Physicality of Words

Interesting Little Brother link

2008-07-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-15T04:21:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-11T06:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-03T08:31:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-07-02T20:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-15T18:32:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-06-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-05-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-07T07:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-26T06:52:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-03-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-12T20:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-11T12:43:00.000-07:00

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?