Want to get your science checked?

Those of you who follow this blog will have undoubtedly noticed that I don't post much any more. The number one reason for that is I've been in the throes of a PhD with very little desire to write about science/astronomy/astrophysics outside of work. Basically, blogging here stopped feeling like something fun to do and started to feel like more work, which is not what I wanted.

Defying Doomsday, an upcoming anthology

If you've been paying close attention, you may have seen my book blog, which I have been maintaining because talking about books is entirely unlike talking about science, even if they are science fiction and fantasy books. If you haven't already checked it out, you can do so here. I'm also editing an anthology, Defying Doomsday, which is currently being crowdfunded. You can read more about it here.

However, I still feel strongly about getting the science right (or at least, not horribly wrong) in fiction. To that end, I am selling five science checks as part of the crowdfunding for Defying Doomsday. If you've always wanted a professional astrophysicist to look over your story and tell you which sciencey bits are done well and which aren't so good, now's your chance! Here's what it says on our Pozible page:

Story Science Check

Tsana Dolichva, whose day job is astrophysics, will provide a professional science check of your work, assessing and critiquing the scientific validity of a piece of your fiction (up to 10,000 words) PLUS a limited edition hardcover copy of Defying Doomsday (exclusive to Pozible backers) PLUS the ebook edition of Defying Doomsday (all formats) AND your name in the book with our thanks

(For longer pieces please contact us and we can sort something out!)

I am more than happy to make arrangements to look at longer work if that's what you would prefer. It's a pretty good deal; not only do you get to have your science checked, you also get to support an awesome anthology! And if you're wondering, I have done some science checking before, including for professional authors.

Here's a bit more about Defying Doomsday:

Defying Doomsday is an anthology of apocalypse-survival fiction with a focus on disabled characters, which will be edited by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, and published by Twelfth Planet Press in mid 2016.

Apocalypse fiction rarely includes characters with disability, chronic illness and other impairments. When these characters do appear, they usually die early on, or are secondary characters undeveloped into anything more than a burden to the protagonist. Defying Doomsday will be an anthology showing that disabled characters have far more interesting stories to tell in post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction.

The anthology will be varied, with characters experiencing all kinds of disability from physical impairments, chronic illnesses, mental illnesses and/or neurodiverse characters. There will also be a variety of stories, including those that are fun, sad, adventurous and horrific.

The stories in Defying Doomsday will look at periods of upheaval from new and interesting perspectives. The anthology will share narratives about characters with disability, characters with chronic illnesses and other impairments, surviving the apocalypse and contending with the collapse of life as they know it.

An infographic

I am a great believer in science for the sake of science. But a lot of politicians people aren't and need to be convinced of the merits of things like space travel and telescopes. To that end, here is an info graphic you can throw at the next person who tells you science is a waste of money. It's probably safer than throwing a punch.

Source: GreatBusinessSchools.org

Bunch of links, mostly outdated

First up, square Earth anyone? Forget realism, let's just have a think about what an Earthlike planet would be like if it were a cube. Puts me in mind of the planet builders in Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. Brought to you by Discovery News.

Second, the Planetary Habitability Laboratory talks about brightnesses of the various planets in the solar system and also of exoplanets. An interesting read, particularly if you enjoyed my old How Bright is the Night? post.

Martian moons eclipse the sun in these NASA photos from the Opportunity rover:

Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

Enceladus pics from Cassini. Enceladus is one of Saturn's moons, most famous for it's ice geysers.

Proposed space robot to cannibalise old satellites which have previously been boosted up to "graveyard" orbits. Many mentions of zombie satellites and grave robbing associated with this one ;-p . From New Scientist.

And finally, laser driven fusion in California. From New Scientist again.

Happy weekend, gentle readers!

Responsible world-building

Something a little different this time. Despite my usual spiel about getting the science right and then attempting to elucidate said science, sometimes you just gotta make stuff up. Sometimes you really just need some FTL* spaceships or your whole plot falls over. There are only so many times you can write a story about slow space travel — or even relativistic space travel. All that I ask is a little consistency. So I'm not going to talk about building worlds in the sense of planets (there will be many other posts about that), I'm going to talk about making up convenient science in a sensible and coherent manner.

World building: not just about worlds.
Snagged from APOD.
Illustration Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA), TrES, Kepler, NASA

Some things are physically impossible. Some impossibilities are standard science fiction tropes, and that's OK. I've mentioned FTL, there's also telepathy (which, as Asimov masterfully showed, doesn't actually require space opera or science fantasy to operate) and worm holes. I am a bit more suspicious of inertial dampeners and hyperspace, but it does sort of depend on the story. I'd lump teleportation into the former list too, but that's a good example of something that we thought was impossible that we can sort of kind of almost start to do. Scientists have teleported photons across a lab and, more recently, I remember reading about a Bose-Einstein condensate (a small collection of atoms) being teleported, but I can't find a link right now so I'm hoping I didn't imagine it.

What they're actually doing with the teleportation at the moment is teleporting the quantum state of the photons/atoms. (I say this because I'm going to talk a little bit more about it shortly.) But that doesn't really matter. If you want to have people using teleports instead of lifts, then go right ahead. But you'd better have a good reason for them to have spaceships. Or a reason, at the very least, or pedants like me will whinge about your inconsistencies on their blogs and no one wants that.

The other thing with teleportation is that at some point you are somehow going to transfer a human-sized pile of data from point A to point B. I don't really care how you do it, but it's going to be a large pile (the upper limit, if you're curious, is about 10⁴⁵ bits) of data that does somehow have to be encoded and then travel. I guess the teleportation part is implying that the travelling is instantaneous (you can invoke quantum entanglement, for example). But what about the encoding? How long is it going to take to encode that sheer quantity of information? (Actually, I did a bit of rough approximating and I got about 10²⁹ bytes** for an average-sized person because the upper bound is, well, the upper bound.)

I assume you are going to let your encoding travel at the speed of plot. That's fine, if you're going to have some arbitrary reason, plot is better than most. However, if you're encoding people so that they can teleport, say, within a building in the space of a few seconds, then you had better not have them waiting a long time for their email to download. The speed of plot is the speed of plot, but really, you can't have different speeds of plot to suit your whim. It's sloppy and it annoys people like me. If you really must have them wait for their email, you had better have a damned good pseudo-scientific explanation.

To emphasise my point:

• So let's say a person is worth around 10²⁹ bytes (if you want to pick a higher number, knock yourself out; it will only make your data speeds more magically fast).
• If it takes them 5 seconds to teleport from A to B (and assuming it shouldn't matter how far apart A and B are) then that's 2.5 seconds to encode the data and 2.5 seconds to decode it at the other end. Or maybe decoding is faster. Whatever. Order of magnitude is close enough.
• So if it takes 2 seconds to decode 10²⁹ bytes...
• ...that's really fast. 
• I mean, have you ever tried to copy a gigabyte-sized movie from your computer to your memory stick? (and assuming you weren't using Vista...) A gigabyte is 10⁹ bytes so a person is 10¹⁹ gigabytes.
• And don't get me started on storing that much data.

But this is science fiction, so those aren't insurmountable obstacles. But they are obstacles that, once surmounted,  have vast-reaching ramifications. Like email. Or hacking into an enemy's database. So if you need slow transfer rates somewhere else, ask yourself why similar technology to what enables teleportation can't be used.

Obviously, these ideas apply more broadly than just teleportation, but that's the example I've run with. And with that I'll close this slightly sleep-deprived post.

Remember: build worlds responsibly.



* Faster Than Light, which is currently physically impossible.
**1 byte = 8 bits

Science fiction done right: Inherit the Stars by James P Hogan

So far most of the content of this blog has been more about the science and less about the writing. Today, however, I want to highlight a book that gets the science spot on.

Inherit the Stars by James P Hogan was first published in 1978 and is now available from Baen (it's even part of their free library). It's got a bit of a "Golden Age" feel to it but it's also recent enough that the science it covers isn't very outdated.

Now, I'm not saying that every mention of science in Inherit the Stars is 100% spot on and accurate today — it can't be, there's been too much progress in the past thirty or so years — but what really makes it stand out is the way in which it presents the day-to-day science and the scientific method.

The story starts when some lunar colonists come across a space-suited body on the moon. A very old space-suited body. Human and yet very much pre-dating human space travel. And so the mystery begins.

The the book can be best described as a scientific mystery as the characters — mostly scientists — try and work out where the body came from, not to mention who it is and why they were even on the moon. The best part is, they do it in a very logical and scientific way. I found it to be a very realistic depiction of how real scientists would go around trying to work something like this out, clunky 70s technology notwithstanding.

The way it was paced, with new hints and bits of information being gradually uncovered (or in a few cases, coming to them completely out of the blue) made it continuously interesting. The main character also goes off and does other things and time passes before new information is uncovered. Unlike in Hollywood, significant scientific discoveries take time to fully understand (y'know more time than just the speed of the plot). Also, because of how the facts were meted out it was difficult to guess the ending ahead of the characters. Which isn't to say that knowing science didn't help me guess a few things before they were revealed, but it was nice not having to read about dull characters that can't put the pieces together and see what's obvious to the reader.

So there you have it, if you want to see a shining example of science done right, go read Inherit the Stars. It's free, so what's stopping you?

(I should also mention that it's the first of a series, but I haven't got around to reading the others yet, so I can't recommend them either way.)

What really takes place at science conferences...

This is a quick world-of-science demystification post.

I get the feeling that what non-scientists think science conferences are like and what they're actually like don't quite overlap as much as they probably should. The TV show Big Bang Theory doesn't help. Brawls don't tend to break out and people are rarely drunk on stage, even students.

Of course, I'm writing this from an astrophysics conference and I've never been to a biological conference, for example (though I have been to a general physics one), so it's entirely possible that biologists do brawl... But I doubt it.

Edit: a biology friend on FaceBook informs me that they don't brawl either. She also reminded me that I should mention the after-hours drinking. No one's drunk on stage, but in the evenings, especially after the conference dinner, drinking late into the night is not unusual.

The basic format is a series of talks in a lecture theatre. There will usually be some longer invited talks and then the majority of talks that people have to apply for. You put in for a talk by submitting an abstract (online) and, if the organisers think your talk will be interesting and if it fits into the program (and if you have some modicum of credibility rather than being a walk-in off the street), then you will get a talk.

If it's a large conference, there might be streams where talks on different topics take place simultaneously in different rooms.

Usually, there will also be a bunch of people who present posters. These people will often (but not exclusively) be students or other researchers who don't have quite enough new material to fill out an entire talk. People who don't get to do a talk, but want to, will usually make a poster instead. Posters will be displayed in some room or corridor and other attendees will wander around during tea and lunch breaks, viewing said posters and talking to their presenters. Sometimes there might be something called a sparkler session (or at least, that's what we call it at Australian astro conferences) where poster presenters get 30 to tell the audience why they should bother looking at their posters.

Overall, the most exciting things that happen at scientific conferences are heated discussions about science, technological malfunctions and bad puns. No brawling, d'you hear that, Big Bang Theory?

The Evolution of a Science

As you may have gathered from the intro of my previous post, I've been at a conference, preceded by a winter school, this week. I had planned to have a post prepared before I left, but it was not to be. Instead you get a post inspired by said winter school. (And incidentally, this was written entirely on an iPad soft keyboard. It wasn't a bad experience, if you're wondering.)

One of the talks I attended spoke about where we are today in understanding galaxies. As part of the talk the presenter also went over the history of the scientific study of galaxies, which got me thinking about how a scientific field evolves in time and what we need to consider when we're inventing a fictional scientific field. Then, obviously, I decided this would make a good blog post and here we are.

This isn't really going to take many societal effects into account, which could be very important in some fields, especially when religion disagrees with scientific discoveries. What I am instead going to talk about is how the scientific progress gets made using examples from galaxy astronomy/astrophysics and a few other fields.

Breaking it down

The way I see it, the development of a scientific field can be broken down into four stages:

1. Discovery
The field first has to be discovered. This is a pretty basic requirement. In the case of galaxies, it was thought a hundred or so years ago that the Milky Way was the entire universe and contained everything we could see in the night sky. Then other galaxies outside of our own were discovered or, more accurately, it was realised that that "spiral nebula" in Andromeda was not actually within the Milk Way) and a field was born.

2. Classification
Once a bunch of galaxies had been discovered, Hubble and others started classifying them based on obvious characteristics of appearance. We actually still use a classification system based on Hubble's. However useful it is to be able to say, "Well, that galaxy there is elliptical, that one is a late-type* spiral," it wasn't quite giving us more information just yet.

3. Analysis
This is the part where instead of just collecting things, we start analysing them in different ways. While Hubble was looking at galaxies with optical telescopes, he also took their spectra. It was at approximately this point when he noticed that all the far away galaxies were moving away from us (looping back to the discovery point) and the field of modern cosmology was born.

Since Hubble, of course, many other people have studied galaxies. As new data became available, thanks to the progression of technology, we discovered dark matter (from studying the dynamic properties of galaxies), we learnt that galaxies can interact and merge and we have been able to observe them at all sorts of different wavelengths leading to the discoveries of a variety of properties of galaxies and other things. We have started mapping the universe (which, if you hadn't guessed, is significantly larger than just the Milky Way), inventing models like hierarchical assembly (sorry, I couldn't find a sufficiently lay link for this one) to fit our data and we are now much better equipped to study the evolution of galaxies.

4. Understanding
The last few points I made in the previous section are tied in with starting to really understand galaxies. This is the stage when we start to understand what's going on and become able to make predictions. As technology develops further, we can test our predictions more and more precisely and, sometimes this leads to discoveries of discrepancies and, again, we loop back to analysing and trying to explain these.

As hinted above, these aren't distinct stages. There is almost always going to be some overlap and a considerable amount of looping as the field progresses. And during the development of the field of galaxies, a whole lot of other (sub-) fields were born such black hole physics (well, more specifically, AGN), dark matter and dark energy (which are actually completely unrelated to each other).


*Don't get me started on why Hubble's ideas of "late-type" and "early-type" galaxies irritate me greatly.


Technology-driven advances

I mentioned above that some of the new discoveries were made when new technology made new data available. In the absence of new data what sometimes happens is that more and more elaborate theories are invented to explain bits of observations that we just don't have enough information to address.

An obvious example that springs to mind is the celestial spheres rotating in the sky which were once used to explain orbital mechanics. The idea was that the stars were embedded in a sphere made of ether or quintessence (or insert fifth element of choice here), surrounding the Earth which rotated around the Earth, accounting for the motions of the stars across the night sky. Then more spheres, with each of the planets, sun and moon embedded in one each, were added to explain the motions of the nearer celestial objects. As observations and measurements improved, more spheres were added to account for things like the precession of the equinoxes/solstices. Even Copernicus, when he came along, kept the celestial spheres and just changed them so that, other than the moon, they rotated around the sun rather than the Earth.

It wasn't until Kepler came along and developed his laws of planetary motion that we moved from celestial spheres to orbits and then, shortly after, Newton came up with gravity and proved Kepler's laws. Kepler was able to do this thanks to the more precise measurements of planetary motions made by Tycho Brahe. New observations made it possible to move forward and, indirectly, contributed to a new field (Newtonian gravity) to be born.

Moving forward

Now we have absolute proof of a lot of things in astronomy and astrophysics (and many other areas of science). Basically, we know stuff now. But we don't know everything, not by a long shot. Remember, just over a hundred years ago, scientists thought that we knew almost everything and only a few small details were left to be filled in. Then quantum mechanics was discovered.

I like to think of the pool of human knowledge as fractal; the more we know, the greater the area of the fractal and the more branches of knowledge we develop, the larger and more visible the infinite perimeter between knowledge and known unknowns becomes.

Solar eclipse: when TV gets it wrong

During dinner this evening, I caught part of Robin Hood on the ABC. (My internet-fu and ABC's handy iView tells me it was episode 1 of season 3, if you're interested.) Part of this episode involved a solar eclipse. I don't have a problem with solar eclipses. I don't object to them often having mystical significance or being used as a plot device.

What I do object to is the creators investing all their efforts into the CGI-ing of the eclipse (link to screen-cap) and not stopping to think about the immediate consequences. What am I talking about? Not five minutes after the eclipse has passed, we see Robin Hood standing on the battlements doing some heroic arrow firing with a backdrop of blue sky and a half-moon over his left shoulder.

A half moon. Right after a solar eclipse. What. The.

If you're feeling slightly lost at this point, allow me to explain. A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly between the Earth and the sun. By a happy coincidence, the angular size of the moon in the sky is approximately the same as the size of the sun. This means that the moon, when passing in front of the sun, can cover it neatly and completely.

Anyone who has stared at the moon for any reasonable length of time will have noticed that it doesn't move around the sky all that quickly. More quickly than stars, maybe, but certainly not halfway across the sky in the space of five minutes. Five minutes after the moon has passed in front of the sun, it's still going to be near the sun in the sky. This means that, since it's day time, it will cease to be visible as the illuminated side of the moon—the part facing the sun—is most certainly not facing the Earth since it just passed between sun and Earth. For there to be a half-full moon in the sky, it needs to be about 90º away from the sun which amounts to about halfway across the sky.

Would it really have been so hard to photoshop (or whatever the movie equivalent is) the moon out of that shot? Really?

People not thinking these sorts of things through make me angry. Especially since lots of people must have been paid to think about the solar eclipse and they all apparently forgot about the mundane moon in the sky.