Blogorrhea Junior

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering." -Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke, one of the Golden Age science fiction writers who fired the imagination of would-be space explorers everywhere, died today in his home in Sri Lanka. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was probably one of the most influential novels in the genre, along with the Stanley Kubrick movie made from it. His creation Hal  was an early model (good and bad) for AI constructs, along with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. From his first novel, Prelude to Space, which foreshadowed the Apollo missions to the moon, to The Fountains of Paradise, in which he described the construction of a space elevator now in the planning stages, Clarke, an engineer, was a practical visionary whose predictions had a habit of coming true. In 1945, he sketched out in a published paper the utility of geosynchronous satellites for communications purposes almost ten years before the folks at Bell Labs launched the Telstar and Echo satellites. Though he was by no means the originator of the idea, he was certainly a popularizer and active proponent of it, as he was of technology in general, and space exploration in particular.

Though his characters could be two-dimensional, his science was generally impeccable and inspiring. No one in my childhood reading made space or the possibility of "slip[ping] the surly bonds of earth" seem so real to me, not even Star Trek. It was Clarke who taught me what geosynchronous orbit and LaGrange points are, proving that a spoonful of fiction helps the mathematics go down, at least to people like me. That inspiration wasn't confined to interesting kids in science fiction. “I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books,” Clarke once said. I can only imagine how many engineers and other space scientists he inspired.

Aside from his novels, Clarke was best known for his three laws of science and technology:

1. "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
2. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

While the first two are important for egging on inventions and new discoveries, it will be useful to remember the third law should we ever meet an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization face to face, since far too many of us are prone to worship what we don't understand, as Clarke also illustrated in his Rama books. Generally dismissive of religion, Clarke was still painfully aware of the necessity of some kind of guiding morality. "As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying," Clarke said in 1967. It's still a timely message.

Thanks for years and volumes of inspiration and great Saturday afternoons. RIP.

[Cross-posted at Cocktail Party Physics]

Depraved Indifference

If you lived in or were visiting New York City during 9/11, you need to read this article, "The 9/11 Cover-Up," in Discover right now. This is especially true if if you were downtown or in Brooklyn at the time or have lived below Canal Street since then. It will explain why you've got a cough, why you haven't felt the same since then, and probably why you're going to get seriously sick in the future. It's also the most perfect example I can think of for why everyone should know a little biology, a little chemistry, just enough to know that breathing particulate matter of any sort is not healthy, whether it's in cigarette smoke or demolition dust. It would be nice, too, if we had some vague idea of the materials used in our everyday world as well. Better living through chemistry and all that.

I don't like to be a know-it-all, but even if I hadn't been working for an environmental consulting firm at the time, I do know enough science that my first thoughts about the air down there would still have been the same: it's not safe and it's not going to be for a long time, or without a professional hazardous waste clean-up. Not when everything in both buildings was pulverized so finely that very little organic remains were found, and burned so hot that it evaporated and aerosolized. When buildings of that size turn to dust and are thrown high into the air, blanketing an entire area and getting into ductwork and HVAC systems, then never properly cleaned, how can that be healthy?

More importantly, why would you believe anyone who told you it was? How can you look at this picture of what the Twin Towers became as they fell down and think that opaque, billowing mess was safe to breathe? Or that what it left behind was harmless? As they did with Katrina, the government failed to do its job in a truly negligent manner, one that smacks of depraved indifference.

The big question is why the EPA, Christy Todd Whitman, and Rudy Giuliani lied about it. Why did the EPA do such a slip-shod analysis? Why did the White House suppress what information they had about the conditions and make it all seem all right? Was it simply not to give Osama the satisfaction of know exactly how much damage his operatives had done? Did Bush et al think that was never going to come out? Or did they think it wouldn't come out until their terms were over and it didn't matter anymore?

And people wonder why I'm such a cynic.

What Becomes a Legend

My dad, a huge history buff, was fascinated with Heinrich Schliemann's excavations of Troy. He'd read the epics in school (man, his education was so much better than mine, even though he only graduated from high school) and to have the stuff of legends prove to be an actual place fired his imagination all his life. An avid reader of science fiction and adventure tales (he's the one who got me hooked on Heinlein, Dune, and Clive Cussler) in addition to history, it was no stretch for him to see the possibility of legend and myth holding kernels or even large proportions of fact. I seem to have inherited that characteristic too, which is why the post on Deep Sea News about a sunken city off the coast of one of Japan's islands lit me up like a pinball machine. The Reuters video gives a great sketch of the find:

Let me first say that this is a apparently a disputed claim in scientific circles, and the lack of artifacts doesn't bode well. If this is a city sunk by an earthquake, logic says it  would have been much like the burying of Pompeii, with houses full of ceramic bits and metal implements. Even if the city had been abandoned years before, you'd expect to at least find old midden heaps or some sort debris and cast-offs, though it's hard to say what might be there without a full excavation. And underwater excavations are incredibly difficult and expensive. If the edges of the rocks look too square to be natural to you, keep the Giant's Causeway (right; click thumbnail for enlargement) in Antrim, Ireland, in mind. Underwater, it would be easy to mistake something like them for artificial constructions. Prof. Masaaki Kimura of Ryukyu University has said that the structures he's taken to be a city could be the basis (he's careful not to say the real thing) for the legends of Lemuria, Mu, and Atlantis, the other big legendary bugaboos now that Troy has been proven a historic location.

The ever-authoritative Wikipedia (see the tongue in cheek here? I'll try not to bite it.) proclaims, "Lemuria has been rendered superfluous by modern understanding of plate tectonics." But then, Troy was thought to be a myth for centuries before it was fully excavated. In fact, a number of lost, ancient cities such as Babylon were searched for on the basis of legends as well as historical writings. Go back far enough and it's sometimes hard to separate the legend from the history.

But disputing whether a particular legend is fact or fiction is not my point. My point is the plasticity of history and why it pays to keep an open mind. Often, fact blurs into legend and back again to fact in the various kinds of stories humans tell each other. Ancient history is very like the Telephone game because so much of it began in oral cultures. Whenever a story is told, it gains embellishments like the accretions of barnacles until the fact has been blurred and smoothed into something different but still familiar. This is because, people like to add a little bit of their own to the stories they tell, to take part in it, to mark it as something of their own. The story then becomes less factual, but not not necessarily less true. If it was a good story to start with—action-packed, with a compelling plot, great characters, and the shiver of schadenfreude—whether fact or fiction, that assures its longevity.

Even better if they have a moral, even one as common as carpe diem, or don't piss off the gods. Any fan of Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter, and Marvel Comics' Submariner will recognize the legends of the lost continent/cities of Lemuria and Mu—cousins of the Atlantis legends. They're commonly picked up by fiction writers, and spun into cautionary tales of cataclysmic apocalypse, often brought on by human arrogance or folly. (The same thing is already happening with Global Warming™; see J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, one of the first to pick up this theme, for starters.) But none of that invalidates the possibility of a story's factual beginning.

Keeping an open mind doesn't necessarily make one a gullible fool, but closing one's mind to possibilities until they're proven beyond a shadow of a doubt can certainly make one look like a jackass. Whoops, hey, Troy wasn't just a story. How about that? Nor does acknowledging the truth of Troy necessarily make the characters of Homer's epic into once-living historical figures. It does suggest they may have been. The site, known as Troy VII, suggests there was a massive war, and wars do breed heroes. Perhaps one of them was named Achilles, or Agamemnon, or Hector, or Paris—or Helen. Unfortunately, Christiane Amanpour wasn't there to get it on tape, unfortunately. But if one never asks the question, or entertains the possibility, one never finds the answer.

So was there a city or large island or continent that was completely inundated in a cataclysmic flood that was spun into Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu? It's not impossible. There are sunken cities all over the world, from the neolithic settlement found by Robert Ballard in the Black Sea (possible evidence of a catastrophic flood that may have given rise to global Flood legends across the world) to a part of Port Royal, Jamaica. Three ancient cities near the mouth of Nile disappeared almost instantly with a big glurp into suddenly liquefied sands of the Mediterranean, probably thanks to a severe earthquake. The oceans are largely unexplored, unknown territory. Who knows what's down there? And wouldn't it be cool if . . . 

Identifying with the Oppressor

There's a really interesting post by Wemblee that I stumbled across on the latest Feminist Science Fiction carnival, about something I once had a running argument about with an editor from the Women's Review of Books. Her post is in response to another about the necessity of female characters and the call and response goes like this:

A lot of the people I know, online and off, identify a lot more easily with male characters than with female characters, which I suspect is one of the major stumbling blocks when we all try to discuss this stuff from equally well-meaning but very different positions. Because I don't identify more easily with men than with women. I don't know why that is. It wasn't, when I was a little girl, a political choice I made. It's just part of who I am, and it influenced the way I grew up and the beliefs I hold as an adult.

I'm reposting what I wrote there as a comment (and I feel a little silly for the comment, since it's kind of off-topic; I probably should've just brought it here). I've edited it slightly, because I'm anal-retentive.

***

I think that's the stumbling place, as you say, in the debate, at least for me. I identify as a feminist, I love gender studies, women's rights is extremely important to me, and yet, I've always identified with male characters more. I understand that part of this is because I grew up in a patriarchal culture; I understand that part of it must be misogyny.

But when debates about misogyny in fandom, or in source texts, roll around, as much as I enjoy those debates for the most part, I often leave feeling like I'm a bad feminist since I always identified with those male characters reflexively.

Now the argument I had, which occurred when I was reviewing books that were both feminist studies of science fiction and science fiction by women (which is not necessarily feminist), was all about ideology. Like Wemblee, I too had identified with the male characters in the books I'd read, and I too enjoy the debates about misogyny (and why can't I spell that word?). The editor wanted me to change what I'd written about identifying with male characters to read as though that had somehow stifled me as a girl. But it hadn't. Like Wemblee, I left the argument feeling like a bad feminist, and I wasn't yet sure enough of my own feminist convictions or personal experience to tell the editor she had no business interpreting  my opinions or experience for me.

Is my identification with male characters due to growing up in a patriarchal culture?  In part, yes. Guys often had (and still have) the juiciest roles in fiction and movies, because they can. But that's a very different thing than saying that personal identification with male characters makes one a misogynist. One needs to aspire to something, and if the only roles one admires are filled by men, then that's what one identifies with, whether you're male or female. Otherwise, it's like saying that a guy who becomes a chef because his mother was a great cook is a misanthrope. Sounds silly, doesn't it? So why are we hobbling ourselves with this outmoded ideology? A better response would be a variation on "hate the sin, not the sinner": identify with the role, not the gender.

Now, I realize that I'm saying this from the perspective of a fairly privileged, middle class white woman. As a woman, I've faced a fair amount of misogyny and discrimination, but nothing like working class people of color have dealt with. But it seems to me that there is no other way to rise above where you are now than to imagine yourself elsewhere first. Do we need role models for our imagination? Isn't that limiting the imagination? Somebody's gotta be first, after all. Why not you?

Intellectually, I understand that the preponderance of male characters and the dearth of female ones, was/is soul-sucking for many women and girls, especially in science fiction circles. I'm not sure how I managed to have enough sense of myself for that not to be the case for me. Even after I absorbed a great deal of feminist theory, I was more annoyed at the ignoring of women and their physical silencing in the real world than by their lack of presence as strong characters in books. Maybe it was because I was an only child in a pretty matriarchal household that I grew up thinking I could pretty much do anything I wanted, and that just because a male character was the protagonist with special abilities and powers didn't mean I couldn't fill the same role myself. Identifying with a male character, for me, did not mean I wanted to be male; it meant I wanted to do those things that the male hero was able to do—and didn't see why I couldn't. It's not the penis we envy, Dr. Freud, it's the power.

I think one of the ideas that has gotten lost in the feminist waves of the 20th century is that, male or female, we are human. If gender is a construct, so is the idea that there is nothing that men and women share, or can share. We've been so intent on delineating where we differ and why that matters that we've given our similarities short shrift. Our physical differences are so trivial and are rightly denigrated as a basis for discrimination, but our imaginations are not different at all. We can imagine that we can do anything at all, regardless of who we see doing it first. That seems to be the premise that I started with in life, and it took a lot of very subtle social conditioning to beat it out of me. I usually had to be told I couldn't do something because I was a girl before the thought occurred to me, and the only time I seemed to believe it was when my female friends said it. If a boy or my dad said it, God help him!  All it did was make me mad, and more determined than ever that I'd do it, whether it was chemistry, taking a class on small engines, or rewiring a lamp.

Science fiction was particularly forgiving in this way, for me. Its worlds are so unlike our own, or twisted just enough to open the door to other possibilities in a world that's just like ours, that the limitations and general assumptions in ordinary fictional settings are not as restrictive. In science fiction, anything can happen. Because it's the future and because there are already aliens as a given, the crew of a spaceship from earth can include Russians (our former enemies from the Cold War), women, and people of color. Science fiction is not just the refuge of the Other. It's where the Other becomes the norm, where we are all Other.

Like Wemblee, I'm going out on a limb here with my "bad" feminism and calling for women to get over the idea that they must have female mentors, female role models to succeed in life, because this is the flip side of gender stereotyping. If you need a woman to validate your choices in life, then you are limiting yourself as much as men, for centuries, have limited themselves by requiring that women validate male roles by "staying in their places."

Here's an example from my own experience. I started off my college career as a biology major at a strongly feminist women's college. Science being the male bastion it was (and still is in many fields), all but one of my profs were male, as my high school science teachers had been too. I only took one course with the lone female prof and she and I didn't like each other much, a fact that matters in the small classes of a tiny liberal arts college. But my male profs were all, without exception, encouraging, demanding, and understanding. This is probably a function of being at women's college, where you would not last long as an instructor if you were a misogynist asshole. My point, though, is that there are men out there who get it, just as there are women out there who don't.

It's dangerous to limit yourself to identifying only with your own gender. For one thing, you're limiting yourself to only one point of view, one way of looking at the world, one way of doing things. This works better for men than for women because they've made the rules for so long. For women, it can be crippling. The playing field is not level yet, and we are not yet in a position to do much more than negotiate the shots men call, which means we have to learn to think a little like men to beat them at the game. Like learning any new skill, we have to learn to use the rules—no matter how unjust or how little we may like them—before we can break or change them.

Here's an example of what I mean. In the Times about Catherine Orenstein's workshops teaching women to write op-ed essays, and why that's important. (And can I just add that the headline is just another bit of Times condescension to women? "Stop the Presses, Boys! Women Claim Space on Op-Ed Pages"?) There's a dearth of women on the op-ed pages, in part because not many women submit essays (and in part because not many men want to hear what women have to say). In a workshop, Orenstein points out that there are more reasons to write than changing the world, shaping public debate, offering a new perspective, or influencing public policy. There is also money, fame, and power.

“What I want to suggest to you,” she [Orenstein] continued, is that the personal and the public interests are not at odds, and “the belief that they are mutually exclusive has kept women out of power.” Don’t you want money, credibility, access to aid in your cause? she asked.

Cristina Page, a spokeswoman for Birth Control Watch in Washington, leaned forward. “I’ve never heard anyone say that before,” she said. “What you’ve just said is so important. It’s liberating.”

Orenstein learned this herself the hard way, as a professional. She's a journalist, author, and occasional op-ed contributor herself, i.e., she writes for money. But why should it be shocking and new to other women that access to public media can not only push your agenda but pay your bills? Have all the successive waves of feminism been for nothing?  Have we not learned to own our own power, our own knowledge, our own abilities? This is definitely a page we could take from the guys. Even when they're talking complete bullshit, they sound as if they are confident experts. We're still mumbling about how we don't really know anything after we've gotten that Ph.D.

Don't wait for someone to mentor you. Don't use the lack of female mentors as an excuse not to keep going or to limit your own vision. Instead, find someone, anyone, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., who supports and validates you, the person, wholeheartedly and enthusiastically. If there isn't anyone to do that, be your own mentor. Drag yourself up by your bootstraps. Fight the power! All too often, women bind each other's feet and insisting that you wait for someone else of your own gender to have done it first is one of those ways. If there is a man in a role you want, imagine yourself there. That doesn't mean you want to be them. It means you know what you want. Now go get it.

Why The Physics of the Buffyverse Matters

Full disclosure statement: I've been a good friend of the author of this book since before she started her career in science writing. I also did the first-draft edit for her. (As a Friend of Jennifer Ouellette [FOJO] I get to call her Jen in my review, unlike everyone else, who would use the sobriquet "Ms. Ouellette.") In some ways, this qualifies me uniquely to review The Physics of the Buffyverse. One of the reasons Jen asked me to do the edit for her is because I'm her ideal reader: I'm both science literate and immersed in fandom, though not necessarily Buffy's, and The Physics of the Buffyverse is aimed at a very specific audience: non-scientist fans of Buffy who are not necessarily science literate and may even be science-phobic. The Physics of the Buffyverse is a great entry point into some very complicated concepts for people who haven't spent a lifetime studying them.

Back when Jen first started down the path that led her to being a science writer, we both worked for large physics organizations: Jen for the American Physical Society (for whom she still edits APS News) and I for the American Institute of Physics. One of the big issues for both of these organizations was (and still is) public outreach. How do you make the general public, including congressmembers who hold the purse strings, understand enough about science to care about it and make wise policy and funding decisions? A particularly difficult group to reach is young women, who are (for reasons varied and hotly debated) discouraged from pursuing their interest in science. Believe me, outreach isn't easy. As Barbie said of math, science is hard, and physics has a particularly tough image problem. And science is often made both unpalatable and inscrutable by bad teachers, dry writing, and spokespersons with the personality of a petri dish. Not to mention bad PR. Ordinary people who are not making their living doing science want their science sugar coated. This may not be a welcome idea in scientific circles, but the good news is that you can sugar-coat without diluting the content. As Mary Poppins pointed out, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Science outreach is a subject Jen and I have discussed often since our first years in the physics org trenches. As a biology geek and former science writing teacher, I would have killed for either of Jen's books when I was teaching in the late '80s. At the time, there was precious little science writing for the general public aside from Lewis Thomas in medicine and biology and Stephen Jay Gould's wide-ranging collected columns for Natural History Magazine. In astronomy, Cosmos had only just appeared and Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way was just a gleam in his eye. In physics there was, uh, . . . Cosmos? I think I can safely say that science writing was just beginning to take off as a niche in publishing, then. Now there are shelves of the stuff, of varying quality and accessibility—and varying levels of complexity. And that's the crux of the problem.

Any good teacher knows that you don't start beginning students off with concepts that are so hard or complicated that it will discourage them. But this is a pedagogical fact that many scientists, when writing about their own disciplines for the general public, either ignore in their eagerness to communicate what they view as the fun stuff or just plain willfully disregard in their arrogance. What they do, in essence, is a knowledge dump from their years of advanced study: here's everything I know and the equations too!  Isn't it cool?  Well, I'm sure it would be, if we understood it. The key here is to simplify it: start with broad general concepts and work your way into the the more specific and complex. Build up the levels of knowledge and detail step by step. And remember that "simplify" is not a dirty word.

You needn't take my word for this either.  Over at Cosmic Variance, a comment from an undergraduate to one of Mark Trodden's posts on the usefulness of science blogs said this:

I have a biochemistry text that remarks in the first chapter that reading scientific literature takes several hours per article if done thoroughly (which has also been my own experience), but many of the technical details are both irrelevant and incomprehensible to a lay audience. Even abstracts are sometimes too much, so I think things like Scienceblogs’ project to present primers on fundamental concepts and Sean’s idea to translate abstracts from the arxiv into plain English are one extremely helpful thing blogging scientists can do.

This is exactly what The Physics of the Buffyverse does. As a non-scientist herself Jen has a good understanding of where and how to start. The method she uses is a time-tested one, based on The Physics of Star Trek by Laurence M. Krauss: give your subject a fun context and the public will read about it. Hint to scientists everywhere: here's a secret about many of the fans of shows and movies like Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy, Star Gate, Firefly, Babylon Five, and Farscape: they're smart and they dig science. And the beauty of fans is that if you write about their obsessions, they will read it, regardless of how tenuous the connection. Whedonesque, the blog of Buffy creator Joss Whedon, has more than 5,000 members and I'm not sure how many hits a day. That's 5,000 potential readers of this book right there, never mind the lurkers and word of mouth. So the fandom-science connection is actually a great way to target an audience, and reach an important segment of the public: people who are already science-friendly but not necessarily knowledgeable. And it will also reach fans who might be a little leery of science, because it's also about how Buffy's world works and how it differs from our own.

But enough about why this book is so important. The real questions are 1) is it correct and 2) is it fun? The answer is yes on both counts. The science is meticulously researched and fact-checked, despite the protests of various nitpickers. What's missing, actually, is the nits. The Physics of the Buffyverse is not, thankfully, so overly detailed or bogged down in minutiae that it becomes both unintelligible and boring to the layman. Instead, the book is carefully structured to start with the basic concepts of physics—thermodynamics, electromagnetism, mass/energy conservation, entropy, momentum, etc.—before going on to the more complex and brain-blendering theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, multiple universes, and wormholes. Start simple, work your way up.

The fun factor is evident in the chapter titles. My personal favorite is "Time Goes Wonky: Relativistic Tricks of the Temporal Trade," which opens with the sentence "Time must seem so irrelevant to an eternal being." The eternal being(s) in this case are not God but the brother-sister Oracle in season 1 of "Angel." For Jen, it's a short hop from Angel offering his watch as a bribe to the Oracle to a discussion of the history of time that, unlike Stephen Hawking's tome, is easy to understand, and from there into relativity. Look how easy it is:

To get an idea of relational time, let's look at a scene from "Doppelgangland" (B-3), in which Oz's band, Dingoes Ate My Baby, is playing at the Bronze. Hours before the show began, both the stage and club were empty. Imagine a lone metronome ticking away in one corner of the empty stage; that is the preexisting absolute time that Newton believed governed the universe. Then the club filled and the band members came onstage and began to play. Now the Bronze is no longer empty. The Dingoes don't hear the metronome. They create their own kind of time. The drummer sets the beat, and the rest of the musicians follow his rhythm, as do the people dancing in the crowd. That is the "relational time" espoused by Leibniz.

The problem with Newton's concept of absolute time is that since it lies beyond human perception, there's no way we can accurately measure it. . . . Since absolute time is beyond our ken, we need a physics theory that works regardless of which kind of "clock" someone uses. A young physicist working in a Swiss patent office obliged in 1905 with a theory called special relativity.

And there's your entry point to Relativity, in plain language, sans equations. That it's couched in terms of a fictional universe detracts from the accuracy not one bit. Nor does the simplification of the issues. Much of science is a need-to-know subject and the fine details and equations often just muddy the waters and frustrate the lay reader. A general grasp of the subject and its implications is what's required by most of the public and that's what's provided here, in clear, simple, and—dare I say it?—amusing prose. That it comes with a Buffy or any other kind of pop culture chaser is actually an added bonus in some circles. Whatever it takes to promote science literacy is fine by me. And The Physics of the Buffyverse does a great job.

Embracing Change

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a Republican (or a Democrat), nor a Luddite, nor a science-illiterate. And that's as defensive as I'm going to be.

Now I'm going to talk about climate change and why the data do not entirely convince me—and what the current conclusions reveal about how we view the world and our place in it. This post will probably bring heaps of scorn from anybody who's seen "An Inconvenient Truth" (which I haven't), but I'm actually writing this in the spirit of inquiry. I've discussed global warming with several people who ought to know (mostly air quality scientists) and they've never offered me a sufficient explanation beyond "that's what the models show." My problem is that I wonder if the models are running with sufficient data to extrapolate from.

I've got a fairly complicated view of global warming, which seems wiser than not (or delusional), considering how complicated the topic is. Climate science is a complex and fairly young science, as sciences go. Although the disciplines used to study climate (physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology, oceanography, paleoclimatology) have well-established principles and methodologies long used to investigate other problems, modern climatology as a discipline is not much more than a century old. By contrast, the study of physics, chemistry, and biology date back thousands of years, and as modern disciplines were practiced with some degree of reliability since the Age of Reason. (Yeah, it's scary that rational science based on the ordered accumulation of facts is actually only a few hundred years old.) Compared to, say, physics, climatology still has that new car smell. This matters only because the younger a discipline is, the less research has been done and the more conflicting ideas about theory there are. It's not a bad thing, but it's not what non-scientists, especially policy makers, want to hear. They want absolutes and incontrovertible facts.

One of the factors that most hampers scientists in studying long-term climate changes is precisely this newness of the study as a scientific discipline. Science depends on reliable, cumulative data and before we started keeping track of precipitation, severe weather patterns, average temperatures, etc. in a systematic, quantitative manner around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the written data is pretty spotty and, far enough back, virtually nonexistent. Calibrated thermometers, for instance, weren't even invented until the 16th century. And it's hard to have a sense of a global climate when you haven't even figured out how many continents there are, or quite how large the earth is, or what the ratio of land to water is, or what the chemical elements are. From paleographic evidence, we have some idea about other drastic changes in climate, in the earth's magnetic field, of the arrival and departure of ice ages, and of the rise and fall of oceans. Written historical records, as far back as they go, have recorded smaller blips in the pattern of climate: the Little Ice Age in Europe and the corresponding warm period, long stretches of drought, volcanic eruption-driven "volcanic winters." But any absolute accuracy in the data only reaches back into the 19th century—just slightly more than 200 years of data in a system that's been running for billions of years through innumerable and unknown geological changes. Even scientists at NOAA acknowledge that "[t]here are not enough records available to reconstruct global or even hemispheric mean temperature prior to about 600 years ago with a high degree of confidence." [emphasis added] And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just significantly downgraded their worst-case scenario from models run five years ago, because of new and improved data.

So here's my question (and it's definitely not rhetorical. I really do want an answer): If we only have about 600 years worth of data on mean temperature for a planet whose rocks are roughly 4.54 billion years old (though its life-supporting climate is billions of years younger) how reliable is that? 600 out of say, even 4 billion is a pretty insignificant fraction. Somebody do the math for me; I suck at it. The point I'm making is that, even if in the last 200 years the climate has changed appreciably (and I'll give you that it has), how do we know the earth hasn't gone through similar periods at other undocumented times in its history? Could the answer actually be that we don't? And if we don't, what does that mean?

Cause and effect in studies of complex systems like climate and ecology is not always a clear-cut thing: Do X and Y happens, unless P interferes or M isn't present. For one thing, living systems are often complex beyond our expectations if not our imagination, and are always surprising us in some way. It's hard to model a system that you're still discovering new facts about. For instance, how much influence does the Amazon really have on carbon dioxide re-uptake (subscription required)? And the phytoplankton we thought were doing that job too aren't doing it as well as we once thought.

Do I believe global warming is a fact? Yeah, no problems there. Do I believe it's entirely caused by human factors. Um, maybe. Do I think there're some alarmist claims on the environmentalist side? Yeah, I do. Do I think the Republicans are stupid for ignoring them? Why, yes, I do, if only because none of their suggestions—decreasing our dependency on oil; finding clean, renewable alternative energy forms, cutting pollution and in general living more lightly on the earth—are in the least harmful to anyone but oil company CEOs and stockholders, who already have more money than God. Oil is a lousy source of energy and there are much cleaner ones that would not even require major infrastructure changes to implement. As far as I can see we already have the technology to maintain the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed with energy and manufacturing and transportation that's at least, at a guess, 25% cleaner than at present, and the only thing that's stopping us is greed.

So I have no objections to the Kyoto Protocols; I think the US needs to get on board that wagon. They're one of the reasons I don't own an air conditioner or a car. I have no doubt that the climate change forecast by most of the accepted models, if unchecked, is going to bring catastrophic changes to Life As We Know It.

And there's the rub.

Over the last few hundred years of human population explosion, we've done some pretty stupid things. We regularly build on vulnerable coastlines. We've dammed and diverted rivers, ruined watersheds, farmed land never meant to be farmed and created huge dust bowls, depleted resources at a fantastic rate, and basically crapped in our own nest. We have, in short, expected the earth's climate and ecology to bend to our desires, instead of trying to figure out how to best work within the system. This is an old argument, trotted out on a regular basis by the early radical ecology movement (c.f. Jackson Browne's anti-nuke anthem "Before the Deluge") and not unheard of now. But let's face it: human beings are control freaks and we don't, as a species, like change. This is one of the reasons global warming and its consequences terrify those of us who take it seriously.

Our complex climate is doing things we haven't been either smart or numerous enough to take note of previously except in an anecdotal way and we feel put upon. The ocean is going to come in and wash away our sandcastles and it pisses us off and frightens us. And it frightens us with good reason. Human beings not only don't like change, we don't deal well with it. Changes in the coastline will affect national boundaries and the amount of land available for the people living within those boundaries. Whenever changes of this sort happen, it makes people nervous enough to think of annexing their neighbors' land, or going in search of more. In earlier centuries, climate change may have sent the Vikings on their raids or been a factor in the French Revolution. If the availability of fresh water is already becoming an international issue, just think what the shrinkage of arable land will do.

New Orleans is a drastic example of what global warming might bring us (and what might happen to Battery Park City here in New York). Or such is the received wisdom. The fact is that New Orleans was built largely below sea level with poorly constructed and maintained levees and it was only a matter of time before a category 5 hurricane came roaring in from the Gulf of Mexico and inundated a city that was built where none should have been. Don't get me wrong: Katrina was a tragedy, but it was a statistical tragedy of tempting fate in the same way Venice and the lowlands of Holland are. Build below sea level or on marshy ground, and you'd better be prepared to get wet. And this is precisely the kind of change we're not prepared for.

We have a long history of this kind of risk blindness. People regularly build on the slopes of active volcanoes, on shifting barrier islands, on landfill, on fault lines, in the regular paths of typhoons and hurricanes. Instead of developing settlements in safer places, we attempt to develop ways to protect ourselves from natural disasters. Often we wait until they happen to even recognize the problem, let alone find a solution, which is basically what we're now doing with global warming. The trouble is that global warming doesn't only affect us, but the entire ecosystem we inhabit. The consequences might be not just the obliteration or inundation of our own structures, but the extinction of species.

As a rule, we think of extinction as a man-made problem, and yet there have been extinctions throughout history that had nothing to do with us. At least five times during the earth's history, 30-95% of its species have been wiped out, making way for the ecosystem we see around us now. Because it's familiar to us and because it seems to have been around "forever" in our foreshortened view of history, this is the ecosystem we think is "right" and that it should be preserved at all costs. But if global warming is not necessarily a man-made phenomenon, but a phase of a cycle that's been going on for millions of years, we may be witnessing nothing more than a natural change. Even if we've contributed to it, somehow sped it up, this is nothing that hasn't happened before.

And without change there is only stagnation and ultimately the death of the system. Humans often forget (if we only recently began to understand) that we're one very disruptive part of a much larger system. We're not, however, necessarily the most important part. No, really, it's not all about us, though we like to think so, in our solipsistic way. I suspect this is because our lifespans are so short, and history is so long. Strangely enough, humans also like to think that we're powerful enough to be the sole cause of all the world's ills, as well as of its marvels. There's as much hubris in that attitude as there is in the idea that we have the power and knowledge to "fix" something as complex as climate.

The point here is that we're looking at patterns in the history of an extremely long period of time, from a very narrow point of view which assumes that much of what happens is either due to our actions or controllable by us or is, at least, going to affect us the most. But the earth has been going through climatic and geophysical upheavals for billions of years without human intervention, and I suspect that it will continue to do so. Just because there are enough of us around to make note of it, and our civilization is advanced enough to begin to understand what is happening, doesn't mean that what's going on is unnatural—just that the changes we see happening are going to affect us as they never have before.

Change of some kind in our biosphere is inevitable and the flora and fauna we live with seem to be far more flexible in their ability to adjust to those changes than humans are. They adjust sometimes by becoming something other than what they were, in a process we call evolution. The question is not what we'll do about the change in climate, but how will we adapt to the changes already occurring. Should we stop trying to fix global warming? Absolutely not. Truthfully, though, I'm more concerned about the social consequences of global warming than I am about global warming itself. We need to remember that change is inevitable and not necessarily the thing to panic over that we frequently think it is. Sometimes change is just . . . different.

Adapt or die.

Call for Proposals

I'm posting this for the folks at the Feminist Press, with whom I've been working for the past couple of months on another aspect of this project.  Please feel free to copy and pass on to others who might be interested.

Girls and Science—Call for proposals

The Feminist Press, in collaboration with The National Science Foundation, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that are suitable for school reports, these are rarely the books that girls seek out themselves to read for pleasure. What would a book, or series of books, about science that girls really want to read look like? That is the question we want to answer.

You’ll find several requests for specific proposals at our website. One calls for scientific detective stories based on the life, research, and discoveries of real women scientists. Another calls for stories featuring real young women—aspiring gymnasts, ice skaters, actors, dancers--using a knowledge of science to help them become really good at what they do. A third recognizes how popular Manga and graphic novels are with girls, and asks for imaginative new collaborations between Manga writers and artists to create adventures about girls who use real science to accomplish their goals. If any of these three book ideas interest you, please check out our website (www.feministpress.org) for more information about deadline and how to submit proposals.

But we do not want to limit our exploration. If you are a writer and have an idea for a book or series of books that is guaranteed to get girls excited about science, we want to hear from you. You may want to create a girl detective series featuring a set of friends—from geeks to sports nuts to mechanical geniuses—each with a knowledge of science that helps in solving crimes. You may want to create a story about a shy girl who goes on field trips with her favorite aunt, a forensic anthropologist, and helps to solve problems as she learns to think like a Dr. Bones. You may want to tell the story of a young science fiction writer who needs to study different fields of science in order to create her adventures. Whatever your vision, if you can write like a dream and can create works that are guaranteed to instill a curiosity about science in girls and young women, send us your proposals. We want to hear from you.

All proposals will be reviewed. Several proposals will be offered standard contracts.

Publisher: The Feminist Press at City University of New York as part of a National Science Foundation grant. (see feministpress.org)

Deadline: October 31, 2006

Format: Proposals should describe the project, the plot, characters, and length. No more than ten pages please.

How to submit: Electronic submission (word doc) to fhowe@gc.cuny.edu with the subject line "Girls and Science." Please include in the body of your email your address, phone number, email address and a short bio. Please also attach a brief sample of your writing (about five pages), and a resume that includes information about publications.

Rudimentary Knowledge

You Passed 8th Grade Science

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Science?

Well, thank God for that! If only I'd done that well on the SATs!

Found a cool-ish new blog via Tangled Bank called Science Creative Quarterly, which is not a quarterly, but is creative and scientific. They've got a project going to collect haiku that "reflect on an organism" as an eventual exercise in phylogeny. I love this idea. I love the idea of using poetry to teach science, and science to teach poetry. And with poetry at an all time high in popularity right now, it makes a great vehicle for getting people interested in science. Can you imagine science poetry slams? Geek ecstasy! However, the quality of what's been submitted so far provokes me to say they would have been better off with limericks than haiku (except the physicists have already done that). Some person (no doubt an undergraduate) calling himself Henry James (might even be his real name, who knows?) submitted this:

E.COLI IN MY BUTT
I learnt this today
there’s e.coli in my butt
also in my gutt

I mean, really. How execrable (pun intended) is that? By contrast, here's two beauties from Basho (remember these are translated, so the syllable count isn't necessarily correct:

First winter rain—
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.

A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.

Even the Haiku Generator did better after a couple of whirls:

priest captures gently
drums grope, gusting horsefly licks
disheveled apes pass

And at least one of the physicists (Robert D. Cowan) came up with a limerick better than that E. coli thing:

There once was a fly on the wall
I wonder why didn't it fall
Because its feet stuck
Or was it just luck
Or does gravity miss things so small?

I used to write a lot of science-inflected (no, not inflicted!) poems, when I was in grad school and all the biology stuff was still pretty fresh in my mind. I loved the metaphors one could spin from the characteristics of critters and basic principles, and how interconnected it all seemed.  Here's one of the ones I still like:

Swimming: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny

Ontogeny: the stages of development through which an embryo passes
Phylogeny: the evolution and development of a species or phylum
Alveoli: small air sacs in the lungs.

Vision of a dancer,
he skims through water blue
as tundra snow,
drifted with leaves
and mayfly corpses empty and papery
as abandoned wasp nests,
over white silica and quartz bottom
like a manta or skate.

O that we had not forever lost our gills,
that we had learned to inhabit water too,
breath through our skins, amphibious.
perhaps we would not yearn
so much for space then,
sprinkled with stars like diatoms,
where gravity bubbles around bits of rock
but really draws upon nothing
beyond their circumferences.
An expanse of blue, deeper,
tempts us there also,
to where there is no air,
where we may drift like lost kites
or wreckage,
swayed by currents or
the twitch of a fingertip.

But we become air breathers
in one blue slithering gasp,
confirmed groundlings
with earth's salts in our blood.
Before this,
we were truly aqueous,
tethered like a space walker,
our alveoli filled
with the suspended detritus of growth,
shed cells like plankton:
the flotsam and jetsam of ontogeny.

And now, when we hold our breath
and dive
for pearls, sponges, coral,
lost rings on tile bottoms,
grasp our treasures and bring them to the surface,
inhale,
we continue recapitulating
our search for thinner atmospheres.

Poets, help out the folks at Science Creative Quarterly, please! Let's show them science and literature can coexist not just peacefully but in good taste.

Truth is Still Stranger

Yesterday, Marcia sent me an email containing some pretty hilarious and very well done PhotoShopped "clones." Squirrels with panther faces, birds with dog heads, stuff right out of Mandeville. I admired them for the technical expertise in creating them, but as "monsters" they were unconvincing. Then today I wandered over to Deep Sea News, where this greeted me:

Go ahead, click on it. I dare ya! The real beastie—a sea anemone—is a meter around at the trunk, with the tentacle crown 2 meters around, and the tentacles themselves trailing to 3 meters. It's found all over the place in the deep ocean, apparently, where critters like squid grown to giant size too. So Jules Verne was not so far off in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (one of my favorite books as a child), and the world is still full of wonders we know little of yet. Somehow that heartens me.

Image by Stephane Hourdez/IFREMER.

Driving Mr. Science

I've had something of a hiatus from reading hard science in the last several years, lulled into thinking I was getting enough of it in Wired and the mainstream media. Reading Jen's books (I helped edit her forthcoming one) has provided a rude awakening. I'm not anywhere near as up on breaking science news as I used to be. To remedy that, I'm letting my Wired subscription lapse and picking up one to New Scientist instead.

I've always been interested in science, thanks to my early reading in science fiction. I'm not sure I'd have thought science was so cool if I hadn't been reading SF from an early age. Fiction, and SF in particular, made the future exciting, fascinating, full of both positive possibilities and terrifying apocalyptic visions. It made tech beyond TVs—rocket packs, credit chips, computers, rockets, satellites, telescopes and the burgeoning field of electronics—attractively cool too. It was one reason I pursued biology and chemistry studies all the way through college, taught science writing as a grad student, and one of the attractions (I thought) of working for the American Institute of Physics (nerd heaven!). One of the interesting things I've noticed since I first began reading Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, C.J. Cherryh et al is that the more I read about hard science, the more convinced I've become that SF is one of the major drivers of innovative science and technology, or at least an important part of the feedback loop.

I was thinking about this the other day as I used my debit card to pay for groceries. This has become such a commonplace activity now that most of us don't think about it. But sometime in the 70s, I remember reading a novel (it might have been by Philip K. Dick) in which the protagonist used something very similar—a "chip" or plastic chit "charged" with a certain amount of money, through which his movements were traced. (Come to think of it, this sounds a bit like the 1956 short story "The Minority Report," doesn't it?) Credit and debit cards are so common now that we forget they were just becoming popular with the middle class in the late 70s and cheap reliable magnetic reader technology coupled with computer networks didn't make them nearly ubiquitous (and give them their instant traceability) until much later. But I was reading about their common use in a decade when the latest thing in recording media was the 8-track cartridge and computers still used punch cards.

Of course, this proposition can become a nightmarish chicken-or-egg problem, since many SF authors either are scientists or engineers themselves or read extensively in these fields themselves to generate ideas. Good hard SF (where the story is built around the science and its consequences) requires research to make the settings and tech plausible if not actually factual. But there are some clear examples. One of the most obvious is virtual reality, which may not have existed for years in any form, if at all, had William Gibson not dreamed it up out of whole cloth in his breakthrough novel Neuromancer in 1984 (which seems a somehow appropriate year). The cyberspace/cyberpunk culture he brought to life in his novels spawned a geekboy fanclub amongst the nascent hacker culture that took his ideas and ran to their labs with them. Gibson has proven to be, if nothing else, a dramatic predictor and terminology spawner. Some of the more astonishing developments include neural implants, most of which are still under development but which may in the near future allow the restoration of sight, mobility, hearing (these are already available), or if Gibson's vision pans out here too, wireless interaction with your computer sans keyboard or mouse.

Update: And here's an example I can't help adding, though it's more a nomenclature influence than an actual tech driver. You can now teleport laser beams, just like Mr. Scott, according to New Scientist. It may not be just like Star Trek's teleporter, but this might be the beginning of a refutation of The Physics of Star Trek, which said teleportation would never happen. (See Clarke's Law #1, below.)

The most recent example of fiction driving tech is the still-experimental space elevator, first posited by engineer and SF author Arthur C. Clarke in The Fountains of Paradise in 1979. Clarke is one of the biggest drivers of space technology, in fact. As his entry in Wikipedia says, "In the 1940s he forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000, an idea experts dismissed as rubbish. When Neil Armstrong landed in 1969, the United States said Clarke "provided the essential intellectual drive that led us to the moon."

Providing the intellectual drive is not quite the same as dreaming up the tech on your own, but it's an indication of how influential writers of visionary SF can be. Clarke has been particularly so, if for nothing else but his three laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

One of the corollaries to Number 1 (I think it might be Heinlein's) is that the best way to invent something new is to find out what the experts say is impossible and then do it. This is one of the things science fiction does. Of course, it's easier to do on a page than in a lab, or at least you might think so. But even extrapolation from the state of current technology can be a bitch, and it takes someone truly visionary to imagine not only a brand new technology, or development in technology, but how it would fit into the world. What uses would we find for this new technology? How would the technology or devices affect society? Would it change human thinking or social structures in significant ways? For instance, just look at what the development of personal listening devices from Walkmen to iPods has done to music distribution and copyright theory.

These are not questions scientists routinely ask themselves, and not always because they don't think of them; sometimes they're not allowed to. The inventors of lasers probably didn't anticipate their use in gunsights, just as the inventors of GPS, closed circuit television, credit cards, and mobile phones probably weren't thinking (much) about the potential for Big Brother-style observation in their inventions. But these are exactly the kinds of questions writers and other artists ask themselves all the time. Science and technology are human pursuits that don't exist in the social vacuum scientists sometimes pretend they do, in their talk of "pure" research. As the pharmaceutical companies in general and Genentech in particular have demonstrated, research is almost always supported by a profit motive of some kind. Sometimes that's the main motive, and damn the social consequences. Those social consequences are what science fiction is good at pointing out. Maybe if we could get the research funders to read a little of it, it might drive their consciences the way it often drives their profit margins.

Update: And along comes Metafilter with a link to a site called Technovelgy.com, wherein modern inventions are paired up with their fictional precursors. And you thought I was just blowing this out of my butt, didn't you?