The Difference Between Spiral Structure in Galaxies and in Hurricanes

April 26th, 2008

I was giving an astronomy talk at a Worldcon a few years back and was showing some pictures of some spiral galaxies like this Hubble image of M81:

Someone in the audience asked if the spiral shape of hurricanes and galaxies were for the same reason.   Here’s a picture of Hurricane Floyd from NASA (who takes images of both sorts of objects):

The short answer, which I gave, was “no.”   I said “the physics are different.”

Now, spiral patterns are complicated and of different types.   Grand design spirals seem to work based on density waves, and another type known as flocculent spirals experience self-propagating star formation which, in combination with their differential rotation, lead to spiral structure.   My friend at Case Western, Chris Mihos, has a nice webpage explaining these points.   The density wave thing is not that easy to understand, but the analogy that he and I both use in class is that of traffic jams on the highway.   Sometimes patterns of car density emerge even though all the cars are moving along in the same direction, and these patterns can persist and travel.

Hurricanes result from low pressure centers in a rotating frame of reference.   Air rushing in to fill the low pressure misses because of the rotation.   We call the apparent, fictitious force that makes it miss the Coriolis force.     This effect is vey different from what’s going on in spiral galaxies.   Gas pressure is not important on Galactic scales, at least not for stars that make up the spiral patterns.

An aside about the phrase “the physics are different” and why I was prompted to write this entry.     I was having a disagreement with someone on a blog about science fiction fans.   My take is that they’re better educated and knowledgeable about science, technology, and future trends.   I think this is obvious, but someone else didn’t agree at all.   It reminded me of a time with a smart fan after this talk who confronted me at a party to tell me I was wrong.   The physics of hurricanes and spiral galaxies are the same.   I was flabbergasted.   She went on to tell me how she went to MIT and was sure.

Well, all my attempts to explain were quickly rebuffed and my correct perspective on this was rejected.   I finally figured out that she was referring to the apparent universality of the laws of physics.   The forces and laws are the same here and there, on Earth and deep space.   But the dominant forces and the equations describing the spiral patterns are different.   There was a fundamental problem with this person’s communication skills.   May have been Asberger’s, which isn’t uncommon among scitech people or sf fans either.   It was interesting to make the realization about her point later, and just wish I’d made it earlier as I did get irritated.

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The Disappointing Veneer of Science in Science Fiction

April 25th, 2008

I like stories of all types, not just hard science fiction. I can get excited about a good fantasy, or a good story of any kind.

What I can’t stand, however, is the pretending. Crap pretending to be science, making it harder to find the real thing, and making it harder for the public to tell the difference. It’s a form of anti-education.

And the latest entry is Splice. Here’s the article on io9 with the very telling headline:
Hard Scifi Flick “Splice” Actually Based on Internet-Rumor Science

Oh, please. Is it really so hard?

Do the research. Hire someone to do the research. Hire a consultant. Have a scientist in the field look over the outline. I don’t even mind a little artistic license. Some concepts do need some simplification for a quick, visual medium like film. But don’t, don’t, don’t pretend it’s real when it’s fake. Decide what sandbox you’re playing in, and just play and have fun. Okay?

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Science and Science Fiction: Nanotechnology

April 24th, 2008

That’s the topic for my class this week, and I just wanted to share a brief introduction with some links to some interesting videos and history regarding nanotech.

Let’s start with NASA Kid’s introduction to nanotechnology. Then there’s a nice, more adult introduction with a summary of current nano state of the art.

Historically, the story starts with nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynmann and his 1959 talk “Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” Another step was Eric Drexler’s dissertation Nanosystems and famous popular science book, Engines of Creation (1986). While this is the visionary thread, the nuts and bolts have been pushed all along in various branches of science, and key steps there involve the discovery of buckyballs and carbon nanotubes (here’s a video), which are potential building blocks for nanotech (although Smalley, who discovered buckyballs, was critical of Drexler style molecular nanotechnology).

Nanofabrication will become reality in one form or another, and the ability to create designer materials will have a large impact. Potential sf style applications include the space elevator, Star Trek style replicators, nanomedicine and related biological applications, and super soldier suits. A good location for non-stop shopping for nanotech information is The Foresight Institute, originally founded by Drexler.

Science Fiction treatments are many and good, such as the novels Blood Music by Greg Bear, Bloom by Wil McCarthy, and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, among others.   There’s an online bibliography of Nanotech in Science Fiction, too.

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What Science Isn’t

April 17th, 2008

I generally only censor spam or super obnoxious posts from my blog, and luckily haven’t had any in the second category (knock on plastic). I’m in turns bemused and annoyed with comments on some entries, like this one, about the antiscience propoganda piece that is Expelled. I know I’m going to be preaching to the choir for most who read my thoughts here, but I thought I’d try to articulate what science isn’t, because that seems to be where the conflicts arise with those pushing anti-science agendas. This applies to creationists, most global warming deniers, those who fear the Frankenfoods and man playing god more generally, and Michael Crichton and his audience.

First, science isn’t a faith. It isn’t a belief. There’s nothing sacred about it. It has no religion, but that doesn’t make it atheist.

Science isn’t political. It isn’t left wing. It isn’t right wing. It has no political agenda.

Science isn’t American. It isn’t English-speaking. It isn’t contained by borders or nationalities.

Science isn’t policy. Science doesn’t say we should or shouldn’t do something. It simply tells us what’s most likely to happen if we do or don’t do something.

Science, is, simply put, the best methodology ever devised for developing reliable knowledge about the world we live in. If you’re reading this now, science has delivered this information to you, and you can’t pretend it doesn’t work and work well. It is the best way of learning how the world works.

Now, individual scientists may be biased, elitists bastards or worse who abuse science to their own ends, but they are no worse (and quite a bit less worse in my experience) than child molesting priests or lying politicians who cast a poor light on their organizations, but shouldn’t negatively impact underlying the ideals underlying their organizations. Those should stand or fall based on their merits, or lack thereof, rather than based on the bad behavior of individual adherants.

So, in the case of evolution in schools…that’s the science. Some particular religion may be right about this aspect of creation or that, or aliens may have come to Earth to tinker with the life forms here, but we have no evidence of these things. For evolution, we have mountains of evidence, well studied, well tested. That’s what should get taught. Likewise for every case where science has advanced our understanding. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe it. It’s still very likely right, based on the track record of science that lets you read this post on your screen today, and it would be a crime to our children and their education to do otherwise.

What’s even more important to teach are not the facts or theories that science has provided us. It’s, again, the methodology that is the core of science itself that is most critically important. The procedure works, and it works in every day life. Ideas can and should be tested, by everyone, and the best and most reliable way to do that is to use the same methods underlying science:

Gather reliable data, and know how certain it is. Develop hypotheses for understanding the observations. Test those by making predictions and testing them against new data. Change your ideas when they fail the tests. Wash, rise, and repeat. The end result will be understanding that can be justified to anyone in the world and that will provide useful answers when required.

Science can’t tell us everything about everything, but where it can be applied, accept no substitutes. The track record makes a strong case that those substitutes are almost always wrong.

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Awesomely Bad Quasar Article: Science Journalism, I Cry for Thee!

April 9th, 2008

Grrrr!!!

No one better tell me about how science reporting is good and I’m being unfair. I dare you. I double dog dare you.

My research specialty is quasars. I love quasars. I’m a world expert, and I know more than anyone you know about them, and also what we don’t yet know about them. I am asked to referee papers, telescope proposals, and grant proposals regarding quasars all the time.

So let’s start with the article. Again, keep in mind I love them and have spent a big part of my life trying to understand them.

The first thing that struck me was the “image” used. It’s an artist rendition, not an actual photograph of any sort. And it’s sort of a lame one, with a disk, a jet, and background stars, without relevant scales or perspective. It’s this kind of shoddy crap that makes people suspicious of science.

Let’s move on. There’s a line early on, “Thought to number about 100,000 in total, they are among the most mysterious, distant and significant objects in the universe.” The only part of that quote with real content is the number 100,000. There are at least many millions of quasars. We’ve only classified on order of 100,000 quasars as such, but know based on various surveys that there are many more. They are not thought to number about 100,000 in total. Only about 100,000 are known. Those are NOT equivalent statements.

Minor point? Let’s talk about the census. Estimates give you the best idea of actual numbers, while actual count systematically misses people.

Then there’s this winner: “Thankfully, quasars do not occur today. If they did, we wouldn’t be here.”

Well, that’s probably wrong. We’d only have a problem if the Milky Way were a quasar, and the gas and dust in the plane of the galaxy would shield us pretty well. I have my students do this calculation (my non-science majors), and we’re only talking about an object as bright as the moon (assuming none of that pesky gas and dust). Bright, but not life-threatening.

Then this: “Quasars begin life as distant galaxies, and eventually they collapse, and the galaxy and gas is swallowed by the black hole.”

No, no, no, no, no, no!!!!!

This is so freaking wrong I want to cry about the stupidity that gets paid a check. Quasars are accreting supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, constituting only about 1/1000 of a galaxy mass. They suck down some local gas and stars in the central few light years, and when they’ve done that, they shut down and stop shining. The rest of the galaxy goes on in orbital happiness, the same way that the Earth would keep orbiting around the sun if it suddenly became a black hole. We’d be unhappy without that warm sunlight, but we wouldn’t get sucked in and collapse onto the black hole sun.

I’ve used XMM-Newton to study quasars, and the article is nominally about new XMM-Newton observations, although that’s hard to tell at first glance. The XMM image referred to is NOT the image attached to the article.

But before we get to them we get a bit of history involving a couple of Caltech astronomers, which is basically right, except this part stands out:   “Greenstein looked at the photograph that contained the image of the object and noticed that it appeared to be at an incredible distance.”   No, he looked at a spectrum, not an image of the object, and determined a redshift than in conjunction with Hubble’s Law let him estimate a distance.

Then we jump back to non-sequiters like: “That is why they are so far away – when we look at the farthest reaches of space we are seeing back into earlier epochs because of the time it takes the light to reach us. ”

What? They’re far away because their light takes so long to reach us? No. Bullshit. The light takes a long time to reach us because they’re far away. The answer to why quasars were more common in the early universe is fundamental and profound, and not found in a banal circular statement like this.

NEXT sentence: “Today they are believed to be a feast happening at the edge of the universe when an enormous black hole devours vast clouds of gas, stars and even entire galaxies.”

As if you hadn’t guessed, quasars do not devour entire galaxies. Period. Nada. Big no.

Can you guess there’s a reporter misunderstanding a source yet? I’m starting to think it.

The last three paragraphs get to the new observation. Sort of. I am a world expert on quasars, and I have sat multiple times on panels reviewing X-ray telescope proposals to look at quasars, and I can’t tell what the observation or results were! Can you?

Didn’t think so.

I love the last line though. “This is why we need to study quasars: they are wonderful and horrible.”

Amen to that!

If I were cynical, I’d say the same applies to women, our fellow Americans, humans in general, comic books, and the reality shows.

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Science and Science Fiction: What Exactly Is Teleportation?

April 7th, 2008

A comment on my Standing on the Ledge with Jumper post got me thinking about this issue today. I realized that to a great degree my disagreement with others concerns the definition of teleportation, and how I think that the standard has slipped for PR purposes.

I think at one extreme every can agree on what constitutes teleportation. An object in one location instantaneously moves from one spatial coordinate to another, without being in the space between those coordinates. This pure definition rules out a lot of phenomena that might look like teleportation, and might be too strict for some, but is close to what I think is appropriate. I’ll explain in this post, and explore some other possible definitions and applications that might fit within those.

First, let’s have a little discussion about the often overlooked science issues involved with this classical teleportation. Larry Niven wrote a great essay called the Theory and Practice of Teleportation that is well worth a read. (Sorry, the link wasn’t working properly just now, and I’ve linked to the cached version.) Some of the issues discussed involve energy conservation principles in physics. For instance, how are potential energy and relative velocity treated with respect to a teleporter? There’s a lot to consider there, so please read Niven if you haven’t.

There’s one part from the essay that got me though:

DEFINITION:

Teleportation is any method of moving from point to point in negligible time. Over short distances we will take lightspeed as negligible. Over longer distances (interplanetary and interstellar) we will require infinite or near-infinite speed.

I make a distinction between psychic and mechanical teleportation. Essentially, psi teleportation involves wishing oneself from place to place. In mechanical teleportation he pushes a button. He may do other things first, such as sighting in, charging batteries, weighing and measuring his cargo, whatever it takes. But eventually he will push a button here and he will instantly be there. Similarly, the adept at psi teleportation may have spent decades in spiritual training, learning to negate distance by the power of a wish.

These definitions are not meant to be rigorous. Intuitively you know what teleportation is anyway.

Do we? First, discounting “psi teleportation” which is a literary device and marks a story primarily as fantasy (or science fantasy, but lets avoid defining sub-genres), I’ve discovered that those pushing “quantum teleportation” have their own definition that differs from Niven’s.

Here is a nice informative webpage about quantum teleportation that begins with: “Teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else.”

Hmm. That sounds a little different. We’re suddenly talking about disintegration and perfect replicas. This distinction is important because it is a slippery slope. The time aspect is gone, and the focus is on replication, not transportation.

Replication is NOT teleportation. It could be part of a teleportation mechanism, but it isn’t an intrinsic part of a definition. Let me demonstrate.

Imagine a Star Trek replicator. It presumably operates by having scanned (destructively or not — this in a second) some object or food. Then the operator has the ability to recreate that object, perfectly (I assume), over and over again. After the first replication, is every perfect replica a teleportation? Of course not.

And from this perspective, why is “disintegration” part of the definition? Non-destructive scanning could be part of a perfect replication, in theory. On the receiving end, does it matter if the original is disintegrated? Only if you want to artificially create a difference between teleporting and copying. The quantum teleportation people are trying to do this, disingenuously, in my opinion.

Consider Jim Kelly’s story “Think Like a Dinosaur.” In it, humans are transported to far parts of the galaxy via an alien replicator. It doesn’t disintegrate them on this end. It’s up to a human operator to “balance the equations” and do this. A human facsimile is recreated on a faraway world, and it doesn’t matter on that end whether the original has been disintegrated. It matters to the dinosaurs, and it matters, artificially, to those wanting to claim that it’s teleportation in one case but not the other.

They also slip in “perfect” to describe the replica. This is trying to do two things. First, to distinguish quantum teleportation from a fax machine, which no one would call teleportation, and to play up a strength of the quantum entanglement which preserves states perfectly. Personally, I’d still consider myself teleported if the process wasn’t perfect and had some strange side effect, like losing all my hair or giving me a suntan. I reject the “perfect” part of the definition. And in any event, we are not the same from moment to moment anyway. Every instant the quantum states of the particles making up my body are changing. I’m not at all sure teleportation, in a bastard definition that involves copying, must be perfect.

So what about Star Trek, now that I’ve brought it up? They already have their consistency issues — sometimes a pattern saved in a buffer can be used and sometimes not — I don’t understand why anyone ever dies on that show. Make another copy from the last saved pattern after any death.

Anyway, I digress. The telling point on Star Trek for me is that their system, which scans people and moves them around and can even recreate them from a pattern (sometimes), isn’t called a teleporter beam. It’s a transporter beam. Quite rightly.

Let’s consider some different scenarios/technology and decide if they’re teleportation or not. How about if we turned people into light in one place and reconstructed them from that light in another (which I once saw in a Piers Anthony novel I’ve forgotten the name of)? Not teleportation. Travel time would seem instantaneous to the traveler, but that beam travels at a finite speed, can be intercepted, and so forth. I’d call it beaming at lightspeed, not teleportation myself.

How about instantaneous transmission of information? Not teleportation, since objects are not moved. At best that information can be used to make a copy. And this is the part of quantum teleportation that I usually discuss since something is happening instantaneously when a wave function collapses in a spatially separated and entangled system. It’s weird and “spooky action at a distance” as Einstein called it. The copying part of the process is to me replication, not teleportation.

There’s another few physical effects that may be equated with teleportation, more so than what is called quantum teleportation anyway:

Quantum tunneling. Particles have a chance to jump through barriers that are classically impossible to jump through. We usually talk about potential barriers and such rather than physical walls, but it’s really the same thing. Why didn’t quantum tunneling get labeled quantum teleportation? I don’t know. It’s more apt in some ways.

Hawking radiation. This is similar. In the vicinity of the event horizon of a black hole, some weird shit goes down. Hawking combined relativity and quantum mechanics to come up with a unique phenomenon. In the vacuum of space, particle and anti-particle can appear spontaneously, recombine, and vanish before they’re noticed. If that happens next to an event horizon, and one particle falls beyond the horizon, the other one must persist and be “emitted” as “radiation” from the black hole. Another way to look at the situation is that a particle teleported through the event horizon. OK, maybe that’s a stretch, but compare it to copying as teleportation.

Wormholes. Relativity in theory allows one piece of space to be connected to another in a strange way, so that while there are many paths with a finite distance, there’s also a special path with no distance, between the two points. Moving through this path, this wormhole, can in principle get you someplace instantaneously fast. Seems like teleportation to me, albeit limited to certain locations.

So let’s look again at quantum teleportation does. From the linked article above:

To make the teleportation work, you have to actually move the particles yourself! All that’s really being done is that some destructive scanning is being done, and the original particle is “perfectly replicated” in some location you’ve moved an entangled particle to.

Aside from the fact that this scheme doesn’t seem scalable up to actual macroscopic objects, let me push an imperfect but illustrative metaphor. Quantum teleportation is like a perfect fax machine, in which not only data are sent, but the magic template to put the data into as well, to make the faxing perfect. Would you call it teleportation if you shredded the paper your document was written on, then took two magic pieces of paper, waved one over the ashes of the original, and sent the other to a different location, and then could magically transform the second piece of paper into a perfect copy of the original?

Neat trick, but I wouldn’t call it teleportation.

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Synergies in Storytelling and Science

March 29th, 2008

It’s one of the proposal seasons in astronomy this month.   There have been deadlines for applications to use the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and a dozen other ground-based telescopes (e.g., NASA’s IRTF, NOAO’s telescopes at Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo, etc.).   I also just got my CD filled with Hubble Space Telescope proposals that I’m responsible for reviewing in advance of a May meeting.

Writing an effective proposal is very much like writing an effective story.   This is how I think about proposal writing and what I try to teach my students.

You want to have a hook.   Within a few lines (typically in the abstract and/or the main body of the scientific justification), the reader should be intrigued into reading on.   This can be done in a variety of ways, just as it may be done in a story.   It can be the promise of an important new result, or the mystery of some new object, or an appeal to the big picture science underlying the proposal.

You need to get in the backstory.   After the hook, the exciting bit, you should explain how we came to be where we are now and provide the reader with enough background to appreciate the state of the (sub)-field.   While reviewers are expected to have some expertise, the proposer is expected to provide as much information as reasonable to bring readers up to speed.   We’re too specialized in science for our own good in a lot of ways.   It’s similar to thinking about readership in science fiction.   A mass audience for a movie needs a lot of help getting up to speed if it’s an exotic setting or time, while sf readers are already familiar with a lot of concepts (space travel, robots, and more) and just need some hints.   Some review panels are very specialized, while others are pretty general.

You need to have plot developments.   Usually the background is historically in nature.   A class of objects is discovered.   They’re studied in various ways.   Some questions are answered, but new ones are posed.   The significance of those new questions is discussed and placed in context.

The climax is the actual proposal that promises how the new observations will tell the end of the story, or at least advance the story of our understanding.

Some proposals are surveys.   Some concern fundamental physics.   Some involve answering smaller questions, but in a final and convincing manner.   Some, weaker ones in general, are considered fishing expeditions where the questions aren’t well posed, but such exploratory observations are required in order to pose better questions.   In the same way, some stories are comprehensive with multiple points of view trying to fully explore some situation.   Other stories are fundamental, attacking the big questions of the human heart.   Others try to solve smaller puzzles in the tiny corners that are appropriate for short stories.   There are rambling, ambitious stories that explore multiple avenues but don’t have well-defined themes since life is complicated.

There’s also a technical feasibility section that is analogous to   getting the science/world right in a story.   Can the telescope/instrument combination proposed actually make the observations that are required to answer question posed in the hook?

Proposals are short, with limited wordcounts, and the text must be lean and cut to the bone.   Wishy-washy qualifiers needed to be excised whenever possible without being untruthful or too misleading.

Like stories, there are no real rules, just rules of thumb.   Anything that works, works.   You can start with the ending, start in the   middle, get away with infodumping if well done and brief, etc.   More deviations from the standard rules will win some fans, but risk losing others who aren’t as open-minded about approach.   Sometimes the name on a story creates a positive or negative biases with   particular readers, and the same is true with proposals.   Reputations precede us, and it’s a small world.

Finally, and this is a scary thought to me on several fronts, scientists reviewing proposals are more like slush readers at magazines rather the readership of those magazines.   When you’re staring at 80 proposals that need discussion and ranking in a two-day meeting, the initial reaction is critical.   Not everything gets scrutinized as carefully as it should be, and a weakly written proposal lacking a hook or clear writing is more likely to result in a cursory pass and a low grade.

I have one more proposal to finish this month, due on Monday.   I’ve already changed the story twice this week, when the   feasibility didn’t work out as originally planned.   My particular challenge with this one is that it’s of the more exploratory nature.   Its strength involves the fact that it will be a first, but that’s also its weakness — I don’t know for sure what we’ll find in order to build a case that well-defined questions will be   answered.   I’m going to have to focus, and build a story, about what’s the most scientifically interesting issue I can address with the new observation.   I’m going to start by trying to imagine the most interesting paper I could see myself writing with the data in hand, and work backwards.     I’ll have a one-paragraph abstract, a one-page scientific justification, a one-page technical feasibility, and a couple of pages for supporting pictures and references.   Tough to do, but that’s what the competition has, too.   For Hubble and Chandra you get to write short stories, but for most ground-based telescopes it’s worse: it’s writing short shorts.

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Alien Sociology

March 27th, 2008

Seth Shostak over at space.com has a nice article today mostly about why aliens won’t visit the Earth.   I agree with the vast majority of his assessments, and the one reason he proposes that they would.   As he points out, most “aliens coming to Earth” stories (at least on TV and in the movies) are stupid.   Star Trek, however, seems to fit this reasoning pretty well in most cases.

Permalink | Tags: Science, Science Fiction | 5 Comments »

The Hard SF Writer’s Bookshelf

March 26th, 2008

  Last summer at the Launch Pad workshop, I brougt in my main reference bookshelf for writing space-based hard science fiction.   This list is by no means complete (I have books stashed everywhere and loaned out and whatever…who knows where they all end up?) .   Here are the results:

Bennett, Jeffrey O., and G. Seth Shostak. Life in the Universe. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Pearson Addison Wesley, 2007.

Berry, Adrian. The Giant Leap : Mankind Heads for the Stars. London: Headline, 1999.

Bova, Ben, and Tony Lewis. Space Travel. 1st ed, Science Fiction Writing Series. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1997.

Darling, David J. Life Everywhere : The Maverick Science of Astrobiology. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Drake, Frank D., and Dava Sobel. Is Anyone out There? : The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. New York, N.Y.: Delacorte Press, 1992.

Gillett, Stephen Lee, and Ben Bova. World-Building, Science Fiction Writing Series. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 1996.

Grady, M. M. Astrobiology. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.

Grinspoon, David.   Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life.   Ecco, 2003.

Harrison, Albert A. Spacefaring : The Human Dimension. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Kaler, James B. Extreme Stars : At the Edge of Creation. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Kondo, Yoji. Interstellar Travel and Multi-Generation Space Ships. Burlington, Ont.: Apogee Books, 2003.
Lewis, John S. Mining the Sky : Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1996.

Lunine, Jonathan Irving. Astrobiology : A Multidisciplinary Approach. San Franciso: Pearson Addison Wesley, 2005.

Macvey, John W. Interstellar Travel : Past, Present, and Future. 1st Scarborough House trade pbk. ed. Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House, 1991.

Mallove, Eugene F., and Gregory L. Matloff. The Starflight Handbook : A Pioneer’s Guide to Interstellar Travel, Wiley Science Editions. New York: Wiley, 1989.

Mullane, R. Mike.   Do Your Ears Pop In Space and 500 Other Surprising Questions About Space Travel.    Wiley, 1997.

Savage, Marshall T. The Millennial Project : Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.

Stine, G. Harry. Living in Space : A Handbook for Work & Exploration Beyond the Earth’s Atmosphere. 1st ed. New York: M. Evans and Co., 1997.

Tribble, Alan C. The Space Environment : Implications for Spacecraft Design. Rev. and expanded ed. Princeton, N.J. ; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Walter, William J. Space Age. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1992.

Woodmansee, Laura S. Sex in Space. Burlington, Ont., Canada: CG Publishing, Inc., 2006.

There are a lot more great books out there, but this is a big chunk of one of my bookshelves.

Permalink | Tags: Education, Science, Science Fiction | 11 Comments »

What do (Astronomy) Professors Do?

March 23rd, 2008

As a professional astronomer with a faculty job as a professor at the University of Wyoming, I find it very common that people outside of academia don’t really understand what it is I “do.”   A lot of misconceptions floating around there, so let me knock some down first before building something in their place.

First of all, there is the notion that professors teach.   We do.   But there’s the notion that all we do is teach, and, moreover, if we only teach say one class a semester, that we just work three hours a week while we’re lecturing, and that teaching assistants handle all the unpleasant and tedious chores like grading.   That’s bull crap.   I do have what we call a “one-one” load, generally speaking, which means I teach one course each semester.   Alternative teaching loads for very research intensive places like Caltech might be one-zero, meaning one course a year.   A more teaching intensive university might be a two-two load, or even higher.   How much work we do for a course can vary a lot from professor to professor and from course to course, but it’s way more than three hours.   The rule of thumb is something like three hours outside of class for every hour of lecture, at least the first time you teach a course.   That’s time spent learning or relearning the material at a high-enough level to teach it well, working problems, preparing slides or other lecture materials (notes, overheads, etc.), writing exams, reading assigned material, meeting with students, working with teaching assistants if you have them, and more.   The material at the graduate level is particularly challenging since you have to make a lot of updates every time you teach a course as it needs to be at the cutting edge of knowledge.

People think that we have summers off, like K-12 teachers, at least if we don’t teach a summer course, which are not that multitudinous.   Ha!   I wish.   My schedule is more flexible in the summer, but that’s a time to get research done (more on that in a minute).   In particular, that’s a time when graduate students get heavily involved in research for the first time, and I spend a lot of my time mentoring them.   Everything from develop research projects to teaching them how to collect, reduce, and analyze data to how to interpret the results and write them up for publication.   We have summer programs for undergraduates, too, and that’s more challenging.   Undergraduates vary in their commitment, skill level, and understanding much more than graduate students.

So what else?   Some people are aware that professors do research, but don’t always understand what that means.   My official job description calls for equal time to be spent on teaching and research.   In my case research output is measured by things like number of papers published, number of grant dollars collected, and outside letters from those in my field (considered when up for tenure).   But what does that mean on a daily basis?   Like most people, I spend my days in an office in front of a computer, spending too much time with my email.   The research time is either spent with students, post-docs (journeymen scientists I hire with grant money), or working on my own projects.   As an observational astronomer, I spend a lot of time working with data from telescopes and trying to understand what it’s telling me about the physical nature of the things we see in the sky.   The research doesn’t count until it’s communicated to others in a detailed fashion. This involves writing papers and traveling to meetings to report results.

Here’s a big misconception I need to correct.   Most astronomers don’t spend very much time looking through telescopes.   In fact, we almost never “look” through them.   Data is recorded digitally as with digital cameras, using very sensitive detectors.   As a practical matter, many of use do use optical telescopes on remote mountaintops, but that’s usually just a few weeks out of the year, if that.   Observational astronomers also analyze data from large surveys that are public and data from space-based telescopes (which include extensive planning, but no real-time observing).   I spend less time observing than I used to, and some of the more recent observing runs (as we call them) were executed from my lab in Wyoming where we sat and controlled an instrument on a telescope in Hawaii.   And in order to get that telescope time in the first place many days or even weeks are spent crafting competitive proposals.   I wrote about the process with the Hubble Space Telescope before.

I’ve also got some time commitments in my official job description that include service and advising.   I spend time every semester talking with students about what courses to take and about longer term goals like applying for graduate school.   I write dozens of reference letters for students and post-docs trying to get into a new school or land the next job.   I work on our graduate program curriculum and our graduate exam, run interference between students and profs as our Director of Graduate Studies.   I volunteer at the open house we have annually at our local observatory.   I referee papers for peer-reviewed astronomy journals.   Usually once a year I review proposals at the national level for telescope time or grant money (taking between 1-3 weeks of my time depending on who it is for).   I host department parties and drive prospective graduate students around town.   And you wouldn’t believe how much time goes into necessary but tedious faculty meetings working on by-laws, hiring decisions, program assessment, and other matters great and small.   Things like my Launch Pad Workshop for Writers fall somewhere in between official duties and bonus extras that look good on my curriculum vita, but that takes a week to run, and a lot of time to prepare for.

Officially,   I get no vacation, either.   I can get away whenever I can afford to.   I set my own schedule.   The truth is most professors, at least younger ones working toward tenure (I’m getting tenure this year with flying colors), work way more than 40 hours a week.   I didn’t take any real vacations the first three years I was a professor, but learned over the last three how I need to.   The university pays me a salary for a nine month work period, spread out over twelve months.   If I have grant money, I can pay myself summer salary, which comes in the summer, giving me big paychecks then.   This gives professors a big incentive to land grant money, or it’s a hit in the wallet.

And let me explain a few things about tenure, what it means, and what it doesn’t.   Generally most new professors are technically “assistant professors,” who are regularly reviewed and can be dismissed easily if they’re not performing at expected levels.   Usually they’re given six years to meet that standard, and then they’re promoted to associate professor and given tenure, or fired (with a year to make a transition).   There’s a final level of full professor above associate that requires a tenured professor to continue to show high performance levels.

So about tenure…it is job security of a sort.   It makes firing a professor very difficult, and is meant to protect us and let us follow our research where ever it leads, even if it is offensive to some or just something that others think is a waste of time pursuing.   We can still be fired for the usual reasons someone would get fired (e.g., gross underperformance, etc.), but there’s a legal procedure that must be followed and a lot of corrective steps before those are reached.   I’m generally in favor of tenure (certainly for myself!), but it has pluses and minuses.   Some professors become what we call “dead wood” after getting tenure.   They teach their classes, putter about, but don’t continue doing significant new research or contribute to a department in serious ways.   Some do spend the last years of their careers pursuing bogus research that never pans out.   Sometimes though, it does let someone do something like a major long-term project that doesn’t bear fruit for many years, something that junior people trying to land jobs can’t afford to do.   That’s a good thing.

Oh, and one major job perk that we have is the sabbatical.   Every six years we can apply for time off, a semester or two, in order to get away from the grind of the fun but stressful job in order to re-energize ourselves and our research.   Some professors complete big projects.   Some find entire new directions to head into.   Different universities have different rules about sabbaticals and cover different amounts of salary.   For instance, I’m heading to Porto Alegre, Brazil and Tianjian, China during the next academic year to do research (making significant steps on my efforts to understand post-starburst quasars).   The University of Wyoming will pay 60% of my salary during that period, while my grant money will contribute the other 40%.   The university would cover 100% of my salary if I left for only one semester.   I expect to publish a lot of papers next year and forge new collaborations.

My astronomy page has links to my papers, my research group, and some recent courses, if you’re curious, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.   And I realize that there are things I’ve neglected to mention above.   Things like going to seminars, journal club, reading papers in my field, various university business, and more.

My colleagues ask me where I find the time to write novels.   I wonder that myself sometimes, and wish I could spend more time on it and get books out faster than I’ve managed.

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The Unique Strength of Science Fiction

March 9th, 2008

Why do people read science fiction, and why do people write it?

And in a related question, why do some look down on it or feel ashamed to admit to loving it?

The answers I feel lie in what science fiction does that other forms of fiction don’t do as well. Here’s what I think are the strengths of science fiction:

It’s a great escape. The real world is filled with long stretches of boredom, or worse, pain. Fiction in general lets us experience a different place, a different persona, with every moment intensely interesting (at least in the hands of a good writer). Science fiction in particular lets us escape further, faster. The challenges are less likely to be the terrifying ones of our lives, such as cancer or foreclosure.

It’s educational, permitting us to learn about technology and science vicariously through characters who need to understand how the world, the universe, works, in order to achieve their goals. For instance, you’d better understand gravity and Newton’s Laws, or you die in space. You’d better understand tidal forces, eclipses, seasons, and many various technological tools, or various terrible calamities may be suffered. This sort of science fiction can be straight up education, imparting a traditional educational lesson, or it may be metaphor for how our entire society must understand science and technology in order to wend our way through the maze of invention and changing circumstances. More specifically…

It’s preparation for the opportunities of the future and how they may change our cultural environment. A long history of stories about human cloning should have prepared us better for this technology, but not enough people read science fiction. We had a lot of ridiculous statements coming from unqualified thinkers, from scientists to priests, who hadn’t really thought much about the consequences of cloning in a serious manner. At least not nearly as much as science fiction writers and readers had. I thought the public “debate” was embarrassing for the human species considering that some of us had already spent decades working through the ideas involved. For instance, the creator of Dolly the cloned sheep suggested human cloning was a bad idea because if a couple cloned the husband, the wife might later become sexually attracted to the son.

It’s preparation for the dangers of the future and how they may threaten us. In grossest terms, it’s the original science fiction story, Frankenstein. I usually object to this in science fiction because it often borders on fear mongering. The cautionary tale has its place when it acts as a warning, but not when it is just mindless sensationalism masquerading as entertainment. We should beware the dangers of unregulated nanotechnology, nuclear weapons, advertising, and multinational corporations, but we shouldn’t reject out of hand technological advance because it’s difficult to predict what will happen. Reading most Michael Crichton novels would have the average reader think that every new technology is uncontrollable and will lead to deaths and worse. This sort of speculation makes for exciting reading, but doesn’t, I think, give much credit to the ingenuity and instinct of humanity.

Finally — and here is where I think we find the greatest strength of science fiction — it’s a unique way to explore the human heart. There are those who like to say that there are no new stories, and those who like to say that Shakespeare already said everything and we’re just rehashing what he already did, but not as well. I reject those statements outright, and believe that science fiction allows us to ask questions — important, meaningful ones — that may have intrigued Shakespeare but that he couldn’t even imagine. Is a perfect simulation of a person a person? What are we in the reflection of alien intelligences? What is the human experience when life spans not decades, but eons? What does it mean to be human when we control our own genome, or can merge ourselves with our technology? What kind of world emerges from instant global communication the likes of which we’ve never had available before? And so on. The questions, literally, are endless.

I think that those who look down on science fiction have a failure of vision or experience. They look down on what they consider lesser goals of fiction, like escapism, and see how even bad science fiction satisfies those needs. They may also be language snobs who look for sparkling prose and turn of phrase foremost in fiction, and fail to recognize that there are other equally worthy (and more worthy, in my opinion,) points to reading a story. Most generalizations are poor form for any thinking person, and I tend to look down upon those who do that when it’s unwarranted. Science fiction at its best is the only form of literature bringing us truly new insights to what it means to be human in the face of what we’re becoming, given our power to change our environment and ourselves. It may be one of the few meaningful ways that we as a species take to examine what we’re doing before we’ve already done it.

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The Science of Spider Star

March 7th, 2008

“A dark-matter world holds the key to a weapon from the heart of a sun.”

That’s the tagline on the cover.   My new hard science fiction novel, Spider Star, was published by Tor this week. I’m pretty happy to finally have the book out, the current expression of my attempts to make my career in astronomy and my interest in writing synergistic.

I wanted to make a very general post highlighting a few of the key sciences/technologies I featured in the novel. In coming days/weeks, I’ll have some more specific posts discussing each of these in more detail.

Stellar Evolution. The story begins on a planet called Argo in orbit around the star Pollux. Pollux is an evolved giant star. The ancient extinct aliens that once inhabited Argo somehow moved their planet as Pollux evolved off the main sequence into a giant. Getting the timescales right and making them work for this was a little tricky (I recommend StarClock as a great tool!). The technology of the planet moving is a key plot element.

Dark Matter. I wrote a brief introduction to dark matter and posted it few months back. The Spider Star, and this isn’t much of a spoiler, is a giant alien space station that sits in the gravity well of a dark matter planet. I leaned on some speculative astrophysical papers by theorists David Eichler and Robert Foot for not only inspiration, but actually calculating some of the complicated details of the world building.

Gravity. The planet moving and the details of life in, on, and throughout the Spider Star relies on understanding gravity. I got to have a lot of fun describing how things work in these strange environments. Some of those counter-intuitive freshman physics problems get trotted out and exploited in the story. Travel in the Spider Star is accomplished through evacuated tubes, letting you go from place to place along the travel web in the same 45 minutes, using only gravity, no matter the distance. Local “surface gravity” changes with altitude.   And more.

Interstellar Travel. I have a lot of different technologies in the book for dealing with interstellar travel, many I mentioned in a recent post.   My favorite one in the book involves dark matter. I invented an alien device called “the Bully” because it pushes WIMPs around for thrust.

Permalink | Tags: Education, General, Personal, Science, Science Fiction | 5 Comments »