting about Wertheims' description is how a slight change in the code for a basic hyperbolic structure will cause it to evolve into ever-more complex beautiful shapes. It's a point she's been able to communicate quite well to women of all ages who show up to learn how to crochet a sea anemone and pick up a bit of geometry in the process. Placing a daunting topic -- hyperbolic geometry -- into a familiar, non-threatening context, made the subject matter more palatable to them, and also helped them retain that new knowledge.

It's only fitting that I also managed to catch a clip of the forthcoming public television special on Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, based on the book of the same name by Tom Shachtman. "History continues to be alive in low-temperature physics," Shachtman insists, and the clip he showed illustrates that perfectly. Among other colorful personalities, we heard about Cornelius Drebbel, court magician to King James I, who attempted to air-condition Westminster Cathedral way back in 1620. But the focus of the clip was on James Dewar's race to become the first to liquefy hydrogen -- only to lose the race to liquefy helium to Dutch scientist Heiki Kamerlingh Onnes, who won the coveted Nobel Prize instead. I especially loved the re-enactments of Dewar's famous Royal Academy lectures on low-temperature physics.

The two-part film is slated to air on England's BBC this spring, and on PBS in the US later this year (June or November). Of course, if the audience follows the established statistical trends, only educated white males over 40 will be watching. But I'd like to think that there'll be plenty of women watching as well. Certainly I'll be tuning in....

fighting the forces

Anyone who doubts the existence of entropy has clearly never tried to stage a combined Buffyverse lecture/martial arts demonstration in midtown Manhattan on a Thursday evening. There must be some offshoot of that most fundamental law of physics that dictates an increasing degree of disorder the closer one gets to that midtown area. (Gratuitous side note: we specifically curse NYC's stupid new traffic rules that forbid both left AND right turns along most of 34th Street. A pox upon Mayor Bloomberg whoever is responsible for this.) This in turn greatly lessens how much "work" can be done -- in this case, how much progress can be made in what would normally be a simple task: unloading a bunch of wrestling mats and weaponry at the CUNY Graduate Center. We eventually prevailed, but only by bringing in an enormous infusion of extra energy in the form of a couple of dedicated -- and strong -- guys from my dojo (thanks Jordan and Dave!). The folks who run CUNY's fantastic Science and the Arts program fight off this powerful, constantly encroaching entropy on a daily basis to bring the NYC populace all kinds of fascinating, fun science-related events. I  bow my head in deference to their tireless outreach efforts, because just pulling off a single event completely wiped me out.

Last night's event was the culmination of almost a year of discussion and planning. Following up on the great time we had showcasing martial arts physics last summer as part of CUNY's First-Ever Amazing Science Street Fair, I put together a lecture based on one of the chapters of my new book, The Physics of the Buffyverse, which details some of the underlying basic physics principles of the most common martial arts techniques seen in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel. Sure, I showed a few clips of fight scenes from the shows -- always a crowd-pleasing approach in pop-culture physics -- but there's really no substitute for live-action violence. So several instructors and students from my former Brooklyn dojo showed up (voluntarily!) to help me demonstrate punches, spinning kicks, breakfalls, fighting stances, and a few crowd-pleasing judo throws, under the watchful eye of Sensei Jordan Dos Santos, who coordinated that aspect of the event. The crowds at both shows were terrific, very engaged, asked thoughtful, probing questions afterwards, and a couple brave souls even attempted a basic hip throw. And oh yeah, we sold a few books, too, because I have no shame. And a mortgage. (Jen-Luc Piquant extends her most gracious "Merci beaucoups" to everyone who bought copies, as it helps her maintain her pixelated perfection.)

So we fought entropy and won... temporarily. I'm sure disorder is creeping back towards the Graduate Center even as I type, because entropy always wins in the end. Let's face it, the laws of physics can be a bit of a buzzkill at times: just think of all the nifty things we could do without all those annoying little insurmountable constraints imposed by entropy. Or energy conservation. Or gravity. On the other hand, scientists continually amaze me with the ingenious ways they find to work around those fundamental constraints, time and time again. Most modern technology -- including the infamous "Moore's Law" in the semiconductor industry, which has yet to reach a fundamental limit, despite decades of warnings -- is the result of scientists refusing to give up in the face of tough obstacles. They don't break the laws of physics, mind you; they work within those "boundary conditions" to find loopholes and come up with clever ways to exploit them.

One has to strike a very fine balance between recognizing what the physical realities are in science and working within those inherent limitations, and refusing to accept the status quo in favor of pursuing innovation and potentially revolutionary breakthroughs. Where would science be if its practitioners weren't constantly pushing the envelope? Yet not all things are possible; those limitations are real. The trick is knowing where you can push, and where you must simply accept reality as it is.

Believe it or not, this has a tie-in to Buffy... and to me. As a woman in the martial arts who trained for seven years in a predominantly male dojo, I had to deal with some very real physical limitations on a daily basis. Invariably, I found myself paired with (or against) someone bigger and stronger -- sometimes MUCH bigger and stronger -- and I literally got my ass kicked more times than I care to remember. I had to learn those inescapable realities and work within my own physical constraints. But there was still room for innovation, for pushing the envelope here and there along the road to becoming a better fighter. And there were some "realities" I found I didn't have to blithely accept, in the form of cultural stereotypes about what girls can, and cannot, do.

There's a popular saying in martial arts circles: "All things being equal, the bigger stronger person will win." As I pointed out in my lecture last night, there's some scientific merit to this statement, because mass is a major part of the equation when it comes to the physics of the fight. Good technique can help a little; I quickly learned lots of little "tricks" to involve even a small amount of additional body mass in my techniques to make them more effective, and for two years prior to my black belt test, I packed on an extra 30 pounds of (mostly) muscle. Not only did I have more weight to throw around, but I could take the hits much better, with a lower risk of injury -- a key factor to consider when you're training full-contact four nights a week.

But sooner or later, we all hit the limit of what our particular "system" (body type) allows us to do. And if we accept that statement about the bigger, stronger person being predetermined to win a fight, why bother training at all? Why not just give up? After all, there will always be somebody bigger and stronger, somewhere, no matter what your size -- unless you're, say, Andre the Giant. That's where Buffy comes in. She's tiny -- very little body mass -- and while the premise of the series is that she has super powers ("Slayer strength") in the form of extra mystical energy (I would like some of that, please!), this only gives her an advantage over mere mortals. The demons she fights have their own super powers, and are usually bigger and stronger. And yet over and over again, she wins.

She wins in part because, well, it's a TV show, and she's the title character. You can't have Buffy the Vampire Slayer without Buffy (although this didn't keep her from dying... twice). But there's more to it than that. She's also trained hard in the martial arts, perfecting her techniques, learning how to get the most bang for her buck, given what she has to work with. But she also realizes, thanks to her practical combat experience, that all things are never equal. She knows she always has a chance -- not necessarily a good chance, but a chance, nonetheless.

See, that statement about bigger and stronger opponents is true, as far as it goes, but it assumes a carefully controlled environment that severely restricts the variables. Specifically, it considers how much force an opponent can  generate to be the sole means of determining the outcome of a fight. That just isn't the case. It's undeniably a major factor: I can say, from personal experience, that being kicked into a wall and bouncing off again instills tremendous respect for the advantages of superior size. However, I prefer a less defeatist attitude. By all means, we must acknowledge that yes, size matters, but  we also need to recognize that it's far from being the whole story. The "real world" (and, clearly, the Buffyverse) is a messy, uncontrolled environment, and there are all kinds of tiny variables that can change the outcome of a fight in a split second. A fight will not play out in reality the way it would in a laboratory simulation.

There's another reason I prefer my version of the "size matters" argument: it's almost always cited by male martial artists as the primary reason why women aren't as "good" at fighting as the men. I was fortunate to train with some terrific guys who always assured me I could succeed, without ever sugar-coating the reality of superior size and strength. One of my instructors memorably told me, early on, "It's not enough to be as good as the men. You have to be better." On the surface, this would seem to be a double standard, but that really wasn't his point. He was a smaller guy. He had to be technically better than the big guys as well. What he was saying was this: the real world isn't fair. There are some undeniable physical realities that a woman (or smaller man) must contend with in a dojo environment, and when size and strength are lacking, superior technique must step in to make up the difference. The deck is stacked to favor size and strength. That doesn't mean a smaller person can't beat a larger one out on the "da street." (Here's just two things missing in the dojo: genuine surprise, and very real pain.)

This should resonate not just with women in the martial arts, but women in physics, or women in NASCAR, or women in any traditionally male-dominated field, because, frankly, the same kind of "innate ability" argument is used in every such arena as a rationale for why more women can't or don't succeed in those fields. Even the success stories are generally viewed with winking condescension.

One of my (many) favorite scenes in Buffy occurs in Season 5, where she is forced to perform a series of pointless tests by the Watcher's Council -- from which she parted ways two seasons earlier -- in exchange for crucial information about her nemesis du jour, the exiled hellgod named Glory. None of the tests favor Buffy's particular, unique strengths; rather, they are designed around an established, traditional criteria dating back at least to medieval times. (It's also criteria that, historically, tend to get most Slayers killed before reaching the age of 20). She gamely jumps through hoop after hoop, with the Council members frowning disapprovingly at her supposedly sub-par performance, causing her to question her own abilities and judgment, finding any means necessary to take away her sense of power so she can be manipulated and controlled. Buffy figures it out, eventually. And she takes her power back. The fundamental situation she faces hasn't changed, just how she chooses to react to it. And that shift in attitude makes all the difference. (Historical note: famed martial artist Bruce Lee had one leg that was shorter than the other. He was told he'd probably never be a great kung fu practitioner because of his physical "disability," but instead of accepting that short-sighted verdict, he designed his own style, jeet kune do, which capitalized on his strengths. Bruce also took back his power.)

That's the real lesson I find in Buffy and the physics of the martial arts, beyond the basic scientific principles. There will always be someone more than willing to tell you how much you suck, why you can't do well at something you love and wish to pursue, why you aren't fit to share the same air as more exalted beings blessed with that elusive "innate ability." They'll try to make you doubt yourself, because some people just can't stand it when others excel. Some people are just mean-spirited that way. That doesn't make them right.  It's important to understand the stark realities of what you face, but if you really, really want to succeed -- whether it's in the martial arts, the sciences, or any other field that ignites your passion, don't let a few naysayers douse your enthusiasm. That's when you set about working within those constraints, addressing those shortcomings that are within your power to change, and figuring out how your particular strengths can work to your advantage. Find your inner Slayer and take back your power.

Yeah, I know. Easier said than done. But that's what Buffy would do. And it's what our greatest scientists do, day after day, pushing the boundaries of what is possible a little bit at a time.