Phil Plait: 7 Ways a Black Hole Can Kill You (Launch Pad)
July 19th, 2009
Phil gives a great, funny talk:
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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Video of Mike Brotherton Speaking About Light (Launch Pad)
July 17th, 2009
I do about 10-12 hours of lecture during Launch Pad. Here’s one of them. Enjoy!
Video of Joe Haldeman Speaking at Launch Pad
July 16th, 2009
Joe Haldeman speaks at Launch Pad day one:
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:
The Big Bang Theory on TV: A Step Forward or Backward?
July 1st, 2009
The issue of the TV comedy, The Big Bang Theory, came up in comments earlier this week.
Pros: the show is funny and gets its science and geek culture very correct. Here’s a scene about the problem with teleportation:
Cons: for the most part, the characters are stereotypical nerds who lack social skills, dress oddly, and have trouble getting dates, let alone getting laid. Here’s a scene with the one guy who is portrayed as having a small clue and does get laid sometimes:
I have degrees in engineering, physics, and astronomy, and have hung out in the nerdiest of places doing the nerdiest of things (at the level of the show, if not nerdier). I’ve also gone to trendy clubs in big cities, played drinking games with students (but no keg stands for at least four years), and ran marathons. I know some really attractive social geeks of both sexes who can blend in with lawyers, baseball fans, or the roadies at a Marilyn Manson concert.
There’s truth in stereotypes, however. My roommate in grad school once got set up to meet a girl for a workout date. An athletic date, how could that go wrong? Well, when he got to the gym, she took one look at him and asked, “Math or physics?” He had been a physics major, but had switched to math…
So, what do you think about the show?
Loading ...Some Thoughts on Haldeman’s Accidental Time Machine
June 29th, 2009
I recently finished reading Joe Haldeman’s short novel The Accidental Time Machine and wanted to share some thoughts about it while my memory is fresh.
First, there is a quality to this book I adored that makes me want to recommend it here. The main character, Matt, is a physics graduate student struggling a bit with life, love, and a career, as many of us do. But the thing is, he’s really a physics graduate student when he approaches problems. So few books feel like real science or real scientists inhabit them, but aside from a few quirks of character, this part felt real. Matt is a young scientist, not a bad caricature of a young scientist, which is more often seen in books and movies.
Going back to Haldeman’s classic The Forever War, he’s always done a great job creating interesting futures, and this book is no different. Always surprising and thought provoking. One of the more interesting futures involves Boston after Jesus’s second coming, and how exactly an atheist Jewish grad student might respond to that (and be responded to).
Haldeman’s style is clean and easy, making the pages almost turn themselves. In my opinion, a little bit too easy and fast at times, and some events flew by too quickly and needed more verbiage and description than given.
This story also suffers the problem of a lot of time travel stories that the ending is bit deus ex machina, although Haldeman is more subtle and less formulaic on this issue than most. I don’t think some readers will be satisfied, however. If you loved The Hemingway Hoax, you won’t have a problem with this book, but if you did you might want to skip it.
Again, a strong recommendation if only for an engaging story about a young scientist that actually gets the feel of being a scientist right. There aren’t enough of these out there (Timescape comes to mind), and I’d like there to be a lot more.
What Harry Potter Didn’t Study
June 28th, 2009
Does it bother anyone else that essentially all of Harry Potter’s education at Hogwarts was about rote memorization of spell casting and totally divorced from “muggle” education?
I mean, the wizarding world need not worry about all the same things that the muggle world worries about, but come on. You’ve still got money, so math, economics, business, etc., are all still important topics. And we have evidence that even with the textbooks being about recipes, experimentation with potions and such leads to better results, so science and the scientific method should be taught, too. Astronomy in the Harry Potter books didn’t seem to be anything scientific.
And how about reading, writing, and all the other things that get taught in middle school and high school? If we let history be replaced with magical history, okay, that still leaves the human condition as a topic that Hogwart’s students skip.
Now, if I were writing the Harry Potter books, I’m not sure I’d do anything different from J. K. Rowling, but their enormous popularity among YA readers disturbs me a little when I think about this topic. How much of their popularity is about changing the subjects of high school into something different and easier? I mean, I think this stuff is going to seem easier to readers. I think I could cast spells better than I could figure out what it means to be human in the face of great tragedy (e.g., what you’re ideally confronted with in English class from time to time), or what is the meaning of art.
So I submit that all the wizards and witches coming out of schools like Hogwarts are miserably educated people without much to their background or experience than the ability to use a wand. Unfortunately that sounds like muggles who just use technology without understanding it, and use Cliff Notes to pass exams.
It’s not good.
If Harry Potter couldn’t cast spells, who would hire him except for McDonald’s? And who would find him an educated, interesting person?
Ten of the Dumbest Things in Science Fiction Film
June 25th, 2009
I’ve been involved in a few discussions recently where some instances of really dumb things in science fiction movies came up. I’m not talking science here so much (my usual issue to harp on) as just things that are so astoundingly dumb you got to wonder what people were thinking, or if they were thinking at all.
TV has more dumb crap than movies, but you have to start somewhere, and films are generally a lot more memorable and more commonly shared.
Here’s my short list of losers, but I’m sure you can suggest some other ones. Prepare to groan, laugh, or cry…I’ve dug up some relevant videos for them, but it wasn’t always easy. Be warned that there are spoilers below, but personally I’d like to be warned about the mega dumb in order to avoid it.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. God lives in the center of the galaxy beyond a great barrier that no one can get through, and that no one has ever gotten through (so how do they know he’s there?), except that the Enterprise can fly there in a few hours and zip in and out without any problems. (Wish the crew of Voyager knew it wouldn’t take them decades to travel a fraction of that distance.) God, where to start? The whole thing was just so very, very dumb.
The Star Wars prequels introducing the midi-chlorians as essentially “sexually transmitted disease” carrying the Force (thanks, Brian, for that way of looking at things). There was a bunch of other dumb stuff, too, from trying to make the Force sort of scientific, and then making Darth Vader the product of a virgin birth. Oh, and Jar Jar Binks. C3PO was the comic relief in the original movies, but that wasn’t enough. Or how about the offensive racial stereotypes pasted onto the aliens? Still, I pick the midi-chlorians.
Superman flies so fast, the spin of the Earth reverses and so does time, so he can rescue Lois Lane from the nuclear-explosion-triggered earthquake. WTF? I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And in the second Superman movie, he and the Phantom Zone criminals start pulling powers out of their asses like those light beams out of their hands. (OK, not their asses, technically.) It’s not science, it’s not even fantasy (which would be self-consistent in most cases). It’s just dumb, almost like “then he woke up and she wasn’t dead.” And unfortunately, the Superman movies got more and more dumb with additional sequels.
Han shot first in Star Wars! We’ve already got dumb stuff in the creature cantina scene with Han’s line about the Falcon making the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs, something that Lucas didn’t fix when he revised the movie. You don’t just go back and change characters like this and think it’s smart. It’s like da Vinci rising from his grave to put a little frown on the Mona Lisa. It’s dumb! Actually, when I watch the new one, it’s like someone scribbled all over the Mona Lisa. Not that Star Wars was ever the Mona Lisa, but still…
In the movie Signs, these sophisticated and evil alien assholes fly to Earth, a planet rich in life and oceans and rain, and attack the humans with hand to hand combat. If that weren’t dumb enough, water, WATER, is like acid to them. Oh, God, yes, about the only substance scientists universally think is likely necessary for life. Dumb!
In Independence Day, the scientist uses his Mac to upload a virus to help beat the aliens. WTF? Computers in movies may as well be totally fucking magic. Any computer genius can hack a password in a minute with a gun to his head while getting a blowjob (Swordfish), so this fan-altered ending to ID4 may as well have been what happened.
The dragons of Reign of Fire eat ash (lots of chemical energy there), destroy almost all land-based life on the surface of the world periodically yet leave no evidence of this, and have only a single male to fertilize the eggs for the entire species. I mean, these fuckers hibernate, too, right? For next to forever, apparently. The dragons were so cool, fighting them was so cool, but the entire concept as developed was incredibly dumb!
Basing a serious movie like Mission to Mars on the “Face on Mars” is an idea that should have been laughed out of production. But noooooo…and we’re all the dumber for it.
The plot of The Core. Bonus points for applying “this is your brain on drugs” type visuals to “this is the Earth without an E-M field.” There’s a lot of dumb in here. Microwaves go right through magnetic fields, but not through atmosphere very well, for instance.
Got to finish up with my favorite kick ball, Armageddon. Any scene in the whole movie is dumb, I suggest. I’ve ranted about this one before. More than once. It’s not only the science that is dumb, however, but a lot of the little complicating details that make no sense. I mean, these are fucking morons running around in space with 12 days of training coming down with “space dementia” and attacking each other and being general goofs. Sorry if I’m being too repetitive with this, but I can’t make a “dumbest” list without including this entire movie. Anyway, here’s a ten-minute version of the film that has cut out most of the movie (and hence most of the errors) and should be the official version from now on.
I’m sure there are a lot of equally worthy matches to these, unfortunately. Somehow there’s always room for dumb stuff in movies, even when people are spending $100 million.
The Path to Science Fiction
June 24th, 2009
My parents set up my first science fiction experience. They called me into the living room when I was about six (1974 give or take) and told me that they had a surprise for me. They then turned on the TV and there was Star Trek.
Little did my parents, or myself, realize what happened on that day.
My first real science fiction novel was Philip Jose Farmer’s A Private Cosmos, in second grade, which I’ve written about before when Farmer recently passed from this world.
Third grade was the year of Star Wars. I was there opening night with my family. Standing in a long line waiting to get in, we were handed “May the Force Be With You” buttons. We had no clue what the hell that meant. A very innocent time.
In sixth grade, I was reading the Dune trilogy (it was still only a triolgy then I believe). I did an oral book report about Dune Messiah and was probably the only one in the room besides the teacher who knew the word “concubine.” Science fiction is great for the vocabulary. Unfortunately, the teacher suggested previewing my future book reports.
I started writing my own science fiction in grade school, with my first real effort in sixth grade. Pretty terrible stuff. I was ripping off John Carter of Mars and worse, ripoffs of John Carter of Mars. We all start somewhere.
There was Battlestar Galactica, and V, and Logan’s Run, and a hundred other movies, TV shows, and books. I remember reading Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of Alien in bed and it scarring the crap out of me (about 5th or 6th grade). I never got enough, and still don’t.
There was my Farmer phase, my Frank Herbert phase, my Heinlein phase, my Asimov phase, my Piers Anthony phase (I admit it!), my Anne McCaffery phase, my Michael Moorcock phase, my Pohl phase, my Poul Anderson phase, my David Brin phase, my Orson Scott Card phase, and my Simmons phase. I read books I probably now don’t even remember they ever existed.
My first Worldcon was in New Orleans in 1988, but I didn’t know how to do a con. I went from panel to panel chasing my heroes, trying to catch a glimpse of them all, and met almost no one.
There was always a little writing here and there. A story for an English class. A dungeon for a D&D game. Just a project of my own. I wrote stories and made my first submissions in college. I only got serious about writing after finishing my classes in graduate school, and Clarion West in 1994 was the flood gates opening for me, when I felt like I became part of the community instead of just an outside observer.
At a Worldcon party in 1995, Fred Pohl stumbled and fell next to me, and I helped him stand up. My god! In such a small way, that was totally cool.
After my first novel came out in 2003, I attended a convention in San Diego and got invited out to dinner with Gregory Benford, David Brin, David Gerrold, and Vernor Vinge, and treated as the new guy on the team. They told me they didn’t say anything nearly as important or interesting as James Blish, Harlan Ellison, or any of those old greats they hung out with when they were first breaking in. Well, I found the whole thing very gracious and intensely interesting.
Now sometimes it’s strange. I have friends who broke in with me, more or less, and who have won awards and are much read. We talk about this thing or that thing, bitch about this publisher or that obnoxious writer, and sometimes the magic seems, if not gone, a little less bright.
But to tell the truth, whenever I catch a glimpse of an episode of Star Trek from the original series, the magic is back. I’m six again, and the universe is very, very big.
I hope that never changes, because that’s really what science fiction is all about.