Physicality of Words

Closing comments

2009-12-31T05:52:00.001-05:00

This blog might be revived one day. Until then, I'm closing comments. It's taking some time to clean up all the comment spam, and it's not worth it while the blog is dormant.

Happy New Year 2010!

Some really small things

2009-06-19T09:49:00.003-04:00

From The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, nominated for the Hugo Award for best novel:

“What’s particle physics?” asked Bod.

Scarlett shrugged. “Well,” she said. “There’s atoms, which is things that is too small to see, that’s what we’re all made of. And there’s things that’s smaller than atoms, and that’s particle physics.”

Bod nodded and decided that Scarlett’s father was prob-
ably interested in imaginary things.

That reminded me about this old, but still good, post about the physics of imaginary things.

And in other news, I now have a baby boy. And I'm considering to revive this blog, maybe. I'll not make any promises, but just see if I find time and inspiration to write here.

Hibernating

2009-04-16T21:27:00.002-04:00

Yes, it is spring. Robins and grackles and starlings everywhere, and the geese going north above our heads. And the snow drops and crocus and even dandelions by the south facing walls. Now is the time you are supposed to come out of hibernation.

It's funny though, how it works. You grow a little heavier, a little clumsier day by day. The sprout is active during the night and keeps you awake. And the days pass faster and faster, leaving little time for everything you wanted to do except the daily grind and the necessary tasks. And then a new family member, and the life changes forever.

Less than two months to go now. The daughter will be a big sister, and we will be parents of two. I don't know how anything is going to be, but I realize that this blog is already a very low priority and it's better to officially pronounce it sleeping until... later. Maybe I'll be back in summer, after mid-June or so.

Hear me talk about dark matter at a convention!

2009-03-17T21:28:00.003-04:00

I'm going to Ad Astra, the Toronto science fiction convention, this year again. And this time I'm even giving a talk: a presentation about dark matter. I intend to keep it at a conversational tone and hopefully accessible for most, and I'm spicing it up with lots of science fiction references (I always wanted to use them for something) -- but it's going to be real science.

I'm also going to be on the panel of scientists answering questions from the audience. (I also offered to be on a couple of other panels, but at the moment it's not clear to me if they are included in the final programme.)

If you are in Toronto the weekend after next, maybe I'll meet you there.

What is a "real woman"?

2009-03-08T07:11:00.002-04:00

I hate it when I'm expected to conform to a stereotype rather than treated as an individual. I really hate it when people say "women are like this" and then expect every single woman to be more or less like that.

Ge me right here: I know that we are all prejudiced -- that we all have a tendency to have expectations based on previous experience. I also know that when it comes to problems in inequality between groups, it makes sense to discuss those differences. The problem is when people are unaware of their assumptions and think that their experience of how things are on average is a prescription for how things should be. That's when they (mostly without knowing it) put pressure on others to conform, rather than to try and meet them as the individuals they are.

Oh yes, this is a pet peeve. And very personal.

Let me give some examples.

I (call me A) once talked to a female colleague (let me call her B) about a woman we both were acquainted with (C). I was a little bit pleased with myself for having deduced that C was practicing some martial art from her relaxed stance when we had to stand and wait for a long time. I know that in that way you can stand forever without getting tired, and you are balanced and prepared to go. To explain what I meant I imitated it (probably not very well) to B. Her reaction: "That's not a very feminine way to stand".

You might see this as a very innocent comment, but what it tells me is that B judges (including C) people from her stereotypes, and the most important thing about how a woman behaves is whether it's feminine. By repeating comments like this she tells me (and everyone around her) that even if she doesn't say it, she thinks I should also first and formost be feminine as much as I can help it, before I can have any other characteristics.

This makes me a bit angry, but I'm too polite to always thake a fight. I hate those little innocent comments, because they are ultimately opressive. They tell people: stay in your place, behave as you are expected.

I know that there are many differences between men-on-average and women-on-average, but I also know that those differences are smaller than the variations between individuals. I think it should be expected of everyone in a polite society to at least have the ideal to allow others to be different from the stereotypes. I think that it's difficult to get to know people as fascinating persons if you always see them through your normative ideas. And sometimes I think it's worse for men, because they often have even more pressure on them to be male.

When I hear the men in the coffee room talk about their wives as "the boss", and exchange cliche phrases of how women are of course incomprehensible to men, I almost feel sick. What does that mean for how they see me as a professional? I might be oversensitive, but on the other hand this actually might have consequences for how people treat each other. If they expect communication failure, I would not exactly be surprised if they will have communication failure. And they spread this expectation, giving it on to others.

By the way: I mentioned exactly this coffee lounge incident to some students over lunch one day. The reaction from the male student: "What, are you a feminist?"

"I'm a woman, isn't that enough?" was my answer.

I don't want to be a "real woman". I want to be me. And I don't want the first reaction when I speak about something I find interesting to be "isn't it very unusual for a woman to be interested in that?" (Maybe more about this another day.)

Role models

2009-02-27T18:16:00.003-05:00

When I think about role models, it takes a while before anything shows up in my head. What is a role model? Someone I have looked up to and wanted to be like, I guess.

The funny thing is that the first role models that show up in my head are all fictive people. It's Modesty Blaise (because she had such varied experience, first hand knowledge of extremely different environments and the wonderful skill to get along with people of all kinds -- presidents and kings as well as street kids and poor fishermen), it's Kip from Have Space Suit, Will Travel (because he got somewhere by being smart and knowing things), it's ... from A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else (because he was intellectual and did not really fit in with his peers, but found a way to be himself), and others. It was fictional characters I looked to when I shaped my ideas of who I wanted to be: smart, reasonable, open to new things, and so on. I might not live up to all of my ideals, but they are still there.

As for real people, I tend to admire everyone who is enthusiastic and really involved in things. People who make things happen.

There are also all of those people who have surprised me, and showed me new ways and attitudes. Like two of my fellow PhD students in Uppsala, who one day told me that it happens that they feel really tired and frustrated over their research -- that it sometimes seems hopeless -- and that they would then just lock the door to their office and cry for a while. Just the idea that there were others who sometimes felt like that was a revelation for me -- and the idea that you could actually talk about it was nothing short of revolutionary. I had always felt that if you could not be enthusiastic about your research all the time, you were somehow not worthy. Being frustrated and bored to the point of crying was to me a shameful secret. Maybe, just maybe, this was something that happened to others too? Even smart, successful students!

And then you go on, and another day you will be enthusiastic again, and make things happen.

Ashes

2009-02-25T17:54:00.000-05:00

I say no more.

Lazy fan

2009-02-24T18:36:00.000-05:00

I haven't nominated for the Hugo awards. (I know I should, but I'm not reading enough to feel that I know what I should nominate...)

I haven't written a LoC in months. A fanzine is coming soon (in Swedish), extremely late as usual.

I'm very much behind on the correspondence for the planning of the Worldcon science and technology programme. (Unfortunately I cannot sign up to participate as a panelist myself, since I'm afraid that will be stressful for us with a two month old baby.)

But I'm going to the Ad Astra convention in Toronto in a month. And I think I'm going to give a talk on dark matter there (I only have a half confirmation). And last week I did hold an information night about the Worldcon, and maybe inspired some people to go!

Fanac cannot always have high priority, but sometimes I'll do some things. And tonight I will meet with the Fearless Fantasy Fans, to look at some boxes of books we got donated to us. There are some goodies there!

Science fiction as myth

2009-02-10T18:50:00.000-05:00

Via Locus Online (their "blinks" in the left column) I found the article Sci-Fi's Brave New World, about science fiction as mythmaking. This is a topic that interests me, as you might know if you have followed my blog. I have written about this here for example.

The article is written by a James A. Herrick, a name that didn't tell me anything (I'm not so good at remembering names). I liked some parts in the beginning, for example this:

The culture-shaping force of science fiction storytellers may be more significant and more widespread than we imagine. That's because they trade in myth. By myth, I mean a transcendent story that helps us make sense of our place in the cosmos.

I'm always astonished that people in the science fiction field are not aware of this important function of their literature: to shape our idea of the meaning and significance of science, of the future, and of our place in the world. Of course, it works just as well if you are not aware of it.

Anyway, it quickly becomes obvious that the writer of the article, Herrick, is not happy about this. He likes only one fixed set of stories, despite the fact that they are not universally helpful when it comes to interpreting the world around us.

This is where i suddenly remembered that I have read about this Herrick person recently, in the Internet Review of Science Fiction under the headline Wrong on Religion; Wrong on Science Fiction. I must say that I'm on the same side as Gabriel Mckee here: science fiction is a good medium for discussing important matters, and therefore for shaping our interpretation of things. I'm not surprised to see that Mckee also has commented the article on his blog.

It's also worth noting, again, that science fiction hardly is a homogeneous canon of ready-made myth. It's an ongoing discussion, mirroring our culture with its dreams and hopes. There are things to agree with, and things to argue against, and that's just the way it should be.

Elisabeth Vonarburg: In the Mother's Land

2009-02-07T11:35:00.004-05:00

To me, it feels really silly to continue reading a book I don't like. Given how many books I have waiting, I don't want to spend any time reading anything just because I have started it.

A few chapters into the novel In the Mother's Land I found that I just was not interested in the story. I got the book from the library just because the author is a guest of honour at the Worldcon, and I was curious about her writing. The story turned out to be told at a very slow pace, and it was a lot about children (well, childreen) trying to figure out where babies come from and what functions boys have at all. Some relationships develop, and there are hints about the world around these kids. I like the idea of discovering the world through the eyes of a young person who does not know anything about it, but there was nothing that made me particularly interested in discovering this particular world.

It's obvious from the beginning that this world has very few boys and men, and this unbalance is of course going to be important. It's expressed in a way I can't help think must work much better in the original French than it does in English: all masculine words are now feminine. You are not an explorer, but an explora. Even words that to me feel neutral (in English) are feminine, if they describe a person or an animal, like the use of "childe" instead of "child", "catte" instead of "cat". This surely makes the gender issue stand out more, but it also slows down the reading for me.

Even "animal wifery" instead of "husbandry". This one does not work for me at all -- doesn't the English language have any word for the female head of a houshold, rather than just a word that means woman? Swedish has at least two: hustru (translated: "the lady of the house" perhaps -- although nowadays it's just a word for wife, in the meaning of a woman a man is married to. Hmm, it's probably etymologically exactly parallel to "husband".) and matmor ("food mother"), should there not be any better word in the word rich English?

After putting the book away for a day or two I decided to read until page 100 before I gave up. Still nothing much has happened, but I know a little bit more about how this future world works. It's a long time since a disaster that changed the earth and introduced lots of mutations. There is the Malady, which kills many children. And there is a sometimes problematic social structure, which nevertheless seems to work fairly well so far. The protagonist, Lisbeï, is now 13, and it looks like she might get some personal problems that might force her out in the world, and she is special in other ways as well that might be important for the future of her society.

But I'm still not caught by the story, or especially interested in any of the hints of conflict. Should I read on, or give up?

I looked at some plot summaries on the web (the one on Wikipedia is short but spoiler rich), and indeed it seems like Lisbeï is going to do big and important things. It might be interesting.

I don't know. I will put the book away for a while, and if I notice that I still think about it I will take it up again later. Maybe I was just not in the right mood for this story now.

The Guardian SF book meme

2009-01-28T09:31:00.000-05:00

Via SF Signal: Guardian's Science Fiction & Fantasy Novels Everyone Must Read: The Meme.

I think I have to go back to the original list to understand the selection of works, because it seems a bit odd to me. Definitely different from most compilations of the "most important sf works" and similar. Some of them I also don't understand exactly why they ended up in the SF/F subset, but definitions of genre boundaries is something you can argue about endlessly. Nevertheless, I like these lists, and I like this one because I have actually read not so few of them: 47 out of 149, that's nearly a third!

So, the ones I have read are in bold, and the ones on my reading list (sort of) are marked with an *asterisk.

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)

Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)

Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)

*Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)

J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)

J.G. Ballard: Crash (1973)

J.G. Ballard: Millennium People (2003)

*Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)

Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)

Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)

Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)

Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)

*Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)

William Beckford: Vathek (1786)

Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)

Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)

Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)

Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)

Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)

Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)

Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)

William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)

Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)

Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)

Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)

Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)

Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)

Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)

Arthur C Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)

GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

*Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)

Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)

Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)

Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)

Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)

Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)

John Fowles: The Magus (1966)

Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)

Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)

William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)

William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)

Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)

M John Harrison: Light (2002)

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)

Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)

James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)

Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)

PD James: The Children of Men (1992)

Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)

Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)

Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)

Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)

Stephen King: The Shining (1977)

Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)

CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) (Book 1 at least)

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)

Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)

Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)

Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)

MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)

David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)

Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)

Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)

Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)

Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)

Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)

Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)

*China Miéville: The Scar (2002)

Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)

Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)

David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)

Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)

William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)

Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)

Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)

Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)

Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)

Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)

Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)

Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)

Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)

Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)

Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)

Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)

Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)

John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)

Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- ) (I have only read the first)

*Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)

Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)

François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)

Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)

Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)

JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

*Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)

Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)

Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)

Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)

José Saramago: Blindness (1995)

Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)

Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)

Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)

Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)

JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)

JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)

Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)

Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)

Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)

Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)

Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)

HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)

HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)

TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)

Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)

Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)

Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)

John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)

John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)

Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

“Imagination is at the heart of both artistic and scientific endeavours”

2009-01-26T07:52:00.000-05:00

The quote comes from Robert Sawyer, who is going to be writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source.

Jeff Cutler, Director of Industrial Science at the Canadian Light Source explains:

"A common thread in Rob’s work – the role that science plays in our humanity and how we understand the universe – is echoed in our focus on discovery, innovation and progress. The residency is an excellent opportunity to have a world-leading author share in the life of a world-leading science facility."

Again, the whole media relase is here.

Reality is interesting

2009-01-25T20:48:00.000-05:00

One thing that happened to me when I started reading science fiction at an age of 13 or so, was that I found that the world and society around me got more interesting. At least partly it actually was a result of reading SF. When you take two steps back from the ordinary and imagine other possible worlds, then you find that the world around you is also a world, with a lot of special and curious characteristics. There are all of the wonderful things that people build and do -- and the frightening things. And you live in the middle of it, and have first hand knowledge that would not be obvious to a time traveller from another era, or a visitor from another planet. You can shift your perspective, and see things with new eyes, and suddenly much of what you took for granted and boring is extremely relevant and maybe even exciting.

With this kind of experience, I loved the following, from Coraline by Neil Gaiman. This is when Coraline returns from her adventure. Remember that she goes exploring because she likes exploring, but also because her everyday life does not seem interesting at all.

Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world.
[...]
Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.

Today's exercise: find something interesting! (I know I will.)

Physics silliness

2009-01-25T08:31:00.002-05:00

It's well known that physicists like making up extremely contrived acronyms to name their equipment or theories or so. There are also examples like the famous paper by Alpher and Gamow, where Bethe was added as the second author to make the author list similar to the first letters of the greek alphabet (stories like this are told all the time to undergrads). And I will just mention the penguin plot (some of you might know what I'm talking about).

The attitude to these things varies in the community. A quote from Dark Cosmos, by Dan Hooper, mentioned in a previous post (in case you don't remember: MACHO stands for massive compact halo object):

Neutrinos are an example of a dark matter candidate we call a weakly interacting massive particle, or a WIMP. Just like MACHOs, WIMPs are not a single type, but a class of objects. (And just like the name MACHO, the name WIMP is a prime example of the all-too-common physicist's habit of using incredibly childish language to describe their ideas.)

Compare this to how a rather famous physicist describes it, when he mentions the same words as a result of "physicists wonderful sense of whimsy".

When is it funny, when is it "incredibly childish"? Think of it what you want, this is still a part of physics culture that you have to live with. I actually rather like it, usually (although some of the acronyms are a little bit too much).

Reading popular science

2009-01-24T21:05:00.001-05:00

I'm reading Dark Cosmos: In Search of Our Universe's Missing Mass and Energy by Dan Hooper. In the preface the author writes about reading popular science:

/.../I still read popular physics books. I don't read them to learn new things about physics anymore, however. I read them for inspiration. It is easy to forget how exciting and incredible modern science truly is. Scientific articles found in academic journals very rarely capture the sense of wonder and awe that originally motivated me to become a physicist.

This made me think. Why do I read popular science books? Of course, if it's not about physics I'm still reading them to learn new things. I'm curious about the world, as much as ever, and I don't want to limit myself to only knowing one field.

If I read popular physics books, it's usually to remind myself of things that I would not otherwise often think about, or to see things I once learned from a different angle. Sometimes it's not mostly for the physics itself, but for the context -- I read The Physics of Star Trek not to learn about physics, but actually to learn about how physics is treated in Star Trek. I read Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics for the anecdotes about how physics is treated by Hollywood.

This particular book, Dark Cosmos is of course exactly about the field I work in, and that I'm reading the academic journal articles from. Still, I didn't buy it to hold on to some sense of wonder, but specifically for inspiration of how to explain the topic. I already know the data, and I know most of the anecdotes, but I want to get better at explaining it and telling others about it. By reading and listening to how my colleagues do it, I hope to catch some tricks of the trade. (The sense of wonder is also a good thing, of course!)

The quote above also made me think about what it was that motivated me to become a physicist. What was it, really? Sometimes it feels mostly like a series of coincidences, but I think I definitely was heading in this general direction from a relatively early age. Still, it's fun to think about what actually inspired me in science when I was still in school. I hope to return to this in later blog posts!

The happy postdoc

2009-01-23T20:07:00.001-05:00

You are a doctor of philosopy. You have defended your thesis, you have got your degree. Now what do you do?

If you would like to cling to the academic world at least a little bit longer, perhaps with the goal of eventually becoming a professor or something like that, you are normally expected to go to another university or institute for a period (or two, or more) as a postdoc.

On our travel expense forms I'm a PDF. Not a portable document format, but a postdoctoral fellow. Usually I forget that this is the official title. In my experience people in general don't know what a postdoc is. It's something at the university. "So do you teach or something?" they ask. Or: "what classes are you taking then?" Nowadays, if I'm among normal people or even undergraduate students, I just say that I'm an apprentice researcher. That makes sense to most.

The postdoctoral years often seem to have a romantic shimmer around them in retrospect. Professors talk about it as the happiest time in their careers. It really is good in many ways. You are free from the pressures of thesis writing, you have few if any teaching responsibilities, and you can spend almost all of your time doing research. You also get to go to new places, learn new things, maybe experience a different culture. You try your wings and your initiative.

On the other hand it's a very insecure position. The job is temporary, and you will have to move one or more times within the next few years but you probably don't know where you will end up. You know that in front of you is The Bottleneck, the competition for faculty positions, and you need to produce results and publish now to prove that you are good enough to come into consideration. If you choose to go to industry instead, you will have to make new contacts and learn to navigate a new world.

I talked to two other postdocs the other day, telling them how I'm planning to go back to Sweden to resume my life: family, friends and all of that. They both shook their heads, and said that this connection to a certain place and social circle is something they haven't had for a long time. That's one of the drawbacks of this kind of career. Janna Levin depicted the problems of moving around as a postdoc in her book How the Universe Got Its Spots, a book I enjoyed very much for exactly those personal (and in extension sociological) aspects.

For me personally I have to say that this is really a happy time. I enjoy my job, I have no real financial problems at the moment, and having my family with me cures most of the attacks of homesickness. Still, I really have no idea what the future will bring. I'm not worrying, but sometimes I think about the future. I'm hopeful, but I have questions.

I want to move back to Uppsala and stay at least relatively close to there. But what kind of job will I find? Will I be able to live a mostly unstressful life with relatively mild and few depressions? Will I have at least enough money not to worry about it? (I've been through some of that, and with kids it's worse.)

Yes, I am a physicist. Now, what do I do with my life?

Cyclotron kids

2009-01-18T10:11:00.001-05:00

I'm always impressed by people who are doing things. I like it. I really loved this report about the "cyclotron kids", with the goal of being the first teenagers to produce and detect antimatter. It's fascinating what people can do, especially with the right connections and the right support. I hope they will succeed! Experimental physics is sometimes very exhausting, when you are in the middle of setting things up and nothing works. Just trying is worth a lot anyway, but it would be fun if they can actually make some antiparticles.

Another view of science and science fiction

2009-01-05T13:49:00.004-05:00

Those of you who liked my little series of interviews about science and science fiction might be interested in the following little note from the latest Ansible:

As Science Sees Us. In a profile of the life-extension researcher Mark Roth, Tom Junod notes that Roth has 'got a lot of ideas, for a scientist, and some of them come from unusual sources, like tabloidy news reports and science fiction.' He continues: 'It's a weird thing about scientists -- you would think that they would love science fiction. But they don't. To admit that you get your ideas from science fiction, if you're a scientist, that's like, career-threatening, man.' (Esquire, December) [MMW]

Christmas with a detector

2008-12-28T08:47:00.003-05:00

I have written earlier about taking shifts and watching the detector. It's usually not an enormous amount of work, but I was still happy that someone else volunteered to take care of i over Christmas this year. I was only appointed as stand-in "run coordinator", which means that I'm responsible for planning and administration of the shifts but in ideal cases should not have to do much at all.

Unfortunately it also means that I'm in a responsible position and the first person to be contacted if something should go wrong. Which it did. On Christmas day we lost connection to one computer in the lab, and could not get all information about the status of the detector. I spent hours and hours trying to figure out first how to deal with the lost connection and then how to make sure that the detector is stable and in a state which will not harm it until someone can get to the lab. I didn't lose any sleep really, but I missed parts of Christmas.

Good that my family is patient, and that we didn't have any elaborate plans.

This is what it's like to be a scientist, sometimes. Even for someone so far from workaholic as me.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-24T21:41:00.002-05:00

I think most people have better things to do right now than to read blogs, but anyway. Happy holidays, and all that! I'm hoping to get time to write a bit the next few days, and to read, and to sleep.

The data plot pitfalls

2008-12-16T18:11:00.000-05:00

It's really an art to present a graph or a plot and explain it.

When I was a new PhD student I was very impressed (actually slightly intimidated) by how a professor could glance at a plot and immediately have comments or questions. Even complicated graphs seemed transparent to them in a way that I did not understand. This made me feel slow and even slightly stupid, especially if I had made the plot and could not explain the features. Sometimes I was not even sure exactly what data I had put in the plot, since I was still struggling with the tools (if you are in the game yourself: I used Fortran and PAW, and when I started I had only very superficial knowledge of programming).

This made me believe that other scientists, and also other students, would probably understand everything if I only showed a graph. The first times I went to collaboration meetings I would show plots and tables and equations and just assume that since I, who was a beginner, could make these they would surely be self-explaining to the more experienced people in the audience.

But they are not. Will the audience remember the definition you showed three slides ago? Will they know how the trigger works that you are talking about? What points could be easily misunderstood because of your special terminology (like using the words "cut" and "variable" as if they were synonymous)?

I learned a lot since then, and among other things I have some experience with interpreting graphs and data plots. It's not as difficult anymore, which should perhaps not be a surprise. This is a skill that just developed with exposure to lots of ways to present data, nothing that I consciously learned.

At the same time I gained some insight into exactly how much you need to explain, and in what order, and how much of the details of your own little special research corner is completely unknown also to people inside the same collaboration. I don't think I really mastered it yet of course, although I'm much better at it.

What I have learned is that clear communication always makes life easier, but also that clear communication takes some effort. You have to understand enough about your audience to be able to see your own plots with their eyes. And while a picture might say more than a thousand words, it might be worth spending a few sentences on explaining what the important features are and give the others time to take a good look at it. If you just flash a plot for a few seconds you will probably leave the listeners more confused than they were before. (Maybe this should be obvious, but if you have been to some conferences you have seen how it's sometimes done.)

Some sciency links

2008-12-09T17:30:00.003-05:00

Science is fantastic. If you have missed the Dyson sphere search that people are actually working on, click on that link.

If you want to stay up to date with what is going on in dark matter searches, you might want to take a look at this thing in Nature: a balloon borne detector has seen a bump in the spectrum of cosmic electrons, which just might be an signature of annihilation of dark matter particles. Of course it's too early to say anything conclusive. This is the kind of data we have to work with so far, and all indications of an observation of any kind will catch the interest of people in the field. So far we are used to being content with setting limits on different models for the dark matter particles.

Speaking about the fantastic, I have recently discovered the Science Not Fiction blog, "looking at the science of futurist technologies—and cool TV shows, books, movies, toys, and video games". There are some fun things there.

But to the question is scientific research a requirement to write believable science fiction? i think I would answer "no". Well, to some extent you will probably need some kind of scientific literacy, but I think there are many kinds of science fiction that are just as good without knowledge of a lot of scientific results. Just like the examples in that blog post. This is probably one of the eternal discussions in fandom, closely related to the questions of whether sf is dying and whither it's going. Hope they make a mind meld of it over at SF Signal!

Canadian house decorations (and politics)

2008-12-03T10:10:00.002-05:00

Apparently Canadian politics is entertaining right now. Actually, this morning I passed an apartment building where someone had posted "GO COALITION!" in huge letters across three or four windows. That made me smile, because I like when people are enthusiastic about things.

Some of the more extreme Christmas decorations also make me smile. It was very windy on Monday, and I passed a house where an inflatable Joseph was beating the inflatable child with his staff, while the inflatable Mary struggled to stand up. That's one of the weirdest things I've seen.

Zombies and vampires

2008-11-28T18:54:00.003-05:00

Horror fiction is not exactly my thing, usually. There is so little fantastic fiction published in Swedish that I have actually read some things John Ajvide Lindqvist anyway just because it was there. And now the movie based on his first book, Låt den rätte komma in gets a really good review at SciFi.com. And it's going to come to a movie theatre here in Kingston on December 12. I want to go!

And once again I ask myself why there is any need for a remake in English. Having grown up with subtitled movies and television, I really cannot understand why people could not just see the original. I guess it's just a matter of perspective, and what you are used to.

Sometimes I feel bad for being listed in blogrolls for physics blogs, when I have long periods when I don't write anything about physics. I like to relax with thinking about other things, like science fiction and stuff like that. Anyway, just because John Ajvide Lindqvist also wrote a good zombie novel (yes, it was good, despite the zombies), I'll post a link to Better Zombies Through Physics at Tor.com, where we see yet another example of how the gedankenexperiment by Schrödinger about the cat in the box inspires popular culture. I'm not sure it actually ever teaches anyone anything much about quantum physics, but it's one of the things that make people in general aware that such thought experiments exists. Physics is part of our culture too, sometimes very much so, and the separation of the two cultures is perhaps not always so wide.

(It's Friday night and want to go home, but I promised a student to test some analysis code first. It's taking forever to execute. Good that it's weekend now.)

How the world works

2008-11-19T21:29:00.000-05:00

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, quoted in this article about anti-authoritarian ideas in science fiction:

“Young people read fiction to figure out how the world works,” he says, “and science fiction is an extremely effective, quick way of testing your views of how the world works.”

This is exactly what I often try to say.

I think not only young people go to fiction to figure out how the world works. We think and understand things to large extent in the form of stories, and get our role models from stories. Science fiction is very powerful, giving tools in the form of story pieces to reflect and make sense of things. Especially if you deal with lots of changes in the world around you.

Rereading

2008-11-14T17:37:00.003-05:00

Neil Gaiman wrote an essay for the program book of the 2002 World Horror Convention, about how to read Gene Wolfe (this I just learned from the introduction of the Wolfe story in the Wastelands anthology). His third point in this essay was: "Reread. It's better the second time."

Sometimes I miss the kind of reading I used to practice as a child and teenager: I would devour tons of books, and find some favourites. The favourites I would then read again and again, always coming back to them. Sometimes thinking about them between readings too.

I don't really do that anymore. Have I lost something? I'm afraid I have. I never make close friends among books anymore, only acquaintances.

I have been thinking about this for a couple of days (especially today, drowsy and unfocussed on anything productive after staying awake half the night to take care of and clean up around my sick child), since the SF signal Mind Meld about books worth reading twice. Which books are there that I would like to read again?

This is not very thought through, just my first inspiration. Here's the list anyway. Some books that made a large impression when I first read them, and that would be fun to take a closer look at again.

Kim Stanley Robinson: The Mars trilogy. And the Three Californias.

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash

Ted Chiang: Stories of Your Life and Other's

Dan Simmons: Hyperion (only the first book of the Cantos)

China Mieville: Perdido Street Station

John Crowley: Engine Summer

Do you have any books you still reread, or that you would like to read again? (I shouldn't ask questions at the end of a blog post, because I always get disappointed when I get no answers. Anyway. It seemed to belong here.)

New Scientist on science fiction

2008-11-11T16:11:00.002-05:00

Apparently there is going to be a special edition of New Scientist coming out on Saturday, about the future of science fiction. I'm going to buy this, read it, and tell you what I think.

I found out via Cheryl Morgan, who suspects "the main result of this will be a whole lot of people who don’t know much about SF (or sci-fi) pontificating learnedly on the subject and earning themselves spots in Dave Langford’s 'as others see us' collection."

We'll see. I'm interested enough to take a look.

IKEA expert!

2008-10-30T21:46:00.000-04:00

This post is just some rambling, IKEA-related thoughts.

I still haven't visited IKEA in Canada. People ask me things: "So, do you actually have IKEA in Sweden, or is it just something you are exporting?" or "Do those names on the things really mean something? What is "Poang" for example?" (Yes, no, yes, and "point" -- it's Poäng, actually.)

People also assure me that IKEA has "all kinds of Swedish food". I wonder. Will they carry kaviar (the pink cod roe bread spread) or tunnbröd (really thin, flat, white bread)? At some point I will have to go and investigate. Now that I actually have a driver's license it will probably be easier.

Anyway, I found the study mentioned here (end of the post) interesting: it says that people tend to like things more if they invest some effort in them. Like assembling the furniture after taking it home from the store. I'm not surprised, but it's interesting to get a confirmation that this is how humans work. If it's too easy to get, it's not worth as much to you.

It reminds me of the first science fiction story I ever tried to write (I was about 14), where there was a youth sub culture where it was high status to wear and use only things you had made yourself. Lots of time invested, and definitely unique -- more cred than anything mass produced. It's actually a little bit like that in many LARP circles. Of course, assembling IKEA furniture does not take any craft skills whatsoever, and you don't show off the results to brag, but it's interesting to see that people value their own possessions not only after how much money they put in them, but also how much work (even if it's as little as assembling an IKEA bed).

How to make convention panels work

2008-10-21T21:05:00.001-04:00

I have been to two sf conventions in Canada. At one of them, I was a programme participant. At both, I was thinking about what it is that makes the panels run smoothly. One common problem seems to be that panelists don't show up for their panels. Someone told me that this is because they might have been signed up for the panel six months ago, and by now they have forgotten about it. This can easily be avoided by some planning.

There are many other things I have learned over the years, involved in planning and arranging cons myself. Here are my thoughts on how to make the panel part of the convention program work well. I should say that my experience is from small(ish) conventions, but I think most of this will apply also for conventions with several hundred members.

Topics. Brainstorm, look at other conventions for inspiration, use the special interests of the guests. Test the topics by discussing them yourself. If you cannot keep it going for more than a few minutes, it might not work for a panel. If it's something you know nothing about this might be difficult -- then try instead to come up with interesting questions. If you can write down ten or so, then it might be a good topic for a panel.

Participants. Don't just wait for people to sign up, also actively ask people you know with some knowledge of the topic in question. Try to put together a panel of people who are not only interested in the topic, but will also work well as a panel. Usually you might not know everyone on the panel, but try as best you can to balance the participants. A very loud and talkative person needs to be balanced by a strong moderator, especially if there are some more quiet or shy people on the same panel.

Information to moderators. Don't assume that everyone knows what they are supposed to do. Make sure that the moderators know what their task is: keep the panel on topic, and let everyone get to speak. Provide them with the panel description in the green room just before the panel, in case they forgot their notes. Add some help questions to that, it can never hurt. You owe it to the members to make sure that the panel is really about what it says in the programme that it's going to be about. Interesting sidetracks can be noted and pursued later in the bar (or whatever meeting place your con has).

Information for all participants. Send out an email about a week before the con, containing at least the following information. Don't assume that everyone knows it all! Even experienced panelists might need some reminders.

A list with the panels this person is signed up for, as a reminder.

Instructions to check on arrival to make sure that when and where your panels are. Check also during the con, for changes.

Instructions to meet with the others on the panel in the Green Room just before the panel starts. It will give them time to say hello and make sure that they all agree on what it is they are going to discuss.

A description of the compensation panelists are offered, whether it is free things from the bar or discount on the membership. Just so that everyone is aware of this in advance.

Leave some space for the panelists to breathe. If possible, don't put the same person on two panels after eachother. In any case, make sure that there is 10 minutes between panels, to let panelists and audience find the next thing they are going to.

Include all information in the printed programme. Yes, the members need to understand what the panels are about. Don't give just a fun title, make sure to provide at least one sentence of description. A nice thing is to also include a very short presentation of the panelists in the programme book, especially if the convention is so large that not everyone will meet everyone. (At Swedish conventions this might be interesting mostly for new fans, since everyone else usually knows everyone already, but nevertheless.)

That was all, at least all I can think of right now. Any thoughts or comments? Anything I should add or remove?

Addendum: someone just reminded me that it can be a good idea to prepare a little guide for each panelist (or other programme participants), just a printed list of items with time and location for each. It's good if it's small enough to fit in the badge holder, so you can easily have it ready at all times. Very helpful!

Listening to dark matter

2008-10-16T22:41:00.003-04:00

This appears to have been significant enough for a press release!

A team of researchers in Canada have made a bold stride in the struggle to detect dark matter. The PICASSO collaboration has documented the discovery of a significant difference between the acoustic signals induced by neutrons and alpha particles in a detector based on superheated liquids.

The PICASSO collaboration has a new paper out in New Journal of Physics. Of course the press release text is a bit easier to digest. Recommended.

(Lots of things going on now, so this corner of the blogosphere has been a bit quiet lately. I won't promise anything.)

Stan Robinson is a "Hero of the Environment"

2008-10-02T08:46:00.002-04:00

My favourite author (if I can still call him that, I haven't read anything by him since Sixty Days and Counting showed up in the bookstores) is among the "Heroes of the Environment 2008" in Time.

In a genre full of environmental warnings, Robinson's gift is a vision that uses the environment and its complexity as the focus of all that happens, rather than merely as grim set dressing or allegorical overlay. And that vision is optimistic about what could, with sufficient will, be brought about. He sees creating utopias as a technical challenge to his craft — they're hard to do convincingly and interestingly. But he also sees them as an empty ecological niche in the imagination; if only to maximise cultural biodiversity, he wants that niche filled.

It's a good short introduction to Kim Stanley Robinson and his books.

I think I will have to reread the Mars-books soon.

Cherenkov blue

2008-10-01T21:10:00.002-04:00

I have been digging around in all the "draft" posts, things that I have written for this blog and never actually posted. The following was written in spring. I think I refrained from posting it because I thought it was silly to pick apart one little thing from a story, in this way. Now that I have read it again I think it's kind of OK anyway -- I just take the story as a starting point for discussing some physics which has nothing much to do with the story itself. Take it as it is-

I have read a good story with a not-so-catchy title ("The Sky that Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and Into the Black") by Jay Lake, in Clarkesworld Magazine.

I really liked this story. I'm not going to write a review, just use it as a starting point for some thoughts (as I often do). But first, I want to quote one line that I just love:

A billion billion years from now, even General Relativity might have been demoted to a mere Captain.

Go read the story. And then, come back here again if you want to talk about details and physics.

You see, I'm going to show my geeky side again. I have nothing against taking some poetical liberties in fiction, but some things just make me itch to tell someone how it really is. Anyone. It's not that I think it has to be straightened out, it's just that I get enthusiastic when I notice that I have some expert knowledge. Therefore: Cherenkov light. But first the paragraph that got me started:

I've been told the specks of light are the excitation trails of neutrinos passing through the aqueous humor of the human eye. They used to bury water tanks in Antarctic caves to see those things, back before orbit got cheap enough to push astronomy and physics into space where those sciences belong. These days, all you have to do is go for a walk outside the planet's magnetosphere and be patient.

Can you see blue flashes from neutrinos in your eyes, if you go outside the magnetosphere? Well, hmm, almost. Neutrinos themselves are not ionizing -- they don't leave "excitation trails" -- but if they happen to interact with matter (a rare event, most neutrinos just pass through without caring the slightest about any matter around it) an electrically charged particle can be created. This particle will kick the electrons in the atoms it passes and disturb them: the atoms might be excited or ionized.

The flash of blue the author is talking about is Cherenkov light. A charged particle is a source of an electric field, and when it's moving through matter it will will be like a ripple in the electric potential the electrons experience. The atomic electrons will wobble a little as the particle passes by, and that electon motion will create a little electromagnetic wave -- light. Every wobbling electron is like a tiny antenna emitting a wave front. If the material is transparent to light, and if the particle happens to move faster than the electromagnetic wavefronts from all of the disturbed electrons, the crests of all the little waves will coincide and build up to a stronger wave. This wave is the visible Cherenkov light, the spooky radiation glow that you might have seen from the water around nuclear reactors or storage of radioactive materials. (As people like to point out Cherenkov radiation is analogous to a sonic boom, but I suspect most people don't think enough about sonic booms for this to be very helpful.)

That thing about water tanks in Antarctic caves is not entirely true either, but almost. Neutrino detectors are located underground to sheild them from cosmic rays. The thing about Antarctica is not the caves, but the ice -- so a neutrino detector in Antarctica is of course using the natural ice as a detector medium. And shielding. Why not use it, when it's three kilometers thick?

The interesting question is now: if all humans close their eyes and watch for blue flashes, could we detect neutrinos? Yes, it's not theoretically impossible, but we would detect far more cosmic rays than anything else so we would never be able to tell the neutrino induced flashes from everything else.

Because we do have cosmic rays (particles moving fast) inside atmosphere, even though the magnetic field is protecting the earth from part of the flux. Among them we have lots and lots of muons, a particle which is like a heavy electron. The muons are very penetrating, and it's mainly because of them we have to hide the neutrino detectors (and dark matter detectors) underground. The muons are actually created in the atmosphere, when cosmic rays in the form of for example protons collide with atoms in the air. They have a short life, which actually demonstrates time dilation in special relativity -- if this effect did not exist, they would decay before reaching the ground.

So, as you can understand, if we could take all human eyes and take note of all the flashes we can see, almost all of them would be caused by muons from cosmic rays.

Another inconvenient aspect of the human eye as a neutrino detector is of course that with 6.7 billion separately operated detectors it would be hard work to interpret the data!

Can you be a scientist and have a life?

2008-09-25T08:56:00.000-04:00

Last week I happened to spend an evening with some geoscientists, among others. Someone mentioned that there are many geology blogs out there (I don't doubt it, although I haven't seen them myself), and got the stereotypical response: "How do they have time to write for a blog?"

I explained that it's only a matter of priorities. You take some time that you would otherwise have used for something like watching tv or reading the newspaper.

You cannot do that, someone said, because you need to keep yourself updated to be a responsible citizen. Well, yes. But you also need to participate, not just watch. Also: is everything you watch and read really necessary to be a responsible citizen?

The woman who first questioned the blog writing continued to claim that she really uses all of her available time for work. Really? Yes, really, she said. Well, she also admitted to having family dinner with her kids every day, and maybe help them a bit with homework and things, but after that she will go work again. Not one minute left to do anything else.

From my point of view this seems to be a bit unhealthy, but it's also an expression of what is often seen as a virtue in the world of science: research is everything. If it's not, then maybe you are not a real scientist...

Recently Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life wrote about this attitude to blogging:

So, in view of these benefits, why are scientists still reluctant to embrace blogs as a mechanism for communication and public outreach? In my experience, the most pervasive challenge to overcome is the pervasive belief that good scientists don't have time for outside interests; that having any interests outside of one's research indicates that a person is not serious about her science. Even graduate students are routinely pressured into believing this, and are often asked silly questions such as "how do you find time to read a real book?" Yet strangely, these same scientists who are doing the asking are unconcerned by the amount of time spent in front of the television or at the local pub.

And this is still talking about doing work related blogging about science! I'm not so sure that the same people who don't find time to read a book will actually admit that they spend any time in front of the television or ever go to a pub -- but I think they should. Relax a bit! Come on, you don't have to pretend that you are too good to have a life. And if you feel that you have to, then something is seriously wrong with the work environment.

I think Chad Orzel said it very well:

Not every thing in an academic's life has to be part of their research program. The idea that there's something wrong with people who have outside interests is one of the most toxic ideas in all of academia, and probably plays a role in driving some good people out of science.

I make no secret of having a lot of interests outside my work. It's obvious from this blog, and although I don't put my whole name here it's no secret who I am -- and easy to find out. I also often talk about things I do when I go out for lunch with people from my group (which I do almost every day). I have a family. I love reading and writing. I like dancing. If it's a bad career move to tell the world openly, then so be it -- I will not give up my life for my work.

You might even say (if you don't mind strong language) F.T.S.

Sweden from outside

2008-09-21T21:48:00.004-04:00

Reading Beijing Confidential made me think about what Sweden might be like seen from the outside. Via a webpage of a friend I rediscovered this funny list of "Things That Are Different in Sweden". Some of the things I don't recognize or understand (Front doors on the back of houses shaped like barns?), and some are very specific (not all apartments have two doors), but in general it's exactly the kind things you would notice if you go there. For us it's funny, because we don't notice those things when we are at home, but after a year abroad it's easy to see that it might seem a bit different.

For the more serious, go to the CIA World Factbook.

Champagne and paparazzi in the science world

2008-09-08T08:51:00.003-04:00

This is just too cute! The LHC celebration champagne: "Break in case of first collisions". (Via US LHC Blogs). There will not be collisions on Wednesday, only one single beam for a start, but anyway.

Elsewhere, the PAMELA result debacle (see my post Science in a faster world) is widely discussed. If you are interested, see for example Adventures in Ethics and Science, or Symmetry Breaking.

Links on parade

2008-09-04T18:10:00.000-04:00

Coilhouse Magazine: "A love letter to alternative culture, written in a culture where alt culture no longer exists". They have a mission statement quoting William Gibson. Looks interesting!

Astronomy Cast: a podcast about astronomy, and some relevant physics to go with it. There are transcripts for some of them. The little I have seen and heard so far makes me want to recommend it to anyone interested in these things. Beginner friendly, and with science fiction relevance: there is for example a three part series about the colonization of Mars.

The PJ Råsmark Blog: a friend of mine from high school, promising "opinions and thoughts concerning as diverse topics as science, magic, religion, critical thinking, pseudoscience, life, the universe, and everything".

LHC will get first beam on September 10. No comments needed.

Science in a faster world

2008-09-03T10:38:00.000-04:00

Two weeks ago I was at a dark matter conference in Stockholm. One thing that was presented was some new and very preliminary results from a space-borne antimatter telescope called PAMELA: they seem to see an excess of positrons (that's anti-electrons) at high energies compared to the expectations from standard processes. This is interesting, because it could be a signature of dark matter particles annihilating. There was some discussion about possible explanations. Afterwards I tried to make sense of my notes, but I'm not sure that I know what they mean and so I'm waiting for the official results to be published. The speaker from the PAMELA collaboration has not even made his slides available on the conference web site.

Now I learn that some scientists are really in a rush to make something of the preliminary data. There is a preprint on the arXiv with some plots and discussions about a dark matter model, the whole thing based on data points from PAMELA taken from digital photos of the slides shown at the conference. Umm.

This is really "pushing the polite boundaries" as Universe Today states it. The data is not officially released yet. I'm just thinking that this is a way to possibly look like a fool in front of the people who are now taking a careful look at the data before releasing -- but it's also a way of making sure that your paper gets talked about, of course. I'm just astonished.

Some links: little thing from Nature, the official PAMELA web site.

Pop science book meme

2008-08-28T03:13:00.000-04:00

This I have to do! It's a book meme version from Coctail Party Physics.

The rules:

Highlight those you've read in full
Asterisk those you intend to read
Add any additional popular science books you think belong on the list
Link back to me (i. e. link to Jennifer, she wants to use the additions and comments to make a top hundred list)

Turns out I'm not doing so well on this one. There are many on the list that I don't recognize at all. There are some that I'm not sure I would classify as popular science at all, like Neuromancer. What is that one doing here? Well, more comments after the list.

Micrographia, Robert Hooke

The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin

Never at Rest, Richard Westfall

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman

Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney

The Devil's Doctor, Philip Ball

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes

Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye

Physics for Entertainment, Yakov Perelman

1-2-3 Infinity, George Gamow

The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene

Warmth Disperses, Time Passes, Hans Christian von Bayer

Alice in Quantumland, Robert Gilmore

Where Does the Weirdness Go? David Lindley

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

A Force of Nature, Richard Rhodes

Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne

A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking

Universal Foam, Sidney Perkowitz

Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman

The Code Book, Simon Singh

The Elements of Murder, John Emsley

Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer

Time's Arrow, Martin Amis

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson

Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman

*Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter

The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine

A Matter of Degrees, Gino Segre

The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss

E=mc<2>, David Bodanis

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife

Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman

*A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin

Warped Passages, Lisa Randall

Apollo's Fire, Michael Sims

Flatland, Edward Abbott

Fermat's Last Theorem, Amir Aczel

Stiff, Mary Roach

Astroturf, M.G. Lord

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi

*Longitude, Dava Sobel

The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg

The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle

The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio

Math and the Mona Lisa, Bulent Atalay

This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin

The Executioner's Current, Richard Moran

Krakatoa, Simon Winchester

*Pythagoras' Trousers, Margaret Wertheim

Neuromancer, William Gibson

*The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios

The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, Sandra Hempel

Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Katrina Firlik

Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps, Peter Galison

The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan

The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins

The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker

An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears

Consilience, E.O. Wilson

Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould

Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard

Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel

The Life of a Cell, Lewis Thomas

Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris

Storm World, Chris Mooney

The Carbon Age, Eric Roston

The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind

Copenhagen, Michael Frayn

From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

Chaos, James Gleick

*Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos

The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky

Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais

Comments:
The Janna Levin book listed here is a novel. I have read her How the Universe Got Its Spots, which was not bad -- maybe I would substitute that one on the list. Instead of Neuromancer I would put a novel with higher science content, for example the latest trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. I haven't yet read Longitude by Dava Sobel, but I recently finished her Galileo's Daughter which I can recommend. By Stephen Pinker I would be tempted to put How the Mind Works before The Language Instinct, but perhaps that is because I read it more recently.

Now to my additions:

The Quark and the Jaguar, Murray Gell-Mann

The New World of Mr Tompkins, George Gamow and Russell Stannard (updated version of the classic)

The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris

Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond

*The World Without Us, Alan Weisman

*The Physics of the BuffyVerse, Jennifer Ouellette

There are two on the list I haven't read yet. I just started reading The World Without Us, and like it so far. The Physics of the BuffyVerse seems interesting, and I know from the blog that she can write.

I might add more to this if something pops up in my mind today.

(The next chapter about the PICASSO detector will come within a few days.)

The PICASSO dark matter detector, part 1

2008-08-21T13:33:00.000-04:00

Some time ago I promised to write something about the PICASSO detector. The following text is based on a talk I gave to some summer students a couple of months ago. If something is not clear, please ask! That's how I learn to explain things.

I assume that you already know something about dark matter, and I will
not go into any details about it this time. (If you have no idea you
can start here
(the less-than-a-minute explanation), or here (explanation for sf writers, with some historical background and a little about detection) or on Wikipedia.)

The most popular hypothesis is that the dark matter comes in the form of weakly interacting massive particles, WIMP, filling our galaxy and passing right through most matter completely unhindered -- just like neutrinos, if you are familiar with them. These WIMPs are what we are trying to discover.

To detect something we need an interaction. When we see things in our everyday life it's through photons interacting in our eyes. To see subatomic particles we need an effect of some kind that can be amplified to human proportions so that we can actually take a look at it. The detectors that are our artificial eyes in the particle world are constructed in different ways to capture the interactions of the particles thay are made to detect.

Since the WIMPs have no electric charge they are completely blind to electromagnetic fields. They interact only through the weak force, which is notoriously short-sighted. This means that an atom has a very small cross section for a WIMP. While an atom looks like a huge cloud to a poor beta particle (an energetic electron), it will look like a tiny dot at the center to a WIMP. Remember that atoms are basically empty, made up mainly of the electric fields of the charged protons
and electrons.

This property can actually be exploited when you try to discover these particles. The question is: how can you tell what particle it was that interacted in your detector? Well, a heavy neutral particle will scatter by hitting an atomic nucleus. In this process it can give a good kick to the nucleus, which will then be thrown out of its place. An atomic nucleus on the run, that's a huge charged particle, which will interact with all of the electrons around it and kick many of them out of their orbits -- it's strongly ionizing, stopping in a short distance. In a suitable detector this will give a very different signal from beta rays or other light particles, which interact directly with the electrons and which lose their energy less efficiently. It's also very different from gamma rays. Dark matter detectors take advantage of this.

Superheated liquids for detection

To understand how we do this with PICASSO we need to take a step back and remember some thermodynamics and the physics of boiling. You probably learned in school that the boiling point is where the vapor pressure needs to be higher than the ambient pressure, so that bubbles that form can continue to grow and not be crushed back to liquid again.

Now, I'm not sure your high school teacher told you (but maybe the professor teaching thermodynamics did?) that there is one more thing that is needed: you need to overcome the little potential wall that comes from the surface tension of the little proto-bubble which also tends to crush it and prevent it from growing, so you need some kind of seed to allow the phase transition to start.

When you boil water on the stove you see bubbles forming on the bottom of your pot, usually in a few places, and rising to the surface. The steam bubbles start forming at little holes or cracks or impurities in the vessel. The water needs some help to start the formation of bubbles when it reaches the boiling point. This is called nucleation.

If you can prevent nucleation from happening, you can heat a liquid much above the boiling point. It will just get hotter and hotter, because there is nothing to start the phase transition. The liquid is then superheated, and if you then introduce something that helps nucleation to happen you will get explosive boiling when the transition go gas spreads to the whole volume.

You can actually superheat water in a microwave oven, as you might have heard. Especially if the water is very pure, and the cup is very smooth -- like a new glass jar. Some people have had terrible accidents, resulting in severe burns on the arms and face. This is why it's a good idea to put the teabag or the instant coffee powder in the cup before heating it, or even leave a spoon in the cup. You can look up "superheated water" on YouTube, and you will se several experiments people have done with this. Be careful!

This effect is the principle behind the bubble chamber detectors that were widely used some decades ago, and it's what we use in PICASSO (and some other detector efforts) to detect recoiling nuclei from WIMP interactions. A recoiling nucleus will interact a lot in a short distance, and deposit the energy it got from the WIMP in the hit in the form of heat. If this little heat spike contains enough energy within short enough distance, it will be the seed needed for a vapor bubble to form and continue to grow.

In PICASSO we don't use superheated water, but instead our liquid is a freon, a fluorocarbon (the kind of molecule used in refrigerators). This is nicer to work with, because it's superheated at room temperature -- no need for extreme temperatures. We have little droplets of this liquid sitting suspended in a gel. You can see all of these little droplets as independent detectors if you like.

When one of these bubbles boil, it will expand suddenly to many times the original size. This will of course induce a pressure wave in the gel, a little sound wave, which can be picked up with piezoelectric sensors.

More to follow...

Interesting Little Brother link

2008-07-16T22:07:00.000-04:00

Yes, yes, it's obvious: this increased tempo of posting is of course just a procrastination method. Not that I should feel that I'm procrastinating when I try to wind down in the evening, but that's how it is.

Anyway, I just want to link to this interesting post about Cory Doctorow's Little Brother by Henry Jenkins (researcher in the field of media and popular culture).

/.../Alec Resnick wrote me to ask me whether I could think of another book which had been so carefully designed to launch a resistance movement. Certainly science fiction authors have been trying to use the genre as a means of political commentary since before any one thought to call it science fiction. /.../ But I don't know of another book which provides so much detailed information on how to transform its alternative visions into realities. And as such, this may be the most subversive book aimed at young readers in the past decade.

It might not be great literature, but it is a good read -- and with the development we see right now it's probably also a very important book.

(And a question: what was the most subversive book in the previous decade?)

Not "normal" dark matter

2008-07-16T14:32:00.000-04:00

Symmetry magazine has a news blog, as you might know. Today I read that next issue will discuss a dark matter controversy: the DAMA dark matter detector sees a signal, which cannot be seen in other experiments. It has pretty much been ruled out that it was dark matter causing the signal. What it is that they see is debated: something that has an annual modulation. Could it have something to do with cosmic rays? The number of cosmic ray particles vary with season because of the varying density of the atmosphere. This is just a speculation. We'll see if they sort it out.

What made me interested in this little news item is that they also mention COUPP, a detector i like. It's a bubble chamber!

Within a week or so I will post a little text about a dark matter detector. It was originally intended for first year physics students. There, now I have promised, so I have to do it!

Circling around the minefield, finding Dracula

2008-07-15T07:21:00.001-04:00

Mostly I try to ignore the science vs religion debate in the blogosphere, because it really brings out the worst in people. Now the story about PZ and the communion wafers makes me deeply uneasy (actually really sad). The short version: there is this guy PZ Myers, a scientist with the interesting hobby to make a lot of noise about anything stupid that people say or do in the name of religion (well, actually I think he claims that it is religion itself that is stupid or makes people stupid). Now he reacted to some story involving bread from the communion by asking people to send him samples of the stuff so that he can desecrate it and post videos of it. I might have some detail wrong, but I'm not going to the sources to look into it because I think it would make me upset and destroy my day.

I agree that some people act a little bit strange, maybe even stupid, when it comes to threats to things that they hold holy. Also, sending PZ death threats is a very un-Christian thing to do (other humans should also be seen as sacred, and then there is this whole thing about loving the enemies...). This in itself makes me very sad, but his whole idea of deliberately demonstrating such utter disdain for other's ways of handling and thinking about the sacred is not only distasteful but deeply in-humanistic. I could also call it mean and childish.

About the meaning that communion can have for people I really recommend Take This Bread by Sarah Miles (thank you Elliot, for bringing this book to my attention!), a story that is perfectly readable also for people with no personal connection with any church.

This said, I have to comment on Dracula, the classic by Bram Stoker. In this book the heroes bring communion bread in enormous quantities, and they bury pieces in soil to make it unusable for vampires. I always wondered about that. Getting hold of some wafers is no problem, but not all wafers carry the vampire-smothering power: they need to be consecrated. This means that a priest has to perform a little ritual, involving the reading of the story of the first communion. The wafers that are left over after the ritual, those that are not eaten immediately, are usually locked in a little cabinet (the tabernacle in the church building, or otherwise in some other place, not accessible to the public). I have heard about people stealing consecrated bread for use in witchcraft, but as I understand it they did it by going to communion and then hiding the bread under the tongue until they left the church. How do you get hold of large quantities?

There might be some anglican priests who would do mass-consecration for use in vampire-hunts, but this is not mentionend in Dracula and I have never heard about it from anywhere. I picture a hidden chapel, with mass-production and a small staff of people packing the wafers for shipping together with vials of holy water (the water is usually much easier to find, but why pass on a good package deal?) and crucifixes. Buy the small vampire-package for home use, or the club pack to share with your friends when you travel to Transsylvania! And then little unconspicious ads in newspapers, sharing the space with mail-order companies selling hygienic underwear or pictures of ladies in costume.

Hmm. This is where blogging protocol requires me to write "I digress" and promise to stay on topic in the future. And actually, I really should bring my daughter to daycare now, and get to work.

Interview with Malin Sandström

2008-07-11T09:18:00.000-04:00

After the interview with Peggy Kolm, blogger at Biology in Science Fiction, I have sent some questions to Malin Sandström, who is bringing science news to the Swedish part of the blogosphere at Vetenskapsnytt. Sorry that it has taken me so long to get around to posting this!

What came first, your interest in science or in science fiction? To what extent are they aspects of the same interest?

I am actually not sure. Probably I did not make that clear division between "science" and "fiction" when I started reading books, but I definitely had more opportunities to nurture my interest in science. The first science fiction I remember reading and can place in time was Gibson, and then I might have been... eleven? twelve? Old enough not to be immediately evicted from the "grownups" section of the library, at least.

Of course these interests have parts in common. I think the underlying theme in good science and good science fiction is partly the same; neat logical threads between known things, nevertheless leading to the unexpected unknowns. And science often makes for good stories, even if it is not usually framed in that way. Reading a scientific paper with "story-teller" eyes can be quite revealing, and it also gives you a few pointers on how to improve your own papers.

In your experience, do scientists read science fiction?

I'd guess more do than are willing to admit it ;-) But sadly, I'd also say that most scientists I have met seem to read very little apart from their academic litterature. (Makes you wonder how many get all the way down the Contents page of Nature to read Futures... I'd love to see those reading statistics.) The few booklovers I've met among my collegues are quite often sf readers, though. And if you go from my part of the field - natural sciences - to the more interactive and reflecting social sciences, I'd expect to find more readers, hopefully also more sf devotees.

What is the role of science fiction for the communication of science? Is it useful, is it negligible, or is it just a source of misconceptions?

It can be useful, but I think you would have to pick and choose rather carefully to avoid misconceptions and get an overarching theme together to communicate the science you want. But as a medium for communicating the excitement of science and pointing out ways to think about science, it has a lot of potential. For instance, what will individual identity mean if we ever will be able to produce human clones? If we add prostheses and improvements to our bodies and psyches, at what point are we no longer human? These questions are still inching their way into the general public discussion, but they've been in the books and short stories for more than twenty years.

What do you think about the portrayal of scientists in science fiction? In other forms of literature?

I actually have no set opinion on this any longer. I'd normally go with my gut reflex and say "bad! All stereotypes!", but I was at a seminar at the PCST-10 conference i Malmö last week where they discussed the development of the portrayal of scientists in the culture, and they had a lot of positive counter-examples for both sf and general literature. Let's just say it varies, and it is getting better - but the scientists I know are definitely more normal :-)

If you read Swedish, make sure to check out Vetenskapsnytt!

Babysitting a detector

2008-07-09T08:57:00.000-04:00

Many experiments need to be monitored around the clock, and so does our dark matter detector. I'm "on shift" this week, which means that I have to adjust my schedule to watch the status of the detector and the flow of data. We take data in batches called "runs" (lingo inherited from accelerator experiments), and especially when a run starts and ends I need to watch closely so that things go right. We also have a data taking plan, and sometimes change the temperature between the runs.

Of course all of this is done remotely. Actually, the whole lab is closed for summer break ("shutdown") and we have no physical access. It means that I sometimes need to be at the computer in the middle of the night, but it's much more comfortable to do it from home than to sit in a control room.

Ideally it should be a minimal amount of work, but knowing experiments you can be sure that there will always be something that does not turn out exactly right. It's only in the movies physicist can make everything work smoothly at the first try. Therefore: sleep deprivation. I also this morning tried to change some parameters and start a run while dressing and feeding our daughter. It was complicated (especially before her father got out of bed and could help us), and I would not recommend it. I will try to avoid combining these two activities in the future, but there is no guarantee.

I will write more about the detector in the future, and explain how it works.

Interview with Peggy Kolm

2008-07-03T11:31:00.000-04:00

This is the next installment in my series of interviews with interesting people about the relationship between science and science fiction. After the interview with Peter Watts I'm interested to see what other biologists say. Who can be more qualified to talk about this than Peggy Kolm, of the Biology in Science Fiction blog.

What came first: your interest in science fiction or your interest in biology? What is the relationship between the two interests?

That's a tough question, since I've been interested in both since I was in elementary school. I think, though, that my interest in science probably came first, since I went through a long Nancy Drew phase before I really got into science fiction. What drew me to science fiction was mix of science and adventure. I gobbled up the descriptions of space ships orbiting black holes and aliens, and that, in turn sparked my interest in learning more about the real science.

You have been blogging about biology in science fiction since 2006. Have you learned or discovered anything interesting by doing this, that you would like to share?

Before I started my blog, I didn't really read that much new science fiction. I purchased the occasional copy of Asimov's or the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and a few end-of-the-year "best of" anthologies, but most of my reading was from used book stores, which put my knowledge of science fiction novels at least a decade behind the times. Once I started blogging, I realized there was a lot of great fiction that I hadn't even heard of, let alone read. As a happy coincidence one of the major developments of the past few years is the expanding availability of fiction
online. I still prefer reading old-fashioned paper books, but e-books have helped get me up to speed with what's been published in the past few years. My "want to read" list is still pretty long, but at least know I know what books to look for.

How well do you think science fiction needs to be founded in real science? What is the relationship between idea and story?

I think that the story - the characters and the narrative - is the most important part of any story, science fiction or otherwise. If the story is engaging and entertaining I find it easy to overlook scientific absurdities. However when the science or technology, rather than character development, is the central element of the story, it's more important to me that the science is plausible. That's especially true when the science is something we're close to achieving, or have actually already achieved - I am much less bothered by faster-than-light drives and travel by wormhole than implausible genetics or cloning. But maybe that's my biology bias showing.

Do you think biology is under-appreciated or under-represented in science fiction or in the sf community?

I do think that biology is often unfairly considered a less "hard" basis for science fiction than physics. That seems to have been slowly changing over the past 20 years or so, as genetic engineering has become routine and cloning of humans has gone from being pure speculation to a likely reality. I suspect that the increase in biology-based science fiction in recent years is also due to the fact that there are more writers with backgrounds in the biological sciences now than there ever have been. (Has anyone actually done a survey? I'd hate to think it was just my imagination.) I'd like to think that trend will continue.

Find more at Biology in Science Fiction .

Canada and Sweden (links all over)

2008-07-02T23:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was Canada day. We went to see the fireworks. It also made me think of Canada, and Sweden, how things are in general in these countries.

I recently found this plot of the general values of different countries, the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World:

I have seen similar maps before, and always Sweden is kind of extreme in one corner.

In the recent novel Shelter by Susan Palwick Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands are the first western countries to give citizenship to artificial intelligences. I assume these three countries have solid reputations of being liberal and progressive. If you only judge from distances on these maps there are several countries closer to Sweden i values than Canada, but from my own experience I would say the countries are fairly similar.

Right now I don't know what to think about my home country on the other side of the Atlantic. Things are so strange lately, I would never have guessed that we would get a law that allows surveillance of private communication. I'm disappointed. There are also strange discussions going on in the European Union about registration and regulation of blogs. And now, the last thing seems to be the possibility that we lose the right to remove our own samples from the tissue records that are kept for medical research (and there is talk about releasing the DNA information to the police...)

On a completely different note I found an interview with William Gibson where he talks about Canada, among other things:

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

I haven't lived long enough in Canada to say anything about the state of the country or about the national identity or anything, but I think it's interesting to hear what other's say.

My next post is going to be another interview, this time with Peggy Kolm from Biology in Science Fiction blog.

Interview with Jo Walton

2008-06-22T09:10:00.000-04:00

Jo Walton recently mentioned her problems with writing science fiction: she knows too much and not enough science. Many people have suggested solutions for the particular example she discusses in this text, but the general questions about the connection between science and science fiction is exactly what I've been exploring in these interviews (see what Mike Brotherton, Alastair Reynolds and Peter Watts had to say).

Here follow the questions (that's the parts in bold face, obviously) and the answers from Jo Walton.

You stated that you know too much but not enough science to be able to write science fiction. How do you think about the science in the science fiction that you read?

If I'm picking holes in the science it's either ridiculous or the book
is annoying me for other reasons. I find if I like the story and the
characters enough, I'll forgive it anything but the most egregious
things, but if those things aren't working for me, I'll start picking
holes in the science. Sometimes even if I do like a book I'll ask my
husband how plausible something is, if it strikes me as either wildly
unlikely or totally cool. A lot of people complain about the science
in The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, for instance, whereas my problem with it was the psychology. People don't act like that.

Do you think that the science in science fiction can be an obstacle to readers as well as writers?

Yes. I think reading the science is one of the
"SF reading protocols" Delany talks about. A Physics major once returned The Forever War by Joe Haldeman saying he stopped reading it because he couldn't figure out the tachyon drive. (One might answer that if he could figure it out he'd be rich and we'd have extra-solar colonies!) But really a science fiction reader just breezes right past the tachyon drive because it's not what the book's about. The tachyon drive is a little signal saying "We have FTL travel and extra solar colonies. Moving right along to the interesting stuff..." Even if he could have learned that reading protocol though, he'd have been one of those people who nitpick about windmills on Mars. I suspect the more science you know, the more this is a problem until all you can read is Hal Clement and Carl Frederick.

And then from the other end you get readers like my aunt who interpret everything as metaphor. Someone reviewed Kelly Link and said they couldn't understand what the zombies stood for. Sometimes a zombie is just a zombie... there are things you can read that way, but that's
not the way to bet.

In your experience, are there readers who get their ideas about science primarily from science fiction? What does science fiction contribute to the understanding or misunderstanding of science (disregarding the fact that a very small part of the population actually reads sf)?

I'm one of them. I don't have any post O Level science education -- in Britain you have to specialise early. So I haven't studied any science since I was fourteen, and then only physics and chemistry. Everything I know about science I know from SF, and from my husband reading Nature and synopsising the cool bits.

One of the problems this has caused me is what I call "past shock", when you find out where science and technology actually is and you can't believe how primitive we are. For instance, I assumed for years that Apollo 11 had got to the technology of Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon", and I was horrified when I found out the space shuttle was the first spaceship to have an airlock. I'd been reading about airlocks for a long long time!

Another problem is when I come to write SF everything I know is second hand. I hate that. When I was whining about this on my livejournal someone suggested that what I should do is actually get a science education now. I'm thinking about looking into that. I'm in North America now, where there are "Physics for Poets" courses, not Britain where it would mean starting over again having made different decisions at 14.

Generally though, it's positive. I mean when the newspapers started having very serious discussions about the ethics of cloning, I was incredulous. Hadn't they read Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh?

I don't think you can learn all that much specific science from any one piece of SF, though there are some pieces of Clarke and Heinlein that really seem as if they're teaching you solid engineering. But if you read a lot of random SF from all periods you are thinking about the ideas of science. There are certain SF givens which might well be wrong and which you might learn wrong, but generally if SF writers are working from actual science and not from other SF (so they're not me!) then if you read a lot of random SF you're going to pick up some random science. Certainly you'll pick up the SF way of looking at the world as something that changes and has possibilities. A lot of people who don't read SF tend to think that the world has always been the same and always will be, and even if they read history there's a tendency to think that the world is leading to an inevitable and better now. SF encourages a way of seeing where we are as a point on a line that extends in both directions. SF teaches you the future isn't going to be the same as the past and the present, and that there are multiple possible futures and choices matter.

Then there's the other thing where you get sci-fi movie simplifications of things making their way into public consciousness, so you have people thinking about cloning who haven't read Cyteen but have seen Jurassic Park. That can be a problem. I heard that in movies they deliberately get the science wrong.

I have the feeling that the scientists in science fiction are more nuanced than in the rest of our popular culture. Is the mad scientist stereotype dead in science fiction, or just transformed into something else?

A mad scientist is a cheap way of doing some plot things quickly. They're usually a cop out the same as any randomly mad person in fiction -- "Nobody would do that! That's mad!" "OK, well, the character is mad!"

Written SF has moved on from having cheap cliche characters, mostly.

Thinking about it, I can't think what I've read recently that has scientist characters of any kind. Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain and sequels do. Alistair Reynolds's Pushing Ice. Chris Moriarty's Spin Control. But I think it's less usual to have scientists at all, most SF these days isn't about people creating a new technology or whatever, it's about people living with the consequences.

More about Jo Walton and her writing on her own web site.

I'm sorry, I don't speak French

2008-06-16T09:12:00.000-04:00

It's funny how people here usually assume that my accent is French. I don't know how many times people here in Ontario have asked me if I'm French, if the language I speak to my daughter is French, or even if I'm from Quebec. Canada is such a multicultural country that you might think that people have heard several accents, but somehow they all make the same assumption about a strange accent or a foreign language.

Actually, I don't speak French at all. I don't even understand many words. By several months of exposure to bilingual food packaging I have picked up some useful phrases like "sans gras trans" (no trans fat) or "farine de blé complet" (whole wheat flour), but I don't know how to pronounce them.

Last week I was in Quebec, for a conference. In case you don't know, Quebec is a French-speaking province. One funny thing I noticed was that my own accent got worse when I had another language around me all the time. It has happened before, but it feels very strange. I also experienced the following funny situation:

***

[The scene is a café at lunchtime. I have successfully ordered a sandwich from a young man, and now I'm looking undecidedly at the bottles in the fridge behind the counter, and another young man waits for my order.]

Me: Umm... Apple juice, please.

Cashier: I speak English, if that helps.

Me, very confused: Well, so do I actually!

[Confused pause.]

Me: OK, so can I order an apple juice?

Cashier: Was that all?

Me: Actually, the juice is for my daughter. For myself... I'll just have a glass of water, please.

[I get my sandwich, and a glass of water, and pay the sum I'm asked for. There is something missing on my tray.]

Me: So, what happened to the apple juice?

Cashier: Did you want apple juice?

***

After this I felt slightly humiliated. Is my English so bad that people mistake it for tourist French? And is it so difficult to understand it when I say "apple juice"?

Review: Final Theory

2008-06-15T21:32:00.001-04:00

My review of the novel I mentioned in my last post is now online at LabLit.com: Where Einstein left off. Go read it, and see why I didn't like the book so much, but also why I still can recommend it.

So, the final theory?

2008-06-13T11:53:00.000-04:00

No, I don't have it. I'm just a simple experimentalist (I work with cabling and bookkeeping, you could say), and the meaning of my work is to give the theorists some numbers to work on, some anchorage in reality. My personal preference is to marvel at the ways we can coax nature into revealing more information, but piecing it all together to a great super theory is nothing I worry about daily.

Anyway, I was looking for this website for the novel Final Theory when I stumbled on something completely different: someone who claims that his book really explains the Final Theory about everything. Sort of fun. On this website we are repeatedly told that our usual interpretation of work, energy and gravity completely misses the obvious and brings us into a mess of complicated calculations and assumptions when it's really very simple. We are told that we should be able to understand the universe using common sense -- have we heard this before? -- and that the experts are too involved and have invested too much in the standard physics to be open to the paradigm shift that will be the result of this theory.

I sort of like these crackpot theories. The "party line" seems to be that they are bad because they confuse people and make it harder to get across the real information about our knowledge of the world, but I just cannot help to appreciate the creativity of these thinkers. I also think that they can serve as a good starting point for discussing and explaining real physics, just like the physics of imaginary things.

There will of course always be the people who are much more interested in the conceptually simple or the poetical and imaginative explanations than in just working through the whole accumulated mass of calculations and experiments that are supporting the regular science. It can be frustrating to talk to them (I have a friend who used to work on a book about how everything works, based on numerology and musical intervals), but it probably also teaches us some kind of lession about human nature.

I found this old review of The Final Theory, and it was interesting to read the comments. Here you see all kinds of attitudes. Of course, physicists often discuss crackpot theories and there is no problem finding discussions on the web were people are explaining them, responding to them, clarifying and asking relevant questions. I think the crackpots are necessary, they are important because they make us think about the nature of science and give us a natural starting point for advice and fun.

That being said, I still recommend that you read the thriller instead of the "science book".

Fun physics links

2008-05-27T21:21:00.000-04:00

Here are two blogs I have recently discovered: An American Physics Student in England and Built on Facts. Maybe I should have a little more focus on my blogging, then I could fill this place will little physics insights. Maybe. We'll see what I might do in the future, lately I have only been making drafts for posts that I never finish.

I also found out that (of course) the world's most famous high energy physics band Les Horribles Cernettes have a homepage (with wonderful retro design, gives me 90's nostalgia). Check them out YouTube as well, and make sure to see the great Collider video: lab pictures and beautiful computers (and a good song).

Summer students

2008-05-21T18:59:00.000-04:00

We have summer students in the group. Many of them, employed over the summer to help out with research. I'm supervising one, and it is clear that I learn a lot from the experience. I'm teaching him linux, C++ and our data analysis software -- quite a big bite. He will surely know a lot after this summer.

I wish I had been a summer student. I'm learning best with my hands on things, throwing myself head first into real work. My undergraduate experience would have been so much better if I had only had (or known about) any opportunity to do something like this. I guess I could have, many students at home seem to find their way to CERN and other places in some way. I just didn't even think that there was any possibility until I had graduated.

At least I'm here now, doing real experimental work occasionally involving nuts and bolts and wires as well. It's a wonder that I didn't drop out long before I got here, given the less than encouraging experiences I've had. I guess I'm just too stubborn to give up.

And at least I can do something for the summer students that actually get to be here. Some are still teenagers!

Art and science

2008-05-12T21:04:00.000-04:00

Rene Bellwied over at the US LHC blog has some thoughts about art and science. I found this comment interesting:

Now sci-fi novels or movies might be good examples, but they are all too obvious, because the same geeks (myself included) that actually conduct the experiments will also read these books or watch these movies with great pleasure.

And also, as stated in the same post, some of the geeks conducting the experiments will actually write the books (or occasionally give advice to movie-makers, who will then anyway make a movie with very little connection to any real knowledge about how the world works).

Who watches little brother?

2008-05-08T12:50:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I finished Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (I got it from the web site, it's the first book I've read entirely on the computer screen). I really liked it, I had real problems putting it down -- or rather closing the file. I liked the voice, I liked the people, and I could really feel the adrenaline level go up in my body in the crowd scenes.

(I'm a little bit scared of crowds, since they are in general stupid and the bad elements easily take over. My body knows the feeling of being pushed around in a flood of people, and the panic of being crushed and not have any chance of getting out. In this book the crowds are on the good side, but I can't help being scared of how bad it might get. And then it gets bad, but not because of bad crowd effects, except maybe in the beginning. Anyway, this was just a paranthesis.)

In case you don't know, this is a novel about a young man who happens to be in the vicinity when a major terrorist attack strikes San Francisco. He is interrogated, suspected for helping terrorists, and after that anything he does is watched by Big Brother in the form of the Department of Homeland Security. So he fights back.

One thing I was thinking when I read the book was that it might be easier to accept use of force and exceptions from human rights for some people in the name of security if you have been exposed to the many stories where the hero wins by doing just this. I remember jumping up and down with fury when I saw the movie Beverly Hills Cop, because this cop really abuses his power -- and gets away with it! The rules are there for a reason, to make it less easy for nervous policemen to do bad things against little people. In the movie they are just dismissed, because they are in the way of vengeance. I don't like the way some stories glorify the use of excessive force to get to the bad guys, and I think that whole mindset is rotten -- but it's nevertheless fairly strong in popular culture. It's easy to see why, because it makes for good stories with a lot of action.

I still think it says something about how some people think. Otherwise the stories would never be told in that way. And that scares me a little.

What do you say? Do you think these things are connected, or not, or maybe just a bit?

For those worried about the human rights abuses in the name of "war on terror", I recommend taking a look at the Unsubscribe me campaign by Amnesty International.

Watch the watchmen.

Pizza talks and thesis sherry

2008-04-28T20:16:00.000-04:00

After a couple of years at one department I got used to how things were done there. Of course I don't expect everything to be the same over here, at another university in a different country, but it's fun to see the differences and similarities.

A new thing for me is the concept of pizza talks. This is a kind of seminar that is held over the lunch hour, and everyone gets pizza (except maybe the speaker). It's a nice idea actually (but perhaps a bit annoying for anyone on a diet).

Something I miss from my department in Uppsala is the tradition of serving cake (also not extremely healthy, except for the general mood -- not that I care, since I love sweets!) when you have published an important paper or when funding was approved or something otherwise good has happened. Maybe I should introduce that over here if the technical detector paper I'm working on ever is finished.

The whole set of ceremonies around the thesis defense is also a lot different here.

I'm not very surprised that the tradition of "nailing" the thesis does not exist here. For those of you who don't know, this is the act of posting your thesis abstract in the main university building to announce that it is printed and that you will defend it. It is done electronically nowadays, but many want to physically post it anyway. At Ångströmlaboratoriet, where the physics departments in Uppsala are located, there is also a board at the entrance where the PhD candidates post the whole thesis (the actual book) with a good nail and hammer. And then you give a party at the department, at coffee time, called "spiksherry", nailing sherry, although sherry is not necessarily included. At this party copies of the thesis are handed out, and many will ask to have it signed.

Over here the thesis is not printed until after the defense, because you are supposed to include corrections. In Uppsala, you just added a sheet of errata to the books.

The big formal or semi-formal dinner parties are also a Swedish (or Uppsalian) thing. Here the celebrations of a new doctor of philosophy are more in the form of going out with the friends to a bar or club. The formal part of the celebration is in the form of a lunch with the people from the group and department. The family and outside friends don't seem to be involved at all, at least not that I have seen.

New environment, new traditions and habits to learn. Always interesting!

Literature as an attitude to life

2008-04-11T12:56:00.000-04:00

A quote from Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I believe in the power of Fiction the way some people believe in the power of God.

Another one from Nancy Moore:

I believe in fiction. I believe that when it comes to understanding what life is all about, imagination trumps fact.

And yet another from Kim Stanley Robinson:

I'm mainly whatever the novel I'm working on at the time needs me to be. Chop wood, carry water—run five miles, write five pages—call it a religion! Not so much Zen Buddhist as Zen Novelist. It should be like:

Q: What's your religion?

A: The novel.

Interview with Peter Watts

2008-04-07T10:05:00.000-04:00

Here's a new interview about the connections between science fiction and real science. This time Peter Watts answers the questions. The first time I really noticed his name was last summer, when Nature had an issue with special focus on science fiction. If I had been following the awards better I would have known that Blindsight was nominated for the Hugo last year. Peter Watts is a marine biologist. He lives in Ontario.

Here are my questions, and Peter's answers. Read all of these interviews together, and you will have something similar to the "Mind Melds" at SF Signal, only different.

What is the relationship between your own interest in science and in science fiction? You said in Nature that they bit you at the same time, through a freind's aquarium and a CBC dramatization of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea but to what extent are they aspects of the same interest?

They're pretty much flip sides of the same thing. In one case I'm performing a thought experiment, in the other a real one, but in both cases I'm looking at available data and trying to figure out where they lead. The difference with writing sf is that you don't have to fellate various funding agencies to pick up the tab; you don't have to twist your research proposal around to suit whatever agenda the politicians of the day deem to be "important" research. You can take on much bigger, much more profound issues. And not least, you don't have to actually know all that much about what you're exploring. You don't have to spend ten years building painstaking expertise in the lachrymal secretions of herring gulls (or whatever you've locked yourself into) before you can play around. You are, after all writing fiction. Nobody holds you to the same standard.

The down side, of course, is that you have to fellate your readers, who can be a much tougher lot to figure out. And you have to simultaneously fellate your publishers, who as far as I can tell don't have much real insight into what the readers want (at least, they pretty much wrote Blindsight off as dead coming out of the gate, which in retrospect was not a particularly good read on the market). Also, of course -- because you're not an expert on the subject of your thought experiment -- you're a lot more likely to get it wrong.

But that can be a feature as much as a bug; scientists who write science fiction tend to lose their extrapolative imaginations when writing about their own field of expertise, because they know too many arcane reasons why any particular scenario wouldn't work according to the current model. It straightjackets them. Vernor Vinge and Robert Forward show much less imagination in their extrapolation of computer tech than in other aspects of their work, whereas folks like Gibson and Delany -- with no science background at all-- seem far more prescient. In my own case, the bona-fide experts who seem to find my stuff most inspirational don't hail from the marine
biology crowd at all, but from the AI community-- an area in which my expertise is, shall we charitably say, limited. Go figure.

Do you think that science fiction is mostly helpful for promoting
scientific ideas, or does it multiply the misconceptions? Does this matter at all?

It depends on whether you include televised, cinematic, and gaming sf in your definition of "science fiction". If you only consider the written form, then it's a mixed bag -- some authors are fabulous at raising awareness, others only feed the misconceptions -- but it doesn't really matter because nobody's reading that stuff anyway any more. We are, as Jeff Vandermeer put it, "in the last days of literacy".

But if you widen the net to include sf tv, movies and games, well, everybody watches that stuff-- and very little, if any of it, does anything to promote scientific ideas. Old-time Star Trek played around with the occasional nifty concept in its day, but deteriorated into unforgiveable cheese back before the turn of the century. Stargate and its ilk-- at least, those episodes I've seen-- are utter crap. The most substantive shows out there-- Battlestar Galactica, which is fucking brilliant, and the short-lived Firefly, which was at least pretty clever-- earned their stripes by pretty much ignoring science entirely, and focusing on human and philosophical issues (and Firefly did a major disservice to scientific verisimilitude by pushing the whole old-west metaphor way past the breaking point. I mean seriously: in what universe does it make sense to move whole herds of cows between planets, rather than transporting frozen embryos?) And while I love the sf gaming scene as much as anybody-- I'm a big Half-Life fan, and BioShock swept me away-- the science in those things shooters is pretty pathetic.

(That said, the way Freeman's ex-supervisor treats him in Half-Life is a pretty decent reflection of a lot of prof/grad-student relationships I've seen...)

So, bottom line: No. Nobody reads the stuff that does, on occasion, treat science seriously, and the stuff everyone devours shows no real respect for science.

Actually, let me back up a bit: I've been unexpectedly impressed with the new "Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles" series. It's far from a perfect show-- there are some significant internal inconsistencies, and there was some really stupid biology in a couple of eps-- but they've also had some remarkably decent biology snuck in around the edges on occasion. It's the only show I can think of that makes explicit and ongoing reference to things like Vinge's Singularity and Moore's Law; it's full of literary and historical references to everything from Lord of the Flies to that
eighteenth-century fake chess-playing automaton, "The Turk". None of this is cutting-edge-- I mean, Vinge wrote his essay in "The Coming Technological Singularity" 1993-- but that only makes it all the more remarkable that other shows haven't dealt with such things. So I hope that series comes back. I think it shows promise.

Does the way science and the Scientist is depicted in popular culture influence how scientists think about themselves and what they are doing? In your experience, does science fiction have any influence on science?

In my direct experience, not so much. There are the usual tales of all the people who got the whole aerospace bug from sixties Star Trek and grew up to work at NASA, but Star Trek-- for that matter, most science fiction-- is not generally about scientists. There's that sf think-tank SIGMA that Bear, Niven, and Pournelle among others part of; they consult with government muckety-mucks on everything from SDI to nuclear waste disposal. But that's sf informing politics, not science.

Of course, there are myriad cases where some skiffy writer imagines this that or the other piece of future, only to have something like it appear thereafter in the real world-- but I think you'd be hard-pressed to claim that one inspired the other. Would the submarine remain uninvented if Jules Verne hadn't done "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"? Would Second Life not exist if "Snow Crash" had never been written? I'm told that the AI elements of one of my novels inspired some guy down in Lawrence Livermore Labs to think about his own work in new ways, but I'd be surprised if that drove anything approaching a breakthrough, let alone one that wouldn't have occured otherwise. Correlation is not always causation; I think it's more likely that sf writers keep tabs on where science is going anyway, and sometimes manage to beat science to the punch.

This is not to say that science is never informed by science fiction, just that it happens far less often than the coincidence of prediciton/realisation might suggest. Maybe it's analagous to smokers and lung cancer: Statistically, tumours bloom in smokers so much more often than nonsmokers that there's gotta be some kind of link-- but when you zoom in on individuals, you can never be sure that this particular cancer wouldn't happened even if the victim never puffed in his life. There are just too many confounds.

In my experience, biology is the hot science now. Many physicists talk about biological applications of physics. But how is it in the science fiction field? At a recent convention there was a panel of scientists, answering questions from the audience. They were all physicists and astronomers, but noone seemed to think that something was missing. Is physics (and astronomy -- also physics) the essential science? Do you get the feeling that biology and biological ideas get less attention in science fiction than physics and astronomy?

Certainly that's been the case traditionally, but I don't think it applies any more. Biology is the headline science of the twenty-first century so far, and I think that's being reflected in the more recent sf to come down the pike (mine, for example). If con panels still emphasise physics and astronomy, perhaps that reflects the "graying of fandom" we keep hearing about; perhaps panels are disproportionately populated by the TwenCen old guard who haven't caught up with the times yet.

That was all for this time. See Peter Watt's own website for more information about him and his books.

Quantum accidents

2008-04-01T16:12:00.000-04:00

This could have been an April Fool's joke: some botanist sues CERN to delay the start of the Large Hadron Collider runs for an investigation of the risks of destroying the Earth. It is discussed all over internet, here is what the US LHC blog has to say, starting with a link to this extensive article (with a reference to Arthur C. Clarke at the end).

Particle physicists would not build this thing if they thought there would be a risk of destroying the world. The first time I heard this kind of worries mentioned was back in 2000 or so, it's not exactly a new idea.

Justina Robson creatively used this concept of a "quantum accident" at a particle accelerator in Keeping it Real. The story is set in a universe where the Superconducting Supercollider was actually funded and built in Texas (it doesn't look like it's going to happen in our world), an an accident in 2015 opens up a rift that puts different dimensions in contact which were previously mostly separated. Now we get contact with fairies, demons, elementals and elves! That's a whole lot better than being swallowed by a black hole. Good story, I will read the sequel as soon as I find it at the library.

Speaking of April Fools, don't forget Locus Online Special Features.

UPDATE: One day late, but this Black Hole Bomb "news item" was really funny.

As others see us

2008-03-26T09:52:00.000-04:00

If you ever read Ansible you are familiar with Dave Langford's ongoing collection of quotes about how the outside world percieves fandom: "As Others See Us".

I just found a sample of my own, from a list of Toronto's Literary Events:

And for the not-so-serious (young adult) reader, this weekend marks the annual Ad Astra conference, featuring sci-fi writers like husband-wife duo Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta.

I'm going there. Does it mean that I belong among the "not-so-serious (young adult)" readers? Well, I'm not that old. And I'm not terribly serious all the time, despite my tendency to take myself a little to seriously. Still, I think those who put together this list share the unfortunate notion that fantastic literature is just escapistic and probably mostly for kids anyway -- partly true, but far from a complete picture and missing most of the interesting parts.

Yet another SETI idea

2008-03-21T20:53:00.000-04:00

This time it's neutrinos from alien physics experiments. I have my doubts about this one. It has to be strong enough to be possible to see at astronomical distances, and we have to be able to distinguish it as a point like source that goes off and on -- it's difficult enough to distinguish any extrasolar neutrino sources as it is, and if it's not on all the time it might just be missed. But who knows what we'll discover with IceCube? It's certainly an entertaining thought.

On a listserv I subscribe to, someone associated this news story to the Stanislaw Lem novel His Master's Voice. I haven't read that one (yet).

From the fringe of fanzine fandom

2008-03-20T13:10:00.000-04:00

My nose is running, my head feels too heavy for my neck, and I feel alternatingly too hot or too cold. Nice. At least I have a new issue of Banana Wings to entertain me, between the long spells when I do nothing but stare out the window.

In case you don't know, Banana Wings is a well known fanzine (edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer) with readers and contributors from all around the world. Fanzine fandom consists of people who communicate through eachother's fanzines -- it is a virtual community surviving from the time before the www, when all mail was snail mail and you had to publish on paper if you wanted to publish anything. It is not directly transferrable to the internet, it has it's own culture with expectations and conventions and survives as a distinct mode of conversation. Of course, nowadays many fanzines are also available for download from eFanzines.com.

From the previous paragraph you can see that I'm not expecting everyone of my readers to know about these things.

In the beginning, when I was new in the world of fanzine fandom, I used lots of fan slang and obscure references in everything I wrote. I wanted to show that I was on the inside, that I was one of the initiated. After a while, when the newness of fanzine making had worn off, my focus shifted from showing off to communicating. I also realized that fanzine fandom was very small, and that I didn't want to scare away newcomers who had not yet discovered that they were interested in deciphering the jargon.

Nowadays when I write I'm trying to address everyone: the experienced fans as well as the neos or proto-fans. By "proto-fans" I mean science fiction (including fantasy, of course) readers who might be interested in fandom but who don't know that yet. I love fandom, fan culture and fan history, but I love science fiction and meeting people even more. I want to build bridges between people I think could have something in common, and I want to promote an exchange of thoughts and ideas about science fiction (again, including fantasy). At the same time I really want to be a involved in fandom.

Reading the editorial of this issue of Banana Wings, it's also obvious to me that I'm not as involved in It All as I sometimes try to be. I have missed the discussion about "Core Fandom" that is mentioned (it has taken place in some other fanzines, which I know of but haven't read), and I don't know "The Eminent Peter Weston's theory about handing out fanzines at conventions". I try in periods to sample what I find at eFanzines.com, but I have two problems with that: I usually don't find them suitable for reading on the computer screen, and I don't want to waste printing resources at work. This means that to get into the habit of really reading fanzines, I would have to get my own printer -- or make myself take a memory stick to a copy shop to print things. At the moment, I'm just sometimes printing sample pages, or compressing them to two or four pages per page (and double-sided of course) to save paper, or not reading fanzines at all.

I'm happy when I get dead tree fanzines in the mail. Especially when they bring with them a feeling that fandom is alive, which Banana Wings does (despite expressing a sligth pessimism about the whole thing). A letter column that takes up ten pages! There is the conversation.

And yes, I'm making a fanzine to bring to Ad Astra.

Talk like a physicist day!

2008-03-14T11:24:00.000-04:00

Today is pi day (3.14), Albert Einstein's birthday, and talk like a physicist day. I'm a physicist, so I guess I talk like one all the time, but anyway.

Because I have friends who understand what I mean, I have the habit of asking people for their boundary conditions when I want to make plans together with them. And when i didn't know the English word "slide" at the playground, I asked what to call the thing that is like an inclined plane. Some think that's funny.

Interview with Alastair Reynolds

2008-03-12T23:22:00.000-04:00

It has been a while, but here's the next installment in my series of interviews about the relationship between science and science fiction. I could have done it in a strict and scientific way, with the goal to find out and quantify how scientists and authors think about these things. You will notice that I have chosen to do it more like a conversation, with personal questions carrying assumptions and opinions in themselves. More fun for me, and still interesting for you!

This time I have sent questions to Alastair Reynolds, author of six novels published with striking cover images of space ships and planets (or republished with a stylish abstract cover). He has a PhD in astronomy and used to work for ESA, but is now a full-time author. I first met him when he was a guest of honour at a convention in Uppsala.

Here are my questions, with answers from Alastair Reynolds.

Someone asked me if reading science fiction has influenced my choice of career. I'm not sure, actually. What about you, what are your thoughts about the relationship between your interest in science and science fiction?

I doubt that I can easily untangle which came first. I was interested in anything to do with space, and science, and the future, from a very early age. My impulse to be a scientist, and my impulse to write SF, both came out of that same drive. Certainly as I got older, I found that SF was one of the places where I was at least exposed to scientific concepts, even if I didn't have them fully explained until I looked elsewhere. Things like "weightlessness", "gas giant", "heat death of the universe". And some of the first science books I read were among the pop science texts of Asimov and Clarke, which led me into reading other non-fiction works.

What do you think: does science fiction have any effect on the public understanding of science, or is it only people of a scientific mindset who read sf anyway?

I think if SF has had any effect on the public understanding of science, it's probably been a detrimental one so far. I mean, what is the key image of the scientist in popular culture? It's Doctor Frankenstein, meddling in things he ought not to. Too often the face of science that SF presents to the world is a negative one, of hubris, of experiments going wrong and ending the world. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I don't know if I'd say that it's exclusively people of a scientific mindset who read SF, but I would say that SF appeals to the questioning mind, and people of that persuasion are likely to be the ones who have the best grasp of scientific issues, among the general public. Certainly if you have a very non-questioning mindset, you're unlikely to be drawn to science as a field of interest.

What is your experience of the image of science fiction among scientists? While you were still combining a scientific career with writing, what did the people around you think of it? Did you ever get strange reactions?

My experience was much more positive than I might have imagined. It opened far more doors than it closed. In fact, colleagues whom I had never suspected of liking - or even tolerating - SF, came up to me and opened up about their interests, the books they had read and what they thought of them. That's not to say that there aren't scientists who dislike SF, but by and large I didn't meet too many of them.

Do you ever feel that the science fiction community has special expectations from you as a scientist by training? What do you think about the science fiction image of the scientist as hero?

I think the assumption is that if you come from a scientific background, you're only interested in nuts-and-bolts Hard SF, the kind where every statement has to be backed up by a page full of calculations. I can't think of anything more boring and futile, quite honestly. I do like some Hard SF - in fact I like a lot of it - but I'm just as enthused by the likes of Jonathan Carroll or China Mieville as I am by the usual hardcore suspects. I'm also resigned to the fact that everything I write will be examined through a critical filter of Hard SF assumptions - like, it's a given that I'm not interested in characterisation, or don't place a high premium on style or subtext, simply because other Hard SF writers don't. I am interested in these things, massively so.

As for the scientist as hero - well, I haven't got much more time for that than the idea as scientist as villain. Both are exaggerated extremes which seek to obscure the uncomfortable idea that scientists are living breathing human beings, with all the fallibilties that come with the package. Scientists get stuff right some of the time and get stuff wrong other times. But they shouldn't be put on any kind moral pedestal.

Another favourite blog

2008-03-11T15:43:00.000-04:00

I just realized that I didn't have Futurismic in my link list. It should be there! It's a blog for "near-future science fiction and fact", with posts about all kinds of weird new technologies and comments about fiction. Also, every Friday they post a list of new free fiction online, so you have something to read over the weekend (well, if that ever is a problem). Since I imagine that most of my readers just subscribe to the RSS feed and never see my sidebar, I'm mentioning this in this post as well.

I'm not very good at maintaining my blogroll. Perhaps I should do something about it. But then again, who cares?

My schedule at Ad Astra

2008-03-08T21:14:00.000-05:00

Just in case someone who reads this blog is going to Ad Astra, I'll post my appearances in the program here. And also, of course, because Important People usually do that, and I want to be like them ;-)

Bad Science in the Movies (Sat 1:00 PM) Exactly what you would think. I don't think it's necessary to fight against or be angry at bad science on the silver screen, but it's fun as a starting point for thinking about how things really work.

Team Banzai (Sat 3:00 PM) Scientists get questions from the audience. If we can answer them, they will learn something, and if we cannot, we will learn something.

Through Rose-Tinted Goggles (Sun 12:00 PM) I will moderate a panel about the roots of steampunk.

Looking for a Few Good Fen (Sun 2:00 PM) How to make people feel like members and help make a convention work, instead of just buying a ticket and expect to be entertained. Always interesting.

Of course I will do what I can to bring a new issue of my fanzine (hmm, and maybe in the process also write some locs to other fanzines...)

Remember the WMAP conspiracy!

2008-03-06T22:04:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the result of the analysis of five years of WMAP data were released (earlier results were based on three years of data). WMAP is the satellite detector that is mapping the cosmic microwave background radiation. From the pattern of tiny fluctuations in the temperature of this radiation we can learn a lot about the universe and how it evolved.

One piece of folklore among physicists is the initials of Stephen Hawking that can be found by the ever pattern finding human eye slightly to the left of the center of the picture. (Actually it looks more like S'H, or S'K, but anyway.) This is a good starting point for conspiracy theories. Especially over a couple of beers.

Blowing fuses, blowing snow

2008-03-06T21:11:00.000-05:00

This week I worked three days in the lab. This involves lifting and carrying water cubes (20 litre water filled soft plastic bottles in cardboard boxes), climbing up and down the detector structure, reaching inside the structure to connect sensors to the detectors, and so on. Very physical work. I love it.

But of course there is also the inevitable frustrations involved in working with hardware. Short circuits, missing parts, leaks, and the usual delays. And did we leave the valve closed or open? I hate it when I notice that I could have avoided or prevented these things if I had thought about everything in advance. I want to do things right! Ah, well, I have to learn to deal with it.

At least we were lucky to get out on the roads when the latest snow storm had already passed and the roads had been cleared. No problems at all. Not like that time when it took us 12 hours to get there (instead of the usual 7 or so). Every trip is a little adventure!

Just before I left I had a massive attack of home sickness. I miss my friends and family in Sweden. I spent some time in the car thinking about my situation here on the wrong side of the Atlantic. At least I have husband and child with me, it could be worse. I'm really quite happy here, the only bad thing is the distance to the people I most want to be with. Should I go back after completing one year, or should I stay here?

---
What the water cubes are for? Neutron shielding of course. See my post here, where I talked about neutron contamination in the context of another experiment.

Toys and dark matter on the web

2008-02-28T11:16:00.000-05:00

Subatomic particle plush toys!

Wow. Really. There is even a dark matter particle. Note that the artist has not invested any prestige in preferring a particular hypothesis of the nature of this particle. Is it a neutralino?

Over at Cosmic Variance science blogger John Conway reports from the dark matter conference last week, and gives some more detail on the "nothing detected"result from CDMS I wrote about some days ago. John writes:

To “measure nothing” is usually a great experimental challenge. You do have to convince the world that you would have seen something if it had been there, that your apparatus isn’t just mute for some other reason.

Go read the rest! And see the graph displayed in his post, that shows the limit.

And when I'm at it, I can also link to the Bad Astronomer article, also about the CDMS result and about dark matter in general. Very accessible for a general reader.

"It's just a story"

2008-02-27T23:15:00.000-05:00

"It's propaganda", someone is complaining. "Come on, it's just a story, it's fiction!" is the reply.

I'm as guilty as anyone, I have done this many times. Still, it's a lame way to defend a story.

Also, I don't think there is such a thing as "just a story". I think stories are how we understand the world. Fiction is storytelling, giving the reader a picture of how the author is thinking about the world -- and that is very true also for science fiction and fantasy. You get inside someone else's head, get someone else's interpretation of what words and actions and phenomena really mean.

This might be dangerous, or comforting, or just confusing. I also think it's very healthy.

The risk in reading fiction by an author with a worldview different from your own is the same as the risk involved in meeting the author in person. We all have different ways of seeing the world. We have to live together in it, and therefore it's good to know how other people are thinking about things. The stories that many people tell together and agree on will spawn ideologies or policies or projects, and the ones very few like end up on the periphery.

In this way we are making sense of things, building meaning from experiences. This is the essence of storytelling, I think.

Of course, there are people (and books) we don't like, and those we cannot stand because it's almost impossible to find some common ground to start a conversation of any kind. It's annoying, it's frustrating, it can be completely maddening. It can also be like a riddle, an intricate puzzle to solve.

I find it very interesting to try to understand what people like in books, when they see something I don't. It really says a lot about them, and about me, especially when we don't agree.

And still: I refuse to finish a book I cannot find interesting, and I will not read a book just because "everyone" likes it. If it's badly written or full of stereotypes and clichés it will take some really strong ideas to make me finish it. I'm sorry, it's not about agreeing or disagreeing with the message, it's about enjoying the actual reading.

---

This is a response to reading bad customer reviews on Amazon. (One day, the internet is going to make me a misanthrope.) By coincidence, Mike Brotherton also had related thoughts.

Dark matter links

2008-02-26T10:17:00.000-05:00

The Sydney Observatory blog is posting Dark matter dialogues, answers to questions from a science fiction author, of all things.

Also, the dark matter thing people are talking about on the net is a survey of large dark matter structure in the universe. (With a cool picture, looking exactly like all other large structure surveys and simulations. But future blue on black.)

Still nothing detected

2008-02-25T11:13:00.000-05:00

A few days ago i heard one professor enthusiastically talk about the new results from his group, one of many searching for dark matter. Another professor (I don't know him or what field he is working in) asked him why anyone would be interested in yet another experiment reporting that they have seen no dark matter. Good question. It's really a strange thing, to work year after year with many different methods, and be happy with zero results.

Of course, as people are quick to point out, a zero result is still a result. You know something more about the thing you are hunting for, you can rule out theoretical models and narrow down the search. This is of course why the results are reported and why they are closely watched by the theorists as well as experimentalists.

As I have stated before, it is actually the challenge of searching for nearly undetectable things that attracted me to particle physics, then neutrino detection, and then to dark matter searches. There are all sorts of marvelous efforts going on, to think of ways to detect a dark matter particle (we usually talk about WIMPs, for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) and distinguish it from other particles that are more prone to interact with matter and give signals in a detector.

One thing that is exploited in dark matter searches is the fact that most forms of radiation (i.e. matter particles or photons) interact with the electrons in matter and don't do much to the atomic nuclei. Atoms are like fluffy clouds of electrons, with a tiny nucleus hiding inside (you might remember the Rutherford experiment). It is way more likely for anything that can interact which the electric fields in an atom to encounter one or more electrons, and perhaps knock them out of the atom, than to slam into the nucleus.

A WIMP ignores the electrons. It is blind to the electric field since it has no electric charge of its own, and it's extremely near-sighted. The weak interaction has a short range, so the probability that the WIMP will actually notice and interact with a nucleus is low -- but it is not zero. If it interacts, it will give some of it's energy to the nucleus, which will recoil.

When a recoiling nucleus moves through the matter in the detector it will also knock off electrons from the atoms it passes through, but since it is heavy and typically carries a lot of electric charge it will do it more efficiently than other particles. If you can build a detector that can identify this pattern and separate it from other interactions, you will already have reduced most of the things that can obscure the visibility of the very rare events where a WIMP actually interacts. This is the basic idea behind many of the efforts to actually find WIMPs.

One example is the CDMS detector. The idea behind this is to use two types of signals. They look at the total ionization, which is the number of electrons knocked out from their atoms. They also look at vibrations that occur when a particle is removed from its place in a crystal lattice. (These vibrations are called phonons, since they can be thought of -- and mathematically treated -- as "sound particles".) By comparing the amount of electrons with the total phonon energy they can identify recoiling nuclei.

It gets a little more complicated, since there are other things that can make a nucleus recoil, for example neutrons. Neutrons, like other kinds of radiation, can come from natural radioactivity and can also be created when cosmic rays interact with matter. In an experiment like this you have to be very careful with the neutrons. Neutrons are absorbed in materials which contains very light elements, like water or plastic that contains lots of hydrogen, so these can be used for shielding. It also helps to put the detectors deep underground, where you are safe from most of the cosmic rays. You also have to take extreme care not to get radioactive elements inside the detector. Interesting challenges. But we are getting very good at it.

The CDMS collaboration has a preprint out (it's one of the first links on that web page if you want to read the actual paper) with a limit that was first presented at a conference last week. A limit, which means that they with a high degree of confidence can say that the WIMP cannot interact better than so much, or else they would have been able to see it. Little by little, we narrow down the possible properties of a dark matter particle.

----

When I'm talking about CDMS I just have to say that their educational pages have a very high level and don't seem to be very accessible for people without physics background. Consider this sentence: "The CDMS experiments (and many others) aim to measure the recoil energy imparted to detector nuclei through neutralino-nucleon collisions by employing sensitive phonon detection equipment coupled to arrays of cryogenic germanium and silicon crystals." Or just the general heavy prose of this one: "The supersymmetric standard model (SUSY) offers a promising framework for expectations of particle species which could satisfy the observed properties of dark matter." That is clearly not the kind of language that works for outreach -- too many difficult words.

As an indication: the reading level of their direct detection page where I took those quotes is "Genius" (while that of this blog is "High school", or at least was before I quoted those things).

Now please tell me if what I have written in this post makes sense!

Interview with Mike Brotherton

2008-02-22T20:42:00.000-05:00

Update: added a final question with answer at the end.

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of interviews with interesting people about the relationship between science and science fiction. It will be fun to see various angles on it. Of course I do this mostly out of my own interest: I want to know what thoughts and experiences others have on this subject. At the same time, I hope that this will be of broader interest, and that my readers will appreciate it. Share and enjoy.

First out is Mike Brotherton, "Hard SF Writer" as he states on his blog. Mike is also an astronomer and a professor at the University of Wyoming.

Now: questions and answers!

Someone asked me if reading science fiction has influenced my choice of career. I'm not sure, actually. What about you, what are your thoughts about the relationship between your interest in science and science fiction?

I can't ever remember not liking science and anything that involved science, including science fiction. Discovering how things worked, the mysteries beyond the everyday, were always interlinked in my mind. When I was six, I wanted to be an astronomer or a paleontologist; that was the same age I first saw Star Trek. Furthermore, good scientific research requires imagination, which science fiction has in great abundance. Good science fiction, in my opinion, requires strong grounding in science.

What do you think: does science fiction have any effect on the
public understanding of science, or is it only people of a scientific mindset who read sf anyway?

Science fiction has a tremendous impact on the general public in movies and TV. The written form is more generally reaching the folks scientifically inclined, true, but it's important to realize that science fiction fans fill all sorts of technical roles in our society from scientists to computer support to engineering and more. These are the people who are in positions to make a lot of decisions about how technology is used and what demand there is for it, the movers and shakers if you will in our modern civilization. And without their support, and at least the positive appreciation of the more general public, support for science would wane and research dollars
would dwindle.

Science fiction can be more dangerous, in my opinion, than people appreciate. A steady diet of movies like Jurassic Park that consistently show scientists as arrogant and blithely releasing
dangers into our world does erode public support.

You teach a course on science and science fiction. What have you
learned from that? Any interesting experiences to share?

Teaching this class really helps me sharpen my critical eye about how to communicate science effectively, appreciating the rare times it's well done, and being frustrated at how often it isn't. I marvel at the ingenuity of some of my students, the love-inspired effort they sometimes apply. On the other end of the spectrum, I also realize just how many years I've put into learning the science and the writing both to do it as well as I do (which isn't badly, but I have
plenty of room for improvement).

One of the things I do in my class is have us watch the old classic DESTINATION MOON, a movie from the 1950s about a rocket that goes to the moon. Written by Robert Heinlein, the story was designed to educate the public about how very possible this feat was and to inspire support. It gets a lot of science right, and has a great scene with Woody Woodpecker explaining how rockets work, something that wasn't general knowledge to the extent it is today. I asked my students to write a scene doing the same thing, and got some nice relationships to more familiar experiences like released balloons and jetting squids. The more abstract the concept, the more important it
is to find comparisons to every day life, even if it seems impossible at first.

What do you think about the portrayal of scientists in sf. Do you recognize yourself?

There are some good and accurate portrayals. Ellie Arroway in CONTACT comes to mind. There are more and better examples in books; Gregory Benford's TIMESCAPE is a good one. I can see myself in those characters.

More often, they're nerdy guys in white lab coats and some kind of ridiculous stereotype (Dan Akroyd in MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN), or nearly the opposite, with Daryl Hanna's ROXANNE or Val Kilmer's super cool dude in REAL GENIUS. Beautiful people played as if the science is a secondary part of who they are, when the reality is nearly every scientist I know lives for science and loves it. We're so talented to get where we are, we could make a lot more money in a different
field, if we cared to. We don't, usually.

What about the portrayal of sf among scientists? Do you ever get
strange reactions if you tell people at work that you are going to a science fiction convention?

My department and campus at the University of Wyoming is generally supportive of my efforts, and I try hard to bring up the positive synergies between science and science fiction. I've gotten NASA and the National Science Foundation to fund some of my science-fiction-related outreach efforts (e.g., the Launch Pad astronomy workshop for writers, see www.launchpadworkshop.org). Bringing in grant money and bringing in high-profile visitors gets positive notice.

And just the same way I have some cachet at science fiction conventions for being the guy who also does real science, a lot of scientists are science fiction fans and they think it's cool that I write novels. Some of my biggest fans are scientific colleagues. The negative folks, the few there are, would actually have to read my books to be too critical and that's usually too much effort. When I travel to give science talks, I'm often asked to also give science fiction talks. The latter typically pull bigger audiences.

Writing takes a lot of time and effort. How do you balance it with work and the rest of your life? Do you have any special writing habits, or designated writing times?

The answer is that the balance is often imbalanced, where I emphasis one or the other for extended periods. The astronomy thing always gets some effort, but I do go months without writing seriously.

Once I start writing on a novel, I write 2-4 hours per day, 1000 words a day, nearly every day, and keep up the momentum through the completion of a first draft.

***

Again, If you want to know more about Mike Brotherton, here's his blog.

Ah, Antarctica...

2008-02-20T09:50:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a day that reminded me of Antarctica. Cosmic Variance had a guest post about IceCube (the kilometer-cubed neutrino detector!) and about working in Antarctica. Almost simultaneously, Mike Brotherton linked to an article about doing astronomy in the whitest place on Earth.

If I'm going to dance my PhD thesis I'll just have to include penguins! (Yes, I did my PhD on AMANDA, which is now a sub-detector in IceCube.)

The winter here in Ontario is white, too. But not very cold, at least not here in the south. (Everyone warned me that the winter was going to be colder than I'm used to. Ha! I haven't even used my warmest clothes. We have had three cold days so far -- and by cold I mean minus 20 during daytime.)

The physicality of dancing

2008-02-15T16:02:00.000-05:00

This is wonderful! Can scientists dance? asks the "gonzo scientist" column in Science (it might be that you need a subscription to see it). Videos of scientists interpreting their PhD thesis in dance. I really liked the tango version of a galaxy captured by a larger galaxy. I was actually looking for this article about the COUPP dark matter search, but it's easy to get sidetracked nowadays.

And I suddenly very much miss dancing. I tried tango at a party in December, and some of it actually came back to me after the first stumbling turns. Maybe I should take it up again?

Academic dress?

2008-02-13T11:24:00.000-05:00

A little debate has been going on around the academic blogosphere, about the way we dress in the world of learning. Would it be better to dress a little better, wearing shirt and tie (or skirt and high heels i guess), to signal authority and to better be taken seriously? This post had something to say about it, commented also here with some further discussion here.

From my point of view this is somewhat silly. A teacher wearing a tie would not usually give me a good impression. You know, a suit. Show me your competence, and I will respect you. Show me fancy clothes and I will think that you have a problem with self confidence and need to hide behind a uniform.

I remember a quote from Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson:

Scientists signaled with their clothes just like anyone else, and their signal often proclaimed, 'I am a scientist, I do things because they Make Sense, and so I Dress Sensibly.'

Physicists are known for not knowing how to dress well. The secretary at my department in Uppsala bought a book about clothing for men, and placed it in the coffee room with the hope that the researchers at least would start looking at their clothes and not wear those with missing buttons and holes at the elbows. She also pointed out to me that about half of the people who attend conference dinners don't bother to change their clothes before, and some of them wear the same shirt for a whole conference. I don't watch peoples clothes so closely, but I have no reason to doubth what she said. But, you know, I don't really care.

Myself? Well. I wear my clothes until they fall apart, mainly because I hate shopping (and because I rather spend my money on books). They usually look nice to begin with at least, according to my taste (which is maybe slightly punk/goth/hippie, if you can imagine that). Sensible? Probably that, too. (Long underwear, good boots, layer on layer, hat, gloves, indoor shoes to change to.) Anyway, I'm happy to work in an environment where I can dress the way I want. Maybe I'll think about it a little bit more when (if) I start teaching regularly, the same way I take reasonably neutral and not too worn clothes when I'm giving a seminar or conference talk.

But in general, I think there is lots of room for individual variety within the reasonable limits for how you can dress at work. It would be fun if people used it more.

No comments!

2008-02-04T21:47:00.000-05:00

My previous post has had about eight times as many readers as I usually get, and not one has commented. Well. Sex gets people's attention, but apparently not for long enough. I guess I write too interesting things that are difficult to comment on...

On a totally different note, Mike Brotherton recently posted about sex in space.

Thinking about sex in some sf/f stories

2008-02-03T23:21:00.000-05:00

Lately, I have noticed that I often disagree with others about sex in science fiction and fantasy stories. I don't have a general theory about it, it's just specific cases that come up where I seem to think differently about it than other readers.

Some time ago I wrote a kind of review of Mainspring by Jay Lake on my Swedish blog. The author himself linked to it, and also to a review on a blog called aguylibrarianreads. That reviewer writes:

I do have one caveat and that is there is a rather graphic sex scene towards the in, that while being consistent contextually, does make it inappropriate for younger readers. I still think it would make a good young adult novel, albeit for the 16 and older crowd.

I confess that this sex scene was something I didn't really like in this novel, but for very different reasons.

Why is it inappropriate for younger readers? Maybe it's a cultural thing, something American that I don't really understand. I remember a friend of mine who told me about a translation of a Swedish book for children, Per, Ida och Minimum about two kids who learn about how their little sibling is made and grows in mommys belly. My friend said that the page about how the seed from the father is actually planted into the mother was censored with some black fields in the translated version. Hmm. I don't remember learning about those things, so I guess I must have picked it up very early -- which is good, because otherwise someone would have had to give me an embarrasing lecture about bees and flowers.

What I would complain about is this: this is the only (or almost the only) place in the book where the author makes young Hethor actually conciously formulate his questioning of things he learned before his journey. There are lots of other things he learns, and he changes hes mind about many things, but Jay Lake usually lets us know by showing Hethor's reactions, not by telling us his thougths. I thought this thing did not fit into the rest of the book, it felt clumsy.

There is something else also, that I have some trouble formulating. Maybe it's just that I'm a little bit tired of depictions of perfect marathon sex -- but it's alright in this story, since Hethor is intoxicated with first love and everything seems perfect to him. Maybe it's that I'm just a little bit disturbed by the fact that the woman is of a kind that is so much smaller than Hethor, and that she still shows him "where else to enter". I have heard a little too much about young people who think that it's normal that the woman feels pain during sex, and the pressure to live up to unrealistic pornographic ideals. Well, anyway, I actually didn't really like the scene.

Then of course we have the infamous inverted fall in His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. People often complain about the fact that the two young protagonists have sex when they are so young (12 or 13 years, I think). When I read the books I didn't think about their age, but I was upset about this event for another reason. It has been a while since I read it now, and I didn't do a really close reading of this section, but as I understood it the sexual act in Lyra's world is what causes the coming of age, and it is after this that a person's daemon is constant and unchanging. To state it clearly: when you have sex your soul takes it's adult form. Don't you see some disturbing implications of this? Very many, possibly the majority, will have their souls formed by an unpleasant experience. What about those who are raped? And also, there are those who don't get any sex even if they want it -- will their souls never really take shape? I think it's a cruel way to construct the way this fantasy world works. (Maybe I misunderstood something. Correct me if I got the whole thing wrong. I actually hope that my interpretation is wrong and that the author intended to say something else.)

Also, I could complain a bit about the connection between sex and knowledge that Pullman makes. His whole point is that experience and knowledge are good things, and are actually what drives the life of the universe. OK, that's all good, but I think you can have lots of sexual experience without gaining any wisdom at all. Also, it's obvious that many people use sex for power rather than love, so I just cannot agree with his way of equating sexual awakening with spiritual maturity.

(And for that matter: the notion that the fall had something to do with sex is very wide spread, but I'm not sure that it's a proper interpretation of the text.)

When I'm talking about these things I also have to mention The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. (Minor spoilers follow, just so you know if you are sensitive about such things.)

I have read many reviews and heard many discussions about this book. We read it for a book meeting in Uppsala, and one of the things we discussed was why it had won the James Tiptree, Jr Award ("an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender"). Most seem to focus on the fact that the aliens the expedition meets on that other planet have somewhat inverted gender roles compared to our society. That's just lame, Russell is not doing anything particularly interesting or new with this. Why won't anyone ever mention one of the most interesting things, the whole focus of the story about Father Emilio Sandoz?

This, the way I read it, is among other things a story about rape. About how guilt and shame is often put on the victim. It's not until Sandoz can admit to himself and others that he was actually raped that the process of healing can start. The interesting thing about this is of course that this time the rape victim is a man, which puts the whole matter a little bit in a new perspective.

I'm not sure. Many clever people have discussed this book without mentioning this, so it's probably just in my brain that this comes together and stands out as interesting. But anyway. (The Sparrow is on the list of books I want to reread at some point. I don't know when. It's possible that I will find completely different things the next time I read it, that's usually how it goes.)

I will stop here, and not discuss any more examples for now. It would be interesting to know what other people think about these things.

15 things I actually did know about sf, and a Neal Stephenson question

2008-01-31T17:42:00.000-05:00

This list of 20 things some people might not already know about sf (at Discovery Magazine) had caused a somewhat silly discussion at io9.

There were no surprises, there are only five things on the list I could not have mentioned myself. ("Even the biggest geeks can't know everything"!) Among them, I was surprised to read about Neal Stephenson's influence:

13 Neal Stephenson’s acclaimed 1992 novel Snow Crash has inspired two major online creations: Second Life (derived from Stephenson’s virtual Metaverse) and Google Earth (from the panoptic Earth application).

I had to find out, and after googling a while I have to say that it doesn't look like this is entirely true. I haven't found any evidence that Second Life is derived from Stephenson's Metaverse -- maybe he inspired people, but I haven't been able to find any official acknowledgement of this. The closest is this article, but it doesn't state that the people behind SL were directly inspired by Snow Crash.

With Google Earth it seems that Stephenson might have been a source of inspiration for one of the co-founders, but it's not a clear-cut answer.

Conclusion: good story, but I don't think the statement #13 in the list is exactly correct.

And as you might notice, I support the use of "sf" rather than "sci-fi" (the io9 rant therefore places me among old men with beards -- ha!). There might not be any real arguments for making the distinction, but it's a real cultural difference -- it's a case of how groups and tribes form and distinguish themselves also within a subculture if you will. People who write and publish science fiction say esseff, and therefore most people who are primarily interested in reading use sf rather than sci-fi. Sci-fi seems to have been adopted by the "media" people (those who approach the genre from the tv and movie side), who might be seen as newcomers who don't care about the jargon that is established in the core of the people who think and write about sf. Silly, but that's how people are. Stupid thing to argue about. Nowadays I don't really care, but I consistently say and write sf (not even SF, but sf) -- that's just a convention I have adopted, and I see no reason to change it. (I sort of liked the argument that sf is better because it covers speculative fiction, a larger cathegory than science fiction. Fair enough -- let's now rationalize our use in this way!)

I should read Michael Swanwick again

2008-01-27T21:46:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I bought Year's Best SF 12. My husband noted that there is a story by Michael Swanwick in this collection, and we started talking about things we have read by him and why we haven't read anything by him for so long. I really think Swanwick is a good author, but I haven't read anything by him since "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur". I sort of lost the interest when it looked like he was so much into dinosaurs. I also always read too little short fiction, and so I miss almost everything he's been writing lately.

Michael Swanwick was the guest of honour at a convention we arranged in Uppsala in 1999 (long ago!). I was very impressed by his earrings, which always looked like they could hurt someone. I was also very impressed by his writing. At Interaction I listened to him talking about some of the exercises he went through to teach himself to write better, which made me curious about reading something by him again. (But dinosaurs? Well, I'm not sure why I'm not interested, but, well, it just seems a bit boring. I feel vaguely bad about this, since I remember being extremely fascinated by dinosaurs when I was six. I guess I lost something since then.) But I haven't.

Now I just found and listened to an interview where Michael Swanwick talks about his new novel The Dragons of Babel. It is set in the same world as Iron Dragon's Daughter, which is a novel I really, really liked.

I guess The Dragons of Babel is now on the list of extremely many books I would like to read some day.

Ten things I've done that you probably haven't

2008-01-19T00:45:00.000-05:00

Wow. How many strange things people have done! (Funny that Sweden is mentioned five times in the comment section, given that it's a country with a population of 9 millions I think it gets lots of attention.) I rarely care about memes, but I want to try this too. Given enough time everyone will experience some weirdness, and so have I. (But I sure know people who have experienced way weirder things than i have!)

So, here are ten things I have done that you probably haven't:

1) Visited the geographical South Pole.

2) Been filmed in a ruin, wearing a cape and mask, for a death metal music video. (Hmm. Well. It was fun, actually.)

3) Collected people to a cuddling pile on a street corner. Or whatever you might want to call it. I'm talking about a lot of people laying and leaning more or less on top of eachother, just to talk and relax. This was during the Falun Folkmusik Festival in 1993 or 1994.

4) Now that I think of it, most people have not done this: defended a PhD thesis in particle physics.

5) Worked in a cleanroom 2000 meters underground.

6) Arranged a science fiction convention nearly alone (70 members, 2 guests, one conrunner on the brink of total insanity). At least I had gophers, and people helping out with some of the practical aspects.

7) Tried to teach math to 30 13-year-olds who instead climbed out on the roof of the school.

8) Visited several student bars wearing a baby on my chest. (No, of course I didn't drink!)

9) Made a catalogue of a collection of thousands of fanzines (which was later donated to a library).

10) Looked very scientific, filling and shaking test tubes dressed in cleanroom gear, as a backdrop to some special founding announcement.

The last item was added today. Our local lab has a cleanroom with transparent walls at the back, and we were asked to go in there and work and show what science looks like (hmm, well, or something...). It could almost have been fun if I had not felt like a fish in a bowl, or a monkey at the zoo. I helped our radiochemist with preparation of some samples, I haven't done anything like that since I was still in school (that is, before I went to university). Very scientific! But all the time people were pointing cameras at us, and talking importantly in front of us. (And when I tried to ignore it I forgot that it was a show going on and talked too loud so that the listeners outside the cleanroom walls could hear it, which gave me a very angry look from one of the organizers.)

Which Philip K Dick story are we in today?

2008-01-12T22:03:00.000-05:00

Via David Nessle: a blog comparing news to PKD stories. Wow. Someone knows all PKD stories by heart, I think.

Fandom lament

2008-01-12T21:34:00.000-05:00

Tuesday this week was the second Tuesday of January. This means meeting with the Fearless Fantasy Fans. Unfortunately it looks that we are now down to two fearless, sitting lonely in a café and wondering where all the other readers of fantastic literature hang out.

Could it be that other readers don't feel the urge to talk about the books they read? That they don't like sharing the experience with others? Or perhaps it's just that everyone else prefers a boring life, going home to sit in front of the tv after work instead of meeting other people? What's the matter with everyone!

I don't know. But I really miss the monthly pub meetings with the fans in Uppsala. We were rarely less than twenty showing up, and often some of us would stay past midnight (not me, for a long time, but I used to). We talked about everything, because these were not any organized club meetings but just a gathering of people with a background in the same interests. (The common denominator was reading science fiction and fantasy, but the local fans were also often into gaming, linguistics, computers, science and mathematics. The usual stuff.)

Then we had book meetings as well, and sometimes we did other things together. We arranged to travel together to conventions. And we held our own conventions.

Describing this all in past tense it is like it's all over just because I moved away. I think Upsalafandom still lives. Now I just want something similar over here. To me fandom has always been about making friends, and the last ten years most of my social life has been related to fandom in some way -- online and offline. Now I feel strangely isolated. Fandom can often be dissapointing, and fans can be very annoying, but I cannot help thinking of it as my people, my
tribe.

I have been trying a bit to get into English speaking fanzine fandom, but I find it difficult to get into the habit of reading and responding to fanzines. Strange. I have to try a bit more. But I would also like to meet people IRL. Talk about books and everything else.

So where are all of the protofans that could be gathered into a group? Why don't they jump with joy as soon as they see our ads, why don't they stand in line to come to our meetings?

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T14:20:00.000-05:00

As a celebration of the new year 2008 I post what is probably one of the best music videos from 2007, and I'm not biased ;-) Elias and the Wizzkids, with a song about coming out of depression:

It's even science fiction: there are rockets, and it ends in the future.

Home devotional unit

2007-12-28T16:38:00.000-05:00

From Paleo-Future:

I started to analyze the function of this device. The labels on the coin slots probably changes with the setting of the faith selector -- it would not make sense to have wine, wafers and incense if you turn it to islam. On the other hand, why is there a Hare Krishna button if the device is set to catholicism? At this point my husband told me that the picture probably wasn't made with so much thought behind it that it makes sense to question it like this. Well. He's probably right. Anyway, it's fun.

About Carl Sagan and science fiction as mythmaking

2007-12-20T17:57:00.000-05:00

Yet another chapter in the saga of Åka discovering things that probably are obvious to most people (at least most people with the same kind of interests).

Very recently I discovered Isaac Asimov as a popular science writer. Previously I have always thought about him as the very dull science fiction author -- I never really enjoyed his stories. When I picked up one of his collections of essays about science I was surprised to find it very fun to read (although I think he puts too much emphasis on how clever and special he is himself).

Now I'm beginning to discover Carl Sagan. I think he has been very important for making people interested in science, and I think it might be fun to read more by him.

Yesterday was the (second) Carl Sagan blog-a-thon. This caused me to take up Broca's Brain, which I intended to read soon, and read the essay "Science fiction -- a personal view".

The greatest human significance of science fiction may be as experiments on the future, as explorations of alternative destinies, as attempts to minimize future shock. This is part of the reason that science fiction has so wide appeal among young people: it is they who will live in the future.

When I started reading science fiction about the age of 12, i divided sf in before and after Sputnik -- it seemed significant if it was written in the space age or before it. Since so much of what I read was old, I had a very strong feeling of already living in the future (and I still often think of it this way). Carl Sagan also talks about this in the essay Wonder and Skepticism, although he experienced these things when they happened instead of reading about it later:

It's been my enormous good luck -- I was born at just the right time -- to have had, to some extent, those childhood ambitions satisfied. I've been involved in the exploration of the solar system, in the most amazing parallel to the science fiction of my childhood. We actually send spacecraft to other worlds. We fly by them; we orbit them; we land on them. We design and control the robots: Tell it to dig, and it digs. Tell it to determine the chemistry of a soil sample, and it determines the chemistry. For me the continuum from childhood wonder and early science fiction to professional reality has been almost seamless. It's never been, "Oh, gee, this is nothing like what I had imagined." just the opposite: It's exactly like what I imagined. And so I feel enormously fortunate.

Sometimes I think about science fiction as a collective work of building a myth of life in the new, technological world. It's the stories we use to make sense of life in a high-tech environment. How do we cope with this rapid change, and what does it mean for how we thing about who we are? Science fiction gives us new archetypes and reshapes old ones to fit with the world we experience.

I once met a young man who told me that William Gibson gave him an identity. It's not so strange. Cyberpunk gave the computer nerds something to identify with, a way of thinking of themselves as cool in their own way without giving up what they like to do.

And somewhere deep inside I think I owe Robert Heinlein for getting me on the way to want to be a scientist. I certainly wanted to be like his heroes, like Kip in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel who could repair a spacesuit, and who knew the distances of all the planets from the sun and could use it to calculate where he was.

Carl Sagan also notes (again from the essay "Science fiction", in Broca's Brain):

Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction.

Reweaving the rainbow

2007-12-19T10:55:00.000-05:00

Physics is wonderful. Some people say that explaining things takes the magic out of them, and some might quote Keats who didn't like Newton's prism experiments (from this poem we have the expression "Unweave a rainbow"):

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.

Richard Feynman, and many others, have answered that by saying that it's really the opposite: the more you know about something, the more wonderful it is.

New York Times has a story about an MIT professor who is an online star with his video lectures on physics. I cannot see the lectures since I don't know if I have access to any program that can play Real Media files (but that might be just as well from a productivity point of view). I sort of like the quote from the lecture about rainbows:

“All of you have looked at rainbows,” he begins. “But very few of you have ever seen one. Seeing is different than looking. Today we are going to see a rainbow.”

/.../

For the finale, he creates a rainbow by shining a bright light into a glass sphere containing a single drop of water.

“There it is!” Professor Lewin cries.

“Your life will never be the same,” he tells his students. “Because of your knowledge, you will be able to see way more than just the beauty of the bows that everyone else can see.”

I also sort of like the idea of a physicist being a superstar who brings physics to the iPods of the masses!

Antimatter

2007-12-17T20:28:00.000-05:00

I just want to share a nice thing I found: How Antimatter Got into Science Fiction. It's a history of antimatter in science and in science fiction, with lots of links and illustrated with pictures of magazine and book covers.

Now I just wonder how dark matter got into science fiction.

Lucia

2007-12-13T11:27:00.000-05:00

Today I feel far from home. Lucia day, the festival of lights.

One good thing about moving about 15 degrees south (and over the ocean) is that we get real winter but still lots of daylight. In Uppsala the sun rises at 8:40 am on December 13. It sets at 14:48. Here in southern Ontario I don't experience the winter darkness, and I'm still slightly surprised every day when I have breakfast and it's already dawn.

In the Nordic darkness we eagerly await the return of the light. Lucia is the first celebration of this. I might have some historical details wrong, but according to my understanding before the calendar reform December 13 was the morning after the longest night of the year. Therefore it has a special significance in folk lore, as we might expect. The day has the name of the Saint Lucia from Syracuse, but the celebrations and the light queen have almost nothing to do with her -- it's just a coincidence of the calendar.

In my world, a proper Lucia celebration is to stay up all night and bake saffron buns (they are yellow and shaped as symbols for the sun, heavy symbolism here) and ginger cookies, and maybe watch some movies with friends. In the early morning it's time to dress up in white gowns and carry candles and go wake people up with singing. Of course I haven't done it this way for many years, but as recently as two years ago I woke up hearing a Lucia procession in the building. They stopped on every floor and sang a couple of songs. I opened the door to my apartment and they gave me ginger snaps.

In Sweden the Lucia celebration is an almost entirely secular thing, if not outright pagan, with some small Christian decorations since it's also a celebration of the promise of Christmas coming soon. Here in a foreign country I have actually participated in a Canadian interpretation or adaptation of Lucia, which was very different. I was involved as an expert or consultant since I know the traditional song and could sing it. The rest of the ceremony was nothing like anything I have seen at home.

There was a story teller, who told a child-friendly version of the story of Saint Lucia (with most of the violence edited out). We learned that she was very brave and generous, and that here husband hated her for giving all her things to the poor and therfore turned her in to the evil emperor. Then entered the Lucia, looking just as they do at home in a white gown with a red sash and crown with candles. While I was singing she lit some candles and lanterns, and then she sang a song that is attributed to the Saint when she was in prison. Then there was a prayer for people in prison and for light in our lives. After this we moved to another room and had a "traditional Lucia breakfast". (They had no saffron in their buns, and they ate them with cheese and jam...)

The Sankta Lucia song in English and German translation.

I rediscover music

2007-12-13T02:14:00.000-05:00

I'm really, really tired today. The combination of being responsible for detector operation for the first time (meaning that I monitor the detectors online and sometimes have to intervene and adjust things), having a social life and being a parent has resulted in a lack of sleep this week.

This is why I decided to try to get some noise in my office, to keep me awake. The post-doc I'm sharing the room with is gone for the week, and so I don't risk disturbing her. I have no music on my work computer, and the first thing to come into my head to look for was The No-Shows from the novel I'm reading at the moment: Keeping It Real by Justina Robson.

Interesting! As strange as it might seem, I had actually forgotten how energized I can be by music. I suddenly felt twice as alive, and actually managed to do something instead of just blankly staring at the computer screen. Why have I been so uninterested in music for so long? I cannot remember when I lost the habit.

The next step was to explore what other things I could find to listen to. That's the dangerous part, where lots of time can be lost. Today I think I gained more than I lost, but I'll have to watch myself there.

A long time ago I had a boss who told me that it's impossible to work while listening to music. My mentor in that work place was listening to AC/DC in his office, but my boss respected him too much to say anything about it. I can understand that music can be distracting, but whether it's good or bad for productivity must depend a lot on what you are doing and what music you are listening to. I'll probably listen to a lot more music at work in the future than I have done for the last few years.

When I'm talking about music I might as well mention that my brother has a new record out with his band.

Dark star

2007-12-10T20:44:00.000-05:00

It's not so strange that I get some of my science news via sf blogs, but I found it amusing that I now learned about some new theory work on dark matter (my own field) from Bowing to the Future. In this post Lou Anders makes the connection between dark stars and Cthulhu:

"...the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh ... was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults . . ." —H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Old ones or not, the idea presented in the article (well, the popular version of it -- I haven't read the real paper yet) is interesting. If the dark matter consists of particles that annihilate when they collide, as we often assume, this could mean that it prevented some of the early stars to light up. If the clumps of matter that were beginning to knot together to form stars contained lots of dark matter, the concentration of these particles would mean more dark matter annihilations, which would release energy and heat the ordinary matter. This would prevent normal stars to form, but instead there would be giant, diluted stars without fusion, glowing only in infrared, gamma rays, neutrinos and antimatter. If such dark stars still exist today we could in principle detect them.

Theoretical predictions always leave me with a somewhat impatient feeling. So how is it really? It's a lot of good thinking, but until we can test it we still don't know if it is a description of reality. I want observations! The idea will mature, there will be calculations and simulations, and some scenarios will perhaps turn out to be testable. Then someone will think of a way to build a detector or use an existing one to try to find something. This process can take decades, so I should not hold my breath...

(There is also an old sf film called Dark Star. I think I have seen it, but I have very vague memories of it.)

Irrationality in literature

2007-12-06T00:36:00.000-05:00

I have an analytic mind. I like to take things apart and see what's inside. With this comes a tendency to see the literal meaning of statements. Add to this that I visualise very vividly when I read, that I see everything before my inner eye, and you see that I have a particular way of interpreting text.

One thing I don't always like is that I'm really, deep inside, a nitpicker and a besserwisser. In particular I instinctively dislike when people use words that have a precise definition in a more general (or perhaps metaphoric) sense. One example is the use of the word "carbohydrate" to mean "food that gives energy". I really had to bite my tongue at a breakfast buffet where a man told his friend that he really needed carbohydrates today — and loaded his plate with bacon and eggs. (There are no carbohydrates in that food, stupid, only fat and protein!) At the same time I think I should be glad that people are creative with language. It works as communication, and as long as the man doesn't think that he's talking about food chemistry it should be OK. I think. But it's wrong!

So I really have built in contradictions. My feelings tell me to be rational, my intellect tells me to allow room for human shortcuts and detours. ("My head is running standard time, my heart on moonlight saving..." Only the other way around.)

Anyway, I recently started to reflect on my reaction to metaphor and poetical descriptions. I usually see the literal meening of a metaphor at the same time as what it stands for, which is actually very nice. But the other day I encountered a sentence and just stopped. "The silent screaming of the Pullulus got louder." This doesn't make sense, it doesn't mean anything at all, I thought. "Silent screaming"? At the same time I noticed that it worked anyway, it still induced the right sort of feeling of something unnatural and bad going on. It works as communication.

I'm funny this way. It's probably obvious for most readers that a sentence doesn't need to be logically constructed, that you can convey a feeling without telling the reader straight out what the feeling should be. To me it's a great discovery, I never thought about it this way. In literature you are allowed to say things that has no logical truth value, that cannot be parsed in the regular way, and you can use this conciously to tell the reader something! (This also demonstrates something that literature can do but that doesn't work on film, which is sort of fun, too.)

"[T]he cold of a hundred winters seems to have been preserved in the stones and to seep out of them." You could not investigate this statement scientifically, and applying a thermometer to the stones would just show that you don't get the point. Isn't it great!

Somehow I think this discovery is related to something that has been bugging me for a while. Some people argue that science fiction is better than fantasy because of "its ability to convey apprehension about the universe and ourselves", the logical structure of it and the connection to science. I don't really believe this, because I think people are clever enough and have enough imagination to use metaphor and myth as one of the ways to understand themselves and make sense of the world. In some ways and in some situations it might be better and more useful than the logical and analytical angle. We probably need both, just because we are humans and work that way.

But on the other hand, we could actually work backwards and use the human reactions to literature to learn something about how we are wired. There is a literature professor, Jonathan Gotschall, who wants to reinvent literary criticism this way (scroll to the bottom):

[T]he field is awash with irrational thought, he says, largely because most literature scholars believe that the humanities and science are distinct. As a result, literary theorists rely on opinion and conjecture, rather than trying to find solid, empirical evidence for their claims, he says. By adding an element of scientific thought to literary criticism, Gottschall says, we could unearth hidden truths about human nature and behaviour.

If he does the research and writes a book, I will want to read it.

(The book quotes are from Wizards at War by Diane Duane and Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell by Susanna Clarke.)

God wrote the rocks

2007-12-02T17:45:00.000-05:00

The first time I encountered young earth creationists (and in fact any kind of creationism) was when the "school evangelists" in my high school (gymnasium) distributed booklets with the title "Are there any signs that God might exist?". It contained the things I now know all too well: flood geology, arguments about the lack of intermediate stages in evolution of species, stories about dinosaurs living together with humans... you have probably heard of it. I was shocked, and slightly offended. Did they really think they could convert anyone with this stupid stuff? It had nothing to do with the question of the existence of God as I understood it. And it was a silly way of reading the bible.

A few years ago I made a serious attempt at understanding how creationists think, why they think it's so important to stick to this idea. It was difficult to ask the right questions, but the impression I got whas that they (those I talked to on the internet, they were all Swedish) didn't really think that it was a very important question at all, but they found the idea of direct creation more attractive than the idea of indirect creation and evolution. It's probably just the internal culture in their churches, how they are used to talk about things.

I find this annoying, since to me it seems that they just decide not to think about how we learn and understand things about nature and therefore they sort of miss the point. I don't think they are any less rational than any of us, only much less empirically inclined. Reason seems to be important to them, but investigating and evaluating the physical world is not. (Remember, this is my interpretation of the creationists I've been talking to, I'm sure there are all kinds of them.) You can do all sorts of reasoning and be extremely cerebral without going out to see the evidence, and then you also end up with all sorts of conclusions which are not necessarily related to what the world really is like.

As you might have noticed, the discussions about the credibility of evolution now ended up to be about the role of science in society -- as we can also see from the incredibly infected (and stupid) debate in the US. I can not come to any other conclusion that this whole thing hurts both sides, research and religion, by focussing the attention on the wrong things. I recently noted that some churches have initiated an "evolution weekend" next year. This is probably a good thing.

In the end, the best answer I've found to creationists is still the filk song Word of God by Catherine Faber (follow the link for the complete lyrics):

Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.

It can be downloaded from The Virtual Filksing, performed by Kathy Mar. (I have the CD. There is also a beautiful neopagan song about fire, water and smoke -- this always makes me smile and think about the candles, holy water and incense generously used in a church (Lutheran!) I know in Uppsala.)

By the way, if you are interested it might be worth taking a look at what Dr. James F. McGrath has to say on the topic of creationism. Or about intelligent design:
An Immoral Godless Pseudoscience.

Random notes

2007-11-27T15:57:00.000-05:00

Janna Levin is someone else without answers to how to find time for writing:

I imagine that full-time research and teaching at a university doesn't leave much time for much else - how do you fit in your writing?

I have no idea. I'm open to advice.

I haven't figured out a smooth method. For long stretches I write as though that's all there is and then I research for long stretches as though that's all there is. And I teach. And I have two babies. Open to advice.

But she published two books, so I guess it works. I guess this is reality.

I can name several scientists, some of them pursuing academic careers, who also write novels. (I'm not sure if Janna Levin knows anything about science fiction, because she seems to think that she's more or less the only one -- at least she doesn't mention that it happens.)

And speaking of science fiction: I'm sure it's great fun to be able to teach a course where you can discuss things like the implications of sex and androids. This is staple food of sf, nothing new or special, but fun as a discussion tool. Why not base a whole course on discussion of possible future technologies and the implications for society? I would want to take a course like that!

I'm travelling too much now. After this week I might be back online ;-)

Update: I found a Book about love and sex with robots. Nonfiction. People write books about everything.

Communication frustration: time?

2007-11-24T21:23:00.000-05:00

How do people find the time to blog? I always have ideas about things I want to write, for one of my blogs (there is the one in Swedish for example) or for a fanzine, or just letters. I always carry a little notebook, where I fill pages with notes about interesting things I want to think about later. There are also times I start writing a blog post, save it as a draft and think that I will finish it another time.

Maybe I'm just not managing my time very well. Work, travel, parenting... I'm not sure how I could organise it any other way than I do. There are people with kids and with full time jobs who blog every day, but I have no idea how they do it.

Benjamin Rosenbaum wrote: "Still, writing time is there to be had if I want it, mostly before 9 am, in a cafe on my way to work." I tried this, but it doesn't work very well for me. It's really difficult to get out of the house even 20 minutes earlier than usual, and mostly I would need much more time than this to really think about something. I also find it difficult to shift focus to my actual work if I warm up my brain with thinking about something else.

Needles in haystacks are easy to find

2007-11-17T08:23:00.000-05:00

Do you know what attracted me to particle physics in the first place? It was the challenge of detection. How to you design experiments to see those unbelievably small things? How do you make sense of the signals or images from a detector? How can you be sure that you see what you think you see, that it was not something else that you had not thought about?

That's what I'm interested in, and as you might imagine it's often not a simple task. The analysis of data from an experiment can take years.

I found this explanation of the ATLAS "spam filter" nice. (ATLAS is one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which will be turned on next year.) Here about 40 million reactions will occur per second (40 million events in the detector!) and of these only 200 will be stored for analysis. We know most of the physics already, and the people working with this are not interested in looking at a lot of the well-known old stuff. Already this trigger system is impressive!

I hope the world will turn out to be arranged in a way that is not too difficult to make sense of from the data we will get soon. Perhaps we will learn what the dark matter really is. As you might know, the most popular candidate for the dark matter particle is the lightest neutralino, a particle that arises from supersymmetric theory. Supersymmetry is one of the first things to look for at LHC, and if this is a correct description of the world it will probably be discovered soon.

And if not, we might still get clues to what the dark matter particles can be.

Why do we think that there is dark matter in galaxies?

2007-11-15T14:12:00.000-05:00

Via Uncertain Principles i found this one minute explanation of why we think there is dark matter. This is a video of a Scientific American editor telling us that stars in galaxies do not rotate as crumbs in a cup of coffee, but as the text on a cd disk.

It's always easy to be a besserwisser when it comes to your own field of research, but I'm going to give in to the impulse to try my own explanation since I've made a promise to myself to write more about science. It is not strictly correct that the stars in a galaxy move as if they were attached to a solid disk, and I would be happier with a demonstration that did not introduce that notion.

Here follows Åka's (really short) explanation of why we think galaxies contain dark matter:

When we measure the velocities of stars in galaxies, we find that the stars far from the center move too fast. The gravitational force caused by the matter we can see is not enough to hold stars with those velocities bound to the galaxy. There is a well known relationship between the velocity in an orbit and the pull of the gravitational force, known since Newton. Therefore we conclude that there must be more mass, and more gravitational force, to hold the stars to the galaxy. This excess mass that the visible stars can not account for is the mysterious dark matter.

I still have to think of a way to demonstrate this with things found in my office ;)

Why we know that this invisible matter is not just dust or clumps of ordinary atoms (the "baryonic matter" mentioned in the video is just physics lingo for atoms, or more stricly atomic nuclei) is a different question. Maybe I'll return to that another day.

Banana Wings!

2007-11-07T20:13:00.000-05:00

When I came home today an envelope was waiting for me. Not a boring envelope, but a big, friendly envelope with british stamps on it. A real fanzine! For me!

This probably means that I'm really a part of English-speaking fandom. That's nice! Now I have to remember to write a LoC.

And I vaguely remember talking to Mark and Claire about an article I wanted to write. The Alvar Appeltoft fanzine archive, now donated to the Royal Library in Stockholm. Maybe. Maybe I'll put it back on my list of things I want to write soon.

But first I want to read Banana Wings 32.

Engineering dreams

2007-11-03T22:25:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I think I should have studied engineering, then I might have had better chances of actually doing some hardware work. Then again, probably not. Many engineers I know are much less interested in working with their hands than some people with purely theoretical background. So what is the secret to being included among those who get to actually hold a screwdriver now and then?

I hope to find the answer to this question soon. But I think that one of my problems is that I'm too nice and polite and just leave the lab when I'm told that there is nothing I can do there. I probably should hang around and get to know things (with the risk of being in the way or annoying people).

I seldom work with my hands at all nowadays, except maybe for replacing a lost button. I need a reason to do things, and I prefer to do things that others are interested in as well. Just wait until my daughter is old enough (soon!). I recently discovered Howtoons, and remember that I used to want kids to have someone to build fun things with. I might even build some electronic circuits with her one day!

Darker matters

2007-11-03T16:17:00.000-04:00

I recently learned that there is another type of dark matter than the one we are usually searching for. Apparently "dark matter" in electronics jargon refers to some kind of dirt that accumulates on circuit boards and other equipment. So dark matter sometimes gets in the way of the seach for dark matter! (Wikipedia does not now this second meaning of the expression. At least not yet.)

By the way, Sean Carrol in a recent post at Cosmic Variance concludes in a somewhat sarcastic tone that dark matter still exists. This is a comment to a science news story about modified gravity. The efforts to explain some of the observations with modified gravity seem far fetched compared to the explanatory power on all scales of the hypothesis of dark matter. Sean Carroll:

Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy that some people are continuing to work on a long-shot possibility such as replacing dark matter with modified gravity. But it’s really a long shot at this point.

Talking about dark things I wonder if goth is very different over here. You might have a hard time to be taken seriously in a black velvet dress if it's automatically considered to be a Halloween costume. But maybe it's safe if you wear it at another time of the year. (I'm not very goth, but I do own a long black velvet dress. And it's not a costume. At least it didn't use to be.)

New fanzine

2007-10-24T20:40:00.000-04:00

A new fanzine from me is available at eFanzines.com. It's called Physicality of Words on Paper, since it's really meant to be printed. I made a few copies for the Fearless Fantasy meeting last week, but before submitting it to Bill Burns and his nice fanzine website I tried to correct the worst typos. It's still not the best fanzine I've ever made, but it works as a means of communication.

This first issue (I intend to make more in the future) contains LoCs I got to my oneshot Of Physicists and Fen two years ago. There are also some notes about differences between Sweden and Canada -- is Sweden more science fiction? -- reviews of the webzine Flurb #4, the fanzine Steam Engine Time #7 and Steampunk Magazine #2, and some random thoughts and information about me.

Now it's online. Download a PDF, realize that two column layout is no good for reading on screen, print it, read it, and then send me a comment! (Please be aware that I didn't really have time to make a fanzine but made it in little ten minute intervals I found here and there. No masterpiece. But still.)