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
I just finished redecorating my student computer lab, replacing my old Demotivator posters from despair.com (great but have been up for 8+ years) with science fiction movie posters:
It occurs to me I should have used the power of the internet to get some other ideas, although I like my choices. I’ve still got a little space on another wall, and perhaps I can add one more. Anyway, let me give my list of favorites and solicit opinions about them and others. Here are ten of my favorites that seem iconic to me. Keep in mind that some great movies have crappy posters, and some crappy movies have some pretty good posters.
Original Star Wars (I like other ones, but this one was on my wall as a kid=iconic in my life):
Original Terminator:
The Matrix:
Alien:
Blade Runner:
Forbidden Planet:
A Clockwork Orange (I also like other versions):
Contact:
Metropolis:
E.T.
Honorable Mentions: Predator, Jurassic Park, Avatar, Tron (original), The Day the Earth Stood Still (original), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Other great ones I missed?
Sorry for all the amazon links, but it’s an easy and quick way to get the images up.
While I guess I always feel busy and sometimes overwhelmed, I’m usually getting more done than I think and it’s often worthwhile. I spent a lot of time running on Sunday (18 miles), and much of my time Friday and Saturday was spent with prospective graduate students.
Most PhD programs make acceptances of graduate students near the start of the calendar year and require a response by April 15th. Often a part of that process between those two events is an invitation to visit the department. The department usually pays for the visit and makes some effort to put its best face forward to convince the accepted students to say yes and spend the next several years (6-7 years is not uncommon in astronomy, for better or worse) getting a PhD.
Quality students are important. They do a lot of the grunt work teaching labs and grading, but more importantly, doing learning to do research. I’m not saying that research is more important than teaching — both are important to a university department — but it is easier to scrape by with adequate teaching than it is with research.
A poor grad student takes more time than they’re worth, while a good one quickly becomes a valued colleague and future collaborator, bringing in their own telescope time and even grant money.
It’s also really hard to figure this out on paper. Students with good grades and GRE scores wash out of top programs, while other less prestigious programs polish diamonds in the rough into young scientists who land coveted jobs.
It’s not all about smarts and grades when it comes to research. A lot of the necessary skills can be taught, but the grad student has to have the fire to want to learn and excel. There is a formula for success and it’s obvious: publish good work a lot. Easier said than done, but there are a lot of worthwhile projects waiting to be done and it’s up to students to push themselves when it comes to the research. Sometimes some things do take a long time, and better a long time than wrong…
I’m talking around some of the things I want to talk about. Success for me as a professor and for graduate students as young scientists depends on an interrelated web of desires, skills, and work. A little luck with weather or choice of research topics doesn’t hurt either.
But good students elevate faculty members and their department. Bad ones drag it down and can make it bad for everyone from the faculty to the undergrads.
So, you want to do a good job recruiting your first picks from the applicant pool. I also believe it’s essential to be really honest and open with them and even to discourage the ones that are a bad fit. It can be hard for a prospective grad student without a lot of acceptances to say no to an offer, but I’ve seen people waste a few years of their lives trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. It’s usually not fun.
I personally have a lot of grad students working with me now: four. Two are within 1-2 years of finishing. Two are just starting PhD projects after finishing classes and qualifying exams. All four have promise, although have moved at different speeds. I’m optimistic all four will complete their PhDs and find employment in astronomy in some capacity.
It’s important to be real with them on the first visit and give them time, attention, and honesty. I trust we did that with the bunch that were just in town. I hope the ones who will be unhappy with a small department in a small town with small amounts of oxygen and heat will pass, and the ones who will be happy and thrive here will accept. That’s up to them at this stage. I’ll do my best to advise them all if they come, and mentor those in research who like quasars as much as I do.
Sometimes people equate the relatively low pay and less enviable tasks the grad students do with their lack of importance. That is far from the truth. They’re vital to departments with graduate programs, and we spend a lot of time and effort recruiting. Sometime all of our visitors accept, sometimes they all decline, but we put in a lot of care every year. I wish them all success, whether with us or elsewhere.
Like me, you may have seen the commercials or trailers for the new movie Limitless coming out in a couple of weeks:
It looks like a cool movie. I’ve always loved science fiction about increasing intelligence (e.g., the excellent “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes made into the pretty good movie Charley).
However, like me, you may have also noticed the tagline, “You know how they say we can only access twenty percent of our brains? Well this lets you access all of it.”
Hmmm…sounds like a variation of the ten-percent myth, that we only use ten percent of our brains. The myth is flexible enough that 20% is equally plausible — and also wrong. I’m sure that when I was younger I was guilty of believing and repeating this myth, but it is only a myth. I don’t want to spend a lot of time explaining why and repeating the linked Snopes article above, rather I want to spend a few moments thinking about this myth and its relationship to science fiction.
Now, first I wonder how many of these myths exist and are widely believed and repeated. Probably counting Snopes articles is a good way to start, although that’s surely incomplete and wouldn’t include numerous superstitions, commonly misunderstood/mispronounced words, let alone many misconceptions I see regularly teaching science. I mean, honest, unbiased, and well-informed folks at the Free Republic dismiss Snopes for its “left-leaning bias.” Reminds me of a Stephen Colbert quote (google Colbert and the bias of reality if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
Once you know that the premise of a story is built around a myth — not a fairy tale or a story of Greek gods, but a widely believed falsehood — it’s hard, for me at least, to establish the suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy a story. I keep thinking, “the writers are poorly informed, not careful, and this story is going to have more mistakes.” Then I start actively looking for them instead of losing myself in the story. How about you?
This is a huge killer in science fiction in particular for me. Sometimes I see a flaw in a plan or the world, and sometimes it’s just a mistake. Sometimes the writers actually have it figured out, and exploit what is an apparent flaw in their character’s knowledge or planning to good effect, but I’ve been uncertain whether or not to trust the reality of the story world. Does the character’s plan have a flaw, or does the writer’s? For instance, some characters, smart and well trained, granted, but not significantly more so than myself, make plans involving the use or abuse of alien technology with only a few minutes of fiddling about with it.
Ultimately, even though the line makes me suspect that the creators of the movie Limitless don’t care enough to get their details right, I’ll go see it if the reviews are good and plan to turn off my critical thinking early. Maybe 80% of it. I’ll only need 20% of my brain to follow this storyline I’m sure!
Should the Big Bang Theory have a Mission? Should Science Fiction?
March 1st, 2011
A friend sent me a link to an article at Physics Today about The Big Bang Theory. The premise of the article was to ask if the comedy could do more than make people laugh, and to propose it could educate them at the same time. Here is the lead:
Could scientists help the cause of science by helping CBS raise its physics situation comedy The Big Bang Theory from the level of Gomer Pyle, USMC to the level of MASH?
Might CBS let physicists help elevate BBT from the level of Seinfeld, a hilarious show about nothing, to the level of All in the Family, a hilarious show about society’s profoundest issues?
I think the Big Bang Theory is already at a level higher than Gomer Pyle, myself, and MASH wasn’t always that deep.
I don’t strongly disagree with the proposal, but let me say a few things about it. Obviously as a science educator, founder of Launch Pad — now accepting applications — and editor of Diamonds in the Sky, I have an interest in reaching the public with good science and I have no problem doing it with entertainment. As a writer, especially one with some success (although far less than the writers of Big Bang Theory), I’d have a huge problem with a group of physicists suggesting I change my formula to pursue their agenda. Personally, I already think there’s a lot of good being done in the proposed direction by exchanges like this:
I think my biggest concern beyond the pushiness is the following. When you intentionally write to inject a message, especially in a comedy, you’re likely to flat on your face if you’re not brilliant. If the Big Bang Theory started to get more pedagogical and ratings dropped, that would end the experiment not just for the one show, but any new show proposals for years to come.
The show already has characters with scientific perspectives, somewhat contaminated with comic books and science fiction, and they make them clear week after week. Exaggerated, funny perspectives sometimes, but ones in lines with science folk. And like in the clip above, Penny is the butt of the jokes sometimes for her lack of science. The physicists are usually the butt of the jokes on social issues…and while there are socially astute physicists, the average physicist puts style a million parsecs behind substance.
Honestly, I’m thrilled with anything that includes science, respects it (but not necessarily individual scientists who can be flaky social outcasts), and doesn’t get it wrong. The cameos by real scientists is especially welcome, too, given that examples like Neil deGrasse Tyson do have social acumen and style.
Let the Big Bang Theory pave the road for the socially conscious and educational science version of MASH. It has shown that mass audiences will watch a show about scientists that touches on real science regularly.
The first day of Launch Pad I usually tell attendees that I’m not out to convert them to being hard science fiction writers, or to try to make them write educational stories. I say that I’d be thrilled if they did, and wish that Harry Potter readers had gotten more of an astronomy lesson and that Twilight readers learned the phases of the moon in order to understand werewolves. Honestly, I’d just be happy if I didn’t see bad attitudes toward science and scientists everywhere, and if the majority of science topics popping up on TV and movies didn’t have major errors. Is that so much to wish for?
So, I don’t think science fiction should have a mission to educate people about science. But I would like it if it did, some of the time, without compromising its entertainment value.
Too much of the time the science on TV and in movies is just plain dumb, the scientists are arrogant and mad or alternatively weird and socially inept, or science is just not a valued part of reality. I suspect that until the public is better educated about science and actually trusts it more than what their political and religious leaders say, shows like the Big Bang Theory will be the exception rather than the rule, and a version with educational value will be laughed out of the water before it’s aired. At least with the Big Bang Theory we often laugh with the scientists, not at them. Except when it’s funny and they deserve it. That’s the way it should be.
P.S. I wanted to add a link to the Big Blog Theory, which discusses the science in episodes of the Big Bang Theory. The show is obviously already getting touches of real science in there, which is not bad for a general comedy audience in 21-22 minutes per episode.
Ten Terrific Resources for Writing Space-Based Hard Science Fiction
February 10th, 2011
I wrote this entry as a guest post for the SFWA blog, and it is now available there. I’ll include it here as well below. For long-time and regular readers, you’ll see elements of previous posts. I’ve culled together ten things that I think are helpful resources (a few of these “things” actually include multiple links). Anyway, have a look and be encouraged to add to the list in the comments. I’m sure I don’t know every great resource out there.
Hard science fiction is science fiction without mistakes in the science, at least not very big ones. You can still be very speculative and far out, but you can’t violate what we know about how the universe works without spoiling the suspension of disbelief. While there’s a lot we don’t know, there’s wikipedias full of what we do, and it can be intimidating even if you’ve got a PhD in a scientific subject. I’m a professional astronomer, but there’s plenty of room for me to screw up when it comes to geology, biology, or any of another half dozen subjects.
I would like to share ten resources, more or less, that I think are really terrific when it comes to getting the science right. These will be biased toward my areas of expertise, and will span books, websites, and software. Old-fashioned books first.
1. Mallove, Eugene F., and Gregory L. Matloff. The Starflight Handbook : A Pioneer’s Guide to Interstellar Travel, Wiley Science Editions. New York: Wiley, 1989. This book is one-stop shopping for nearly every serious idea put forward in the last few decades, although it is not 100% complete (e.g., the Alcubierre Drive is missing). The relativistic rocket equation is a bonus. Maybe you could search dozens of wiki pages for the same information, but this is a book worth having on the shelf.
3. Sheffield, Charles. Borderlands of Science. This book is a readable summary of a number of areas of science: physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, etc., with an emphasis on topics most likely to concern a science fiction writer. The solar system and space flight both get long chapters to themselves, for example. Chaos theory gets a big chapter too — bigger than it deserves probably — but is interesting enough. This book is a handy starting place for an sf writer, but doesn’t really go into enough detail to do more than spark a story. The bibliography is therefore unfortunately thin (but at least there is one!).
4. Gillet, Stephen, and Bova, Ben. World Building. Gillet and Bova wrote a pretty nice book on issues of world building that come up when constructing an alien planet. While this is a useful book, it’s starting to get a bit dated given all the discoveries about actual extra-solar planets out there, so be aware that the possibilities for alien worlds are growing and perhaps broader than suggested here.
5. To keep current, we move to the web and there are several places to go for information about actual planets (and systems of planets) around real stars. One of my favorites is exoplanets.org. Other nice sites are the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, Planet Quest, and The Planetary Society’s Catalog of Exoplanets. We’re now at a stage where you can’t just make up anything you want about some star systems, but what we really know may be stranger and more interesting than imagination.
6. How do you get to those planets? Well, you need maps for one thing. One great website with 3-D starmaps, among many useful pages, is Winchell Chung’s Project Rho. SolStation.com is another great site. ChView is a third.
7. OK, you have your starmaps, planet information, interstellar starship, but there are a lot of details still to worry about, like how to move around in star systems and orbit planets. There’s a nice webpage with an overview of orbital mechanics for you.
8. Maybe we haven’t found any planets around a particular star of interest, or you want to make up your own star system. Any star system must conform to the laws of planetary motion, and those planets, once placed, will have a narrow range of allowable temperatures, atmospheres, and other properties. A program like Astrosynthesis may be what you need. As a professional astronomer, I can do this myself, but it really isn’t so complicated that software can’t. There are others like StarGen out there, as well.
10. Finally, I do think it’s useful to read good examples of hard science fiction. There is some variation depending on audience, from the hardcore science fiction fan to the general public. Stanley Schmidt at Analog ensures the science is good there. I created an anthology of astronomy-themed science fiction that’s online for free: Diamonds in the Sky. Andy Fraknoi has compiled a list of stories with good science. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have a semi-recent anthology called the Hard SF Renaissance that I can recommend.
This is just my own biased list. There are lots of great resources out there, but these are ones that I think are useful and I’ve used many of them myself. Don’t forget wikipedia either, as it has really gotten pretty good on a lot of scientific topics, or youtube.com, which has clips from a lot of good documentaries. If you’ve got other resources you love, I encourage you to leave a comment and suggest them.
The Impact of NASA’s Kepler Mission on Science Fiction
February 3rd, 2011
We’ve just had a major announcement concerning first results from NASA’s Kepler Mission.
Before providing links to the details and reactions to the details, let me describe what the mission does and what it will continue to do. Kepler is basically just a big digital camera in space that takes pictures of a field of stars over and over again, every half an hour. Computer software analyzes the images looking to see if any of those stars dim periodically from an orbiting planet passing in front. How much dimmer, how long the dimming lasts, and the period of the dimming, together with information about the star itself tells us the size of the planet and how far it is from its central star. Thus we can figure out, roughly speaking, the temperature of the planet and if liquid water can exist on its surface.
This is an effective approach and has previously been used to discover planets, but the stars need to align for success. Or the planets and stars, that is. The plane of the planet’s orbit must cross in front of its star from Kepler’s perspective. Furthermore, orbital periods can be centuries long in principle, and the software is only flagging planets when multiple episodes of dimming are observed consistent with a single period. Less than a year of Kepler data is so far being analyzed (out of a total expected mission duration of three years), so in this initial announcement only a small fraction of what Kepler will find could have been found so far, and that’s a tiny fraction of the total planets out there.
In a long-awaited announcement, scientists operating NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite reported Wednesday that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially tripling the number of known planets in the universe.
Of the new candidates, 68 are one-and-a-quarter times the size of the Earth or smaller — smaller, that is, than any previously discovered planets outside the solar system. Fifty-four of the possible exoplanets are in the so-called habitable zones, where temperatures should be moderate enough for liquid water, of stars dimmer and cooler than the Sun; four of these are less than twice the size of Earth, and one is even smaller.
Since Kepler is only looking at about 150,000 stars, and the Milky way has a million times more than that, Phil Plait estimates (too low as he acknowledges) that there are potientially a million Earth-like planets out there. And let me emphasize that he’s WAY TOO LOW with his estimate, as Kepler will find more longer period planets still, and is only finding planets with their orbits lined up just right to cross in front of their star. The first factor will drive up the number by factors of several, but the second is a larger factor, something like a couple of orders of magnitude (depending on the details of the size of the star, the size of the planet, and the orbital radius of the planet). So to be conservative, let’s call it over 100 million Earth-like planets likely in the Milky Way. This is likely still be an order of magnitude low.
It would imply that the chances of any given star system having an Earth-like planet is probably better than 1/100, and that there are on order of a billion of them in the Mily Way.
That’s a lot of planets.
Science fiction positing that inhabitable planets are few and far between (e.g. Battlestar Galactica) seems to be unlikely.
Now, life could still be rare, but there are probably a lot of planets out there with warm oceans. I think that makes life probable given how quickly it popped up on the early Earth. It took a lot longer for there to be multi-cellular life.
So, maybe most systems don’t have Earth like planets, but every few dozen radomly sampled will. Most of those will probably only have bacterial-type life, depending on the age of the system.
Still, I’m seeing a galaxy filled with life and the chances of other intelligent species out there to communicating with skyrocketing.
Solar systems like ours seem, based on Kepler, more common than some of the weird things we’ve found with the Doppler method.
This is exciting. Ensuring years will give us many thousands of planets, hundreds of Earth-like planets, and within my lifetime I expect astronomical detection of evidence of life on an alien world (through atmospheric analysis).
We are living science fiction here, folks, and it’s cool!
I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.
and
…our children will inherit a world significantly depleted and damaged in comparison to the one our parents handed down to us. And they know it…
Teens want to read something that isn’t a lie…
OK, this might turn out to be true, but I’m calling BULLSHIT.
This reads like Paul Erhlich’s Malthusian call about overpopulation as looming doom (especially with the word “depletion” which is a red herring in my informed opinion), or any other prophet of the end of the world. Remember the ozone hole, or the Y2K problem? We recognized those problems and fixed them before they did us in. Climate change is a problem we’re aware of, and might solve simply and quickly with geoengineering if we can’t solve it in a more prudent manner. If something gets us, I bet it’s a black swan we won’t see coming, and this kind of futurism pretending to be fact is just someone’s personal pessimism given too much credence.
Science fiction is good at the cautionary tale. It sucks at prognostication, and I suspect Paolo is no better than anyone else at this impossible task. I’d make a case, a strong case, that despite some obvious problem areas, most people are better off now than in the past and we have been able to work our way out of holes through regulation and technology.
I’m personally an optimist and think that my life is a lot better now than in past decades, even if I wasn’t making so much money. Entertainment choices and the internet alone beat the shit out of mail-order shopping and 4 TV sucky tv channels and no video games. Industrialization brings lowered birth rates, and if we can get over the current hump we might just self-correct out of over consumption and pollution. Or maybe not. I’m saying my vision is plausible, but I won’t get arrogant and call it the “realistic” future.
Now, doomsayers like Paolo serve a useful purpose, and may make their view of the future less likely by calling it realistic. Useful doesn’t mean right. As a scientist, I’m skeptical of this sort of prognostication and roll my eyes at the folks who are so certain everything will be great or everything will be terrible (they never change their opinions no matter what happens). All I can do is make myself and my part of the world better, and know that there are others like me.
What do you think? Is the future going to be awful? Or better? Or is it stupid to pretend that you know?
Advice for High School Students Interested in Majoring in Astronomy in College
January 3rd, 2011
I made some strategic errors in my career, mostly because I split my energy between engineering and astronomy double majoring when it would have been better to commit to one or the other early. By most measures, I’ve done fine, now being a tenured professor at the University of Wyoming, with a salary, research, and teaching expectations that are quite acceptable. I didn’t exploit my options as well as I could have, however, and here’s some advice to help you do better.
First, college has gotten ridiculously expensive at a lot of schools. It’s possible to make a decent living in astronomy, but it isn’t the kind of career worth taking on $100,000 plus of loans. Don’t go to an expensive private college unless it’s a some kind of lifelong dream, or you get a free ride due to a great scholarship or rich parents.
There’s another reason not to go to an exclusive Ivy League school. They don’t all have great or large astronomy departments, and even for the ones that do, there’s more competition from other students to be the best in the class or work with the top professors. At the undergraduate stage it’s probably better to be top dog at a less prestigious undergraduate institution and set yourself up to get into the graduate program of your choice for the PhD. Graduate admissions committees seeing Harvard or Princeton on an application do take that into account, but it’s a lot harder to stand out at places like that, and if you can get into them, you can be a star someplace else.
Understand also that there’s not a lot of difference at the undergraduate level between an astronomy major and a physics major, so don’t let details of the astronomy major be a big deal in selecting a college. The physics GRE (a college version of the ACT) will have a potentially big effect on grad school applications, and there isn’t an astronomy GRE test. A minor in computer science is a good idea as astronomy is getting more and more data intensive, with larger and larger data sets to analyze.
So here’s what I recommend. Pick an affordable public university with a large and superior astronomy department that will provide a lot of opportunities to get involved in research and make your grad school application spectacular. Work your ass off to be a star. Do summer programs and/or do research with more than one professor in the department. Ideally, have your name on some papers and line up some great letters of recommendation before you graduate. Don’t plan on becoming an astronomer with only a BA or BS degree, but realize you should expect to complete a PhD and college is just a step in that journey.
There are quite a few public universities with large and superior astronomy departments I recommend. Tuition varies among them, especially in-state vs. out-of-state, so be careful making comparisons. In no particular order, and realizing I may be omitting some good options, here’s my list: University of California (Berkeley, Santa Cruz, LA), University of Arizona, University of Wisconsin, University of Texas, University of Colorado, University of Florida, Penn State, Ohio State, University of Washington, and the University of Hawaii. There may be some other smaller or more specialized programs that are good choices, especially if you can get in-state tuition or like their faculty/specialty.
If you want another source of rankings of graduate programs (which is a good surrogate for program quality and opportunities especially if you search on larger programs) try this webpage. Here’s another list of programs with links.
When I was a kid, I collected rocks. One of the rock-related items I bought was a sheet of cardboard labeled Mohs Scale of Hardness. Talc is a one, while diamond is a ten. Tooth enamel is apparently a five. My card didn’t have a diamond on it when I bought it, but an encouraging aunt sent an industrial diamond for me to glue on. Harder minerals scratch softer minerals. There are materials softer than talc and harder than diamond, so it isn’t quite a ten point scale and you can have intermediate values.
There’s a hardness scale when it comes to science, too, although not so well quantified. Physics is at the hard end, with high standards of rigor and easier to tell if you’ve got things right, moving on down through chemistry, biology, getting softer moving into sciences that deal with human and animal behavior, psychology and social science, where it’s increasingly difficult to tell if you’ve got things right, and I’ll finish at the soft end with economics since that’s the “dismal science” on my radar this week. Most economic findings are apparently wrong. Asimov’s Foundation series posited a “psychohistory” that elevated sociology to a hard science, but that’s still only science fiction to us today.
I wanted to try to make a hardness scale of science fiction, the way there is for rocks. I’ve thought about this sort of thing for many years now, trying to characterize the science/reality component of science fiction and to rate work by that measure. Let me try to quantify my scale, and make Mike’s Scale of Hardness of Science Fiction movies:
0. Futurama. While often clever, there’s nothing hard about Futurama in the slightest, which is fine for a funny cartoon. It makes a sort of perfect zero to start with.
1. Star Wars. I have often dismissed the Star Wars movies as fantasy, which they are. But they look like science fiction, with spaceships and robots. The mysticism of the force and a host of other ridiculous items make the science of Star Wars about as soft as talc.
2. Superheroes, e.g. The Fantastic Four, Superman, etc. There’s a wide variety of superhero stories out there, and some are better scientifically than others, but the average is ridiculous, although there’s often an effort to involve some science. Yes, cosmic rays exist but they don’t give people (or monkeys) superpowers. Yes, an alien native to a high-gravity world would likely have different capabilities on Earth, but leaping not flying. Etc., etc., etc. There’s sort of an attempt to be self-consistent, or fix the most ridiculous things with a “retcon” now and then in the comics or in a movie. Basically though, just a notch above Star Wars here.
3. Event Horizon. There’s actually a lot of good science and hard science fiction elements in this horror movie, but it basically turns evil into an actual physical force and certainly feels like the supernatural is involved. It doesn’t manage, in my opinion, to reach the level of Solaris where the supernatural elements are understood as advanced alien technology.
4. Armageddon. How could this stinker be so high? Well, it tries to set everything in the real world that has real science as we know it. That’s it. You get a 4 on the hardness scale by leaving out magic and the supernatural. But no higher if you get every other damn thing wrong every single time, like Armageddon does. The Core could go here, too.
5. Star Trek. This franchise tries to get the science right, and does some fraction of the time. It also tries to put in a fair amount of science. It’s sometimes self-consistent, but has a lot of baggage, too, and there are aspects of the technology that do not bear close scrutiny. The ability to time travel, for instance, just makes a mess here as implemented, and how they do it never made sense to me. Then there are the transporters…I haven’t figured out why anyone ever dies on the show, or why the doctors don’t use these. Look, there are some Trekkies out there who I am sure have some tortured explanations for some of the things that don’t make sense, but there are some things that don’t make sense.
6. Space Cowboys. I might have been able to use Deep Impact here, too. Basically what you get if you make Armageddon and don’t make such a huge number of mistakes, just a consistently steady rate of small ones. Still including a lot of science and getting a lot of it right.
7. Aliens. The Aliens universe has faster than light without paradoxes or dealing with relativity, even if it also uses hibernation for space flight. For historical reasons we’ll permit that one conceit to still allow a hardness rating of seven, but no higher. Cleverly, it keeps the focus off issues like this one so you have to think about it even mattering. The biology of the alien is suspect to some, also. This level marks the peak hardness for the majority of good science fiction.
8. Avatar. James Cameron enlisted a lot of scientific help to create Pandora and its flora and fauna. His unobtanium, very high-temperature superconductors, isn’t known to be impossible. The magnetic fields required to make mountains of the stuff levitate, however, while conceptually correct would have consequences not in evidence. Probably too cool of an idea for Cameron and art won. From my reading about the starship, we’re not talking faster than light travel. Lots of good science here with only a few minor problems and no major ones.
9. Contact. If we grant the wormhole technology of the aliens, the only faster-than-light mode of travel given the physics stamp of approval, I’m only aware of few very small items technically wrong, and a couple of things that are sort of misleading but done for particular artistic effects. Contact is harder than Avatar primarily because of the actual emphasis on issues of science and engineering, while having more subtle violations of known science.
10. 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Harder than Chinese arithmetic,” a phrase I recall reading a long time ago in some bad porn, applies. That seemed to be about as hard as…something…could get, and indeed, I know of essentially no science flaws in this movie. If I wanted to get super nit-picky, I could argue about a few things, but they’re not clearly wrong.
I’d love to see a science fiction movie harder than 2001. There’s written science fiction by writers like Greg Egan, Geoffrey Landis, and a few others that are pretty hard. I shoot for above an 8 myself.
Now, there are a few other comments I wanted to make. Like minerals, science fiction movies are not always so pure. A movie like Red Planet does pretty well getting the physical science right but is rather boneheaded in some basic errors in biology. I’d have to give it something like a 5 or 6, but would rate the physical science harder and the biological science softer. Then there’s Battlestar Galactica. Given the faster than light, a few other minor problems, but the huge number of things it does well, it should be a solid seven, maybe a 7.5, except for all that mess with fate and the supernatural that kind of ruined it as hard science fiction for me.
How does this scale look to you? Did I make any mistakes? Is it easy or hard to think of other movies and fit them in here? I don’t have a scratch test like you would have for minerals, but I suppose I could parameterize a few axes and quantify vector lengths and directions, although frankly that would still be pretty subjective and perhaps even too geeky for me.
I’ve written about applying for jobs and given some tips about on-campus interviews. I wanted to give some brief advice about what to do when you actually get a tenure-track job offer. My advice will be pretty general, but with a few more specific things for science jobs like astronomy.
First, celebrate. It’s hard to get job offers like these in most fields today. Take some time to smile, have a drink, kiss your loved ones, play with your dog. Seriously, enjoy the moment.
Then it’s time to review the offer. There will be a description of the job provided, along with offers for a salary, start-up, relocation, and perhaps some other particulars. You want to wait to see this all in writing before negotiating.
Figure out if the offer is a good one. For state employees, like me, our salaries are public record and you can actually see what your peers are making. You may be able to check salaries at other similar universities.
Start-up is University money to help you get off to a good start while you’re busy getting settled in, developing courses, setting up a lab, etc. You need to have enough to be successful. Outside of science and engineering, most start-up packages are small, but for an experimental physicist a laboratory might cost $600k and be essential to success as a researcher. These numbers are rarely public but ask friends and mentors about start-up packages at similar universities for similar positions. Also, there are sometimes restrictions about how the start-up money can be spent, so be aware of what’s off limits, if anything, and realize that that might be a negotiating point.
There will be a teaching load associated with the position. One thing that can sometimes be negotiated is a reduced workload the first year or first semester, permitting more time to focus on research or just developing one course at a time.
Some other things sometimes come up. A more experienced applicant might get a job offer with a reduced time to tenure review, for instance. Make sure that’s something you want as it can sometimes take a couple of years to achieve peak productivity, especially if teaching is new.
Figure out what will make you the happiest and most productive, and also figure out the minimum numbers that you need to be successful. It can be a disaster to take a job with a $400k start-up if the laboratory to do your work requires $600k minimum — there may not be other funding somewhere.
Figure out if you have some additional bargaining chips on the table. If you’re bringing in grant money, or want to bring students or post-docs with you, those can play into a negotiation. For instance, if you’re not being offered a break on the courseload your first semester, you might get one by offering to pay a portion of your salary with your incoming grant money.
If you’ve applied for other jobs, especially if you’re shortlisted and have been interviewed, let all the parties know you’ve been made an offer. This might help bring you a competing offer that you can use as a huge negotiating chip.
OK, so here’s the meat of the post. You should not just take or leave an offer. You should prod to see what is negotiable. You should make a counter offer, and, if possible, justify the counter offer as much as reasonable. Give reasons for everything, like the price of equipment, the extra time you will need to develop a graduate course, the salary/start-up your friend at a competing university just got.
There are a few big items you can also include in a counter offer. One is a job for a spouse. Spousal hires are more common than many people think, and can often be a boon for both sides as the spouse is often a quality person. This is the time to bring it up, at the moment of the peak negotiating strength. The department/dean wants to hire and has a strong candidate they will try to please. After an acceptance of an offer, there is much less incentive.
OK, so you push on everything you can, basically, and find out if there is room for negotiation or not. Sometimes there won’t be much, or you have to be ready to turn down the offer if the offer really is lacking something essential.
More common is the situation where some things will be negotiable, but other things won’t be, often for strange technical reasons (e.g., administrative or legislative rules). That’s ok — if they can’t budge on one important thing (e.g., insufficient relocation funds) then they ought to provide something else, right? Be ready to giveaway points that are unimportant in return for gaining benefits that are the most desireable.
The department head may be the one making the offer and doing the negotiating, but it is usually a dean behind the head who has control of most of the resources. Don’t look at the department as your enemy, but potential ally. A candidate who gets a good salary and start-up is highly valued, and that value gets added to the department.
Often departments will institute deadlines for reply, and often the deadlines are reasonable (2-3 weeks). Many candidates want extensions because they want to see if they’ll get offers from other universities. Extensions may be available, but only ask for one if there’s a real chance for another offer and it is one you highly desire. Keep in mind that a counteroffer is an implicit suggestion of a positive response to the demands, so be prepared to say “yes” or offer “yes” immediately if all demands are met.
I have to confess that I was not a great negotiator in the past, and I was always just concerned about astronomy first, everything else second. A lot of academics love their subjects more than anything else and have not necessarily done much negotiation or want to under any circumstances. There’s a short book I strongly suggest: Secrets of Power Negotiating. Well worth the time. I felt really happy getting some friends higher salary offers offering them some advice from the book about how to make counteroffers.
This probably sounds adversarial, and it is at some level. But the goal should be to find a win-win solution in the negotiating. The university wants to hire you, and you want them to hire you. Find a way to make everyone happy. When all parties agree, there should not be negative feelings, but mutual respect and good feelings about the qualities of the other.
Losing (some) Faith in Science, but it still Beats the Alternatives
December 21st, 2010
In my second or third year of graduate school, I went through a period of depression of several months after realizing that the Ivory Tower was pretty dirty, even in a field of pure research like astronomy. I was starting to see how politics and power interfered with my ideal of how science, especially a fundamental physical science without a lot of immediate application, should work.
Still, I wasn’t a totally biased moron like some of the sociologists around that time arguing that science was a social activity and that social forces determined its conclusions (see “science wars“). There’s a reality out there, and no matter the prestige or authority of a scientific figure, if their position is falsified by experiment, science rolls over them. They might fight it, but it happens sooner or later. There are way too many sociologists who don’t actually do science themselves, even when they call themselves social scientists. Maybe it’s because they really don’t believe that there are objective right answers and that it’s all sort of a big game. Like I said, morons.
I did have a big transition to go through, however, as I came to realize that there was a hell of a lot more that we didn’t know than we did know. I mean, we have thousands of textbooks and journals filled with scientific knowledge. It’s hard to realize that there remain millions left to write when you can’t see them. I made that transition and I find it ridiculously easy now to think of new experiments and observations worth doing to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge. I’m creative, and like doing this a lot more than I like doing the work itself, unfortunately. Luckily I have students and post-docs these days to help.
But I digress. Let me get back to my more recent challenges to my “faith” in science. Make no mistake: science is not a religion. It is a methodology that works to produce new, reliable knowledge. I’m just concerned now that it doesn’t work as well in practice as I always thought it did. I am only reassured by the notion, which I want to make very clear, is that as flawed as it might be, every other method is worse. Kind of like democracy or our court system.
I’ve been reading a little less science fiction the past few years, and a little more non-fiction. Let me list a few of the books and what I’ve learned from them about how science outside my cozy little area tends to be a lot more biased and wrong a large fraction of the time. Maybe I should have been less scornful of the sociologists in the science wars.
The Invisible Gorilla. This is basically a book about how humans deceive themselves, covering a range of illusions many are not aware of. The title comes from an experiment demonstrating that many concentrating people won’t even notice when a gorilla runs through the middle of a basketball game they’re watching. They cover a lot of ground in the book and I had a better idea of the staggering hurdles in doing good experiments in human psychology and communicating the results fairly to the public. I highly recommend this book. (Disclaimer, I’m friends with one of the authors, Dan Simons, and might be guilty of the illusion of objectivity even though everyone else thinks this is a great book, too.)
Wrong. This book is more to the point, and quantitatively explores just how wrong “experts” are has chapters devoted to science and journalism. In some fields like economics, apparently almost every paper is wrong. The author, David Freedman, emphasizes he’d still prefer to go with the science when it’s available. It’s still less likely to be wrong than other methods, and can often be checked or falsified. He does provide some rules for figuring out what advice/findings are probably more reliable than others. Also highly recommended.
The Black Swan. Nassim Taleb writes from an economics background and actually predicted the 2008 financial crisis. He makes some great points about the difficulty of predicting extremely rare events than no one really has any expertise about. He makes the point that fields like astronomy do have experts while economics doesn’t — at least if you determine expertise by correctness about what’s going on. Yes, this is a good one to read, too.
Packaging Boyhood. This is the book critical of superheroes I destroyed a few months ago (a version of my rant is on the amazon link as a review there). I recommend you stay far from this stinker, unless you want an example of the kind of things discussed in The Invisible Gorilla and Wrong. It’s just a piece of crap that has little resemblance to science, but got wide media coverage as scientific evidence saying that superheroes were bad for boys. Yes, this is the work of social “scientists.”
Sex at Dawn. This is a book about a particular aspect of evolutionary psychology, prehistoric sexuality. The case is made that for most of our history as a species, men and women both had multiple sexual partners and enjoyed the situation very much. It’s a strong case, actually, supported with various forms of evidence and a lot more than ‘a just so story” as evolutionary psychology critics would say. Now, about 10-15 years ago I read a book called The Moral Animal that reviewed mainstream evolutionary psychological thinking, and on sexuality it featured the competing strategies of men and women in pair-bonds, both looking to cheat for personal advantage. That book made a lot of sense to me at the time, but Sex at Dawn makes a better case. But I wonder, is it wrong, too?
Good Calories, Bad Calories. I’ve let myself get overweight again. I have lost weight in the past by exercise and low-carb diets. The Food Pyramid introduced around the time I was a kid stresses carbs and limits fats, and most Americans are overweight or obese, and heading toward diabetes and early death. Reading the opening chapters of this book is reminiscent of Wrong, and how a combination of scientists and reporters basically screwed a couple of generations out of good health. I also read The Paleo Solution and recommend that if you’ve got weight/health issues. I know this is hard stuff to figure out, but it isn’t as hard as it seems from what’s happened.
My conclusion is that outside of the physical sciences, there are few real experts and too many examples of misapplication of scientific findings, especially where money or politics is involved.
Still, science wins out in the end because there are right and wrong answers, and even so flawed it is better than guessing or wishful thinking. All this reading has chanced how I think about my world view and the host of “scientific findings” I’ve assimilated to form that view.
Anyone got some other cases where we’ve been misled seriously? “Global warming is a hoax” maybe, but that’s Fox News and oil companies, not the scientists (seriously). There are some popular feminist myths out there that are full of it, politically motivated (e.g., the wage gap, often used to motivate pro-female legislation and bolster the case for overwhelming sexism, vanishes when you correct for job choice and experience, and also the myth that false rape accusations are exceedingly rare). Michio Kaku and some left-wing environmentalists made up a bunch of bull about the dangers of plutonium on the Cassini mission. I can probably think of others given time, but it is sort of disheartening that there’s so much “knowledge” floating around based on what scientists, experts, and journalists are saying, when so much is pure crap.
OK, I’ve already written two posts on this, an initial one with a lot of links and a follow-up after I’d gathered more information for myself. I’ve continued to read some documents, in particular several hundred pages of depositions. Maybe only several hundred…there are thousands there, and depositions are boring mostly.
My opinions have evolved a little as I’ve taken in more information. I had some biases that led to some mistaken impressions that weren’t totally fair, and, on the other side, have some criticisms to make where I previously gave the benefit of the doubt.
To briefly recap, Martin Gaskell, an astronomer I know personally and whose work I admire, has sued the University of Kentucky over religious discrimination over a job as an observatory director that he applied for.
After reading Martin Gaskell’s deposition in greater detail, and assuming Martin is telling the complete truth about everything, he was right to sue. In particular, he was told by someone in the know that he was sabotaged primarily by the biology department who was asked to weigh in on notes that Martin hands out in conjunction with a talk on astronomy and the bible. The claim is that they shouldn’t hire a “Christian.”
I find that claim implausible, unfortunately. If they’d said “Creationist” I could believe it.
This is hearsay, and I didn’t see corroboration in other depositions. I saw a lot of “I can’t recall” and “I don’t really know about biology or creationism.” Maybe circling the wagons, maybe honest sometimes. If Martin can’t get corroboration, I think he’ll lose.
Now, Martin also seems confused to me about the application of science to evolution and strays, not much, but definitely, from good science. He seems to criticize mainstream biology for not entertaining supernatural elements may be involved, all the while accepting most of the basics of evolution. He unfortunately also points to books and articles by Intelligent Design proponents for people who want to know what problems evolution has. That’s totally bogus crap, and Martin hides behind his ignorance of evolution to justify it. That would concern me if I were hiring.
Martin seems to have a problem understanding that while his religious views can’t be a factor in deciding not to hire him, when they leak over into science and become part of his scientific views, they’re totally fair game. He doesn’t seem to understand that when he makes a religious criticism of science, he’s not making just a religious statement but a statement of his own scientific acumen.
So-called “theistic evolution” and intelligent design arguments he suggests people look at, are either bad science, or not science at all pretending to be science.
Like most religious scientists, Martin compartmentalizes. He’s a really good astronomer and practices good science in astronomy. Apparently in biology, something he doesn’t know much about, he relaxes his scientific principles. Bad Martin. I bet he would feel uncomfortable with a evangelical biologist who was fine with mainstream evolution, but wanted “theistic cosmology” and pointed at “problems” with the Big Bang and suggested folks read some religiously motivated critics.
On the other hand…I was unfair to Martin. His position at Nebraska included no research component. He was doing a great job with his teaching and doing his “high-powered” research in his spare time. He also set up and ran an observatory very much like the one at Kentucky and was already very experienced with the duties required for the job. He really was by far the top applicant, even if he’s something of an overachiever.
Laws designed to prevent discrimination helped contribute to the problems here. Kentucky brought up the topic of Martin’s beliefs concerning evolution and how it might affect his outreach activities (fair game in my opinion since Martin had spoken publicly at KY in the past and had online materials about it), but didn’t feel like they could explore it fully. Martin felt like they weren’t allowed to consider it at all and tried to evade the topic completely. Bad deal.
I think they should have hired Martin, and that Martin should have agreed not to talk about evolution (which he is not an expert on) as part of his duties as Observatory Director. I think that would have been agreeable. The PR issue could have been handled by asking Martin to state that he’s not a creationist, which he isn’t strictly speaking, if it comes up.
It’s a shame. This should have been a win-win. Now it’s going to be a lose-lose. Some will see Kentucky as a discriminatory place. Some will see Martin as a creationist and bad scientist.
I think that Kentucky was concerned about Martin’s not creationist but less than perfect views on evolution, not his religion. I think that Martin could have eased a lot of their concerns but didn’t think it was a topic he should discuss with them at all, conflating science and religion (as he does in his talk/notes). Some folks involved probably freaked a bit, not distinguishing between young-Earth creationist and Martin’s almost mainstream position that is similar to that of some Christian biologists like Francis Collins (who I think is full of crap trying to make his religion scientific, but he’s head of the NIH and Martin is SOL).
I’ll be watching how the court case goes in February and reserve the right to change my opinion as other details may emerge there.
I can’t tell you how weird this is, personally knowing so many of the participants personally. Well, no matter what happens I anticipate continuing to work with everyone scientifically in the future. I imagine they can’t or won’t talk about the case now, but I bet there will be a few stories circulating after the fact.
OK, more astronomy and science fiction posts again in the near future, and a little less of this until February…
