[Note: Every week I hold a live video chat on Google+ where I answer questions from readers. I call it Q&BA, and when I get a question that stands alone, I'll make it its own video. ]

A lot of people, it seems, have morbid thoughts about space. Why else would I get asked this so much: "What would happen to the human body exposed to the vacuum and cold of space?"

Of course, this sort of thing is depicted in scifi movies a lot, and people are curious about it. And even though the movies always get it wrong — you don’t explode, or freeze instantly — it does make folks wonder about it. And while the reality isn’t maybe as gooey as in the movies, it’s still pretty nasty.

I wrote about this in my review of the movie "Mission to Mars", as well as answering a question many years ago from a reader. And even though it’s an icky thing to think about, it does give me a chance to talk about heat transfer, which is pretty, um, cool.

I make no excuses for my love of Doctor Who, and one of my favorite things about it since it was rebooted back in 2005 has been the music. I have always loved the title theme (originally written by Ron Grainer), ever since I was a little kid, and the modern orchestral reworking of it by Murray Gold is magnificent. I listen to the soundtracks all the time.

Gold wrote a new theme for The Doctor for Matt Smith’s version of the character, called "I Am the Doctor", and it’s fantastic. It’s got an odd beat to it, because it’s in 7 (as opposed to the usual 2, 3 or 4 beats per measure of most music). A bit off-kilter, just like the Time Lord himself, and with an underlying momentum and power. Also like The Doctor.

And that’s why I love this video: Murray Gold playing the theme on the piano — which he posted pseudonymously to YouTube!

Very cool. I’m looking forward to getting the Series 6 soundtrack as soon as it’s available here in the US. But for now, I think I’ll just go have a listen to this track from Series 5 played by the National Orchestra of Wales. Allons-y!

Tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to The Nerdist!

Never tell me the odds!

Yegads. I saw this while I was outside the other day; that’s a lenticular cloud, shaped by winds blowing over the Rocky Mountains. We see a lot of them around Boulder, but this one looked really familiar. I suddenly realized: it’s a ship from Star Wars!

I thought it looked a lot like Queen Amidala’s ship. But I couldn’t be sure, so I sent a note to my pal Bonnie Burton, aka BonnieGrrl, the proprietor of grrl.com, and major Star Wars dork. She concurred with my conclusion of the cloud looking like a Naboo Royal Starship (I was careful not to bias her by suggesting it; she mentioned it herself). And Bonnie should know: she literally wrote the book on Star Wars crafts!

Still, it looked like another ship from Star Wars, too… maybe even one that might be carrying Vader himself. If that’s the case, I know which cloud I could really use now!

Moisture and updrafts matter not. Look at me. Judge me by my convection do you? Hmm? Hmmm?

Professor Brian Cox is a physicist in England, very well-known there as a popularizer of science. The reasons for this are many-fold, including his ubiquity across media (including podcasts, Twitter, and of course TV)… but also because he has an infectious enthusiasm for science coupled with a boyish charm.

This was all on display recently when he hosted a great segment on the BBC’s show A Night With The Stars, where he simply and effectively demonstrates why atoms are mostly empty space:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? It helps if you can enlist Simon Pegg to help, too!

I like this demo a lot. On a very tiny scale, objects act like both particles and waves. On a big scale, like our solar system, we can think of planets as discrete particles, interacting through gravity only, and it works pretty well. Our semi-evolved brains want to think of electrons that way as well: little spheres whizzing around atomic nuclei. But that’s not the way the Universe works on the quantum scale; electrons act like waves, and that means they can interfere with each other. When a crest meets a trough they cancel, when a crest meets a crest they add together. If you have a wave bouncing around inside a box the result can be chaos.

I like to use the example of sitting in a tub, and rhythmically pushing your body along its length with your toes. It’s hard to do unless the rhythm is just right; otherwise the waves smack into each other chaotically and it’s a mess. But get the pattern timed just right and you’re in sync. That timing is just a simple multiple (like 1 or 1/2) of the time it takes a wave to move from one end of the tub to the other. You can actually feel it as you push; the correct timing just feels natural.

Electrons around an atomic nucleus work the same way. It’s more complicated than your bathtub, but the principle is the same. The electrons can only exist where the wave crests and troughs add up correctly. They literally cannot exist anywhere else. They’re like standing waves, as Brian shows.

We teach kids that atoms are like little solar systems, but that model is really bad! In principle, planets can orbit the Sun at any distance — give a planet more orbital energy and it’ll move away from the Sun and continue orbiting, happy as you please. But electrons can’t do that. They can only be at energy levels where they don’t interfere with themselves (and each other). It’s more like a staircase; they can only move up or down by discrete amounts. Once you figure this out, a ton of stuff becomes possible: lasers, semiconductors, fluorescent bulbs, atomic bombs… it’s quantum mechanics, and it’s a huge, huge field of science.

And it’s all because, as Brian demonstrates, a rope held at both ends won’t vibrate at any old frequency. Amazing, isn’t it?

Post script: can you imagine a show like this running on American TV? No, I can’t either, unless they had a toll number you could call to vote for atoms being a hoax perpetrated by Big Little Science.

I watched "Battle: Los Angeles" recently, a movie about aliens invading the Earth. It wasn’t terrible, and it wasn’t great. It was watchable, and worked sufficiently well in lowering our supply of popcorn at Chez BA.

But like every alien invasion movie I see, there’s one small, really eensy-weensy problem: the reason they give for the invasion itself was dumb. [SPOILER] They came to steal our water? And use it for fuel? Say WHA?

Ignoring the silly idea of using water for fuel — that’s got physics exactly backwards, since you get energy out of combining oxygen and hydrogen to make water, and it takes energy to crack them apart — there’s an even bigger problem…

… which I won’t tell you here, because I go into all sorts of detail in my latest Blastr article, 6 Reasons Why Aliens Would NEVER Invade Earth. Mind you, I’m not talking about aliens just coming here to shoot the breeze, but aliens coming here to shoot us. It’s hard to think of a good reason they’d do so, and certainly the reasons given in pretty much every movie don’t make sense. And I have a real problem with just how bad aliens are at taking over. Wiping us out should be pretty easy; heck, I wrote a whole other Blastr article about that, too.

So head on over there and give it a read. Agree, disagree? Leave a comment there, too. But if you disagree, be nice: I’m way better at wiping out life on Earth than any Hollywood alien could hope to be.

- Blastr: So, you wanna blow up the Earth?
- Blastr: My Favorite TV Scientists
- Blastroid
- Blastr: Other than that, Spock, how was the movie?
- Blastr: I Was A Zombie For Science
- Big budget movies that got their science right
- Master of Blastr

So I finally watched the pilot episodes of the new Fox scifi drama "Terra Nova" (it airs Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET). I found it watchable, with some potential, and like every other TV show in existence (except "Firefly") it had some things I liked and some I didn’t. I got email about it due to a couple of lines in the pilot, which I’ll get to in a sec. First, a quick overview.

Gotta get back in time

The idea behind the show (no real spoilers here, since this is all explained in the first minute of the program) is that by the year 2149, the Earth is dying. Pollution, global warming, and so on have made the planet nearly uninhabitable. People need rebreathers just to go outside, and many scenes show huge chimneys pumping smoke into the air just to hammer home that point. Population control is mandatory; having more than two kids is an invitation for the police to come.

The show centers on a family – cop father, brilliant doctor mother, rebellious teenage son, science whiz-kid teenage daughter, and their youngest, a girl. And yeah, if you count three kids, good for you! That drives part of the plot in Part 1 of the show, so I won’t spoil it.

The big plot device in the show is that a fracture in time is discovered — how and why are not disclosed, perhaps to be revealed in a later episode — that goes to 85 million years in the past. People are being sent back in time to populate the still-clean planet, save humanity, fight dinosaurs, and so on.

I’ll note that I like how the time travel was handled. When we join the story, time travel has already been around a while — this family is sent back as part of the tenth wave of colonists — so the writers didn’t have to spend a lot of time talking about how it was done. It just is. Also, the writers circumvented the inevitable fan rage with a short expository scene stating how this isn’t really our past; the time line has split, so it doesn’t matter if you step on a butterfly or eat an entire herd of dinosaurs. It won’t change the future. That made me smile. Score one (pre-emptively) for the writers.

Of course, the show tried to distance itself from "Jurassic Park", and did so by having the first look at the dinosaurs be a herd of brachiosaurs, and then having the main characters in souped-up jeeps getting chased by a carnivorous velociraptor/T-Rex-like animal.

Um, yeah. Oops.

I’m no paleontologist, and I like watching dinosaurs with big sharp teeth eat a person as much as the next guy, so that part was fine. But then they went a little bit out of their way to add some astronomy, and kinda blew it. So I have to jump in here a bit.

What follows is me nitpicking the science of a couple of lines of dialogue. I don’t do this to be petty — I gave up on that in my reviews a long time ago — but just to use these lines to point out the real science. Any snarking is incidental.

(more…)

If the recent season finale of Doctor Who made you despair of waiting a year for the next season to start (with only two holiday episodes between now and then to alleviate the pain), then try watching this fan-made trailer for the show. It’s quite well-done (and there are no spoilers for the last episode).

Sigh. Yeah, now the wait will be even worse. And I should know: I’m a doctor.

Oh– there are two other fun DW vids, if you’re so inclined: this one, a Series 6 synopsis that is spoiler-ish, and this one, which is a quite spoilery funny mashup of the good Doctor with Tik Tok from Lady Gaga Ke$ha. Yes, seriously.

Tip o’ the sonic to Nerdist and Blastr.