Ten Science Fiction Novelists I Really Like
July 26th, 2008
I sometimes feel the need to balance criticism with praise. Just not necessarily at the same time or for the same things. Some people reading my blog for the first time because they saw my post about Michael Crichton may think I’m a Comic Book Guy type who hates, or is at least critical of, well, everything.
I write science fiction because I love science fiction. I knew it from the moment I read my very first science fiction novel, Philip Jose Farmer’s A Private Cosmos. I had gotten the book as a birthday gift from a friend when I turned eight and had no idea I’d just fallen into this wondrous rabbit hole.
So, here are a dozen sf novelists currently working who have done work I like a lot within recent years. I’ll say a few words about each and recommend a novel or two that I’ve read an enjoyed. I was just going to do five, then six, then ten, and decided to stop there. It’s a completely biased list, and a little arbitrary in some ways. All I’m guaranteeing for each is that they’ve got scientific sensibilities, write entertaining and thoughtful books, and are still active writers. In no particular order…
Jack McDevitt writes stories set in the future, in space, with aliens. I like that combination when competently done, and McDevitt is more than competent. I very much liked The Engines of God:
Joe Haldeman has a degree in physics and is an amateur astronomer. Since The Forever War, he’s continued to experiment and write different sorts of books from both a literary and idea-driven perspective. Recently I enjoyed Camouflage:
Robert Sawyer is exceptionally skilled at providing very clear explanations of complex science issues. He also turned some ideas around in surprising ways, as in Calculating God:
Alastair Reynolds is the other sf novelist out there with a PhD in astronomy, and while some of the speculative elements he features are way out there, he’s got a solid science background. I recommend his first, Revelation Space:
Eric Nylund is an old friend of mine I’ve known since the mid 1990s when we met at Clarion West, where I first became a fan of his work. He made the New York Times bestseller list with his last Halo tie-in book, Ghosts of Onyx, which I liked very much. I wanted to recommend a different pair of books, though, featuring his own original universe. Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered:
Nancy Kress was one of my Clarion instructors way back when, and before the workshop I read her excellent novel Beggars in Spain. More recently I really enjoyed her Probability trilogy, Probability Moon, Probability Space, and Probability Sun:
David Brin’s Startide Rising was one of the best sf novels I read in college, and I was thrilled to get a cover blurb from him for my first novel Star Dragon. A few years ago he jumped publishers to Tor and wound up with my editor (and that probably added six months to her response time to me, too), and I recall asking her if the new book was good. That’s a relative term in some senses, and what I was really asking and what she responded to was whether or not the book was good at the Startide Rising type level. She said it was, and I agreed after reading it. Kiln People:
Vernor Vinge, one of the inventors/popularizers of the Singularity concept, has written some really great books. I’m not a huge fan of some concepts he uses, like his “zones of thought” or the “on-off star” which seem more like fantasy than science to me, but no one does aliens the way he does. Fantastic. Check out A Fire Upon The Deep, and A Deepness in the Sky:
Robert Charles Wilson is a really fine writer with a gift for character and intriguing situations. I haven’t gotten to Spin yet, but I really liked Blind Lake and The Chronoliths:
Greg Egan is a hard sf writer’s hard sf writer. Sometimes I have problems following his way-out but well-researched ideas that often push the very boundaries of our understanding. I recommend Quarantine:
I could easily do another list or two of sf writers I love, and maybe I will in the future. What saddens me is that there isn’t enough time to read as much as I like. I usually read 20-25 books a year, comprising a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and sometimes the choices are driven by research I need to do for a project. If you’re annoyed that I didn’t mention someone you think is every bit as good or better than those on this list, chances are I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet. John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War is on my to-read shelf, for instance.
Permalink | Tags: Science Fiction | 9 Comments »
Why Do We Crave Stories?
July 25th, 2008
Earlier this week, award-winning sf writer Nancy Kress (who is attending Launch Pad next week, by the way) wrote a short post about “the point of fiction.” I agree with her that a primary point is indeed “to decide what matters.” Last night, I was starting to reread Robert McKee’s excellent book, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, and in the first chapter he writes:
Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics: How should a human being lead his life?
…
Traditionally humankind has sought the answer to Aristotle’s question from the four wisdoms — philosophy, science, religion, art — taking insight from each to bolt together a livable meaning. But today who reads Hegel or Kant without an exam to pass? Science, once the great explicator, garbles life with complexity and perplexity. Who can listen without cynicism to economists, sociologists, politicians? Religion, for many, has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy. As our faith in traditional ideologies diminishes, we turn to the source we still believe in: the art of story.
I think that’s very insightful and why story matters so much. People have always gossiped to keep track of everyone’s social status and their own, a very useful skill that conveys evolutionary advantage, even if it’s tawdry, but we also listen with fascination to stories about people we don’t know or that don’t even exist.
We learn, vicariously, from stories about what’s important and how we should live our lives, discovering what works and what doesn’t and how people perceive each other. There is a relationship between fiction and society that runs deep. It’s why there are forbidden stories that people reject, and how the stories and society symbiotically reflect each other. It’s why I have a problem with Michael Crichton whose work gives the public unconscious guidelines for how to view science and scientists, with suspicion and fear, even though science provides our greatest hope to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
Being able to learn from the successes and failures of other people had to provide significant evolutionary advantages, hence our need for story today. It’s a fundamental way we educate ourselves about life and our world, for better or worse.
Writers have a responsibility here. I’m not suggesting that we write polemics. I am suggesting we endeavor to write what’s true about people, society, and the world at large. If we do that, we honor what underlies the story cravings, and we provide a valuable contribution. Anything else is abuse.
Addendum:
I just saw this Scientific American article about how story trumps science, for many people for much vital information, because of the evolutionary history of our species as I discussed above. We didn’t evolve with science. We evolved with story. We must learn how to let science trump story when it can, as science is more reliable. Story, however, will always continue to serve an important role given the limitations of science.
Permalink | Tags: Science, Science Fiction, writing | 1 Comment »
Free Audio Short Story in MP3 Format: The Point
July 25th, 2008
I’m ahead of the curve on science topics, usually, a bit behind on technology. At least compared to some of my very tech-savvy friends whom I talk with. I’m starting to catch up, a little. As an experiment, I have made an MP3 format recording of myself reading one of my shorter short stories, “The Point,” written for a University event last year. The reading is about ten minutes long. I used an Xbox 360 Rockband microphone (!) and the software Audacity. I used some noise reduction and normalization on the final version of the file. It’s not quite as professional as I’d like, but it’s fun to be able to do things like this. I want to learn to do some video work, too, which doesn’t seem like it has to be difficult given some of the people I see on youtube.
The point of the story itself was finding a way to work with the latest ideas in cosmology in combination with a humanistic view of the universe.
Enjoy “The Point.” I posted the text last fall.
Permalink | Tags: Personal, Science Fiction | 1 Comment »
Is there anything to UFOs?
July 16th, 2008
I go back and forth on this issue. I’m generally skeptical, but every once in a while I come across something that looks like real evidence. Recent radar reports requested under the Freedom of Information Act might qualify.
What’s hard about this stuff, assuming there is anything to any of it in the first place, is that there are a lot of crazy and unbalanced people attracted to the UFO community who are full of crap. It seems that any topic outside of the mainstream tends to be more open (hello, sf fans) and more willing to take in the fringe folk. Then when you have the opportunity to visit with community members, the well balanced who may have insight into something a little weird going on get swamped out by the loonies.
I don’t think we know everything going on in and above the world. I want to know, but fringe communities don’t have quality control over information the way we do in science (which is also imperfect, although much less so).
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Scientific American on the Batman
July 15th, 2008
Scientific American interviews a professor of kinesiology and neuroscience, Paul Zehr, about the realities of being the Batman. Too many people think the hard part of being Batman is getting the billions of dollars to buy all the toys. Hardly. The physical conditioning, training, and recovery are much more stringent and more limiting to the length of his superhero career. Some really good points in the interview. Check it out.
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Does Science Fiction Dampen Interest in Space Exploration?
July 14th, 2008
Here’s the brief article quoting Buzz Aldrin:
I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today. All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It’s not realistic…if you start dealing with fantasy and beaming people up and down and traveling seven times the speed of light, you are doing damage. You’re not helping. You have young people who have got expectations that are far unrealistic, and you can’t possibly live up to the expectations you have created in young people. Why do they get bored with the space program? That’s why.
I think Aldrin has a point, but not an absolute one. I was inspired to go into science in part because of my love of science fiction, and Star Trek was the first introduction to sf I can remember. Star Trek itself probably owes the space program for getting greenlit, so there’s something circular going on here. Science fiction definitely inspires, or supports, the dreams of some folks who embrace space exploration.
As an educator, I’ve seen Aldrin’s point plenty enough, however. There are a lot of ridiculous space fantasies out there, and I believe they do have the effect of undermining the real thing. They do lead to unrealistic expectations, misconceptions, and more. TV and movies in particular trivialize serious problems. The worst offenders get the science wrong, but portray themselves as science-savvy if only for the window dressing of high-tech stuff.
Aldrin seems to fall into the camp advocating mundane science fiction rather than hard sf (see my explanation of the distinction), but we have common goals: educating people about the realities of the endeavor to explore space and getting them excited about it. My space exploration involves objects much more distant than the moon, but suffers from a similar lack of support among some. Getting answers to our questions about quasars and such is a slow, laborious, and expensive process and depends on complex, multi-level supporting arguments that need constant checking and sometimes revision. It isn’t cheap or easy and takes a lot longer to communicate how and why something is really cool — a problem for some in the post-Star Wars generation of CGI and broadband.
My personal contribution to addressing Aldrin’s issue has been to try to educate writers at Launch Pad about modern space science and astronomy, leading to, I hope, more stories that have better quality science and realism.
So, is Aldrin mostly right? Mostly wrong? Or is it more complicated?
Permalink | Tags: Science, Science Fiction, space | 10 Comments »
Outside the Ghetto and the Ghastly Example of Michael Crichton
July 3rd, 2008
There are a number of writers of SF — I’ll briefly consider “speculative fiction” in general before turning to science fiction specifically — who have never written genre fiction. That is, at least as far as the publishers and bookstores are concerned. Some of these fall into the nebulous area of “literature” in which snooty professors in college creative writing classes automatically flunk a story that is about robots. Some fall into the less nebulous but poorly defined category of “best seller.”
Some of the literary writers who have dodged the sf label include Salman Rushdie and Margret Atwood, either through their own means or their own publishers’ insistence as described by Bryan Appleyard. Similarly, although for very different reasons, some writers like Stephen King and Michael Crichton have never been marketed as genre writers. Stephen King’s first novel Carrie was about a girl with telekinesis, but was not marketed like a genre novel.
I’ve been thinking about this topic as I’d like to reach wider audiences, and the new example of Final Theory: A Novel by Mark Alpert hangs in my head. Non-fiction science manages to reach out effectively, with books like Cosmos and The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory regularly hitting bestseller lists without having to disguise them as non-science. Not so for fiction.
The science fiction that escapes from the ghetto seems to have a few things in common, the primary one being accessibility. It’s usually set in the present, or the very near future. The genre elements can be significant, but fewer seems to be better, so the readers have less to assimilate. True fans of science fiction, on the other hand, are happy to see “FTL” unexplained, and would be bored to read a page of explanation, no matter how well written, about the concept. I recall reading the first few chapters of Encounter With Tiber by Buzz Aldrin and Stephen Barnes and having difficulty continuing because every term and concept was laboriously explained. The SF fan will even happily grok made-up words and technologies without immediate explanation as long as their role is clear in context.
For the last several decades the king of bestselling science fiction, not called science fiction of course, has been Michael Crichton. He knows how to write a page turner. His characters, while not very deep, are sympathetic. His work survives the translation to film and has been very popular, reaching billions of viewers worldwide. I’ve read a number of his books and have seen many of the movies, mostly enjoying them.
In my opinion, however, he has three fatal flaws and my intellectual integrity prevents me from using him as a model for how to get science fiction to the wider public. His themes are consistently anti-science, he makes large and consistent errors in getting the science right, and he consistently insists he’s not just a writer but that his M.D. and his research gives him expertise on the science he gets wrong. Oh, and he’s a dick, too, writing one critic into a book of his as a child rapist.
The theme of much of Crichton’s work is that of Frankenstein: playing god brings destruction. This is the message of Jurassic Park and Prey, for starters. There are related themes in books like Sphere, which indicates that there are things that humankind is better off not knowing. Now, I wouldn’t say that there’s anything wrong with a cautionary tale. They have their place and their strengths. When a writer devotes so much time to pointing out the great arrogance and hubris of scientists and how it always brings doom, well, I think that sucks. We don’t have enough positive examples of scientists in books and movies. What we get is that they may be smart, but that they’re rarely wise. Part of me fears that this message resonates with the public in much the same way that people vote for president based not on a candidate’s intellectual ability and judgment, but upon some idea about who would be more fun to have a beer with.
Now, for a writer who seems to take great joy in how scientists make mistakes so often and are not to be trusted, Crichton is guilty of making fundamental errors in many of his books. I don’t mean something small like “photon” being replaced by “proton” in one sentence accidentally. I mean, just plain not having a clue what the hell he’s talking about.
While I’m not going to criticize the idea of getting dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes in amber, which is neat if not quite possible, it is clear that he has no idea about chaos theory which he uses as a theme in Jurassic Park. Chaos theory does not mean, without “Chaotician” Malcolm even writing down a single equation, that every complex system will fail. Zoos routinely operate without immediate widespread disaster. A similar analysis of the space shuttle, including the math, indicates it’s too complicated to fly, but it does. Why? Because complicated things can be understood, individual parts can be tested for quality, and feedback control systems don’t let just anything happen. And moreover, chaos theory is about understanding predictable aspects of non-linear systems, not just throwing up your hands and saying “it’s unpredictable!”
Luckily, the book is about dinosaurs, not chaos theory. However, his books on global warming, State of Fear, and on the dangers of nanotechnology, Prey, are riddled with outright errors and misunderstandings that undermine the premise of each. Realclimate.org deconstructs State of Fear, while Chris Phoenix at Nanotechnology Now explains how the science in Prey “isn’t real.” Please do take a look at both of these links if you have any doubts about the case I’m making here. They’re both very clear and compelling.
While Crichton paints scientists full of hubris causing death and destruction, threatening our entire way of life, he himself is setting back the public perception of not only individual branches of science but of science itself. And he has the gall to think he understands the science better than the scientists doing the work, at least in the case of global warming; he lectured to packed crowds and advised politicians about his skewed and incorrect views all the while claiming the working climatologists doing the work had the skewed and incorrect views. Well, luckily for us there’s a way of determining if he got his facts right or wrong, and he got a great number of them wrong. The problem is that he’s full of hubris himself and apparently hasn’t acknowledged his numerous mistakes and misunderstandings. He’s just like the stereotypical hypocritical neocon, who intentionally labels their enemies with their own shortcomings and uses antonyms interchangeably with synonyms. Hence the scientists possess the sin of hubris and Crichton fancies that he himself is writing scientifically accurate work even while it’s full of anti-science.
If the anti-science itself isn’t the key to Crichton’s popularity, I can’t help but wonder at how positive an influence he could have been if he’d been promoting science instead of attacking it.
Finally, if you’re like me, both fascinated and repulsed by the popularity of a writer like Crichton, enjoying his work even while being revolted by its flaws, check out The Science of Michael Crichton: An Unauthorized Exploration into the Real Science behind the Fictional Worlds of Michael Crichton (Science of Pop Culture series), edited by a friend of mine, Keven R. Grazier. The book contains essays by several experts (including Ray Kurzweil) concerning the accuracy or lack thereof of the science in Crichton’s work. If I’d finished reading the book, I’d probably have written a longer post!
Permalink | Tags: Science Fiction | 60 Comments »
Black Hole to Eat the Earth?
June 21st, 2008
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going on on-line and will produce the most energetic man-made collisions ever created. There have been concerns that this will produce various doomsday scenarios, but as Dennis Overbye writes in the New York Times citing a recent safety report, the particle accelerator isn’t going to create a runaway black hole that could eat the Earth.
The proof is pretty trivial to high-energy particle physicists.
Cosmic rays from space already hit our atmosphere with far greater energies than the LHC can produce, and we study these air shower events with facilities like the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory. If collisions like the ones that will take place in the LHC produced black holes that had planet-eating capabilities, all the planets and stars would have been destroyed long ago.
Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA contest responded to the question “If you could live forever, would you and why?” with ‘I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.’
My version for the LHC threat: Collisions made by the LHC will not destroy us, because we should not be destroyed, because if we were supposed to be destroyed, we would have already been destroyed, but we haven’t been destroyed, which is why the collisions won’t destroy us.
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Top 10 SF Movie Lists and the Top SF Movie of All Time (Can You Guess It?)
June 18th, 2008
First, I am providing my own personal list in response to yesterday’s American Film Institute list. I’m going to overlook some questionable science in a few movies, and not overweight the science. I am going to leave out fantasy, including superhero movies and Star Wars — mitochlorians or whatever they were called does not make Star Wars science fiction. Unless I specify otherwise, I’m talking about director’s cuts, which makes a substantial difference for a couple of movies on my list.
1. Blade Runner
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
3. Contact
4. Aliens
5. Alien
6. A Clockwork Orange
7. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
8. Terminator
9. The Abyss
10. Gattaca
Guess I like films by quality directors, with four of these by James Cameron, two by Ridley Scott, and two by Stanley Kubrick. I think the sequels are worthy, too, as both Aliens and T2 moved beyond the originals and broke new ground.
Other top science fiction movie lists
AFI:
1. 2001
2. Star Wars
3. E. T.
4. A Clockwork Orange
5. The Day the Earth Stood Still
6. Blade Runner
7. Alien
8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
9. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
10. Back to the Future
Rotten Tomatoes:
1. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Metropolis
4. Alien
5. Minority Report
6. The Empire Strikes Back
7. Children of Men
8. The Host
9. Star Wars
10. Aliens
IMBD:
1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. Star Wars
3. The Matrix
4. Alien
5. Ivan Vasilevich menyaet professiyu (1973)
6. Metropolis
7. Aliens
8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
9. 2001: A Space Odyssey
10. The Prestige
The Online Film Critics Society:
1 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2 Blade Runner (1982)
3 Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)
4 Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
5 E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (1982)
6 Metropolis (1927)
7 Brazil (1985)
8 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
9 Clockwork Orange, A (1971)
10 Alien (1979)
The Guardian, cheating a little bit by combining some originals and sequels:
1. Blade Runner
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
3. Star Wars/Empire Strikes Back
4. Alien
5. Solaris (1972)
6. Terminator/Terminator 2
7. The Day the Earth Stood Still
8. War of the Worlds (1953)
9. The Matrix
10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
An online internet-voting based list: http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_film.html
1. Blade Runner
2. Star Wars Trilogy (IV-VI)
3. The Matrix
4. Alien
5. 2001: A Space Odyssey
6. Aliens
7. Terminator
8. The Fifth Element
9. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
10. The Day the Earth Stood Still
Wired.com:
1. Blade Runner
2. Gattaca
3. The Matrix
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey
5. Brazil
6. A Clockwork Orange
7. Alien
8. The Boys from Brazil
9. Jurassic Park
10. Star Wars
The Best?
Blade Runner tops four of the lists, but doesn’t appear on two of them. 2001 tops two of the lists, but doesn’t make the top 10 at all on one. I think that the strengths of these movies also make them turn off some audiences, unfortunately, as they also top my list.
It’s interesting to note that the only movie that makes all the lists, the highest, including mine, is Alien. By some form of meta-analysis, that would make this the top science fiction movie of all time. I’m the only one who left off Star Wars (the internet voting list technically lumps together the first trilogy and the Guardian combines it with Empire, leaving out the Ewoks), but come on, it isn’t science fiction, it’s a fantasy getting too much credit for having robots, spaceships, and rayguns. It’s my blog and Star Wars doesn’t get to be the top science fiction film here.
So, in space no one can hear you scream, but on Earth we all did and loved Alien.
Permalink | Tags: Popular Events, Science, Science Fiction | 5 Comments »
American Film Institute’s Top 10 Science Fiction Films: A Cultural Failure?
June 17th, 2008
There’s a TV special on tonight with AFI’s 10 Top 10 films, covering ten genres. I’ll skip ahead to give and discuss just the science fiction:
OK, I’ve seen them all, and agree with a lot of the choices. Even most of the ones that I disagree with, I have to admit that there’s a case to be made.
I’d toss Back to the Future, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and replace Star Wars with The Empire Strikes Back. I’d add Aliens and Contact, and do some reordering, potentially moving a few more onto the list. Maybe Gattaca, the Terminator, the Matrix…
You know something sad, though? With the exceptions of 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and perhaps Blade Runner, I don’t know that I can say these movies compete with most of the others on the other top 10 lists (except for the animation category, which also seems weak). Now, Alien and T2 are fine movies, but they’re not moving or classics at quite the level of so many other categories. I mean, here are the number 10 movies in the other categories: Finding Nemo, Big, Jerry McGuire, Cat Ballou, Scarface, The Usual Suspects, Sleepless in Seattle, Judgment at Nuremburg, and the Ten Commandments. Compare those with Back to the Future with its theme park rides, Huey Lewis soundtrack, and Michael J. Fox’s less than Oscar-winning performance.
I guess I’m griping that there aren’t more great science fiction films. So many seem so small, so focused on the special effects, on a snappy plot over deeper meaning. I suspect that many movie makers just try to make a “sci-fi flick” rather a great movie.
Well, suppose I’m just griping. I love science fiction. I love movies. Too few science fiction movies seem to hit the mark of greatness. I mean, really, Back to the Future is a fun movie but is it really one of the ten best of the genre ever made?! If it is, there’s been a massive cultural failure.
Looking at AFI’s top 100 list issued in 1998, we have Star Wars at 15, 2001 at 22, ET at 25, Dr. Strangelove at 26, A Clockwork Orange at 46, Close Encounters of the Third Kind at 64, and Frankenstein at 87. There are a number of fantasy films I haven’t listed, but I wouldn’t call Star Wars at 15 a top showing.
Now, lists like these are subjective by nature, but there’s been nothing close to The Godfather of science fiction, and I don’t see any reason why there couldn’t be except that perhaps no one is even trying.
Permalink | Tags: Popular Events, Science Fiction | 2 Comments »
Absolute Hot?
June 10th, 2008
Okay, I thought this idea was dumb before I read the article. There’s an interesting discussion to be had about extremely hot temperatures, which I didn’t appreciate until I read it.
Permalink | Tags: Education, Science | No Comments »
Green “Stars” for Real?
June 10th, 2008
In light of the recent posts about the red M stars, as red as they’re perceived to be anyway, I wanted to bring up the issue of the non existence of green stars. A star with the appropriate temperature, not too dissimilar from that of our own Sun, has a spectrum that peaks in the green. Yet there are no green stars. Why not?
I’ve asked this from time to time as an extra credit question on introductory astronomy exams. I usually only get a few correct answers out of 120 students. It does take different thinking from the every day.
The reason there are no green stars is that those stars of the appropriate temperature also put out a lot of red light and blue light both. Emitting all colors, they appear white.
But if you look carefully enough, there are some green star-like objects. I was discussing this with a friend at the American Astronomical Society meeting last week. These greenies aren’t bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, or indeed with any telescope I’m aware of that you can use with an eyepiece. [We’ll ignore the philosophical question of whether or not they’re actually green if you can’t see them with your own eye.]
They’re a subset of quasars/radio galaxies of redshift 3 or so, which places the strong Lyman alpha line (the strongest emission line of hydrogen) at an observed wavelength of about 500 nanometers. The light at shorter wavelengths is eaten by intergalactic absorption. The light at longer wavelengths can be much fainter than the Lyman alpha emission.
This is the best example I can find in a quick search. The color composite cannot be trusted as it is created using broad band images and the band with the Lyman alpha is a blend of blue and green. The combination of the strong Lyman alpha line and the eye’s peak efficiency both in the green should make this object appear green to the eye if seen through a large enough telescope. At least I think so. I’d love to hook up a regular color camera to a telescope (it would need to be close to a meter in diameter at least) and test this. Perhaps as an experiment this summer at Launch Pad we can try it.
Permalink | Tags: Science, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
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