Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Critiquing the Astrophysics of the Big Bang Theory Song
July 9th, 2009
The Bing Bang Theory Theme Song – Bare Naked Ladies
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait…
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!
“Since the dawn of man” is really not that long,
As every galaxy was formed in less time than it takes to sing this song.
A fraction of a second and the elements were made.
The bipeds stood up straight,
The dinosaurs all met their fate,
They tried to leap but they were late
And they all died (they froze their asses off)
The oceans and pangea
See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya
Set in motion by the same big bang!
It all started with the big BANG!
It’s expanding ever outward but one day
It will cause the stars to go the other way,
Collapsing ever inward, we won’t be here, it wont be hurt
Our best and brightest figure that it’ll make an even bigger bang!
Australopithecus would really have been sick of us
Debating out while here they’re catching deer (we’re catching viruses)
Religion or astronomy, Encarta, Deuteronomy
It all started with the big bang!
Music and mythology, Einstein and astrology
It all started with the big bang!
It all started with the big BANG!
Now you all get to see what a great big dork I am as I critique the astrophysics.
“Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started.”
Yeah, that’s pretty good science there. I like it. But then…
“Since the dawn of man” is really not that long,
As every galaxy was formed in less time than it takes to sing this song.”
Eh, what??? Galaxies took at least hundreds of millions of years to collapse from the “hot dense state” to anything looking like a galaxy. And many took longer. Do they just mean the stuff that makes up galaxies?
A fraction of a second and the elements were made.
Eh, what??? Big bang nucleosythesis took about ten minutes, set primarily by the timescales for which the universe was hot and dense enough to drive fusion reactions, and the half life of free neutrons, which is 890 seconds (about 15 minutes). And that made the hydrogen, helium, deuterium, lithium, and not much else. For the majority of elements that make up you and me, millions of years cooking in stars were required (as Sagan said, we’re all “star stuff”).
And then there’s this whole stanza:
It’s expanding ever outward but one day
It will cause the stars to go the other way,
Collapsing ever inward, we won’t be here, it wont be hurt
Our best and brightest figure that it’ll make an even bigger bang!
These lines are about cosmologies with a closed universe that has multiple cycles of big bangs. While that seemed plausible in the past, current evidence seems to rule most of them out, although people continue to propose versions of this idea, all theoretical, and quite untested. This is not a model I’d sing about if writing something today, and I sure didn’t for my story “The Point.”
Otherwise I like the song pretty well.
Below is a fan-made video for the whole song, with lyrics:
TV version:
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