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.

If a nanoparticle field emission thruster (the aforementioned NanoFET) has been a subject of investigation for University of Michigan electrical engineer Brian Gilchrist for several years now. Gilchrist, joined by a team of scientists, has published and presented papers (pdf) at conferences (pdf) around the country, trying to show the theory of how electronically charged nanotubes could enable a spaceship to achieve astonishing speeds.

As Gilchrist envisions it, a nanoFET engine would be installed as a series of flat plates around our spaceship—let’s say the Millennium Falcon. So instead of the white glare of rockets pointed off the back of the Falcon as it flees TIE fighters, there would be a series of flat panels that resemble the silicon wafers that go into microchips (the MEMS production process would be very similar). Each panel would be covered in round discs, each 10 centimeters in diameter, which in turn would be comprised of thousands of emitters, each roughly 100 micrometers in diameter.

Each emitter works a bit like an tiny particle accelerator: The anode of the emitter charges the nanoparticles, which are then accelerated and then shot out a tube by a strong magnetic field generated by a stack of microchip-like components. “In that a particle accelerator uses an electrical field to propel charged particles to high speeds — that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Gilchrist told MSNBC. Thanks to Newton’s third law, as the ship ejects particles in one direction, the ship moves in the opposite direction. Eject long, thin nanotubes for high-efficiency, slow acceleration; use short, thick nanotubes for better acceleration at greater cost of energy. The NanoFet could potentially eject nearly any type of nanoparticle that would take a charge.

The nanoFET is also remarkable flexible and scalable. A plate of nearly any size could be placed more or less anywhere on the object to be propelled, and each plate could be nearly any size. So instead of the Millennium Falcon merely being the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, it could also be astonishingly maneuverable, with smaller plates on different parts of the hull to establish tight turns and sudden changes in direction.

The only real downside is that nanoFETs are not imagined to provide the kind of high acceleration needed to break Earth’s gravity and escape orbit. But once in space, a ship equipped with nanoFET would have an extremely thin and lightweight engine with a commensurately compact fuel source. The nanoFET would be able achieve nearly constant acceleration. Do that for long enough, and speeds of 90 percent of light speed might become possible. Just think, if the Americans in Armageddon had a nanoFET powered space ship available to get out and intercept that asteroid, that whole Affleck-Armageddon fiasco could have been avoided. And wouldn’t we all want that?

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.