Category Archives: science

Time to move on

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Dan and I are driving to Montreal, where I will be going to Worldcon 67 (Anticipation 2009), and Dan will be hanging out partly working and partly on vacation. We cross the Merrimac River, and Dan says, “Did you know there used to be salmon on the Merrimac River?”

“Well, I’m not surprised,” I say. “The lobster in the ocean used to be so plentiful that they washed up onto the beaches. They fed lobster to the prisoners in the jails so frequently that the prisoners sent a petition to King George begging him to make them stop.”

“Let’s face it,” says Dan. “The planet isn’t what it used to be.”

No, it isn’t. “It’s going downhill fast,” I say, letting my pessimism get the better of me. “Time to move on. Time to get that colony ship ready to voyage out to the next planet.”

“I’ll be the first to volunteer,” says my science-fiction-averse husband.

Whoa.

Wasn’t there an article recently in The Boston Globe Magazine in which the author opines that “The baby boomers are the first generation that will… actually live too long. By refusing to expire after a reasonable number of years, the boomers are threatening the social order”? In arguing that the average lifespan of generations ago was in the forties meant that people in their forties were old, the author has succumbed to a common misunderstanding. She has overlooked the fact that over a third of the population died in infancy, in childhood, and in childbirth. And in war. It was not unusual for those that survived these catastrophes to live into their seventies or eighties or longer. But the author puts forth an argument that may be only too popular among the younger generations: The old folks have been around too long. Time to find a graceful, civilized way to get rid of them.

Well, young lady, this is your chance. We can solve the problem of the Earth on her last gasp and the overpopulation of healthy boomers growing older in one single, visionary stroke: Just pack us up in a space ship and send us off.

Hey, maybe a lot of us will go.

We baby boomers get a virgin planet where lobsters wash up on the beaches, and you get to deal with this dying Earth. Do you think you might actually do something about it before the human cancer kills the whole planet? Somehow, I don’t think so. Maybe it’s already too late.

And worse: Wouldn’t it be just like us to ruin the next planet, too?

Observed in today’s science/technology news

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Google News top four Sci/Tech headlines for this morning, or… “One of these things is not like the others”:

Oppenheimer downgrades Apple to perform [from “outperform”, a stock rating]

Microsoft plans quick fix for IE [please be sure to download and install the patch to keep your passwords and other personal data safe]

Yahoo to scrub personal data after three months [glad to know that…]

and, oh yes…

Scientists say universe is expanding

Okay, let’s assume that we all guessed correctly that #4 is the one not like the others. The timescale of this item far outlasts the timescale of the other three. And let’s look more in depth at this breaking news.

Haven’t we in fact known that the universe is expanding for, well, years now, if not decades? But the big news here is that we now have added evidence that the expansion is accelerating. And you know what that means… Sometime in the future we will not be able to see any other galaxies but our own, even with the most powerful telescope because they will all be past the event horizon — farther away than the speed of light can carry their image to us. And we will be isolated in a lonely universe.

The implication of this discovery is that we (well, at least some of us) now believe that so-called empty space is not really empty at all; rather, it’s full of energy. And this energy also prevents the further “clumping” of stars into galaxies and galaxies into larger and larger galaxies, which our current mathematical modeling of the universe would predict but which we do not observe.

On a personal-interest sidenote, Einstein has also been vindicated. When he developed the General Theory of Relativity, people (including him) believed that the universe was static (not expanding). According to Einstein’s original theory, the measured effects of gravity should have been stronger than they actually were. And so Einstein introduced a kind of fudge factor into his equations known as the “cosmological constant”, set to -1. The purpose of the cosmological constant was to reconcile the mathematics of the general theory with observed phenomena. But with an expanding universe, the cosmological fudge factor–er, constant–was no longer needed. At one point, Einstein called the introduction of the cosmological constant his greatest error. But it turned out that the measured expansion of the universe did not sufficiently account for the discrepancy, and this set scientists looking for dark matter, and later for dark energy. And now, this measurement of distant galaxy-clusters reported in the news today may finally account for the discrepancy and explain the need for the cosmological constant by proving the existence of dark energy in otherwise empty space.

And where does all this leave string theory, the ten-dimensional universe, parallel universes, and other approaches not yet  considered mainstream physics? They are not disproved. Quantum field theory predicts that the energy of a vacuum should be 120 orders of magnitude (yes, ten to the 120th power) higher than those observed. So we still have a way to go.

World of Wonders: Cosmology Explained

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Thank you, Becky, for the blog party! Happy 115th post! Visit all the participants at Wonders Never Cease. May I bring something to the party? How about—a universe?

This may or may not be true, but it’s a fair description of opinions that a number of respectable scientists seriously appear to hold. And it really gets me.

It’s not just that all the stars and galaxies without number in our universe all came out of what can only be described as nothing much. When you look out into the darkness of night between the stars, you are actually seeing the distant past from before the stars were born. And the universe is still expanding. Some say it will continue expanding indefinitely, so that eventually all of our far and eventually even our near neighbors will be beyond the event horizon and therefore invisible to us in an increasingly dark and lonely world.

It’s not just that we have unobservably tiny particles with adorable names like muons and charmed quarks. And best of all are the strings—one-dimensional particles tinier than can be detected even in theory, miniscule units of resonant, vibrating energy out of which all matter is made.

It’s not even that they’re now saying that the universe comprises not four dimensions (three of space plus time) as we perceive it but actually ten dimensions. Or maybe eleven, depending on which set of mathematics you buy into. And where are the other dimensions, you might ask? It’s a reasonable question. They’re all very, very tiny and curled in around themselves at every infinitesimal point of intersection of the three dimensions we perceive. There. I’m glad I could answer that question for you.

And speaking of sets of mathematics, there are now a number of alternate theories explaining what’s going on in the domains of the very tiny, the very distant, and the very long ago and far away. The mathematics behind these theories is so complex that only a computer system can reconcile them. The theory behind this reconciliation, M-theory, holds that each individual version of string theory encapsulates a part of the truth, a viewpoint about the cosmos. The truth is: Human beings invented this stuff, but we can no longer comprehend it. At least not yet.

But what really gets me are the branes. A brane (short for “membrane”) is a surface of any number of dimensions that forms an elemental unit or building block of the cosmos. At its smallest, a brane might be a string (tiny vibrating unit of matter/energy too small to be measured; see above). At its largest, well… Some scientists think that the entire universe as we know it is just one brane in a larger structure of multiple universes. Some scientists have speculated that our universe (brane) is connected by a single string (brane) to another entire universe (brane) from which it was sundered during the Big Bang. The connecting brane is stretching and stretching as the two universes drift farther and farther apart, but some day, zillions of years from now, the connecting brane will grow so taut that it will begin to pull the two universes back together again. Zillions more years later the universes will collide and all matter and energy will collapse into, well, nothing much, until the next Big Bang comes along.

Until we can find out what substance the physicists are on and get some for ourselves, how can science fiction writers possibly hope to come up with anything this good?