Recent years have seen a notable increase in the number of successful TV shows with some sort of scientific component — Numbers, CSI, House, Bones, Lie to Me, Fringe, and so on. But there’s no doubt which network show has the most accurate science on TV; that would be the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory.
And it’s not because the writers are all physics Ph.D.’s who have traded in equations and laboratories for a glamorous life in Hollywood. It’s because the Big Bang Theory is one of the very few shows to have a full-time science advisor: David Saltzberg, a particle physicist at UCLA. David confers with the writers, reads every script, provides complicated-looking equations for the white boards in Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment, and suggests the occasional physics joke.
And now David, encouraged by some of his well-meaning friends, is going to be explaining the science behind the show in his new blog:
The show is a comedy, but the science here is completely serious — read about dark matter, quantum mechanics, monopoles, and all sorts of good stuff. I’m sure much of this was explained carefully in the original scripts, but landed on the cutting-room floor in interests of time.
The Big Bang Theory, of course, raises strong feelings among scientists. Right here at Discover, you can read both pro and anti feelings about the show. The complaints are mostly about the cheerful reliance on various stereotypes that we would just as soon see stamped out. All four of the main scientist characters are socially maladjusted guys; the one main non-scientist is a blonde woman with severe science-phobia.
I think the critique of sexism is mostly fair. In the real world, plenty of brilliant socially-maladjusted scientists are female! (To be fair, Penny represents the everyperson character to which the audience is supposed to relate; in almost every activity not related to science or technology, she is much more competent than the boys.) The critique that all these nerdy scientist characters somehow damage the image of science I find much less compelling — even though, in the real world, plenty of brilliant scientists aren’t socially maladjusted at all. It is, after all, a sitcom, not a public-service announcement; sitcoms get a lot of their mileage out of stereotypes. And as socially awkward as the scientist characters are, they are also portrayed as lovable and warm people at heart. Shows like this humanize science, and who knows what ten-year-old kid will see an episode and start thinking that physics is a career to which real people can actually aspire.
Now if we could just get across the idea that even young girls can aspire to these careers, we’d be getting someplace.
From Spike Jonze’s new film, Where the Wild Things Are, based on the classic Maurice Sendak book. Neither the book nor (apparently) the movie are pablum. Via io9 (spoilers at that link).
We’ve gotten a little bent out of shape over gravitational lensing recently (see here and here). But the fun doesn’t stop: gravitational lensing has now officially come into the 21st Century with the release of Eli Rykoff’s GravLens. (Not to be confused with GRAVLENS, Chuck Keeton’s immensely useful and powerful gravitational lensing modeling software). You can now lens a star, a galaxy, or an image of whatever or whomever you want (e.g., your favorite blogger), right in the comfort and safety of your own palm. GravLens is freely available at the iPhone application store. Go download it, and make yourself a beautiful Einstein Ring. This is your chance to support the fledgling “Physics applications for the iPhone” industry!
Here at Cosmic Variance we love our teaching moments. Science is everywhere, and there’s no need to be stuffy about it. One of the best ways to communicate the excitement that we feel about science to a much wider audience is to connect it to popular culture in all sorts of ways — whether it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NUMB3RS, or Angels & Demons.
So it’s great to see the producers of ABC’s hit TV show LOST jump on the bandwagon. This fall they will be releasing the DVD collection of the fifth season, and the Blu-ray edition is going to feature a special treat: mini-”lessons” on various academic subjects related to the show. (The final season of the show begins early in 2010.) One of those subjects is time travel, and you have a pretty esteemed group of professors guiding you through this fascinating subject: Nick Warner of USC (who taught me general relativity back in the day), our old friend Clifford Johnson, and myself. Suffice it to say, I’ve seen the rough cut, and they did a good job — and we had quite a bit of fun. I was only included because having all the professors speak with British accents would have seemed a bit posh.
And along with that, they’ve just launched an associated website: LOST University. You can see what the other courses in the curriculum are going to be, including Philosophy and Foreign Languages. At the moment the website is essentially promotion for the DVD’s themselves, but I’m hoping more content will appear over time. LOST has a tradition of enhancing the show with quite elaborate online activities, in the form of alternate reality games. So hopefully this new site won’t simply be an advertisement — one of the lessons of new media is that giving away cool stuff for free makes it more likely that people will pay money for the even cooler stuff.
To be clear: the science of time travel on LOST does not necessarily obey all the rules. None of us had anything to do with the show itself, and I have no idea what the writers did in terms of seeking science advice. But understanding how the rules are broken can serve as fodder for teaching moments just as easily as seeing them obeyed. That’s life here “on the cutting edge of tomorrow.”
Too busy at the moment to provide what is traditionally known as “content.” Instead, enjoy this artistic and message-conveying video, sent by loyal reader Markus.
For the many international CV readers, today is the US’s Independence Day celebration, which is in large part an excuse to bar-b-que meat products, blow up fireworks, and drink beer. If you’re tuning in from abroad, you are probable sober enough to read Daniel’s upcoming post on gravitational waves. For the rest of the drunken US crew, you can probably handle the Muppets.
PS. While we’re talking beer, I must recommend the current Full Sail Limited Edition L.T.D. (Recipe No. 3), sold in bottles with the pale blue label. Seriously. Try some.
Another contender for Best Video of All Time. Via hilzoy, an Iranian-government propaganda video from a while back. It reveals the secret (naturally) collaboration between John McCain, George Soros (”he uses his wealth and slogans like liberty, democracy, and human rights to bring supporters of America to power”), Gene Sharp, and Bill Smith, aimed at undermining the true will of the Iranian people. (Transcript.) I especially like the part where Smith says “we have achieved a lot through international scientific conferences.”
It’s pretty clear that Iranian security is using 1984 as a how-to guide. Spying on your family as a social good.
The situation in Iran is no laughing matter; it remains to be seen whether Ayatollah Khamenei has painted himself into a corner where further large-scale violence is inevitable. Our thoughts are with the Iranian people demanding their rights of self-government.
Jerry Zucker and his wife Janet Zucker deserve a great deal of credit for turning the idea of the Exchange into a reality. More importantly, for a twelve-year-old such as I was at the time, The Kentucky Fried Movie was a major event in modern cinema. So I was pleased to see that the title of Jerry’s post (”I’d Like to Thank the National Academy”) was the same one that I had used when I gave a talk at the NAS annual meeting. Not that either one of us should be overly proud of that particular line.
Also, he gets away with saying stuff like this:
The really great thing about these scientists is that because their brains are exactly two-and-a-half times the size of the average person’s in the movie business (although in fairness, that also includes talent agents), they are actually more creative and therefore much better at coming up with science-related ideas for movies than our so-called “creative community.” I don’t mean to offend anyone but as much as I loved Slumdog Millionaire, it’s no Viagra. Often, science gets tacked on like wallpaper in a story, but when it’s really integrated into the narrative it can take things in surprising new directions. And thanks to the Exchange and the National Academy of Sciences, research just became much more fun.
That thing about the brain sizes is what they call “creative license.” But it’s deployed in the service of making a good point! Scientists are good at coming up with ideas, and it would be great if a closer relationship between science and Hollywood helped some of those fun ideas percolate into the wider culture. (My giant brain scoffs at giving specifics about how this will actually happen.)
With the new Star Trek out, it’s long past time (as it were) that we laid out the rules for would-be fictional time-travelers. (Spoiler: Spock travels to the past and gets a sex change and becomes Kirk’s grandfatherlover.*) Not that we expect these rules to be obeyed; the dramatic demands of a work of fiction will always trump the desire to get things scientifically accurate, and Star Trek all by itself has foisted half a dozen mutually-inconsistent theories of time travel on us. But time travel isn’t magic; it may or may not be allowed by the laws of physics — we don’t know them well enough to be sure — but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed. And sometimes it’s more interesting to play by the rules. So if you wanted to create a fictional world involving travel through time, here are 10+1 rules by which you should try to play.
0. There are no paradoxes.
This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.
1. Traveling into the future is easy.
We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.
2. Traveling into the past is hard — but maybe not impossible.
If Isaac Newton’s absolute space and time had been the correct picture of nature, we could simply say that traveling backwards in time was impossible, and that would be the end of it. But in Einstein’s curved-spacetime universe, things are more flexible. From your own personal, subjective point of view, you always more forward in time — more technically, you move on a timelike curve through spacetime. But the large-scale curvature of spacetime caused by gravity could, conceivably, cause timelike curves to loop back on themselves — that is to say, become closed timelike curves — such that anyone traveling on such a path would meet themselves in the past. That’s what respectable, Einstein-approved time travel would really be like. Of course, there’s still the little difficulty of warping spacetime so severely that you actually create closed timelike curves; nobody knows a foolproof way of doing that, or even whether it’s possible, although ideas involving wormholes and cosmic strings and spinning universes have been bandied about.
3. Traveling through time is like traveling through space.
I’m only going to say this once: there would be no flashing lights. At least, there would only be flashing lights if you brought along some strobes, and decided to start them flashing as you traveled along your closed timelike curve. Likewise, there is no disappearance in a puff of smoke and re-appearing at some other time. Traveling through time is just like traveling through space: you move along a certain path, which (we are presuming) the universe has helpfully arranged so that your travels bring you to an earlier moment in time. But a time machine wouldn’t look like a booth with spinning wheels that dematerializes now and rematerializes some other time; it would look like a rocket ship. Or possibly a DeLorean, in the unlikely event that your closed timelike curve started right here on Earth and never left the road.
Think of it this way: imagine there were a race of super-intelligent trees, who could communicate with each other using abstract concepts but didn’t have the ability to walk. They might fantasize about moving through space, and in their fantasies “space travel” would resemble teleportation, with the adventurous tree disappearing in a puff of smoke and reappearing across the forest. But we know better; real travel from one point to another through space is a continuous process. Time travel would be like that.
4. Things that travel together, age together.
If you travel through time, and you bring along with you some clocks or other objects, all those things experience time in exactly the same way that you do. In particular, both you and the clocks march resolutely forward in time, from your own perspective. You don’t see clocks spinning wildly backwards, nor do you yourself “age” backwards, and you certainly don’t end up wearing the clothes you favored back in high school. Your personal experience of time is governed by clocks in your brain and body — the predictable beating of rhythmic pulses of chemical and biological processes. Whatever flow of time is being experienced by those processes — and thus by your conscious perception — is also being experienced by whatever accompanies you on your journey.
5. Black holes are not time machines.
Sadly, if you fell into a black hole, it would not spit you out at some other time. It wouldn’t spit you out at all — it would gobble you up and grow slightly more corpulent in the process. If the black hole were big enough, you might not even notice when you crossed the point of no return defined by the event horizon. But once you got close to the center of the hole, tidal forces would tug at you — gently at first, but eventually tearing you apart. The technical term is spaghettification. Not a recommended strategy for would-be time adventurers.
Wormholes — tunnels through spacetime, which in principle can connect widely-separated events — are a more promising alternative. Wormholes are to black holes as elevators are to deep wells filled with snakes and poisoned spikes. The problem is, unlike black holes, we don’t know whether wormholes exist, or even whether they can exist, or how to make them, or how to preserve them once they are made. Wormholes want to collapse and disappear, and keeping them open requires a form of negative energies. Nobody knows how to make negative energies, although they occasionally slap the name “exotic matter” on the concept and pretend it might exist.
A few days ago Apple Computer issued a press release which got some media coverage. I don’t usually pay much attention to such things, but two items caught my eye:
- One billion downloads in nine months. This is a really, really big number. For perspective, this is equivalent to every man, woman, and child in the US downloading three iPhone applications. Or one out of every seven people in the entire world downloading an application. It’s one download every time your heart beats for your whole life. It’s one application download for every hundred stars in the galaxy. Or one application every fourteen years, for the entire history of the Universe. This is a lot of downloads. In a market space that didn’t even exist a year ago. All of this has happened in only nine months (an average of more than 40 downloads a second, day and night, nonstop). Here’s a “visual” of one billion, from the wikipedia page:
- The billionth download happened to be the application Bump, something I posted about last month (and, because of April Fool’s, was considered suspect). Small world. Maybe Andy will get to shake Steve Jobs’ hand? That would be almost as exciting as my brother hanging out with Lindsay Lohan.
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
