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 grandfather lover.*) 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.

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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.

I’m not supposed to give away too much here. But recall that Hollywood loves science, and occasionally we can help them out with an interesting idea or two. So it’s possible that if you were to watch tonight’s episode of Bones (8 p.m., 7 Central, on Fox), our plucky heroes Booth and Brennan could be investigating a murder that makes clever use of expertise in physics. It’s even possible that the murder technique was dreamed up in part by one of our previous guest-bloggers, which might very well be reflected in the name of the research institute where the dastardly deed takes place.

I’ve probably said more than I should already.

If you’re like me, all too often while relaxing and watching a good procedural drama on TV you find yourself wondering, “How did they solve that differential equation so quickly?” That’s why we need more hit prime-time TV shows with web pages that explain the mathematical content underpinning each episode.

As far as I know, the only show that rises to this challenge is NUMB3RS, the CBS drama featuring Charlie Epps, a math professor at a suspiciously Caltech-esque university who teams up with his FBI-agent brother to solve crimes. The shows creators, Nicolas Falacci and Cheryl Heuton, had a goal from the beginning of creating an entertaining hour of television that would involve science in an intimate way. (I suppose math is almost as good.) As part of the effort, they’ve partnered with Wolfram Research to follow each episode with a web page delving into the various mathematical concepts that were discussed, including Mathematica notebooks to illustrate the various ideas:

The Math Behind NUMB3RS

Episode 11 this year was entitled “The Arrow of Time.” Here’s the opening:

You can see the full episode here; the math page is here. This stuff would make a great topic for a book.

And the winner of our Elevator Pitch Contest is: Jason Dick, for New Horizons!

Takes place about a century from now. Humanity has discovered planets around other stars harbor life. We send out a generation ship, where multiple generations of intrepid explorers will be born and die before it reaches its destination. This show follows their journey, where they are faced with mechanical failure, collisions with small dust grains that cause lots of damage, and people who crack under the stress of their situation. Mostly it’d be about a human drama of extremely driven people who are in a difficult situation, and whose children are forced to carry the torch of their parents.

A well-deserved victory, as Jason has long been one of our most intelligent and helpful commenters. And it’s a good show idea, certainly comparable with many things actually appearing on TV. Jason, shoot us your address and a T-shirt will be forthcoming — soonish.

Interestingly, concepts that took the framework of a conventional sitcom or drama (Friends/ER) and made the characters scientists didn’t fare as well with our voters. This might be a reflection of our voting pool, or a real difficulty involved in translating the life of a scientist into compelling narrative.

‘Tis the season when various academies, all the way up to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, decide which movies were most deserving of our admiration this year. The studios know this, and make a big push to win awards, which can translate into box office. For example, this being the Age of the Internet, a number of screenplays are available for download online (including some for movies that haven’t quite been released yet). Some interesting choices:

The Dark Knight

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Frost/Nixon

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

WALL•E

You might not think that the script for WALL•E would be all that fascinating, since much of the movie was free of dialogue; but you’d be wrong.

INT. ABANDONED BNL SUPERSTORE – NEXT DAY

LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S “LA VIE EN ROSE” PLAYS

Eve scans through the market.
Wally follows from a safe distance.
A stray puppy-dog.

Eve glances over at him.
Wally panics.
Bumps into a RACK OF SHOPPING CARTS.
Creates an avalanche.

They chase him down a flight of stairs.
Wally reaches the exit doors.
Won’t open!
Carts pig pile on top of him.

It’s like a little poem. I laugh just thinking about that scene.

Friday was the opening of The Day the Earth Stood Still starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly; it’s director Scott Derrickson’s remake of the 1951 Robert Wise classic. The previous Friday witnessed our panel discussion at Caltech about how science intersected with the film. Reviews thus far (of both the movie and the panel) have been mixed; personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the panel and thought the movie rose to the level of “pretty good.” (Lost amidst the excitement of aliens and CGI was the excellent acting in the film, including a great performance by Jaden Smith in the role of the petulant stepson.) But it could have been great.

Derrickson refers to his own film as a “popcorn movie with interesting ideas,” and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. The original movie was extremely compelling because it managed to be gripping and suspenseful as a narrative, while also dealing with some very big ideas. In 1951 we had just entered the atomic age, the Cold War was starting, and the Space Race was about to begin (Sputnik was 1957). Moreover, radio astronomy was just taking off, and people were beginning to talk semi-seriously about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; Fermi introduced his celebrated paradox (“Where are they?”) in 1950. The time was right to put everything together in a compelling movie.

The threat of nuclear war hasn’t actually gone away — the chance of a nuclear weapon being used within the next decade is probably higher than it was in the 1970′s or 80′s (although perhaps not the 50′s or 60′s). But now we also have the danger of environmental catastrophe, which was alluded to in the movie. But the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still basically sidestepped questions of international cooperation, which were crucial to the original version. The heady mix of ideas and drama that was waiting to be tapped in 1951 isn’t quite as obvious today.

A huge problem with a remake like this is that the 2008 movie-going audience comes with a very different set of expectations than the 1951 audience would have. We are very used to giant special-effects extravaganzas in which aliens want to destroy the earth, so the conceit itself is not sufficient to keep us interested. And there isn’t that much tension in the question of how the plot will be resolved; I hope I’m not giving away any spoilers by saying that humanity is not destroyed. We know that humanity is going to be saved (although it would be something if it weren’t), so we’re not on the edge of our seat wondering about that. There might be some tension in the particular method by which the saving is accomplished; the original did a great job on that score with the iconic robot Gort, and without giving away anything about the remake I’ll just say that I don’t think they managed to be quite as suspenseful this time.

But there remains one form of suspense that I thought the film couldn’t have taken advantage of more than it actually did: the questions of why aliens might want to wipe us out, and whether humanity is worth saving in the first place. Judgmental aliens are a staple of science fiction, but how realistic are they?

To put things in perspective, the universe is 14 billion years old and the Solar System is about five billion years old. Let’s be conservative and imagine that life couldn’t arise around first-generation (Pop II or Pop III) stars, since the abundance of “metals” (to an astronomer, any element heavier than hydrogen or helium) was practically nil. You need at least a second-generation star, formed in a region seeded with the important heavier elements by prior supernova explosions. But nevertheless, it’s still easy to imagine that the aliens we might eventually come into contact with come from a planet that formed life a billion or two years earlier than life began on Earth. Now, a billion years ago, we were still struggling with the whole multi-celluarity thing. So we should imagine aliens that have evolved past our current situation by an amount analogous to which we have evolved past, say, red algae.

It’s simply impossible for us to accurately conceive what such aliens might be like. (When Jennifer Connelly’s exobiologist asks Klaatu, the alien who has assumed the shape of Keanu Reeves, what his true form is like, he quite believably replies “It would only frighten you.”) It’s completely plausible to imagine that advanced civilizations routinely leave behind their biological forms to dwell within a computer simulation or some other form of artificial substrate for consciousness. As plausible as anything else, really.

But if they did pay us a visit, is it plausible to imagine that they would want to wipe us out? Since we have no actual experience on which to base an answer, one option is to look at our own history, as the Kathy Bates’s Secretary of Defense does in The Day the Earth Stood Still. The lesson is not cheerful: more powerful civilizations tend to either subjugate less powerful ones, or wipe them out entirely. Okay, you say, but any civilization that is capable of traveling interstellar distances must have figured out how to live peacefully, right?

Maybe. The problem is, it wouldn’t be a clash of civilizations; more likely, from the aliens’s perspective it would be like the clash of an annoyed homeowner dealing with mildew, or perhaps an infestation of cockroaches if we’re feeling generous. Turning again to experience, human beings are right now causing one of the great mass extinctions in the history of the planet. We could stop killing off other species, but we find that it would slightly cramp our lifestyle to do so, and we decide not to make that sacrifice. True, when we send spaceships to Mars and elsewhere, we are very careful to take steps to ensure that we don’t contaminate any traces of life that might be clinging to the other planet. But clearly, that’s not because we place great value on the continued existence of any one species. Rather, it’s because (to us) any kind of life on another planet would be incredibly unique and interesting. But there’s no reason to believe that we would be all that unique from the perspective of a galaxy-weary alien civilization. They may well have bumped into millions of worlds featuring all sorts of life. If we’re lucky, they might give us the respect that a human being would show an ant colony or a swarm of bees. If we’re lucky.

This is an area in which science fiction, for all its vaunted imagination, is traditionally quite conservative. With some notable exceptions, we tend to assume that the forms life can take are neatly divided into “intelligent species” and “everyone else,” and we are snugly in the former category, and all intelligent species are roughly equally intelligent and it’s just a matter of time before we get our own seat in the Galactic Parliament. Although SF offers a unique opportunity to examine the way we live as humans in comparison to different ways we might live, the usual answer it gives is that the way we’re living now is pretty much the best we can imagine — alien lifestyles are much more often portrayed as profoundly lacking in some crucial feature of individuality or passion than they are as a real improvement over our current messy situation. We are special because we love our children, or because we are plucky and have so much room for improvement. We voted for Obama, after all. I bet there aren’t many alien civilizations that would have done that!

So basically, I’m suggesting that this is a film that would have been improved by the addition of a few imaginative philosophical debates. You don’t want to be didactic or tiresome, but those are not necessary qualities of a discussion of deep ideas. If the ideas are interesting enough, they might even improve your box office.

Foreign Policy has compiled a list of the Ten Worst Predictions for 2008. You’ll be happy to hear that physics has made the cut!

“There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.” —Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org

Scientist Walter Wagner, the driving force behind Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is making his bid to be the 21st century’s version of Chicken Little for his opposition to the world’s largest particle accelerator. Warning that the experiment might end humanity as we know it, he filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s U.S. District Court against the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which built the LHC, demanding that researchers not turn the machine on until it was proved safe. The LHC was turned on in September, and it appears that we are still here.

Admittedly, FP didn’t get it quite right — as loyal readers know, it’s something of an exaggeration to say that the LHC was “turned on in September.” Protons circulated around the ring, but there were no collisions, and there won’t be until later this year. Still, they were right about the wrongness. The LHC is perfectly safe.

The other predictions were also amusing. Here’s my favorite:

“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton’s to lose, but it takes a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the first Iowa caucus was held. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.

Of course, asking Bill Kristol to predict the future is like asking Rod Blagojevich to head a good-government task force. Here’s my prediction: Kristol will continue to say dumb things, next year and far into the future. And get paid handsomely for doing so.

If you spend a lot of time in the MGM Grand in Vegas (and who doesn’t?), you will have walked by Television City. It’s a fun place to get some free entertainment if the craps tables have been unkind (or if you had a great meal at Joel Robuchon), but it’s serious business for CBS/Viacom: this is where they show clips and pilots of prospective shows to average Americans, to gauge whether they should be picked up for seasons to come. Apparently it’s easier to find average Americans in Vegas than over here in LA.

So here’s your chance to chime in on our contest to choose a science-themed TV show. Recall that the idea behind the elevator pitch contest was that you had bumped into CBS bigwig Les Moonves, and taken the opportunity to quickly pitch a TV idea that made use of science in some way. While you might have thought that Mr. Moonves was just humoring you, in fact he took some of the ideas very seriously, and ultimately picked six of them to make pilots of each. Sadly, we don’t have clips from the actual pilots; something about intellectual property rights. But here are the original descriptions of the six finalists; note that CBS has tentatively assigned names to each show.

Below the fold there is a poll, where you can vote on which show you like the best! Voting will be open for the next week. For the winner, a T-shirt, and who knows? Some people in high places read this blog.

1. New Horizons (Jason Dick)
   

   Takes place about a century from now. Humanity has discovered planets around other stars harbor life. We send out a generation ship, where multiple generations of intrepid explorers will be born and die before it reaches its destination. This show follows their journey, where they are faced with mechanical failure, collisions with small dust grains that cause lots of damage, and people who crack under the stress of their situation. Mostly it’d be about a human drama of extremely driven people who are in a difficult situation, and whose children are forced to carry the torch of their parents.

2. Three Geeks in Boston (Naveen)
   

   Three guys share an apartment in Boston: a freelance writer training for an ultramarathon, a chemistry student who wants to work in a Michelin star restaurant, and a disillusioned theoretical physicist in grad school. The runner views himself as a lab rat and writes about his experiments with the latest training gadgets and techniques. The chemist hopes that molecular gastronomy will be his path to a dream job with Heston Blumenthal or Grant Achatz. The theoretician realizes how his math can be applied to topics ranging from tracking flu epidemics to studying the sociology of Facebook.

3. The Parameters (astromcnaught)
   

   An enormous laser experiment blows a hole in local space-time. Things start to behave strangely, and hilariously, the world over. Young Ruford with the assistance of a mysterious mechanics professor has to adjust the parameters of reality back to normal. Different parameter each week. E.g. speed of sound drops to 1 meter a minute. Something electromagnetical causes clothes to start becoming transparent. Gravity becomes stronger…the world starts spinning faster…the moon draws closer…air becomes thicker…ice sinks. The dog’s called Rhombus.

4. The Scientific Inquisitor (Matt)
   

   A lapsed cardinal with a rigorous scientific background is called back into service by the Pope. When the vatican is under pressure to bestow sainthood on a politically inconvenient deceased priest, they dispatch the show’s hero. Our cardinal has secret instructions to debunk the would-be saint’s requisite “miracles”, thereby denying sainthood. He does so with scientific acumen and great aplomb. Each week, he struggles with being used by an organization he doesn’t respect, as well as his own emotional desire to believe in something beyond the cold materialism he practices. Both cynical and hopeful, the show illuminates the boundary between evidence and faith, in a (perhaps Sisyphean) struggle to find a balance between the two.

5. Friends with Experiments (Peggy)
   

   Friends in a top university molecular biology lab. Three young men and three young women – a couple of postdocs, grad students, a Sigma sales rep and a departmental administrator – find love and laughs as they run gels, hang out in the departmental lounge, attend conferences, and interact with the other wacky lab denizens. Plenty of opportunity for sight gags, such as an unbalanced ultracentrifuge “walking” through a wall or the noob grad student accidentally setting her bench on fire. And lots of opportunities for romantic situations: all-night sample collecting in the cold room, working closely in the darkroom, or a mixup that puts our male and female postdoc in the same hotel room at the AAAS conference. And what holds them together is their love/hate relationship with their research.

6. Apocalypse Tomorrow (Dr. Free-Ride)
   

   The economy has tanked and modern infrastructure (utilities, highways, food supplies, schools) is decaying – “pre-apocalypse”. We focus on a couple who left science a decade ago, moving to a small town for a new start. Their kids keep stumbling into sciencey situations, drawing their parents into them. Their town has a distinct anti-science vibe — science and technology didn’t hold off the decay gripping the community, and (we find out) the town is still scarred by tragic events due to mad scientists. Despite themselves, our family uses scientific reasoning and keen observation to rebuild the community and their own lives.

Click to get to the poll and cast your vote… (more…)

Yesterday’s launch event for the Science and Entertainment Exchange was a smashing success. The enthusiasm of everyone in the room was palpable, especially on the Hollywood side — these folks would love to be interacting more closely with scientists on a regular basis. (Let me pause to give a plug for Eleventh Hour, a show which I haven’t actually seen yet, but whose writers were complaining that they sometimes take grief for being too scientifically accurate.) I came away from the symposium with lots of new ideas, and also a deep-seated fear of our coming robot masters.

So, in honor of the new program, we hereby announce the Cosmic Variance Elevator Pitch Contest. I don’t know about you, but many folks I know with an interest in science take great pleasure in complaining about the embarrassing lack of realism and respect for the laws of nature apparent in so many movies and TV shows. Here’s your (fictional) chance to do something about it.

Opening scene: you step into an elevator at the headquarters of CBS/Paramount Television in Hollywood. (Unclear why you are there — perhaps to have lunch with your more-successful friend from high school, who works for their legal team.) There is only one other person in the elevator with you for the journey to the top floor — and it’s Les Moonves, President and CEO of CBS! (Again, unclear why he is taking the same elevator as you — we’ll fix that in post-production.)

Here is the perfect opportunity for your elevator pitch.

You have thirty seconds — which, as this blog is still a text-based medium, we’ll approximate as strictly 100 words or less — to pitch your idea for a new TV show that is based on science. It can be an hour drama, a half-hour sitcom, a reality show, game show, documentary, science fiction, whatever you like. For example:

I have an idea for a show called Cosmic Variance. It’s about seven scientists who blog during the day, but at night they fight crime! And to do it, they used advanced notions from modern physics and astrophysics, from adaptive optics to quantum decoherence. They’re young, they’re sexy, and they break hearts as they bust heads. But their university colleagues are already suspicious of their blogging, so they have to keep the crime-fighting activities completely secret. They have a deep underground lab where they carry out cutting-edge experiments, and there’s a canine sidekick named Sparky.

Okay, that’s a fairly silly example. I’m not eligible to win the contest. But you, the reader, are! So here are some of the ideas you want to keep in mind while polishing your pitch:

Most importantly: Les Moonves’s goal in life is not to make science look good. It’s to make money. So don’t pitch that this show would make the world a better place, or make science seem interesting; convince him that it’s exciting to everyone and will attract millions of eyeballs.

Use the science. For our purposes, we’re less interested in a show idea that tacks on some science to make things sound cool, as we are in a concept that couldn’t happen without the science.

Story is paramount. As much as we love accuracy and realism, there has to be a compelling narrative. You need to convince Moonves that people will be emotionally connected to the characters and their situation.

It’s easy to mock the efforts of others, but here’s a chance to see whether you could really put together a compelling show idea. Leave your entry in the comments. They will be judged by our crack team of scientists/bloggers/crime-fighters, and the winner will get a Cosmic Variance T-shirt. (We have plans to upgrade the quality of our current swag options.) Please note that there is not some hidden plan to actually make any TV shows out of this — we have no clout along those lines, so if you are a professional scriptwriter, don’t dump your plans out in public here on our blog. But if you’re a pro you already knew that.

And then: memorize your pitch! You never know when you might find yourself trapped in an elevator with the right person, and you have to be ready.