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.

Comments

[Kristin]

I remember when James Gleick's book _Chaos_ came out in the late '80s, too. I read it right before taking a class in nonlinear dynamics, and although I remember being kind of critical about the places where the book deviated from the Real Science--such as when Gleick described Mitchell Feigenbaum's taste in shirts, as I recall--I think it was because the notion of a science book written for a popular audience was still so unfamiliar to me. Yes, I'd read _Cosmos_, and yes, my parents had given me a copy of a book with the best of The Journal of Irreproducible Results (the original one--this was back in 1982). But Carl Sagan was a popularizer, for crying out loud, and real scientists did not popularize! I got that message loud and clear and so figured that one had to choose between science and writing. And I chose science.

And now today, we have science books with titles like "Stiff" and "Spook" and "The Physics of the Buffyverse." (And I'd love to do a mashup of chick lit and science!) I think that now that science is yielding ever more thrilling results thanks to the more powerful tools we have, there's more curiosity out there. Maybe I'm a little late to the party, but it's been really cool to see the new approach to science communication take root during those years I was holed up in the lab.

[Lee]

Hey Kristin! I've never understood that aversion to popularization either. The publications that got me interested in science did exactly that: the early Omni Magazine (when Ben Bova was the editor), Cosmos, and even before that, Isaac Asimov's general audience books on astronomy, chemistry, and biology, everything Jacques Cousteau wrote, and the National Geographic. I talked my parents into getting a subscription to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's Oceanus for me, which was a general audience report on their projects. But I also came through the back door of science fiction too, which was just reviled in general, so I was used to the uphill battle. I just wish the scientific crowd would get over it--or quit griping. Can't have it both ways. So brava to you for going with the writing. We need more folks like you and Jen.

[Erica]

> As Barbie said of math, science is hard

You remember that one too, eh? ;-)

Cheers,

Erica

Hungry for yuri? Have soem Okazu: http://okazu.blogspot.com