D. Boucher at The Economic Word generated the above chart with Google’s endlessly entertaining Ngram viewer. The Ngram viewer lets you search for the number of occurrences of a specific word in every book Google has indexed thus far. As you can see, “future” peaked in 2000, leading Boucher to wonder if we’re beyond the future. Yet, Boucher hedges:

Strangely, however, I look at the technological improvements over the past ten years and I see revolutionary ideas one on top of the other (for instance, the iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Google stuff, Social Networks…). My first reaction is to blindly hypothesize that our current technological prowess may distract us from the future. If it is the case, could it be that technology is a detriment to forward-looking thinkers?

I thought it might be fun to Ngram the Science Not Fiction topics of choice and see if we live up to our reputation as rogue scientists from the future. I figured if we’re all from the future, then our topics should either a) match the trend or b) buck the trend. I’m not sure which is right, but the results were quite interesting. Charts after the jump!

I searched the topics from 1900-2008 with a smoothing of 4.

To start, Kevin Grazier with Space and Physics:

Jeremy Jacquot with Biology and Biotech:

Malcolm MacIver with AI and Robotics:

Erik Wolff with Engineering, Energy, and Electronics:
It seems my compatriots are all from the future, indeed! Peaks in the ’80s and ’90s right down the line, as predicted by the initial “future” graph. The hypothesis holds. The future must be behind us.

And now, yours truly with Transhumanism and Human Enhancement:

My goodness, an anomaly! Look at that exponential growth–whoa, so intense, but what does it mean? I honestly have no idea. Now, both transhumanism and human enhancement are much smaller percentages of the total word count (.000001% as opposed to say, AI’s peak of .001%), but they are the only words still on the rise. Do scientific words with futuristic connotations hit a saturation point? Or are we no longer thinking of the Next Big Thing as being futuristic? I hope to have something resembling an answer before the New Year.

Back in the early 1990s, Jon Durant very usefully outlined out the three main types of scientific literacy. This is probably as good a place to start as any:

• Knowing some science – For example, having A-level biology, or simply knowing the laws of thermodynamics, the boiling point of water, what surface tension is, that the Earth goes around the Sun, etc.
• Knowing how science works – This is more a matter of knowing a little of the philosophy of science (e.g. ‘The Scientific Method’, a matter of studying the work of Popper, Lakatos or Bacon).
• Knowing how science really works – In many respects this agrees with the previous point – that the public need tools to be able to judge science, but does not agree that science works to a singular method. This approach is often inspired by the social studies of science and stresses that scientists are human. It covers the political and institutional arrangement of science, including topics like peer review (including all the problems with this), a recent history of policy and ethical debates and the way funding is structured

On the first point, I do think that there are some basic science facts which should be required fodder in K-12 education. From my field alone, people should not only know that Earth orbits the sun, they should know that our year is based upon the time takes Earth to complete the journey.  Don’t laugh. On my last birthday, when I told folks that I’d completed another orbit of the Sun, a distressing number of them did not understand the implication and, upon further questioning, didn’t know that Earth’s orbital period was the basis of one year. K-12 students should know that the Moon orbits Earth, why it goes through phases, and given it’s significance (in particular for several religious holidays), that our month is based upon that orbital period. Finally, everybody should know why we have seasons.

Knowing how to find Polaris, the North Star, and why your satellite TV installer pointed the dish south-facing, are both practical, but I’d place those in the category of “nice to have” not “need to have.” At the same time, I also think there’s a fourth bullet item that Dr. Bell could have included, one to which she alludes in the body of her text:

Science isn’t necessarily a transferable skill. This is easily demonstrated by examining carefully the lives of scientists outside of the laboratory (or, to put it another way: “yeah, cos scientists are all sooo well organised outside of work, living super-rational evidence-based lives, all the time”). It would be lovely if we could provide a formula for well-lived lives, but people just aren’t that consistent.

In addition to teaching factoids—even useful ones—about science, and in addition to educating non-scientists about the process of science, educators need in instill  a willingness in people use the lessons learned and knowledge imparted. Why do we learn this stuff? Why is it practical?

At the same time, there is a human tendency, to which Dr. Bell alludes in her quote above, to compartmentalize our knowledge. Dr. Bell implies, rightfully so, that many, arguably most, scientists check scientific thought at the door as they leave work–when it would be equally useful in organizing their (our) personal lives. Related, talk to any science educator who’s given a writing assignment. I can guarantee that, at some point(s), the assignment was met with the student question, “Are you going to grade off for English?” as if proper grammar is the purview of English class alone and slacking is allowed in biology (or pick your favorite science). Author Jennifer Oullette uses this notion—that life runs more smoothly and interestingly when met with a dose of science and math–in her Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.

What got me jazzed on this topic, enough to write at length about it, was the confluence of two events – one fun, quirky, and topical, one somewhat more on the horizon – both of which benefit when approached with a due application of scientific skepticism. The first was a recent web buzz, where a Charlie Chaplin movie (and not a particularly good one at that) was, in essence, promoted from the genre of comedy to science fiction. A woman in the 1928 Charlie Chaplin film The Circus appears to be talking on a cell phone, which wasn’t invented until decades later.

A short Google search turns up countless, and often very amusing, analyses on this video like this one from the Washington Post. Apparently George Clark of Yellow Fever Productions noticed the quirk  of the “woman on a cell phone” in the background when he was watching the DVD extras for the film, and after a year of studying this clip, he concluded:

This short film is about a piece of footage I (George Clarke) found behind the scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s film ‘The Circus’. Attending the premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, CA – the scene shows a large woman dressed in black with a hat hiding most of her face, with what can only be described as a mobile phone device – talking as she walks alone.

I have studied this film for over a year now – showing it to over 100 people and at a film festival, yet no-one can give any explanation as to what she is doing.

My only theory – as well as many others – is simple… a time traveler on a mobile phone. See for yourself and feel free to leave a comment on your own explanation or thoughts about it.

Seriously? NOBODY could give an explanation better than that of a time-traveling cell phone user? Well web sites and surfers alike certainly offered up their speculation.

What was surprising, nay a wee bit appalling, was the ratio of conspiracy theories—and just plain “out there” speculation—to critical and/or scientific thought (Though if you read one article, the second post in the talkback, there’s a hilarious example of somebody who tried too hard to apply too much science to the problem, and winds up writing a lengthy discourse, nay manifesto, about Einstein and time and relativity and GPS satellites and the speed of light and… what were we talking about again?).

One simple “Where’s the cell tower?” comment (and thankfully there were some of these) in the articles’ talkbacks  should have been “End of subject”, at least as far as the object being any kind of communications device, and in too many cases it wasn’t. Do the search yourself, even when there were posts of this nature they were often ignored, and outlandish hypotheses floated instead. While I’m not beyond my own tongue-in-cheek blog posts (muzzle flashes from alien warfare anybody?), it’s astounding to me how many Twilight Zone-caliber theories were floated on the 1928 cell phone user that weren’t intended as glib. (Trust me, I’m from the future, and we have way better communication devices than cell phones.)

Which brings me to the second topic that got me to write this, my own manifesto, which is one that is still ahead of us but one on which I’ll posted increasingly often. It’s late 2010, and in the runup to 2012 a quick Google search reveals that the whole Mayan Calendar mythos is still generating a vast amount of fear and fear-mongering.  We will all soon be subject to an onslaught of sketchy scientific claims, references to “lost” ancient wisdom, and predictions of gloom and doom on this front from now until January 2013. Not only is is useful to have Mad Science Skillz to combat outlandish claims, we have to be both willing to use the tools at our disposal and to pay attention when the scientifically perspicacious make what should be topic-concluding “Where’s the cell tower?”-like observations.

Their experiment has its origins back in 1871, when James Maxwell proposed a thought experiment: A demon controls the only door in a wall separating two sealed chambers filled with gas molecules. The demon allows only fast moving particles to enter one room, and only slow moving particles to enter the other room. After a while, one room has only fast moving particles, and the other has only slow moving particles. The system has lost entropy, but without expending any energy, creating a seeming violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist, offered a key insight into Maxwell’s paradox in 1929: The demon had to expend energy measuring the speed of the molecules, thus the overall system of demon plus gas actually required work and the expenditure of energy. The demon used energy to take a measurement, creating information, preserving the second law, and establishing the idea that information could be converted to energy, and vice versa.

Proving that idea in the lab took another eight decades.

Now I’m going to confess that I’m in deep scientific waters here, probably well over my head, but this is how I understand Sano and Toyabe’s experiment: They put a series of nano-scale beads into a solution. They then put a charge on the solution that induced the beads to rotate clockwise, or at least, to consume less energy turning clockwise than turning anticlockwise. Some writers have likened this to a staircase: it costs more energy to go up stairs than down. So in this case, clockwise is downstairs.

But random molecules in the solution would occasionally strike he bead and cause it to turn anti-clockwise or go “upstairs” — building up more potential energy. The scientists (or their doctoral student-lackey) would watch the rotation carefully — whenever the ball turned anti-clockwise (go up stairs), they’d put a charge on it to prevent it from turning back (rolling down stairs), keeping it at a high potential energy. Then next time the bead randomly turned anti clockwise, they’d again prevent it from spinning back, building up yet more potential energy. In essence, they converted the knowledge of the direction of spin (information) into energy. (I actually find the diagram at top left to be more illuminating than all that clunky text, but I had to give it a go.)

The experiments were precise enough to establish a conversation rate of 28 percent, information to energy. Not really enough to solve world energy problems, but enough to prove an interesting point: Knowledge may not be exactly power, but it sure is work.

In the early 1930′s, Tesla claimed that he had invented a death ray that would benefit the military in battle—one capable of destroying up to 10,000 enemy aircraft at distances of up to 250 miles.  It was so lethal that it would end the spectacle of war.

Tesla died before he could build this death ray, and he had no documentation hinting at its design in his personal effects. Nobody (not even the FBI) knows what happens to the death ray plans, if any existed.

Now it seems that Tesla’s missing death ray has been found, and it’s working, operational, and frying guests at the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas.

Below are short excerpts of the guest scientists’ responses, with links to the full versions:

Ken Caldeira: “…If you could directly produce chemical fuel from sunlight and do it affordably, that could really be a game changer…”

Jack Horner: “…If we want to see an animal like a velociraptor, we will be able to create one by genetic engineering. It might even be possible to make something that looks like a T. rex…”

Oliver Sacks: “…We thought that every part of the brain was predetermined genetically, and that was that. Now we know that enormous changes of function are possible…”

Sylvia Earle: “…We’ve explored only about 5 percent of the ocean. For us to have better maps of the moon, Mars, and Jupiter than of our own ocean floor is baffling…”

Rodney Brooks: “…The arguments we have about drugs and sports are minuscule compared with what’s coming, such as ‘What is the definition of human?’ We have the Paralympics now, but we’ll have the Augmented Olympics in the future…”

Debra Fischer: “…Every year since 1995, we have discovered more extrasolar planets than the year before. A parallel thing could happen with extraterrestrial life: After we find one example, we’ll hone our strategies to be smarter and more efficient…”

Tachi Yamada: “…I don’t believe just because you’re poor, you shouldn’t have access to lifesaving technology…”

Neil Turok: “…The science has reached the point where questions that used to be just philosophy could be observationally testable in 10 or 20 years…”

Ian Wilmut: “…We should be able to control degenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and heart disease…”

Sherry Turkle: “…Sometimes a citizenry should not ‘be good.’ You have to leave room for real dissent…”

Brian Greene: “…We may establish that there is not a unique universe—that ours is just one of many in a grand multiverse. That would be one of the most profound revolutions in thinking we have ever sustained…”

To recap, in order to get Cobb, Ariadne, et. al. out of dream-within-a-dream level 3 and up to dream-within-a-dream level 2, Arthur had to give them their “kick”: The sudden sensation of falling. Yusuf’s special soporific concoction didn’t effect the inner ear, so sleepers would wake up from a feeling of sudden acceleration like falling. We later learn that the “kick” can be the sense of falling itself, or the sudden stop at the end of falling, generally known as “crashing”.

The original plan in the film was to blow up the floor of the hotel in room in which the characters slept, causing them to fall and thus wake up. But when the van in dream level 1 went off the bridge, by the rules of the film, the dreamers became weightless. How to make them fall?

Arthur’s solution was to tie together all the bodies with a cord, push them into the elevator, attach the explosives to the side of the shaft above the elevator (or possibly on the elevator roof, I forget exactly), and set off the explosion, propelling the sleepers downward and waking them up. That worked, but seemed like a lot of labor.

How about:

* Pushing the tied together bodies out the door into the hallway. Tie one end of a length of line (or wire) to the people and tie the other end to the door handle or something else solid. Push the bodies away as hard as possible. They should accelerate until they wake up, or when they reach the end of the line, they’ll stop with a sudden jerk.

* Taking the tied together sleepers, spinning them around fast. If that didn’t work, Arthur could  grab a door jamb with one hand and  the spinning block of bodies with the other hand, bringing the spinning to a sudden stop. (Credit for this idea to my wife and ad hoc inner ear expert Miriam Goldstein)

* Using a fire extinguisher, or multiple extinguishers. Most hotels have fire extinguishers in the hallways. Water extinguishers use a CO2 canister at 2000 PSI to propel the water, so the initial burst might provide some momentum, and CO2 fire extinguishers are often stored under far higher pressure. One may not be enough to get those bodies moving, but several in succession might do the job.

* Using the explosives, but skipping the elevator part. Push the bodies into the hallway and tie them together as described above, and then set off the explosive maybe from one end of the hall. The shock wave would propel everyone at high speed. Maybe Arthur wouldn’t even need to tie the group together.

Clearly, Arthur had options. Anyone else have ideas?

At the NewSpace panel I attended yesterday, Mark Street, from XCOR, said he and a group of colleagues went to see the first film together.

“Our favorite part was the testing,” he said at the panel. “You know the part where he tries out the rocket boots, and he turns them on at like 10% and gets thrown onto the roof of car? We cracked up because that’s exactly what happens.”

Obviously, Street was joking, but his point was that Iron Man was one of the few movies to offer a smatter of realism in how science gets done: Have an idea, test it, have it not work right, try again.

“It never works the way you think it’s going to work the first time,” said Molly McCormick, an engineer who designs space suits for Orbital Outfitters.

At Discover’s panel Thursday, Discover blogger Sean Carroll, who I don’t think attended the space panel, made the same point on his own.

“Iron Man had the scientific method,” he said. “It didn’t always work.”

Well, every science educator has their “pet” topics–things they really like to convey to receptive minds. This is one of mine (tides are another and we’ll be visiting that topic soon).

“So how IS it done, Mr. Smarty Pants?”

The notion that a spacecraft could gain (or lose) energy by passing close to a planet was first developed in the early 1960s by Michael Minovitch, a very clever UCLA graduate student who was working as a summer student at JPL. Previous research had suggested that a spacecraft would be accelerated by passing close to a planet (or moon)—the spacecraft gains a bit of momentum while the planet loses the exact same amount. Minovitch showed that this technique could be used to reach places in the Solar System using far less fuel. Using chemical propulsion alone, it is nearly impossible to reach many places within the Solar System: both near to (Mercury) and far from (the Jovian planets beyond Jupiter) the Sun. Gravity assist opened up new venues of exploration.

The Voyager II spacecraft used the gravity of Jupiter and Saturn to reach Uranus and Neptune.  Galileo swung past Venus, Earth, and Earth again, to reach Jupiter. Cassini (at right) used Venus, Venus again, Earth, then Jupiter in order to reach Saturn (notice also in the graphic that the spacecraft followed the same kind of spiral path outwards that Icarus would have followed inwards to the Sun, as mentioned in Part I). Other spacecraft have employed the technique; even the Dawn Mission used a gravity assist from Mars en route to the asteroids Ceres and Vesta. (You can see the current position of Dawn here.)

It begins with the concept of a gravitational sphere of influence.  There are different definitions of this gravitational sphere of influence: the activity sphere or Hill Sphere (here’s a cool Hill Sphere calculator). They are all supposed to define a (nearly) spherical region around a planet.  Outside of the gravitational sphere of influence the trajectory of a spacecraft is dictated chiefly by the gravitational attraction of the sun, with a nearby planet giving a slight gravitational tug, or perturbation, to that trajectory. Within the sphere of influence the roles are reversed – it is the planet’s gravity that primarily dictates the spacecraft’s trajectory, with the sun’s gravity being a perturbation.

Geometry of a Gravity Assist

To perform a gravity assist a spacecraft enters the sphere of influence of a planet–let’s use Neptune as an example–its trajectory is bent by the planet’s gravity, and it leaves along a different path. If the diagram above is accurate, the magnitude of the velocity/energy is the same going in as going out–by the law of conservation of energy.  The magnitude of the inward velocity vector, Vin, is the same as the magnitude of Vout (red vectors). That is entirely true, and this is why the notion of gravity assist gets very confusing!  Remember, though that these velocities are relative to Neptune. The gravity assist is relative to the Sun, however, and Neptune is moving with velocity Vn. If we determine the velocity of the spacecraft relative to the Sun, which we do by adding Vin and Vout to Vn (blue vector), nose-to-tail fashion, a different picture emerges. The white vectors below are the heliocentric (sun-centered) velocities. We see that not only does the heliocentric inbound velocity vector (Vhi) change direction when outbound (Vho), it increases in magnitude. The spacecraft has picked up speed and there’s your assist!

For a gravity assist in the real world, a spacecraft passes behind a planet (as above) to gain speed/kinetic energy, and behind ahead to lose it.

A good scientist understands his/her biases, so I will admit up front that I’m highly biased here , but a more realistic cinematic depiction of gravity assist, one that incorporated all the above, was in the pilot episode for the Fox series (not picked up) Virtuality. As with the development of gravity assist at JPL in the early 1960’s, Virtuality had an advisor who was a very clever former UCLA graduate student who currently works at JPL.

In Virtuality, as the crew of the starship Phaeton approached Neptune, they also approached the “Go/No-Go” point in their mission to the star Epsilon Eridani. If the Commanding Officer, Captain Pike, decided to “go”, they would “slingshot” around Neptune, out of the Solar System, and engage their Orion Drive to take them to Eridani. Approach Neptune another way, and they would be rerouted back home to Earth.

During their “slingshot”, one of the crewmembers, Dr. Jules Braun, reports that their trajectory is off  by “Five milliarcseconds in the B Plane.” Simply, Dr. Braun was referring to an imaginary plane, the B-plane, that dissects a planet perpendicular to the incoming trajectory. To get the desired gravity assist, a spacecraft aims at a pre-determined point (not coincidentally called the “aim point”) in the B-plane.

So consistent with our previous statement “pass behind to gain speed/pass ahead to lose”, if  Phaeton approached Neptune as in the diagram, they would be catapulted out of the Solar System and onto Eridani. Approach Neptune on the opposite side of the planet, and they would be rerouted back home to Earth.

There! Gravity assist explained simply, if not in a nutshell, with a cinematic example to boot!

I will admit up front that I found Sunshine quite enjoyable, so put any of my nit-picking in that context.  In the DVD commentary director Danny Boyle pointed out that, traditionally, in horror films the monsters attack from out of the darkness. His vision was to create a threat that attacks from out of the light instead. Very clever. At the same time, the movie was far from perfect. Having served as the Science Advisor on a TV series (or two), and having made the mistake of reading too many online fan comments about the shows on which I worked, it’s clear that people, in particular those with science backgrounds, tend to be particularly chagrined when they feel that  it is their science that is being maligned or given improper respect.  In this sense, apparently I’m no different.

With a background in orbit dynamics, I had a few “Oh please!” moments in the movie that made me cringe—partly because they were in my field, but also because they were very easy to get right, and doing so would not have impacted the drama of the film one iota. It’s this latter fact that I find bothersome in films.

The premise of Sunshine is that our sun is dying 5 billion years prematurely, so the spacecraft Icarus is dispatched to deliver a stellar bomb to restart it—to “create a star within a star.” Unfortunately, and for unknown reasons, the crew of Icarus fails to complete their mission. The movie follows the adventures of the crew of Icarus II seven years later attempting to succeed where Icarus failed. It has been said that, “If you see a gun on the wall in Act I, it should be used by Act III.” Therefore you just know that they’re going to encounter Icarus en route.

We join the mission as it is already well underway: Icarus II is approaching Mercury for a “gravitational slingshot” to send it closer to the Sun. Wise choice by the filmmakers: A gravity assist would almost certainly be needed to get a spacecraft and her payload—in the case a payload the “mass of Manhattan Island”—to the Sun. It turns out that from an energy standpoint—where energy is roughly equivalent to the amount of fuel that you would need to expend—our sun Sol is THE single most difficult star in the entire Universe for a spacecraft to reach. Earth is moving fairly rapidly, just shy of 30 km/s in its orbit, and just like a figure skater whose spin rate increases as she pulls her arms in, the velocity of a spacecraft traveling inwards to the Sun increases the closer the spacecraft gets. (Remember that fact the next time you hear somebody say “Well I don’t know why we don’t just shoot all our garbage/toxic waste/spent nuclear fuel into the Sun.” It is actually easier to send it to Alpha Centauri, or Sirius, or even Wolf 359 that it is Sol, though it would take far far longer.) So a mission to Sol would be very difficult to do without gravitational assists from the planets Mercury and/or Venus. That aspect of the movie is perfectly reasonable!

But before we get to Mercury to engage in the slingshot, there’s a problem: When we first see Icarus II, her orientation suggests that she is following a trajectory whose path is radially inwards to the Sun. Because of a physical law called the conservation of angular momentum, Icarus II would actually have to follow a spiral-shaped trajectory inwards to reach the Sun, so at the 6:05 point in the movie when mention is made that they’re 55 million miles from Earth, that would have been the straight-line distance. They would have travelled much farther by that point in the mission.

Then when we leave Mercury, we run into another issue. At the 18:05 mark in the movie, Captain Kaneda tells Icarus (also the name of the ship’s computer), “Icarus, please plot our trajectory following the slingshot around Mercury.” So far, so good. Later, though, we see a graphic of Icarus orbiting Mercury, and at the 23:20 point in the film, Icarus says, “Slingshot complete, Icarus leaving Mercury orbit.”

Oops.

As depicted in the film, the spacecraft actually performed several orbits around Mercury before “slingshotting” towards the sun. From an energy standpoint that’s not only very wasteful, it would probably be counter-productive. In the case of Icarus II, it would have taken energy (fuel) to slow the spacecraft in order to enter into Mercury orbit, it would have taken more energy (even more fuel) to leave Mercury orbit, and the spacecraft would have realized no benefit—or more likely would have expended more fuel than saved—from Mercury’s gravity.  A gravity assist, also known as a gravitational swingby, is performed in a single pass by the planet—like they did in Star Trek.

Recall in the original series Star Trek episode “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” the crew of Enterprise performed a one-pass “slingshot” (technically a powered assist or Oberth Maneuver) around the Sun to gain the speed needed to return to their own time. They repeated this maneuver using a Klingon Bird of Prey in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The only problem with the maneuver depicted in Star Trek is that there is no indication that the “slingshot” would allow them to attain a greater speed than they could by warp drive alone (we’ll show later that it may have had some benefit had they been trying to escape the gravitational pull of the Milky Way Galaxy, but locally it would have done little). Further, in The Voyage Home, there was a concern expressed that the Bird of Prey could be captured by the gravity of the Sun.  In short, and perhaps an entry for another time, a ship capable of faster-than-light travel simply could not be captured by the gravity of a sun the size of Sol unless it had a serious malfunction.

The concept of gravity assist can be difficult to understand fully, even if you have a decent background in physics, so I can give Hollywood a pass on not getting it perfect. In Part II, though, we’ll discuss how it’s done and show an example where Hollywood got it right.

Science fiction has long tackled the biggest questions about the human condition: What is reality? What makes us human? What is consciousness?

So to Susan Schneider, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, sci-fi seemed a logical way to illustrate some of the existential conundrums of philosophers over the ages, from Plato to René Descartes to David Chalmers.

“Science fiction fires the imagination and can get across conceptual ideas and thought experiments, or scenarios, that test philosophical theories,” she says. “Consider Isaac Asimov and his stories about robots and what happens if they become conscious. What does that tell us about the notion of a person?”

In her new book, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2009), Schneider mines time travel, artificial intelligence, robot rights, teleportation, and genetic modification to discuss the nature of space and time, free will, transhumanism, the self, neuroethics, and reality.

Each chapter tackles a different philosophical question via essays by Schneider and academic colleagues with titles like “Could I be in a Matrix or a Computer Simulation?” and “Free Will and Determinism in the World of Minority Report.” These discussions draw parallels between such sci-fi stalwarts as Star Trek, Blade Runner, and Brave New World, and philosophical classics like Plato’s The Republic and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.

The book sprang from a 2007 undergraduate Penn course of the same name, which she plans to resume in the 2010-2011 school year. The course grew of out of Schneider’s quest for a compelling way to introduce students to philosophy, plus her own research on the nexus of philosophy and cognitive science.

“Cognitive science regards thinking as computational. I examine how it shapes our understanding of the mind, the self, and consciousness,” says Schneider. “If both computers and humans arrive at answers in a computational manner, then how much of a difference is there between us and them? Not all philosophical questions involve cognitive science. But the area of philosophy I’m most interested in—the nature of our minds and thinking—is in constant dialogue with cognitive science.”

— Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

Via Hero Complex come these ingenious public service announcements and travel posters from a near future in which time travel is possible and robots are self-cleaning.  Designed by artist Amy Martin, the posters are $20 each and proceeds benefit 826LA, a non-profit writing center for kids 6 to 18.

In the following audio you can listen in on what amounted to a 20-minute chat with David Tennant (The  Doctor, obviously) and Julie Gardner (executive producer and now head of drama for BBC Worldwide)  and five reporters. You’ll here Tennant and Gardner talk about shooting “Planet of the Dead,” the sadness of ending their time working with the Doctor, their futures, and the possibility of Tennant attending the next day’s panel naked. Both are charming, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

(The recording is a little noisy at the start, but on the upside, you’ll get to hear Tennant expressing amazement at all the recorders paced in front of him. Also, you’ll hear a lot of reporters asking questions, but no, none of them are me.)

The Audio Charm of Dr. Who, David Tennant

Among the things we learned:

• X-Men’s Storm would need to consume 120,000 in food calories or have a nuclear reactor in her stomach to generate the minimum 500 million joules of energy needed to shoot lightning bolts from her body. On the plus side, such a metabolism definitely helps one stay in movie shape.
• In Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise survives a 2,200-g mid-air body slam (where g is the acceleration due to Earth’s gravity, 9.8 meters per second squared), but Newton’s second law doesn’t fare so well. “A force to the head exceeding 150 g’s is usually fatal.” Usually, sure. All that Scientology in his noggin probably helped cushion the blow…
• Best physics flick went to 2001: A Space Odyssey for the jogging sequence in the rotating circular space station, while raspberries went to Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow and The Core for such travesties as exploding fireballs on an asteroid with no atmosphere. Star Trek got a (dis)honorable mention for phasers that took a half-second to reach their targets. “You’d be better off with a gun,” he noted disdainfully.

After the session, Weiner noted the rising trend of scientists—James Kakalios (The Physics of Superheroes, Lawrence Krauss (Physics of Star Trek) and our own Phil Plait—using pop culture to teach science literacy. “The public’s view of the world is so shaped by popular culture, we have to start to make those connections and show what’s real and what’s not,” he said.

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

* Folks in LA can catch Weiner when he hosts “When Worlds Collide: The Science of Movies” panel at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Aug 6.

DISCOVER: What kind of realistic technology could we use to get to nearby stars? Which stars would be feasibly reachable by such technologies?

Kevin Grazier: It’s a saying plastered on T-shirts and bumper stickers—the kind sold at both science-fiction conventions and physics departments nationwide:

186,000 miles per second:
It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

The speed of light, of all electromagnetic energy, in a vacuum is the ultimate speed limit in the universe. Nothing that has mass or carries information can travel faster.

This universal speed limit is a direct fallout from Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Special relativity implies that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, but values that we tend to think of as constant in our daily experience—mass, length, and the rate of the passage of time—are not. Depending upon the relative velocity of two observers, these values will “adjust” so that both observers see the speed of light as a constant. Two observers travelling at high speeds relative to each other will find themselves in strong disagreement about measurements like the length of each other’s spacecraft and the rate of the passage of time.

Another consequence of special relativity is that, as an object travels increasingly faster, it behaves as if it has increasingly more mass. Therefore the amount of thrust it takes for an incremental change in velocity (known in the space program as a delta-V) is vastly greater at high speeds than at low. This effect is also highly nonlinear: It takes almost an order of magnitude more thrust to accelerate from .9c (nine-tenths of the speed of light) to .99c than it does to accelerate from .5c to .7c. An object travelling at the speed of light would act as if it had an infinite amount of mass and it would, therefore, require an infinite amount of energy (read: an infinite amount of thrust/fuel) to attain it.

This is, of course, a shame for civilizations (like ours) who want to explore planetary systems around other stars first hand. The distances involved are, well, astronomical. Just within the Solar System, it typically takes NASA probes 6 months to a year to reach Mars; it took Cassini 6 years, 9 months to reach Saturn. The (currently) fastest object created by humankind, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, will take 40,000 years, give or take a few thousand years, before it makes its closest encounter with its first star: AC+79 3888—currently located in the constellation Ursa Minor. At that speed few Time Lords, and even fewer humans, would survive the journey to even “nearby” star systems.

Current chemical rockets, and even the more efficient ion drives, cannot propel humanity to the stars at a reasonable speed, but there are concepts for interstellar spacecraft drives that are promising, that could be constructed in a practical sense, and you may be surprised how long the designs have been around. Stanisław Ulam, a Polish mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project, proposed nuclear pulse propulsion back in 1947.

The idea is simple: explode a series of nuclear bombs behind a spacecraft. The explosions are directed against a thick steel “pusher plate”. The pusher plate is, in turn, connected to the spacecraft by a huge shock absorber to lessen the high G forces from the impulsive accelerations. In the straightforward terminology of Jimmy Johnson, the engineer on the Phaeton:

Basically, we gonna blow us up a bunch of big ass bombs off the ass-end of this here ship. Big ass bombs gonna vaporize some big ass alloy plates, and the translation of all that big ass energy’ll make us go real fast. Real fast. Yippe kai-ay, m…

The practical attempt to design and develop nuclear-pulse propulsion was performed by General Atomics in San Diego in the 1950s and 1960s. Ultimately the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the Unites States and Soviet Union made the testing for such a drive illegal, nevertheless over 50 years ago the design seemed practical and could be implemented within the bounds of existing technology. For more information, NASA and Star Trek designer Mike Okuda provided still more details on Project Orion, the U.S. government’s investigation into a nuclear-pulse spacecraft.

An Orion-style drive powered by thermonuclear explosions could theoretically reach speeds of .08c to .10c. That could get a spacecraft to the nearest stars within a human lifetime, but not within Phaeton’s 10-year mission. Virtuality is set in the mid-21st century, and it’s reasonable to assume some technological advances in the intervening time. Phaeton does not use thermonuclear explosions for propulsion, the charges dropped out the back are matter/antimatter charges (yes the thrust for Phaeton is, in essence, provided by photon torpedoes). The obvious assumption is that by the mid-21st Century, science has solved problems regarding the generation and containment of antimatter. One estimate has shown that Orion-style drive propelled by matter/antimatter explosions could attain speeds of .5c to .8c.

If Phaeton’s Orion Drive (named after the real-life nuclear concept) could propel it to 80 percent the speed of light, it could get to Sol’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri (4.4 light-years away) in just 5 years, 6 months. That’s certainly a vast improvement, and shortens the round-trip mission time to several nearby stars to less than a human lifetime.

Only, it gets better.

Special relativity, which bit us in the asteroid when it comes to top-end velocity, does our crew a favor as our spacecraft attains speeds that are a high fraction of the speed of light. Recall that for objects travelling at relativistic speeds, values like mass, time, and length appear to “adjust” to keep the speed of light a constant. At high speeds, distances that we measure at “rest”, or at low speeds compared to c, appear to be shortened. This effect is called Lorentz contraction or Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.

Moving at a snappy .5c, the distance to Alpha Centauri is only 3.8 light-years (down from 4.4), and the apparent travel time is a bit over 7 years, 6 months. At 80 percent light speed, the distance is 2.6 light-years, and the travel time is 3 years, 3 months—less elapsed time for the crew than it would take for light to make the same journey.

Travelling at a speed of 0.7c is the “break even” point, where the combination of spacecraft velocity and Lorentz Contraction means you are travelling at “functional light speed” (the distance to Alpha Centauri in that frame would be 3.1 light-years and the travel time 4 years, 5 months). Of course time passes at different rates based upon their relative speeds as well, a phenomena called relativistic time dilation, so if Phaeton were travelling at a speed of .7c, for every year that passes for the crew, a year and five months would pass for The Edge of Never viewers back on Earth. Billie Kashmiri alludes to this in her confessional near the end.

With the phenomena of Lorentz Contraction as an aid, many more star systems become potential targets of a 10-year mission. There are sound scientific arguments why astronomers believe that any star that could potentially have a planet with life, in particular intelligent life, must be similar to our Sol: from mid-F range on the Herzsprung-Russell Diagram to mid-K. There are several stars in that size/temperature range in Sol’s neighborhood. Below is a screen capture of a spreadsheet that the producers of Virtuality used to select the target star for Phaeton’s mission (text color corresponds to the star’s color):

On the spreadsheet are the stars’ distances at rest, and at various fractions of light speed—with the corresponding travel time.

Click image to embiggen.

Epsilon Eridani, the nearby star that the Phaeton is sent to explore, has one, perhaps two planets orbiting it, as well as at least three asteroid/planetesimal belts. If we assume that Phaeton’s Orion Drive can get her up to .8c, or 80 percent the speed of light, then because of Lorentz contraction the journey (normally 10.5 light-years) is only 6.3 light-years, and it takes just under 7 years, 11 months. So if the Orion Drive can reasonably get a spacecraft up to .8c, then Phaeton’s mission is actually closer to 16 years. If, however, the Orion Drive was capable of propelling Phaeton to .9c, or 90 percent the speed of light, then the distance to Epsilon Eridani is only 4.6 light-years, and the one-way flight time is 5.1 years.

So in order for Phaeton to get to Epsilon Eridani and back within the stated 10-year mission duration, we clearly see that the ship’s Orion Drive would have to propel her to over 90 percent the speed of light (.9c). For all the elements of Phaeton’s mission that might be practically attainable by the mid-21st Century, this is where a little science fiction enters the picture.

Thank you to Steve Cooperman, Doug Creel, and John Weiss for their helpful input and comments.

One question that had occurred to me can be answered. Is Daniel a descendent of Michael Faraday, the 19th century English physicist, chemist and (until recently) featured star on the back of British 20-pound notes? The writers of Lost like to have fun with historical names (John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, for instance, and Daniel Faraday’s own mother, Eloise Hawking). But the original Faraday had a special interest in electromagnetism, so the thought crossed my mind: Could Daniel be his great-great-great-grandson?

Naw. Michael Faraday had a wife but no kids. So much for that, unless he was igniting someone else’s Bunsen burner on the side. But there may be another Faraday connection hidden in the science of “Lost.” At least one online denizen has speculated that “Faraday cages” have already — and will — play roles in the show.

Made from an electrically conducting material, such as metal, a Faraday cage blocks electromagnetic signals from entering or exiting the cage. Elevators often act as kind of Faraday cage, which explains why your cell phone doesn’t like to work in them; the outer shell of an airplane is another (lightning can hit plane’s structure but not fry everyone inside thanks to this phenomenon). Faraday cages can also be used to protect electronics from electromagnetic pulses, or stop electronics from leaking giveaway signals, so they are often found in military and aerospace hardware.

These days, Faraday cages are a hot topic in an unexpected field: privacy. RFID tags, those devices that track everything from library books to food products, are a major bugaboo for privacy activists. But you can prevent the tags from being detected by using a portable “RFID shield,” a very basic kind of Faraday cage. (This site sells credit-card shields for $9.99 in “five attractive colors.”)

By Randy Dotinga

In the most recent issue of Nature, there are two papers…that detail the characteristics of sodium and lithium under extreme pressure. Specifically, these two metals adopt semiconductor-like (even superconductor-like) characteristics if you subject them to giga-pressure (literally, 80-200 gigapascals). The sodium actually becomes optically transparent during this squeeze. Reading this reminded me of a Star Trek [movie] that involved a not-so-scientific explanation of “transparent aluminum” …Is the idea of using transparent metal for windows pure science fiction?

The paper you’re talking about, the one on high pressure sodium, sure did make a lot of noise in the science world, and for good reason. Drs. Yanming Ma and Artem Oganov at SUNY Stonybrook showed that  lithium and sodium do goofy things under pressure — like turn transparent. Normally under really high pressure, elements turn into metals, c.f. hydrogen. The science makes intuitive sense because the atoms are getting smooshed together as the pressure increases. The electrons are freed to become conductors, and the element takes a metal-like structure. But in sodium, it turns out, the electrons line up into columns, one on top of the other. This creates gaps between the atoms, and instead of becoming a conductor, it becomes an insulator, and, conicidentally,  becomes transparent.

All of which is cool, but it doesn’t really answer Michael D’s question, because the sodium is under 200 gigapasacals of pressure, the sort of pressure you find if you were journeying from Jupiter’s surface toward its core, not hanging out on the bridge of the Enterprise.

And yet! That formula Scotty gave for transparent aluminum in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home very nearly exists in the form of aluminum oxynitride  (known as ALONtm). Harder than diamond, ALONtm is far more shock resistant than even bullet resistant glass. In Air Force tests it has resisted multiple rounds from a .50 caliber sniper rifle. That hardness also prevents wear and tear, since neither sand nor rocks nor shrapnel in the night will scratch the stuff.

In practical use, the ALONtm would be the outer layer for windscreens of cockpit covers. It would be backed by a thin layer of glass and a layer of transparent polymer to prevent shattering. All together the ALONtm windscreen would be thinner and lighter than a traditional bullet-resistant windscreen.What’s unclear from my research is whether it would be strong enough to hold back enough water to make the aquarium for all those humpbacks whales on a captured Klingon spaceship, but it’s a start.

The main downside? It’s wicked expensive. Traditional bullet resistant glass goes for $3 per inch-squared, but ALONtm costs between $10-$15, or it did back in 2005.  I can’t seem to find any more current applications for it, but this is the military, it could be classified.

Anyway Michael D., I hope that answers your question.

I want to have a teleporter in my story. How would one work?

The good news is that a working teleportation device already exists. The bad news is that it won’t work for you if you happen to be bigger than a rubidium atom—but scientists are toiling away to fix that. As physicist Michio Kaku noted last year in DISCOVER, we could be teleporting things as big as a virus within a few decades, which means we would be ready teleport a person around the 23rd century, just in time for the predicted construction date of Captain Kirk’s Enterprise.

The key to teleportation is to realize that we don’t want to use it as some kind of “matter transporter.” The kind of everyday matter that makes up you, me, and the planet, is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. Quantum physics tells us that every proton is identical to every other proton, every neutron is identical to every other neutron, and the same holds for electrons too. What’s important are not the particular particles that make up our bodies, but the way those particles are arranged into atoms, molecules, and cells. Duplicate the arrangement, and you duplicate the person.

The situation is analogous to what happens when a scene is captured by a TV camera and transmitted to a screen somewhere else. We’re not interested in somehow transporting the actual photons that entered the camera’s lens to the eyes of the viewer. Instead, the camera records the pattern the incoming light makes. Information that describes this pattern is transmitted to viewer’s screen, where a brand new set of photons are produced with the desired color and intensity. These convey the image of the scene to the eye. What’s important is preserving and transmitting the pattern of information, not the original photons.

The key to transmitting the information pattern of solid matter, as opposed to an two-dimensional image made of photons, is a spooky phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. It turns out that particles can be in a number of different states, and big part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is that these states are undefined until they are somehow measured. Imagine tossing a coin and catching it. In the quantum world, not until you peek at the coin does it decide to be heads up or tails up! Entanglement means taking two particles and treating them together in such a way that their states become mingled. The states of the particles are still undefined until measured, but now making a measurement of one particle’s state will instantly determine the state of both particles, not just one. This holds true, even if you took one of the entangled particles and moved it to the other side of the solar system before performing the measurement.

Incidentally, Einstein loathed this idea, and it was one of the things that turned him away from quantum mechanics and towards a more-or-less dead end approach to physics in his later years. But thanks to a piece of quantum theory known as “Bell’s inequalities” along with entanglement experiments conducted in Paris in the 1980’s, Einstein was proved to be wrong.

Entanglement makes teleportation possible like this: first create an entangled pair of particles, say two atoms. We’ll call one atom “the pitcher,” and the other “the catcher” (This is not standard physics terminology). Now move the catcher to wherever you want to teleport to. This must be done very carefully to avoid destroying the entanglement. Now let’s take an atom that we want to teleport. This atom has a particular internal arrangement of electrons, neutron and protons that somehow makes it special to us—we’ll call it the Scotty atom. We put the Scotty atom into a chamber containing the pitcher atom. The states of the Scotty and pitcher atoms are combined and then measured. This combination process scrambles the state of the Scotty and pitcher atoms, putting them into random states.

So far, it looks like all you’ve done is put a perfectly good Scotty particle into a quantum shredder—the arrangement that made it special has been destroyed. But now you take the measurements of those scrambled random states and transmit them (in theory this could be done by radio, or any other method you can think of) to wherever the catcher atom is located. A regular, run-of-the-mill, atom is pushed into a chamber with the catcher atom. We’ll call this new, boring, atom the Tabula Rasa atom. The information about the random states that we measured after the Scotty and pitcher atoms were combined is also fed into the chamber. Presto—the Tabula Rasa atom takes on all the attributes of the Scotty atom. To all intents and purposes it is the Scotty atom.

Scientists are working on scaling up the process so that it works on larger and larger scales, hoping to move up from atoms to molecules, molecules to cells, and maybe one day, entire people. But the basic process is the same as for a single atom.

Note that in some ways the process is similar to what happens on Star Trek—teleporting someone requires disintegrating their body. There’s no way to teleport someone and leave their original body intact—the person can’t exist at the pitcher and catcher ends at the same time. Teleportation cannot be used to make copies of a person. In quantum mechanics this restriction is known as the “no cloning theorem.” In some ways however, teleportation is quite different to Star Trek—it requires quite a bit of preparation and equipment at both ends of the process—you can’t just appear on the surface of a planet you’ve never visited before.

But you could imagine this being used as a way to travel to distant solar systems—a robot probe with a supply of entangled particles could be sent out on the decades, or centuries long, journey required to travel between stars. Once it arrived at it destination, explorers would step into a teleportation chamber on Earth containing the entangled pairs of the particles sent with the probe. Their bodies would be destroyed, but information about them would be transmitted by radio at the speed of light to the probe. The probe would receive the information, and reconstitute the explorers. Of course, if anything happened to break the chain of transmission, or to disturb the entangled particles before the right time, the explorers would be killed. But if everything worked, to them it would feel like going from Earth to an alien world in the blink of an eye.

The Freshman Hook Up is a wry take on the phenonmenon of stellar nucleosynthesis–a phenomenon to which we owe our existence. After the Big Bang, most of the ordinary matter in the universe formed into isotopes of hydrogen, helium and a smattering of lithium. Heavier elements—making up nearly all of the periodic table—simply did not exist. So how is it that we can stand on a planet mostly made of rock, and enjoy active biochemistries that rely on carbon, oxygen, nitrogen along with some other elements?

The answer lies in stars, which are essentially clouds of hydrogen and helium that have collapsed due to their own gravity. Stars shine because at the core of the star the temperature and pressure is so high that atoms, which normally repel each other if squeezed too closely together, can fuse together. This fusing releases the energy that eventually manifests as light. During their normal lives, this fusion process means that stars can produce all of elements on the periodic table up to and including iron.

Iron is the end of the road for fusion, because fusing iron atoms together doesn’t release any additional energy to feed the cauldron at the core of the star. What’s needed to make even heavier atoms is a Type II supernova—when a star explodes, during it’s last incredibly violent moments there’s a huge surplus of energy that can be tapped to fuse even atoms like iron into heavier and heavier elements. The supernova also ensures that all the elements produced by a star get scattered out into the galaxy instead of just staying locked up in the core of a star. These elements are then available to form into planets–and eventually us. This is what Carl Sagan meant when he said “We are all star stuff.”

Background image used in illustration courtesy of NASA.

I know that many scientists (and at least one science blogger) really like the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory.   The show is well-written and acted, has a half dozen funny one-liners per episode, and delivers a weekly helping of science and nerd culture in-jokes.

In a recent episode, Howard the NASA scientist erased several hours of data from the Mars Rover after inviting a woman he had met in a bar to come back to his office and drive it.  His pick up line: “Have you ever driven  a car …. on Mars?” Funny stuff and mostly harmless, right?

No.  Not right.   After watching several episodes on a recent cross-country flight, I’ve concluded that this show is bad for American Science. And here’s why:

Three of the four main characters are scientists with limited romantic prospects.  Howard lives with his mother and inhabits an imaginary world where his Beatles haircut makes him irresistible to women.  Raj finds himself unable to speak when the nerds’ sexy neighbor is in the apartment.  Sheldon apparently has a sitcom version of Asperger’s Syndrome.

Only Johnny Galecki’s character, Leonard, finds himself simultaneously able to work in physics, love comic books and successfully date women.

Thus BBT reinforces the popular stereotype that scientists are social misfits (mostly male) who can’t get a date.

Not only is this not true (granted I work at a science magazine but most of the researchers I meet are very cool and many of them are women), but research has posited that these portrayals potentially discourage kids from pursuing science past junior high.

I made this argument to Sean Carroll while I was out at Caltech last week, and his response was essentially, “Lighten up.  People love these characters.”  Respectfully, I say that’s wrong.  People loved Urkel, but no one wants to be Urkel.

As the creators of the dominant portrayal of scientists in American culture right now, the producers of BBT can do better.  And they can start by letting Howard move out of his mom’s house.

The Lobster-Eye X-Ray Device (LEXID)  uses X-rays (like Superman!) to see through walls. The LEXID looks like a flashlight, but it uses  X-ray emissions to see through up to three inches of steel. It’s actually pretty neat, the designers modelled it on the vision system used by lobsters and other crustaceans. Where the human eye uses a lens to refract light onto the optic nerve, a lobster uses a series of tiny biological “mirrors” to project disparate light beams onto a single focal point. The LEXID collects X-rays in the same way.

Or how about a little mini-radar type system? The Xaver 800 can see into a room, map it onto a screen, and maintain real-time, three dimensional updates on the locations of people within the room. The system relies on Ultra Wide Bandwidth signals, a method that relies on timing and and a large selection of radio wavelengths, rather than sheer power (Traditional uses of radiowaves use a narrower part of the spectrum but are higher power).  The system can see through concrete, reinforced concrete, wood, brick, and pretty much anything except a continuous sheet of metal.

So there’s plenty of ways for futuristic soliders and talking cars to see through walls. I just wish I could figure out how we got to thinking that infrared was one of them.

The plot imagines that Einstein did not actually fail in his quest to develop a unified theory of everything. Instead, horrified by the atomic bomb and fearful of the uses to which his unified theory might be put, but unwilling to destroy his work completely, Einstein entrusts the theory to a few trusted students. Decades later, those students–now elderly physicists–start turning up dead as a malevolent entity tries to piece together the theory for its own ends. While visiting him in hospital, a former student of one of the physicists is entrusted with a clue to the location of Einstein’s final theory, sparking a cat and mouse chase to discover the deepest secrets of the universe–and in best Crichton fashion–the key to the destruction of humanity.

Bearing in mind that coming up with a real unified theory of everything would be a bit of a tall order, Alpert none the less had to come up with a reasonable fictional theory for Final Theory, a difficult trick given that it needed to be more-or-less compatible with the current standard model of particle physics, consonant with the hints researchers are garnering from the bleeding edge, and workable in terms of the physics and maths available to Einstein in the 1940s and 1950s. But Alpert pulls it off, giving the book a nice meaty finish instead of collapsing into anticlimactic technobabble. If you’re looking for something to sink your teeth into during these long winter evenings, give Final Theory a try.

1. Up until now, The Doctor has been played by characters on the thin side, from William Hartnell as the spry First Doctor to the angular Tennant as today’s Tenth Doctor. Why not go large? Possibilities – Robbie Coltrane, Matt Lucas, Mark Addy.
2. We’ve seen female Time Lords before, so why not a Lady Doctor? A female doctor also opens up the door for the return of the long-term male companion.  Possibilities – Samantha Morton, Helen Mirren.
3. If America can elect a black President, then the BBC can cast a black Doctor. Possibilities – Chiwetel Ejiofor, Don Cheadle (reprising his British accent from Ocean’s 11)
4. Why does the Doctor always have to be British? The BBC could sell out to world’s most lucrative TV market by going American.  Possibilities – Jason Bateman, Neil Patrick Harris
5. And why must a regenerated Doctor always mean a brand new actor? With the loss of Tennant in these uncertain and anxious times, the BBC could reassure us by returning to the other Greatest Doctor Of All Time: Tom Baker.

Things take a turn for the worse when McKay’s rival (played by Kids in the Hall alum Dave Foley) demonstrates his latest invention, a machine intended to solve global warming by sucking heat through a transdimensional bridge to another universe. Of course, Things Go Wrong, and the entire facility and everyone in it is threatened with death by freezing. But hey, we’ve got a room full of top scientists! They’ll put their heads together and figure it out, right?

Ha ha ha! No — the room instantly dissolves into a squabbling babble, with each scientist convinced that their approach is the best. And indeed in real life, although all professional disciplines are invariably competitive and have their fair share of forceful personalities, physics appears to be something of a magnet for large egos. Of course, there are many normal personalities in physics, but not for nothing did Ann Finkbeiner’s excellent history of the Jasons (an elite group of scientists that advise the government) have a working title of “The Arrogance of Physicists.” Nor did Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the Manhattan Project, succeed in building the atom bomb because he was a brilliant scientist (although he was); it’s well documented that he succeeded because of his unique ability to get many of the biggest names in science all pulling together. The question is, which came first, the science or ego? That is, does physics naturally appeal to a certain personality type or does pursuing physics promote and develop certain traits?

In any case, many times in fiction, scientists (of whatever discipline) are portrayed as somewhat otherworldly, sometimes even saintly, figures, nobly pursuing knowledge and untainted by pettiness. But scientists are human beings too. In showing a group of status-conscious individuals capable of taking great offense at the smallest slight, albeit in an exaggerated manner (dismissive putdowns during audience Q&A is more likely than outright shouting) Atlantis get points for its scientific realism.

Most of the time an EMP is associated with a nuclear warhead detonation, in which case most of the people in the blast area have bigger problems than dysfunctional electronics. But in the scenario proposed by these shows, someone has devised a weapon that provides the pulse without using a nuclear reaction. Flux compression Generator bombs harness the energy from a small explosion and convert it into an electromagnetic pulse.First takea coil of copper wire, and encase it in something very sturdy. Then run a lot of electricity through the coil,  which will generate a reasonably powerful magnetic field. Then set off a small explosion within the coil.  In broad terms (and there’s all sort of other small stuff going to actually make this thing work), the explosion will force the magnetic filed out through an opening in one end of the casing, causing the pulse. The pulse would be “tens of megajoules” in strength, easily enough to do a lot of damage to local electronics.

So, what would the effect of a pulse be? There’s no evidence that a pulse hurts people directly, but most of the people who have experienced one (i.e. the people living in Nagasaki and Hiroshima) were more worried about the nuclear blast than the EMP. Certainly electronics are quite vulnerable to an EMP because the copper and silicon act as lightning rods. High-voltage electricity runs up the wires and into the components, generating a power spike far beyond the ability of most surge protectors ability to handle. The circuit boards and microchips would be totally cooked. But the copper wiring itself isn’t especially damaged, and simple devices that use electricity, like lights and batteries, don’t necessarily suffer from an EMP. There’s a great video on the How Stuff Works website of a guy driving a car through an EMP. He drives at slow speed through the EMP generator. When it goes off, the car’s engine shuts down and he coasts to a halt. However, the brakes still work, the battery still works, and some of the dashboard lights are still on. The car dies because the computers that handle fuel injection and other engine functions shut down, but the battery still works.

An EMP like KITT’s would probably permanently destroy all the slot machines, the computerized door-lock touchpad, and a host of other stuff, but it might not actually turn off the lights, unless it hit the computers running the power generator. But a nuclear detonation is another matter. A 1998 paper published by the Federation of American Scientists notes the 1958 nuclear test explosion in the South Pacific that knocked out power in parts of Hawaii, hundreds of miles from the test area. It goes on to say that an explosion 500 km above Kansas could knock out electronics in the entire continental United States. And while it might not kill anyone directly, it would destroy the computers running hospital equipment, traffic signals, automobiles, and airplanes. Plus, it might kill the Internet.

OK, now I’m scared.

Donna and the Doctor’s relationship is like that between adult siblings or very old friends, and it’s a nice change of pace from the romantic overtones that played out with the previous two companions. The dynamic is enhanced by the fact that Tate/Noble is older than the typical early-twenty-something female companion, and so perhaps a little less susceptible to looking at the adventurous Doctor with a starry-eyed gaze. Donna is perfectly willing cut the Doctor down to size if she thinks he’s getting a little too pleased with himself. This leads to some of the most memorable exchanges of the show to date, and Tate plays the part with impeccable comic timing and gusto. Tennant is, well, still the best Doctor ever (with Tom Baker in a more than honorable second place.)

The Doctor and Donna’s friendship plays out across a season of ambitious stories. The fall of Pompeii, a factory of alien slaves, a library the size of a planet that plays host to some of the scariest monsters ever, and the intensely claustrophobic confines of a damaged shuttle all form the background to some thrilling (and sometimes genuinely moving) plots. The season builds to a no-holds-barred climax which acts as a reunion show of sorts: A group of the Doctor’s former companions (including Torchwood’s Captain Jack and Sarah Jane Smith) band together to stop a dark threat from the past. Some Who watchers objected to the second half of the finale, feeling that the conclusion tried too hard to make fans happy in some respects. But I think the show stayed true to the darker and more ambiguous nature of the show, with an ending that really packed a punch.

The DVD’s also include the standalone 2006 Christmas Special, in which the Doctor teams up with Astrid Peth, played by none other than Kylie Minogue. (The real scene stealers are The Hosts, angelic robot concierges that go very, very bad.) There’s also a set of making-of features, one for each episode, deleted scenes (including a slightly, but significantly, alternate ending to the Season Four finale), and a bunch of other extras. If you decide to only ever own one season of Doctor Who, make it this one.

The British sci-fi series, Primeval, features a small team who have the job of capturing dinosaurs and other creatures who wander through rips, or “anomalies,” in the time-space continuum.The DVD of the first season that we reviewed yesterday is out today, and the nice folks at BBC America gave us the opportunity to pose a question to the cast about the show. Here, Andrew-Lee Potts, who plays Connor Temple, the show’s resident geek, answers our question about what creature he’d most like to see make an appearance on the show.

In recent years, science fiction and fantasy shows have generally tried to steer away from plotlines that involve creatures appearing, then terrifying and/or eating bystanders, and then being dispatched at the end of the episode once the cast has figured out the creatures’ main weakness. This plot formula is only for the start of season one, the thinking goes, when audiences need self-contained stories to introduce them to the cast and the show’s milieu. The real meat happens later, as multi-episode arcs and more complex character development are brought in, and monster-of-the-week episodes, with their limited formula, go to the bottom of the story pitch pile. Primeval explodes this thinking by having a show built firmly around the monster-of-the-week device, while still advancing engaging season-length arcs and furthering clever character development.

The premise of the show is that tears in the space-time continuum are popping up in increasing numbers across the countryside. The tears, referred to as “anomalies,” connect the present day with various time periods in the Earth’s history, typically tens or hundreds of millions of years into the past. Problems arise when the local prehistoric fauna—a T. Rex perhaps, or a gorgonopsid—wander through an anomaly into, say, a shopping mall parking lot. Our band of heroes, led by paleontologist Nick Cutter (played by Douglas Henshall, whose grounded performance makes a good counterpoint to the more fantastic elements of the show,) is tasked with keeping a lid on things. Complicating matters are the team’s abrasive boss (my favorite, as the writers have given him much more depth than such a character normally receives, and he occasionally steals the show) and Cutter’s sorta-ex wife, who is shaping up to be the best British female science fiction villain since Servalan.

The other big stars of the show are the creatures, beautifully and realistically animated CGI creations–it’s not a surprise that they’re good, since the team that produces them was responsible for the BBC documentary Walking With Dinosaurs. For Primeval, some artistic license does get taken, but the creatures that run, swim, and fly through the show are very believable, and prove you don’t have to travel to another planet to find creatures and worlds that are utterly alien.

The first DVD volume of Primeval was actually shown as two seasons on British television, then combined into one 13-episode season on BBC America. (A third season in expected to air in the UK in January). There is an audio commentary for some episodes, and behind-the-scenes bonus features. It goes on-sale tomorrow, when Science Not Fiction will have an exclusive clip from one of the Primeval cast members talking about what kind of creatures they’d like to see on future episodes of the show.

ETA: Typo fixed!

This is in fact not far off how some real stars die: iron poisoning. Stars exist via a balancing act between two forces. The first force is the star’s own gravity, which produces an inward compression. At the core of a star this compressive force creates the conditions that allow fusion reactions to occur. Left unchecked, gravity would cause a star to collapse in on itself. Gravity is balanced by the second force, an outward pressure that comes from the core of the star, where the nuclear fusion reactions release huge amounts of energy. This outward pressure is constantly trying to blow a star apart, but is restrained by gravity.

Normal, healthy, stars fuel the reactions in their cores by burning hydrogen. When hydrogen atoms are burned in a fusion reaction, they are smashed together to form helium, releasing energy. However, eventually the time comes when the star uses up so much of its hydrogen that it can no longer sustain hydrogen fusion. In real stars what happens next is complex, but in essence, the outward pressure falls, so gravity squeezes the core tighter, raising its temperature. This gives the star a new lease on life because the core is now so hot that it can repeat its energy-from-fusion trick, balancing gravity again. But this time the core is fusing helium atoms into even heavier carbon atoms. Unfortunately for the star, turning helium into carbon doesn’t release as much energy per atom as fusing hydrogen into helium. Eventually too, the helium will run out–and the star will collapse further. If the star was massive enough to begin with, the star can continue to produce energy by fusing the carbon, and the cycle repeats, with heavier and heavier elements being fused together–with less and less energy being produced each time.

Eventually an element is formed that will release no energy if used as the raw material for a nuclear reaction (in fact, it would cost energy to fuse.) This element is–surprise, surprise–iron, and it pretty much marks the end of road for a star. The star can no longer fuse atoms as fuel for its reactions. Pressure can no longer balance gravity. Gravity finally and utterly wins control of the star’s fate. The resulting implosion of the core creates a shockwave that blows away the outer layers of the star, producing a supernova. Thus the star dies in one of the most violent and spectacular explosions known to astronomy.

So, that settled, what’s the beginning and middle of the book like? Awesome. Despite its length at 960 pages, the fast pacing of the book is reminiscent of Stephenson’s earlier, shorter, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. However, he also takes the time and room to delve into subjects ranging from orbital mechanics to Plato’s Theory of Forms. The book revolves around the adventures of a young scholar called Erasmas, who has lived most of his life within the confines of a millennia-old order mostly devoted to theoretical research. When an enigmatic and unexpected arrival settles into orbit around his world, Erasmas’ life is turned upside down.

The book’s release is well timed, coinciding with the activation of the big daddy of particle accelerators, the Large Hadron Collider. The Large Hadron Collider is part of a quest to understand just how arbitrary are the laws of physics–a question that becomes significant within Anathem.

Our current best theory of fundamental physics, the Standard Model, explains much behavior–such as how the atoms of carbon that make up much of your body were formed, or how molecules interact chemically–in terms of a relatively small number of forces and particles. Using the standard model, you can explain why takes 13.6 electron volts to ionize a hydrogen atom (that is, the amount of energy required to completely remove the single electron that orbits the nucleus of a hydrogen atom), and not, say, 12.8 electron volts, or 114.4 electron volts. Ionization energies are critically important to whole swathes of chemistry and physics, and if the ionization energy was different, we’d live in a different universe–or wouldn’t live at all, if the different laws of chemistry were incompatible with the evolution of life. The point is that many very important numbers that scientists routinely plug into their calculations are explainable and predictable in terms of the Standard Model, meaning that the mathematical logic of the Standard Model compels those numbers to be their specific values and no others, in much the same way that if you fix the length of two sides of a right-angle triangle, the length of the third side is also automatically fixed, and can be calculated from the Pythagoras Theorem. (In Anathem it’s is possible to produce so-called newmatter, which is made from atoms that have been created under the auspices of slightly tweaked physical laws and so have properties different from that of regular matter because they have different ionization energies and so on.)

However, there are some numbers which, even with the Standard Model, can not be explained in terms of other numbers or the internal logic of the Standard Model. These are known as the Parameters or Constants of the Standard Model and include things like the mass of the electron. These parameters must each be measured experimentally and together with the mathematical framework of the Standard Model, define the laws of particle physics as we know them. What physicists at the LHC and other places are trying to do is to put the Standard Model through the wringer, testing it at higher and higher energies in the hopes of seeing some clues to a simpler structure that may underlie the Standard Model, just as the Standard Model lies beneath the complicated rules of chemistry.

If it exists, this structure may show us that some Constants are constrained just as tightly as the ionization energy of hydrogen–or it may show us that these Constants are not a logical consequence of deeper laws of physics and mathematics, but arbitrarily emerged by accident during the big bang. In other words, is the universe they way it is because no other way is possible, or are the laws of physics just an accident of the history of the universe? If we went back in time and reran the big bang, would we be as likely to see a radically different universe emerge as our own? Stephenson deserves credit for his trademark skill of putting ideas as big as this one into a book that’s also a rattling good read.

The clock in question is a new addition to Eureka’s research labs, capable of measuring slices of time less than one billionth of one millionth of a second (one femtosecond). The technically-inclined characters seem quite excited by it, as they should—in the real world, maintaining a grip on the exact passage of time is an essential and technologically-intensive activity. Our ability to measure time accurately is the key to many other measurements–for example, the meter is defined in terms of how far a photon can travel in one second.

Historically, the most accurate way to measure time was to use astronomy. The second was defined as 1/86,400th of the length of time it took the earth to rotate once on its axis. This worked fine in the era when clockwork meant little gears and springs, but eventually clocks were built that were accurate enough to detect the fact that the Earth’s rotation is ever-so-slightly, but continually, slowing down. Rather than have seconds grow slowly longer as the years went by, the second was redefined in terms of the best clock then available, the so-called atomic clocks, which rely on measuring the frequency of specific type of microwave radiation emitted by cesium atoms. The second is now defined as “the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.”

A network of government laboratories all over the world together average the measurement of hundreds of atomic clocks to produce International Atomic Time, the ultimate reference against which all other clocks are calibrated. Because the Earth is slowing, it’s necessary to occasionally introduce leap-seconds into these calibrations, so that noon stills falls when the sun is at its zenith in the sky.

But scientists are trying to push past even the incredible accuracy of traditional atomic clocks, striving to measure smaller and smaller slices of time. The seriously-awesome people at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology have created the most accurate atomic clock ever, a so-called Quantum Fountain that measures time so accurately, it would take 60 million years of operation to be out just one second.