Cocktail Party Physics

does science fiction matter? at all? even a little?

Oh, cool! My favorite topic. And somebody asked me to write about it! Peggy Kolm, over at Biology in Science Fiction, sent the Cocktail Party an invitation to blog about science fiction for ScienceOnline09, an annual science communication conference that brings together scientists, bloggers, educators, and students to discuss promoting public understanding of science. She and Stephanie Zvan of Almost Diamonds will be moderating a session on science fiction as a tool for science communication and are looking for input on the topic and to start an online conversation between science fiction writers and science bloggers. Since the primary function of Cocktail Party Physics is to communicate science to the masses (and here you thought it was virtual drinking), I'm biting. Besides, who can resist answering lists of questions about oneself? Not I! Since one of my first posts for CCP was about Arthur C. Clarke's space elevator, it seems only appropriate.

I will now proceed to bloviate. Or expound. Pick your verb.

• What is your relationship to science fiction? Do you read it? Watch it? What/who do you like and why?
  
  I'm a long-time science fiction fan who dabbles in writing it, and I occasionally teach it in literature and writing classes. I cut my teeth on the original Star Trek in the 60s and quickly moved on to harder drugs in the 70s: Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Cherryh, Norton, Pohl, Niven, Clarke, Frank Herbert, and reluctantly, Philip K. Dick. I read it wherever I could find it, and watched it when I could (in our one-channel household, that wasn't often; now I have no TV at all). I still think Babylon 5 is one of the finest pieces of TV science fiction ever made, though Firefly is certainly interesting and could have been a close rival had it gone on longer. Networks have a bad habit of canceling stuff just when it gets interesting, which is why I've always been more of a fan of SF (or specfic) in print than on TV or in the movies. That said, Star Wars hooked me when it first came out and deeply disappointed me later (though I'm an undying fan). I also saw Silent Running at about the same time and still think of it fondly. It kind of rode in on the cusp of the ecology movement and the thought of that orbiting forest was just heartbreaking. I still hope it wasn't prophetic. And, of course, there was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I didn't see until several years after it came out. That just reinforced my interest in astronomy, cosmology and space travel, Hal or no. "It's full of stars!"
  
  What attracts me to science fiction and its various subgenres is not just the hardware or the science but the world-building: how that science fits into the larger scheme of things, how it shapes society, how society interacts with it, how society shapes science in turn. I've been at least as fascinated by the interaction as I've been by the science itself. I think scientists sometimes unconsciously think of their research as occurring in a vacuum; it's pure and righteous because it's the search for knowledge. But history is full of boxes that were opened too early, or that couldn't be slammed shut again and I think that's one of the useful checks and balances of science fiction. It asks those questions about consequences.
  
  Currently, I'm following Iain M. Banks, China Mieville, Melissa Scott, Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, Connie Willis, and William Gibson, among others. Banks is uneven and can be extremely obtuse, but his conceptions of AI and a far-reaching, far future galactic society are fascinating, when they work. Melissa Scott brings some interesting twists to the hacker culture envisioned by William Gibson, who's gone far beyond that into more culturally interesting and less sciencey questions in his recent books. I like Gibson for his ability to anticipate or ride the culture and technology wave the way he does in All Tomorrow's Parties and Idoru. He and Bruce Sterling have really helped turn contemporary science fiction into futurism, and as a result driven some of the science itself, at least in computers. Neal Stephenson just leaves me in awe; even his not-quite-successes are provocative and thoughtful. I like that he's not afraid to ask big questions or use science in outrageous ways. Ditto with Dan Simmons. Did he actually coin the term Post-human? I don't know quite what to say about Mieville except he's a fascinating world-builder. I also have a deep fondness for Spider Robinson, who is one of the most humanist of contemporary science fiction writers, but because he's funny as all hell, gets little credit. He's the guy who first got me interested in Tesla. How could I resist someone who carries lightning in his pockets?


• What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any? Can it do more than make people excited about science? Can it harm the cause of science?
  
  Science fiction's job, first and foremost, is to tell a good story. That's the job of any kind of fiction. The science is a tool for telling the story and of course, tools get bent and broken when they're used. But the beauty of science fiction is that, because it's fiction, it's allowed to go out on a limb and stretch the facts, to extrapolate wildly, and take science down paths it might never go. Personally, I think the popular press does far more to mangle science communication than most science fiction does, precisely because it presents itself as definitive fact. We expect facts to be correct, and if it's someone not versed in science writing about  a new development, sometimes it's disastrously misleading. Fiction, not so much. It's a story. The important point is that science fiction can't be the only way of communicating science. It's a jumping-off point, not a primary source. And its job is not to promote science, though it can be a great vehicle for that.
  
  What science fiction can do that science journalism can't (or just doesn't, often) is not just elide the boring stuff, the drudgery of lab work, the negative results, the scratching for grants, but gussy up that process. For SF, it's usually the technology that's in place, or as in Geoff Ryman's novel Air, one that's about to go online, that's exciting. Sometimes, as in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise, it's all about the process too. Fiction is great at communicating the sense of possibility and the excitement of discovery. It humanizes the scientific process. People do science, and sometimes they do it imperfectly, or for other motivations, or hoping for other results. It's good to remind us all of that fact.
  
  As for harming the "cause" of science, I think you have to define what that is first, before you decide whether fictional portrayals can harm it. If the cause of science is to discover how everything works, to advance human knowledge, I doubt that much said about it in science fiction would stop or harm that. Humans are too curious to let much stop them from asking "Why?" and "How?" If the questions aren't asked now, they will be eventually. The mad scientist has been an archetype in the culture at least since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, if not Prometheus, and that hasn't stopped or hindered anything. Politics and ignorance do far more damage in that area than sketchy science in SF ever will.
  
  What stories like, say, A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Road or even Dr. Strangelove do is make us think about the possible consequences of new or old technologies. That's never a bad thing. If science journalism picks up the story there, and helps the public explore and make decisions about the use of those technologies in an honest and rational manner, so much the better. But sometimes a story can reach people where "just the facts" can't. Even if it's not entirely factual or absolutely correct in every detail, SF is serving science. Ask those engineering geeks who went around WorldCon chanting "The Ringworld is unstable!" at Larry Niven. Asked to derive those same equations for some other unstable system, they'd have been bored stiff. Sometimes those mistakes are just as important as the absolutely correct science facts.
  
  But if the cause of science is simply to go its merry way unquestioned by the muggles, that makes science fiction, even SF with bad science in it, even more important.  It's important that the questions get asked, even if they're the wrong questions. At least a discussion gets started.
  
  Then there's the question of what bad science is in this context. And who gets to define that? Is it "impossible" science? Science whose details are a little sketchy? Is it science that dead ended, like Steampunk, or failed science that transformed into legitimate science, like alchemy? Once you insist that science fiction stick strictly to the known facts, you've cut the heart out of it and you've cut the heart out of science's primary driver: curiosity. Should only scientists write science fiction about their fields? Oh, hell no! Save me from (most) scientists writing SF!
  
  One of the problems I noticed pretty early in my exploration of science fiction was that in "hard" science fiction, especially that written by people who were either scientists or extremely knowledgeable about science, the characters were often 2-D instead of 3-D. The writers were more interested in the hardware and tech than in creating strong characters. But you can't have a good story without good characters. Tech alone will not drive a storyline (one of the problems with the later Star Wars movies: they're too caught up in the special effects and props). And if you don't have a good story with good characters, you have few readers or viewers.


• Have you used science fiction as a starting point to talk about science? Is it easier to talk about people doing it right or getting it wrong?
  
  Absolutely. Not only here at CPP and on my own blogs, but in the classroom. For a couple of years, I taught a freshman composition course based on writing about science. We used one of Stephen Jay Gould's essay collections and a couple of science fiction novels each semester to both illustrate the difference between writing factually and writing about science and to ask questions about science itself.  One of the novels we used was Frank Herbert's The White Plague. Herbert did a lot of research about the availability of equipment and plausibility of developing deadly microbes in your basement if you had the knowledge, and was careful to be as correct as possible when describing the science and the construction of the underground lab. I still have my doubts about whether it would be possible for one person to construct a deadly microbe with his own resources in his basement, but my class swallowed it whole. The lesson I learned from this is that most people don't notice whether the science is wrong or right when it's a good story. They suspend disbelief, which is what writers want. What matters is that the plot seems plausible. What the book did do is start a conversation about research on biological warfare agents, long before the Sarin gas attack in the Japanese subway, or the anthrax scare over here. A number of students ended up writing research papers about it.
  
  I think worrying about "wrong science" or "bad science" in science fiction is something of a red herring, truthfully. I don't think it has that much influence, even on TV. As a literary genre, it's finally being taken more seriously than it ever has been before, but it's still not highly regarded or the type of entertainment that people take very seriously, unless they're already geeky.
  
  It's a kind of self-perpetuating cycle. When I recently tried to add "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler to the syllabus of a class I'm teaching, my supervisor's response was "Oh, take that out; the students don't like it and don't understand it." I suspect one of the reasons they didn't like and it and didn't understand it was because so many academics don't teach it well, and don't like it themselves. Which is odd, because it's a story all about communication, as well as about neuroscience. But it's a typical response to science fiction, sadly.
  
  The audience for SF is largely self-selecting, and while we're pretty passionate about it, it's not until someone like Cormac McCarthy writes a post-apocalyptic novel like The Road, or Margaret Atwood writes a piece of feminist specfic like The Handmaid's Tale, that people pay attention to the genre. Gaming is changing some of that, as have shows like Firefly, Andromeda or Farscape, but I don't think the non-geeky public at large pays much attention to SF, or, sadly, to science. And it's the non-geeky public that science needs to reach most.


• Are there any specific science or science fiction blogs you would recommend to interested readers or writers?
  
  Science Fiction blogs:
  
  I highly recommend Feminist SF--The Blog! and the carnival associated with it. And of course, IO9, but everybody's going to say that. More feminist SF at Ambling Along the Aqueduct.  And there's Lablit.com, which has the same aim that the NAS's new Science and Entertainment Exchange (headed up by our own Jennifer Ouellette), to encourage the realistic depiction of science. And, well, Eat Our Brains. What else would you call a group blog by SF writers?
  
  Science blogs:
  
  I love Deep Sea News for the critters and politics; Thus Spake Zuska's take on gender issues in science; Beyond Stone and Bone because I'm a history/archaeology geek too; and Cosmic Variance keeps me up to date on the physics end of things. Both BLDGBLOG and Pruned have a lot more science in them than you would think at first glance. And Bruce Sterling's blog over at Wired.

dance dance (your) ph.d.

Jules Feiffer used to draw cartoons for the Village Voice, back before it, too, sold out to the man, and every now and then he'd throw in an interpretive dance cartoon like the animated one that opens his website. The caption would read something like, "A dance to bowling" and a leggy, Giacometti-like woman would spin her way across the panels, inevitably ending in some kind of disastrous tangle. The subject of this post reminds me somewhat of those cartoons. I hardly know what category to put it in. Biomimicry? Fifteen Minutes? Communicating Science? Just how do you label an interpretive dance of your Ph.D. research? I guess "How cool is that?" works.

Dance, of course, has its own physics in its turns and leaps (one that Jennifer has covered in some of her writing about the physics of the fight in her Buffyverse book), but representing physics, or any kind of science, in dance is a whole different matter. This isn't the first collaboration of its kind, however. In 2004-5, Britain's Institute of Physics worked with the Rambert Dance Co. to create "'Constant Speed,' a ground-breaking physical interpretation of scientific principles," commissioned for Einstein Year. This year's first World Science Festival, held here in New York, featured Armitage Gone! Dance's "The Elegant Universe," inspired by Brian Greene's book of the same name.

Gonzolabs, the people who thought up the 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest, are also pretty sure that "the human body is an excellent medium for communicating science—perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting." Let's test that hypothesis.

Behold, samples from  "Taking Science to the Dance and Back Again," in which graduate students, post-docs, and professors dance their Ph.D.:

In true Jules Feiffer mode, we have Jolene Chang's "The Mechanism of Agrin's Function in Interneuronal Synaptogenesis":

For the more physics minded, there's also a hot "physics tango" of "Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes"; an interpretive dance of "Generating Entanglement in a Cold Atomic Ensemble via Atom-Light Interaction in an Optical Resonator"; "Understanding turbulence to use magnetically confined fusion" and more. Here's one of my favorites, "The Effects of Climatic Variability and Land Cover Change on Aquatic Ecosystems, Carbon Cycling, and Ecosystem Services of the Amazon River Basin":

Explanations of the dances can be found on YouTube by clicking on "more info" to the right of the video. Gonzolabs has links to all the videos. The winners, BTW, will have their research professionally choreographed and presented as "This is Science" at the 2009 AAAS meeting in Chicago. Gonzolab's adds that "the goal of this contest is to bring scientists and artists together in a successful collaboration. The output--"THIS IS SCIENCE"--will continue to develop with the aim of a full theatrical run and, hopefully, a world tour."

How cool is that, indeed?

H/T to Dr. Glam.

a spark in the dark

One wouldn't expect the 17th century English philosopher Francis Bacon to have much of a sweet tooth; he always struck me as a rather curmudgeonly sort, thoughts firmly fixed on Higher Matters, eschewing the paltry comforts of the flesh. But Jen-Luc Piquant suspects he might have had a secret fondness for hard candies, based on a passing remark Bacon made in his treatise, Novum Organum (published in 1620): "It is almost certain that all sugar, whether refined or raw, provided only it be somewhat hard, sparkles when broken or scraped with a knife in the dark."

Now, one could argue that Bacon was merely being an observant scientist following his natural curiosity, but stop and think for a moment under what conditions he might have discovered such an effect -- alone in a darkened room with a bag of hard candy and a knife to break up the pieces into smaller bits that were easier to consume. Sounds like a secret sweet tooth to me! This also establishes Bacon as the earliest to record the phenomenon, known as triboluminescence, a.k.a., "the Wint-O-Green Life Saver Effect."

I adored Wint-O-Green Life Savers as a child, mostly for the refreshing minty taste, but they also had loads of entertainment value. It's pretty well known that if you chew fresh, dry Wint-O-Green candies in a dark room -- or snap them in two using a pair of pliers -- you'll get a spark of greenish/bluish light. That's triboluminescence. In 1753, one Father Giambattista Beccaria wrote a treatise on "artificial electricity," in which he described how easy it was "to frighten simple people only by chewing lumps of sugar, and, in the meantime, keeping your mouth open, which will appear to them as if full of fire." One bets Beccaria was just a laugh-riot at parties. (Actually, considering the level of superstition at that time, he was fortunate not to be run out of town, or even burned at the stake.)

By the late 1790s, sugar production began to produce more refined crystals of pure sugar in the shape of a large solid cone. Once transported and sold, the cone would be broken into smaller chunks using a "sugar nip" -- I'm guessing similar to, say, nail clippers or a similar type of pinching device. And of course, when the sugar cone was nipped in a darkened setting, there would be tiny bursts of visible light, and Beccaria's little party trick became less effective -- because everyone knew about it by then. It's not just sugar that shows the effect, either, When a diamond facet is being ground, or the gem is being sawed during the cutting process, the diamond may fluoresce blue or green. Open certain postal envelopes in the dark, or tear a Band-Aid wrapper very quickly, and you might see a brief blue-green glow.

There's actually rather a lot going on here, from a science standpoint. The simplest explanation is that when molecules are crushed or torn asunder, electrons are forced from their atomic fields and start colliding with nitrogen molecules in the air. The collisions cause a transfer of energy from the electrons to the nitrogen molecules, which begin to vibrate (an "excited state"). The nitrogen molecules want to get rid of the excess energy -- I guess the vibrations make them uncomfortable -- so they emit light, usually in the ultraviolet range, but there's usually a small amount of visible light as well.

Or, as Wikipedia succinctly puts it: "electrical fields are created, separating positive and negative charges than then create sparks while trying to reunite." It's rather like a lightning strike, in fact. The effect is usually observed with asymmetrical crystals; when those materials are scratched, crushed or rubbed, the chemical bonds are broken and a small flash of light is emitted. Hence the name triboluminescence from the Greek tribein ("to rub") and the Latin lumen ("light").

The effect is even more pronounced with Wint-O-Green Life Savers because of the flavoring used: wintergreen oil is technically known as methyl salicylate, a fluorescent chemical, which means it absorbs light of a shorter wavelength and then emits it as light of a longer wavelength. So when you crush a Wint-O-Green Life Saver between your teeth, negatively charged electrons break free; the atoms that once were their homes become positively charged, and the free electrons start dashing about in search of a new home. Meanwhile the sugar crystals disintegrate, causing nitrogen molecules from the surrounding air to attach themselves to the surface. The free electrons strike the nitrogen molecules, causing them to emit invisible ultraviolet radiation and a faintly visible glow. The molecules of methyl salicylate (wintergreen oil used for flavoring the candy) absorb the ultraviolet light (shorter wavelength), and then re-emit visible blue-green light (longer wavelength). And you have sparkage.

Most of us would be satisfied with that level of detail in an explanation, but scientists adhere to higher standards. They want to know precisely what is happening atom by individual atom, and preferably even at the smallest subatomic level. That way they can better control physical phenomena, and the more you can control them, the easier it is to exploit such effects in practical applications. That's why researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began conducting experiments that exploited the effect to shed light -- literally -- on how materials fracture. They published their findings last year in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

"When you break a pencil, you actually have to have broken chemical bonds," Illinois professor Kenneth Suslick told the New York Times last year. "Yet our understanding of the process is surprisingly poor. I fact, when you look at the quantum mechanics of that, it isn't exactly clear how the breakage occurs." What is clear is that when one breaks a material, invariably this drives chemical reactions. And a reaction like triboluminescence "gives us a spectroscopic probe to see what's going on right at the fracture point," said Suslick.

But triboluminescence, as it naturally occurs, is a very small effect. The Illinois researchers had to figure out some way to amplify the effect in order to glean useful information from the fracture point (a spectral fingerprint, if you will). Suslick and his collaborators filled a test tube with a slurry of small sugar crystals and liquid paraffin, then immersed a vibrating titanium rod into it. This generated ultrasound waves, creating lots of tiny bubbles constantly growing and collapsing in the paraffin (acoustic cavitation). The shock waves caused the sugar crystals to collide, nitrogen and oxygen bubbled through the slurry, and the result was bursts of light 100 to 1000 times brighter than the usual triboluminescence. So far they've found the presence of carbon monoxide, CO2 ions, and other products of combustion, and are now working on determining the chemical reactions taking place during triboluminescence.

Research in this area continues to yield surprising results. Last month, physicists at UCLA announced that unspooling a simple roll of Scotch tape produces sufficient X-rays to make clear images of their fingers. Seth Putterman and several students constructed a device to unspool the 3M brand Scotch adhesive tape at a steady rte of about 1.3 inches per second, and placed it in a vacuum. They measured emitted light and X-rays.

Surprisingly, the tape did not emit X-rays continuously, but in short bursts -- enough energy to produce an X-ray image of a finger in a second. (A dental X-ray takes about one-third of a second.) The next step is to build a device that brings two pieces of tape together, and then rapidly separates them -- at a rate of around 1000 times per second -- using a piezoelectric device. The idea is control the effect, and hopefully miniaturize it for potential applications.

Something similar happens with cloth tape, which displays a glowing line where the end of the tape is being pulled away from the rest of the roll. Putterman's team has found most brands of clear adhesive tape also give off x-rays, albeit with a different spectrum of energies. Duct tape does not, and they haven't gotten around yet to testing masking tape. Apparently you also get triboluminescence when you tear off the piece of tape at the end of a roll of photographic film.

Given Putterman's prior work on things like sonoluminescence, it's not surprising that when asked about potential applications, his thoughts naturally turn to nuclear fusion. The idea is that energy from the breaking adhesive could somehow -- aye, there's the sticking point! -- be directed away from the electrons to heavy hydrogen ions that would be cunningly implanted into the tape. Those ions would accelerate and (hopefully) collide with sufficient force that they could fuse, emitting energy in the process. But fear not, OSHA! Ripping off a piece of Scotch tape is not exposing us to dangerous radiation on a daily basis in the workplace -- unless you happen to work in a vacuum. Air molecules otherwise intercept the X-rays, rendering them harmless pretty quickly.

A more realistic possibility is finding some way to exploit the phenomenon in simple medical devices to destroy tumors with bursts of x-rays. And like the Illinois researchers, Putterman's UCLA group is eying a potential application to detect x-ray emissions from composite materials as they start to fatigue (i.e., become more prone to cracking); current methods, which work very well with metals, don't always reveal weak areas composites in time to prevent a crisis. Since composite materials are increasingly used to build airplanes. I, for one (in a burst of self-interest), would support any new technology capable of telling ground crews whether or not the plane I'm boarding is likely to break into pieces mid-flight, 37,000 feet in the air. Just sayin'...

So, wintergreen-flavored candies and Scotch tape could be potential energy sources in the future -- bet the manufacturers never saw that coming. Science is weird. And in this case, truly stranger than fiction.

heads will blog

Fans of BloggingHeads.TV can now watch my latest diavlog with Big Daddy Chad (Orzel) of Uncertain Principles. We talked about dancing like a monkey, True Lab Stories, why choosing a small teaching college doesn't mean you're a "failure" in the Ivory Tower hierarchy, what's wrong with Neal Stephenson's Anathem (i.e., confusing Many Worlds with the multiverse, per Chad), and whether Cosmic Variance has sold out to The Man by moving to Discover magazine, among other topics. We only had an hour, so we did not discuss the "ghost muons" of Fermilab (neither of us being high energy physicists, how much could we have said?), or the direct observation of a new planet (announced right in the middle of recording the diavlog), nor did we explore the burning question of What the Hell Was Going on With My Hair. (The simple answer: it was a Bad Hair Day. Static cling is nobody's friend.) Next time, I hope Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna, makes a cameo appearance.

We also talked about a new major development in my life that I haven't had a chance to blog about until now. It's jumping the gun by a few days, but since it came up on BloggingHeads: as of Monday, I'm the new program director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange (SEE), a fledgling initiative of the National Academy of Sciences to serve as a liaison between writers, producers, directors and so forth in Hollywood in need of technical expertise, and the scientists best able to provide that valuable input. I'll write more about it in the future, once we're fully underway, but here's a snippet from the "official" description of the program on the Website:

The portrayal of science – its practitioners, its methods, its effects – has often posed a challenge to the entertainment community. Though it has inspired some of the most intelligent and compelling storylines, science’s many complexities have confounded even the most talented writer, director, or producer, time and again pitting creative license against scientific authenticity and clarity.

Likewise, the scientific community has struggled to find an effective conduit through which it can communicate its story accurately and effectively. Though many of the world’s biggest problems require scientific solutions, finding a way to translate and depict scientific findings so that reach a wide audience has required a sounding board that has often been missing.

The Science & Entertainment Exchange bridges this gap and addresses the mutual need of the two communities by providing the credibility and the verisimilitude upon which quality entertainment depends – and which audiences have come to expect. Drawing on the deep knowledge of the scientific community, we can collaborate on narrative and visual solutions to a variety of problems while contributing directly to the creativity of the content in fresh and unexpected ways.

Regular readers know I have a long-standing interest in the intersection of science and popular culture, especially film and television. And now I have the opportunity to be involved with a program that I think has real potential to make a difference. There's never been a better time, given the plethora of prime-time TV shows with scientific content and themes. The biggest indicator of how strongly I believe in this, is my willingness to set aside a thriving freelance writing career that I spent 15 years building up, in order to embark on this new adventure. I'll still be blogging, of course -- with the obligatory disclaimer that anything appearing on the blogs is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the NAS or SEE -- and will finish writing the calculus book, but my primary focus for the foreseeable future will now be science and Hollywood. (Jen-Luc Piquant feels so fabulous by proxy.)

Let's face it: ragging on the depiction of science in film and TV is a time-honored tradition on the Interwebs. There's an entire Website devoted to Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, and io9 just put up a poll asking readers to vote on which technical inaccuracies in science fiction annoy them the most. "Nuking the fridge" has a pretty high ranking, as does, say, performing delicate brain surgery in the back of a speeding van, but my pet peeve is the way science is often treated like magic: voila! Science saves the day! It's a miracle! I think real science is so incredibly cool in and of itself, and often stranger than fiction, as evidenced by io9's new list of the best real-life science fictional inventions of 2008. You really don't need to make anything up, or extrapolate very far from the truth.

That said, I'm convinced that while the constant snark directed at science in movies and TV might be entertaining to those in the "geek clique," it is not, in the long run, constructive, or conducive to fostering change in how science is portrayed in Hollywood. It's easy to point fingers and toss off zingy crowd-pleasing one-liners; it's a lot more difficult to actually offer well-considered workable alternatives in a format that is easily accessible to those in the entertainment industry. It should be a "win-win" for both science and Hollywood in terms of fostering creative cooperation between the two groups. I think the Science and Entertainment Exchange has the right idea, and I'm delighted to have the chance to put the hypothesis to the test.

the universe makes a lotta gas

Last winter, on my annual visit home to New England, I received the sweetest reminder of why it is that I have such a fierce love of scientists. My treasured nephew was three at the time, and obsessed with both monster trucks and the Chimney Sweep dance from Mary Poppins, tumbling over my mother’s kitchen broom and occasionally bumping his big bowling ball-like toddler head on the side table next to the couch. After twirling himself dizzy, he’d crash on the sofa hardcore, and then drift off for an hour or so.

One night after dancing himself silly, he passed out in front of a public television science special on the universe, something about Jupiter, I think.

When he woke a couple of hours later, I was in the kitchen washing dishes. He crept up behind me, still rubbing his eyes and said, “You know what Auntie? The universe makes a lotta gas.”

“Yes it does, baby,” I replied. And then we made cookies.

At three, my nephew knew more about the universe through osmosis than I did at twenty-eight, the year I took a temp job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that ended up lasting six years.

I’m a lab secretary. If I’m your lab’s secretary, I have access to your credit cards, your CV, your passport, and your society memberships. I could write a crackpot paper about string theory and its effects on pineapple custard and publish it under your name on Optics Express.

But I wouldn’t do that. My job is to get you to the plane on time so that you can present your brilliant paper on quantum physics and gravity in the solar system to a bunch of people whose lives revolve around fun new uses for cesium fountains. I have no idea what any of it means, but if some government bureaucrat gets in between you and your travels, I will cut a bitch to make sure you get to your conference.

At some point in my career, I evolved from an apathetic Paperwork Processing Technician to a fierce advocate of scientists. It might have been the irresistible charm of listening to John Dick rehearsing some operatic melody in his office late at night while I was shoveling Material Safety Data Sheets off my desk by the truckload, or the careful explanation of the Bose-Einstein Condensate that was materializing in a laser cooling lab behind my desk. They called it a Quantum Blob for my benefit, and I still think it’s a better name for the odd little thing that appeared on the breadboard and turned a grad student into a Ph.D.

Mathematicians wandering the halls without their shoes, grad students forgetting tanks of fog-spewing liquid nitrogen in front of my desk, using a dead $10,000 Class 4 laser as a paperweight. Utterly charming. Still, it wasn’t the odd quirks, the hiccups of bad manners or lapse of understanding in social contracts that spawned my devotion.

It was a rail gun.

A friend had been hired to write a screenplay of Robert A. Heinlen’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and called to ask what the best way would be to launch a big chunk of rock from the moon to earth, scientifically. Heinlen had imagined a catapult sort of contraption, but since I had a large pool of physicists at my disposal, I posed the question.

A small crowd gathered at my desk, scribbling notes and figures on worn post-its. After some spirited arguing, the conclusion was that a rail gun would be the best option for such a task. There was some more arguing about distance and velocity and perhaps something about torque and the actual size the rail gun would have to be to hurl a boulder of moon towards earth, but in the end, I had an answer. Rail gun.

Whether or not there was enough ice for a mining colony was answered with a quick call to a soft-spoken and good humored Jim Williams.

Hundreds of tiny facts passed from their brains to mine every year. Maybe the universe is shaped like a soccer ball…or maybe that’s a crackpot idea. The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It snows methane on Pluto. Whispering Gallery Modes. What happens when you toss a lit cigarette into liquid nitrogen. The universe makes a lotta gas.

All of them have this marvelous talent for explaining these enormous mysteries to me so that I can understand, which is a kindness and a blessing.

My scientists answer questions about general relativity with the same nonchalant tone of voice one would use when asked the question, “Do you have the time?”

Oddly, though I worked in metrology, no one ever wore a watch. And John Dick never changed his clock for Daylight Savings.

And so I fell in love with all of them. The high maintenance ones, the ones without shoes, the ones who dressed like they were rolled in glue and then attacked by clothes hampers on the way to work, and the ornery, cranky ones tend to be my favorites. There’s nothing finer than saving a cranky scientist from him or herself, when the bureaucrats and bean-counters call to harass them about the cost of a conference or a rental car.

They’re busy thinking about the universe, and how much gas it’s producing, and such calls and emails can break them into quivering balls of cesium-flavored Jell-O.

And they’re all weirdly grateful when I pick up a gauntlet and call the accounting department to explain that they’re to call me with the bullshit questions, because when they tie up my scientists with a four dollar discrepancy on a rental car, SCIENCE IS NOT HAPPENING, JACKHOLE.

All of them were once my nephew, pondering the amount of gas the universe makes.

My mom called a few months ago, telling me that my nephew was asking her for a white suit. I pictured him in some sort of Steve Martin-esque get up, wearing bunny ears. She explained that he needed it so when the astronauts go to Mars, they will see him and pick him up for the ride.

I thought his logic was pretty solid, so I got him the suit. It’s what I’d do for any of my scientists.

I hear the mermaids singing

Ever since I first heard Brian Eno's Music for Airports (hear a sample here) I've been into electronica and ambient music. WNYC radio show New Sounds' John Schaefer defines ambient music as "music of little or no rhythm, with background sounds and effects as foreground music." As my tired old arena-rock damaged ears get older, I find it immensely soothing and much better to write to than, say, the Stones or The Who, or even, God help me, Van Morrison. I was a band nerd in high school and though I didn't play an instrument, I occasionally "roadied" for our Class AA band because two of my best friends did. One was first chair flautist and the other played piano and percussion. Hanging out with them (and the influence of my classical and opera-loving mother) and another friend's hippie parents got me completely hooked on music of just about all kinds. It wasn't until grad school that I first heard music like Eno's though, and that got me interested in all sorts of things, some of which might be classified as noise by the undiscerning: like found music.

Yeah, you know what I mean: the car horn symphony like this one by Dennis Báthory; the folks whacking out percussion riffs on up-ended 10-gallon paint buckets, the sound of wind in the wires, even whale songs. It's ambient music in its literal sense: Take what's already in your environment and arrange it a little, or use objects that we don't tend to think of as musical instruments to create music. Paul Winter was one of the first musicians to do this with natural sounds, working with whale sounds as early as 1967. Twenty years later, that culminated in his recording of Whales Alive, an extended improvisation with whale song recordings recorded live at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (where the acoustics, with their seven-second reverb, are by turns magnificent and muddy, depending on the instrument and tempo).

We don't know much about the sounds that whales make (more samples here), except that they are definitely some sort of communication, rather than just echolocation (though they are that, too). Male Humpback whales seem to sing more than females and usually during breeding periods and in known breeding grounds. There's no Rosetta stone for Whale-to-human yet, so we're not sure what they're communicating, or if they're just serenading their girlfriends. They're haunting enough to make some of us want to sing along though, as are some other ambient sounds. T.S. Eliot is far from my favorite poet, but I've always loved this line in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each." Since whale songs can be heard for up to 100 miles, I've often wondered what sailors in wooden ships made of the sounds of whales through the hulls, and if that wasn't where the notion of mermaids first came from.

The urge to make music seems to be a universal human characteristic. It's a form of pattern recognition (or Gestalt psychology) as hardwired into our brains as language seems to be. We like to make sense of our surroundings, so we have a hardwired tendency to try to organize the random input from our senses into patterns, whether it's visual input, like Rorschach blots (right), stains on the wall, or sound input. Recognizing music in sounds or sounds in music is often part of musical training for sight reading and composition. This ability to make patterns crops up in odd places and can really come in handy at odd times too. I remember lying in bed listening to a loud building alarm going off for what seemed like maddening hours before I managed to turn it into a sort of white noise rhythm pattern in my mind, at which point I fell asleep to it. We commonly see it as a behavioral tic indicating boredom too. How often have you started to drum your fingers or tap your foot in boredom or impatience? Thus is born many a percussion track, like this one from the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, where the ambient sounds are human-made, and a couple of real musical instruments are added on to round out the composition, as Winter did with whale songs and his clarinet. In this piece, in addition to running water, you can hear lots of percussion on found instruments, wine glasses humming and a different technique that's almost like LP scratching, along with violin and guitar.

Srsly, what else do you do in Antarctica when you're not researching? You form a band!

Engineer and musician Noah Vawter, who's currently a Ph.D. candidate at MIT's Media Lab, takes found music one step farther with Ambient Addition,"a Walkman with binaural microphones" Like Báthory's car horns, Vawter's portable device takes the existing noises around the listener and reinterprets them. In this case, that reinterpretation involves a non-random overlay of sound, something with harmony and rhythm, two key components of music. He accomplishes this with the use of a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip, which does pretty much the same thing our brains do: overlays order on chaos. the result is that, instead of isolating yourself from the world around you with a set of headphones plugged into your iPod, you're actually highly tuned into your environment and experiencing the literally found music of it firsthand. Every walk becomes an original composition.

Another example of the intersection of electronics and music, and my new obsession, is Tomoko Sauvage's  water drip performances. Sauvage first came to my attention through a YouTube video of her performing on waterbowls in Paris (It's kind of a crappy quality video, so I won't embed it; here's a better one of her rehearsal with Scottish pop star Momus). She has a set of graduated-sized porcelain bowls filled with varying amounts of water that she plays like a percussion instrument with a couple of wooden kitchen spoons, accompanied by an electronic drone and drum track or electronic shruti box. Same principle as playing a glass harmonium, harmonica or harp (like the wine glasses in the video above): fill a receptacle with water and make it vibrate. The water acts as an amplifier as well as determining what note the receptacle "plays" by how much liquid you make resonate. The water bowls, Instead of being rubbed to make them resonate (as you also do with Tibetan singing bowls), are struck like a xylophone. The cool thing about this method is that the tone can be varied a little by stirring the water, which adds a vibrato. You can hear and see this in the Momus video I linked to above. The struck bowls have a bell-like tone similar to struck singing bowls, one that's deeper and more resonant than glasses. Don't try this at Thanksgiving with the jello salad bowl.

Where Sauvage's work gets back to the ambient is in her waterdrop performances, like this one:

In this case, she's using hydrophones to transmit the sound of water dropping into the bowls and hitting the bowls themselves, the water in the bowls moving, the sounds of her pouring water in, and her disturbing the water and flicking the bowls with her fingers. That kind of plooping sound the water makes pouring into the bowl is due in part to a process called cavitation (the making of a cavity), where air bubbles created by changes in pressure in the water oscillate and explode, creating teeny shock waves. Usually it takes a marked change in pressure for cavitation to occur, but fast-flowing water can do the same thing on a smaller, quieter scale than, say, a submarine or ship propeller. On that louder and larger scale, cavitation can actually erode rock and damage metal. In Sauvage's bowl though, it's more like blowing water through a straw: noisy but harmless. These are normally sounds you wouldn't hear well, if it all, without amplification, and a normal mic wouldn't help much.

Hydrophones were originally developed to collect sounds underwater and transmit them the way land-based mics do, to amplifiers and recording media. This is done with pressure-sensitive transducers "tuned" to the same impedance (how fast sound moves or propagates through a medium) as water, rather than air. Transducers turn the pressure of sound waves into electrical signals that are then decoded by the amplifier. Water is a great acoustic medium because of its density, which gives the sound waves more particles to push around, creating more pressure over the same surface area for the transducers to pick up. Because of this, even faint sounds, like shrimp clicking their little claws to stun fish (remember that shock wave?), can be easily heard underwater with a hydrophone. Sadly, now that we have the tools to hear them, some of those noises and natural songs are being lost in the noise pollution of ship traffic, which is mostly more cavitation noise when it's not sonar or drilling.

Hydrophones are used in a number of different research areas, from studying the aforementioned sea mammal communication and echolocation and estimating their populations and feeding and migration patterns, to hunting subs, studying sound propagation and visualizing sound wave fields (pdf), and monitoring underwater earthquakes and volcanoes. Whitlow W. L. Au, Chief Scientist in the Marine Mammal Research Program at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, was recently elected President-Elect of the Acoustical Society of America, which gives you some idea of how closely the two fields are intertwined.

But this is the first I've seen hydrophones being used to make music. Is it mermaid music, or music for mermaids?

they like to move it, move it

Fans of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the fictional Infinite Improbability Drive that powers the spaceship Heart of Gold. It allows for faster-than-light travel, per Adams, and is based on one of the central peculiarities of quantum physics: the notion that a subatomic particle exists in a superposition of states until it is observed and its wave function collapses into a definite state. Until then, every possible state -- however improbable -- exists simultaneously. As applied to the Infinite Improbability Drive, this means that as the drive reaches infinite improbability, the ship will pass through every conceivable (and inconceivable) point in every conceivable (and inconceivable) universe; the ship is literally everywhere at once, and you can then decide at which point you want to be when the improbability levels return to normal. Ergo, a body can travel from one place to another without passing through the intervening space -- provided you have sufficient control of probability.

This is easier said than done, of course: an earlier deployment of the improbability drive on board the Starship Titanic was designed to make it infinitely improbable that anything could go wrong. Instead, the deployment supposedly ended in a "Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure," presumably because it was not fully appreciated that "any event that is infinitely improbable will, by definition, occur almost immediately." Then there's the fact that human beings can find travel by improbability a distressingly surreal experience: they can turn into sofas, lose limbs, nuclear missiles can morph into sperm whales, and in this clip from the film version of Adams' novel, the Heart of Gold morphs into a giant ball of yarn.

But the savvy sci-fi enthusiast also knows that the drive is based on Brownian motion: the random jittery movement of particles suspended in a liquid or gas (a nice hot cuppa tea in the case of the Infinite Improbability Drive), which in turn gave rise to a mathematical model for describing such random movements that has found any number of real-world applications (although not, to date, in an Infinite Improbability Drive). Back around 60 BC, the Roman poet Lucretius penned this description of the random motion of dust particles, which he used as proof of the existence of atoms (a controversial view at the time):

"Observe what happens when sunbeams are admitted into a building and shed light on its shadowy places. You will see a multitude of tiny particles mingling in a multitude of ways.... their dancing is an actual indication of underlying movements of matter that are hidden from our sight.... It originates with the atoms which move of themselves. Then those small compound bodies that are least removed from the impetus of the atoms are set in motion by the impact of their invisible blows and in turn cannon against slightly larger bodies. So the movement mounts up from the atoms and gradually emerges to the level of our senses, so that those bodies are in motion that we see in sunbeams, moved by blows that remain invisible."

Lucretius was on the right track with his observations, all those centuries ago, although he didn't account for the effect of air currents on the "mingling motion" of the dust motes. Nobody really commented significantly on the phenomenon again until 1785, when Jan Ingenhousz discussed the strange motion of coal dust particles on the surface of alcohol. But he isn't credited with the "discovery" of Brownian motion, which is probably a good thing, since "Ingenhouszian motion" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

The name derives from the 19th century botanist Robert Brown, who was studying pollen particles floating in water under the microscope. Within those grains of pollen, he noticed even smaller particles jiggling in seemingly random motions. Augh! They were alive! Well, not quite. Brown was a scientist, refused to panic, and repeated the experiment with particles of dust. He saw the same kind of thing, and thus concluded that the motion did not occur because the pollen particles were "alive." (Brown's original paper is here.) Today, of course, scientists understand the underlying mechanics of Brownian motion, and appreciate its importance as a means of indirectly confirming the existence of atoms and molecules.

Say you've got a grain of pollen moving about randomly in a bowl of water. The pollen is a good 250,000 times larger than the water molecules that make up the water in the bowl. With the naked eye -- or even a simple microscope, like the one Brown used -- we can only see the pollen, which seems to move randomly of its own accord. What we can't see are the much smaller water molecules, which are jiggling in their own form of thermal motion. Those smaller water molecules collide with the pollen grain constantly, from all different directions, which should average out to little or no movement. But there are always tiny imbalances at any given time: say, 20 water molecules exerting a force pushing the pollen to the right, and maybe 22 water molecules "pushing" to the left. Because of this slight imbalance, the pollen will move ever-so-slightly to the left. And that's why we get random Brownian motion with grains of pollen suspended in water.

I found myself musing on Brownian motion while listening to a talk by Harvard University biophysicist Adam Cohen during the 2008 Industrial Physics Forum in Boston. See, the smaller an object is, the faster it will jiggle, and since individual atoms and molecules are very small indeed, this constant motion really interferes with high-resolution imaging. How do you pin down a single molecule long enough to really prove its physical properties in depth? Sure, scientists now routinely use laser tweezers to trap and cool atoms, and it's a powerful tool, indeed. But the smaller the sample the more power is needed to hold a molecule in the trap, and at some point so much power is needed that it "cooks" the molecule instead of just trapping it.

Cohen -- a relatively spanking new PhD who looks like a teenager (or maybe I'm just getting old) -- did his thesis work on coming up with a viable solution: the Anti-Brownian ELectrokinetic trap (or ABEL trap), which can pin down single molecules at room temperature. It's an ingenious combination of many different scientific tools developed over the last 15-20 years. You need a fluorescently labeled molecule of interest -- a polystyrene nanosphere, for instance, or maybe a bit of tobacco mosaic virus -- a fluorescent microscope to track the molecule, and a smidgen of laser light on the order of mere microwatts.

The basic idea is to slow down the molecule's instantaneous motion by zapping it with carefully timed bits of electricity, via electrodes surrounding the sample -- albeit at a safe enough distance to ensure no unwanted chemical effects are produced. Oh, and did I mention the microfluidics? The little "kicks" of electricity get transmitted to the molecule via tiny micro-channels in an underlying chip. Cohen also added glycerol to the solution to increase the viscosity a bit more and further slow down the Brownian motion.

It's essentially a real-time electrokinetic feedback process that can be used to control the motion of individual molecules: basically, those carefully timed electric jolts induces an electrokinetic "drift" that cancels the natural Brownian motion of the molecule. (Per Cohen, the feedback mechanism plays the same role as "Maxwell's Demon," enabling the system to seemingly "violate" the second law of thermodynamics by wringing order out of randomness.) The faster this process can be applied, the more efficient the trapping mechanism will be. So far, Cohen has used the ABEL trap to study fluorescent quantum dots, DNA molecules, fluorescently labeled lipid vesicles, single particles of the tobacco mosaic virus (the image above shows the actual trajectories of 13 such TMV particles held in an ABEL trap), and single molecules of large complex proteins, as well as fluorescent polystyrene nanospheres and cadmium-selenium nanocrystals.

Generation 1 of the ABEL trap employed microfluidics in a kind of "Magic Wand Device" for the feedback, said Cohen: four photoresistors in a diamond pattern embedded in a wand, which had the added advantage of being incredibly cheap (50 cents each). He could then drag the wand across a monitor to move the particles, and it worked as long as no shadows fell across the screen.  The brilliance of the microfluidic cell is that ABEL can move both charged and neutral particles -- the latter via a sort of "electro-osmotic" effect due to hydrodynamics forces (i.e., the particles literally "go with the flow"). For Generation 2, Cohen developed a software-based feedback mechanism to track the tagged single molecules, combined with CCD imaging. Now he can click on an image of the particle on a computer screen to move it around. And ABEL still allows scientists to study the dynamics of single molecules, since "the center of mass is immobilized by the feedback, but the internal dynamics are unchanged," says Cohen.

But the best part? Cohen's control over the movement of the particles using this real-time electro-kinetic feedback is so precise, he even managed to make a movie showing particles in an ABEL trap "subject to an arbitrary waveform": i.e., the eminently danceable "I Like to Move It, Move It" song from the animated film Madagascar. You can see Cohen's (very short) movie here -- make sure your sound is on! -- and below, for your aural edification, the "music video" from Madagascar's credit sequence, featuring the entire "cast," including Julian the Groovy King of the Lemurs (voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen). Get down with your bad selves, y'all!

do the wave

My last post about paper probably gave you something of a clue that I'm interested in the intersection of art and science. Photomicrographs are just a small example of that interesection. When you're not looking for information in them, they often appear artistically abstract and yet strangely unmanufactured. But information is not art without being somehow altered—either physically or theoretically. That is, a photomicrograph in itself is not art, just representation. But take that photomicrograph and do a painting of it, putting it in a new setting, a new medium, reinterpreting its information as emotion or human experience, and it becomes art. It often doesn't take much alteration, either, sometimes nothing more than a move from one medium to another.

This is one of the things architect/artist Maya Lin has done with her new series of wave form installations. The latest is an 11-acre installation at the Storm King Art Center in New York State called "Wave Field." The first of these was created for the courtyard of an engineering building at the University of Michigan, and started as a site-specific representation of what was being studied in the building, in this case, fluid dynamics and flight. There have been three in the series, and each installation represents a different type of wave in a successively larger landscape, from the small, intimate field of foot-high waves at the University of Michigan (right), inspired by non-linear Stokes waves, to the new Storm King installation, which features lines of 12-18 foot waves that you can walk through.

It's one thing to do the math and see 2-D representations of waves, or even to watch their liquid form breaking on a beach. But being able to actually walk through a field of frozen waves gives an entirely different sense of their form and function, and a graduated sense of their movement as well. It's the same effect walking through a dune field produces, but this is far more calculated and artificial. Rather than being a literal representation of information they become a proprioceptive experience. You can feel the shape of the physics, rather than just take it in intellectually.

Much of Lin's other recent work deals with various types of topographical representation, and is worth taking a look at. If you'd like a quick tour, here's a little video on what she's up to. The Storm King landscape will be open next spring. I hope they've planted it with wildflowers.