Books
drorzel | November 19, 2016People have been raving about the new movie Arrival, which is an adaptation of Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," which I did a guest lecture on for a colleague's class on science fiction some year ago. It's unusual enough to see a science fiction movie hailed for being smart that Kate and I actually arranged a babysitter for the night, and caught it in the theater.
It's a surprisingly credible effort at adapting a story I would've guessed was unfilmable. I wasn't as blown away as a lot of the folks in my social media feed, though. I think that's largely because I'm too familiar with the…
drorzel | June 17, 2016The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded-- it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, so instead we did it via Skype from my office on campus. (Where there was some sort of heavy equipment running outside my window before and after the interview, but miraculously, they took a coffee break for the crucial fifteen minutes of the actual call...)
You can listen to the…
drorzel | June 7, 2016The Pip is nuts about superheroes, so when he and his speech teacher made a book, naturally, it introduced a new super hero: Lightning Bolt. It's only a couple of sheets of paper folded in half and stapled, and the text and illustrations were done by his teacher, but the contents are 100% our Little Dude, so I'll reproduce it here.
LIGHTNING BOLT by [The Pip] Orzel
[Illustration: Lightning bolt's Mask]
Alternate Identity Len Boom
Occupation: Scientist
Speciality: Studying super powers. In his lab there's a computer that can communicate with Lightning Bolt.
Home Town: Lightning Bolt City…
drorzel | March 1, 2016As you probably already know, last year we ran a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute for science-fiction writers who would like to learn more about quantum physics. The workshop was a lot of fun from the speaker/oragnizer side, and very well received by last year's writers, so we're doing it again:
The Schrödinger Sessions is a three-day workshop for science fiction writers offering a “crash course” in modern physics, to be held at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), one of the world’s leading research centers for the study of quantum mechanics. We will introduce participants to…
drorzel | February 8, 2016I've been remiss in my self-promotional duties, but I'm giving a public lecture tomorrow night in Newport News, VA, as part of the Jefferson Lab Science Series. This will be my traditional "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, with the sad addition of a slide honoring the late, great Queen of Niskayuna (visible as the "featured image" with this post). This isn't the first dog-physics talk I've given since her death in December, but the previous one was the relativity talk, which has less Emmy-specific content. This one includes one of the video clips I made around a dog…
drorzel | February 5, 2016A long-ish stretch of time, but I was basically offline for a bunch of that because I needed to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. So there are only four physics posts from Forbes to promote this time:
-- 'The Expanse' Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Simulated Gravity Right: Another post on the SyFy adaptation of "James S. A. Corey"'s books, talking about a nifty bit of visual effects that nods at the Coriolis force you'd see on a rotating space station.
-- What Is The Quantum Pigeonhole Principle And Why Is It Weird?: A paper published in the Proceedings of the…
drorzel | January 22, 2016The Center for Quantum Technologies is running a "Quantum Shorts" contest, where they solicited short stories exploring some aspect of quantum physics. They cut their large number of applicants down to two short-lists of ten, one for the "Open" category, and one for the "Youth" category. They'll be giving out a "People's Choice Award" based on Internet voting, so you can go over there and vote for your favorite.
There are also judged prizes, and I'm serving as a judge for the "Youth" category (and already sent in my rankings), so it would be inappropriate for me to plug any particular stories…
drorzel | November 23, 2015The Pip is nute about superheros at the moment, primarily the Justice League, and particularly Batman. He's got quite the pile of toys around this theme, making for a decent photo subject:
The Pip's collection of superhero toys.
Technically, these aren't all Bat-Toys-- you can see a Spiderman Lego set in there (from some alternate universe in which Peter Parker got Tony Stark to buy him a Spider-Copter) and also a few Transformers. But Batman holds down a pretty solid plurality in the toy population.
The Bat-Boat that's front and center in this shot (which ended up in the bathtub shortly…
drorzel | November 1, 2015The hot SF release of the fall is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy, concluding the Imperial Radch trilogy. The first of these, Ancillary Justice won a Hugo two years ago, and the second, Ancillary Sword should've won this past year, because I really didn't like the Three-Body Problem.
The release of Ancillary Mercy generated a ton of buzz, to the point where, as I remarked on Twitter, I felt as if I were letting down some ill-defined "side" by not being more excited about it. But while I liked Ancillary Justice quite a bit (it's the rare book I've voted for the Best Novel Hugo that's actually won…
drorzel | August 30, 2015So, the Hugo awards were handed out a little while ago, with half of the prose fiction categories going to "No Award" and the other half to works I voted below "No Award." Whee. I'm not really interested in rehashing the controversy, though I will note that Abigail Nussbaum's take is probably the one I most agree with.
With the release of the nominating stats, a number of people released "what might've been" ballots, stripping out the slate nominees-- Tobias Buckell's was the first I saw, so I'll link that. I saw a lot of people exclaiming over how awesome that would've been, and found myself…
drorzel | August 14, 2015I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to watch a summer blockbuster. The movie was enjoyable enough, thanks to charming performances from the key players, but the premise is dippy even for a comic-book movie. It does, however, provide a hook to talk about quantum physics, so...
-- Great Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand…
drorzel | July 4, 2015Seveneves is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book-- 700-something "pages" in electronic form-- and contains yet another bid for "best first paragraph ever":
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
The rest of the book involves what follows on from that. Namely, the destruction of basically all life on Earth.
I should say up front that this was, on the whole, a very enjoyable book. In a lot of ways, it's what I…
drorzel | May 30, 2015As much for my own future reference as anything else, some thoughts on the bits of the Hugo ballot that aren't Best Novel (which I've already talked about). At this point, I've probably read as much of the voter packet as I'm going to (though if I've left out something actually good, I could go back and pick it up...). That doesn't mean I've read everything-- there are quite a few things on there I'm not going to bother with because, you know, life is just too short-- but I've read those that seemed worth a shot.
In the short fiction categories, two of the longer nominees were weirdly…
drorzel | May 24, 2015As the Hugo nomination debacle unfolded, one of the few bright spots was the replacement of Marko Kloos's novel with The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, who is apparently a Big Name in SF in China. This got a good deal of buzz when it was released in the US, and I've sorta-kinda been meaning to read it for a while. Having it move onto the Hugo ballot provided a great excuse to finally crack it open. And given that I wasn't blown away by the other two non-Puppy nominees on the slate, or the one Puppy book that I had already read, I had great hopes this would redeem the category.
Alas, it was…
drorzel | May 5, 2015I'm still in the late stages of an awful cold, but shook it off a bit to write a new conversation with Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna over at Forbes:
“HEY! YOU POODLES! STAY OFFA MY LAWN!”
“Emmy! Stop barking!” I sit up. She’s at the gap between the fences, where she can see into the front yard.
“But, those poodles..”
“We’ve had this conversation. It’s a public street, other dogs are allowed to walk on it. No barking.” She comes over, sheepishly. “Why can’t you just lie down and enjoy the nice day, hmm?”
“Well, I would. But, you know… Quantum.”
“What?”
“I would love to just lie in the sun, but…
drorzel | May 2, 2015A month or so back, when I went to Vanderbilt to give a talk, I met Robert Scherrer, the department chair down there, who mentioned he was starting a blog soon. That blog is Cosmic Yarns, and has now been live for a while, but I've been too busy to do a proper link. He's using it to look at the science of science fiction, and has a bunch of nice posts up, including a good explanation of why you don't need to worry about giant ants:
Has this ever happened to you? While you are enjoying a relaxing picnic in the New Mexican desert, your lunch is overrun by ants: not ordinary ants, but 12-foot…
drorzel | April 27, 2015Over the last month or so, it's been kind of hard to avoid this book, even before it hit stores. Big excerpts in the New York Times and The Guardian generated a good deal of buzz, and arguments on social media. Unsurprisingly, as one of the main elements of the book is a look at the phenomenon of social-media shaming, so anybody who had participated in or even watched one of these unfold had an opinion.
I've enjoyed Ronson's previous books a great deal, because he brings a real empathy to all the interviews and profiles he does. Even when he's profiling really problematic people, like some of…
drorzel | April 18, 2015There has been a lot of stuff written in response to the Hugo award nomination mess, most of it stupid. Some of it is stupid to such an impressive degree that it actually makes me feel sympathetic toward people who I know are wrong about everything.
One of the few exceptions is the long essay by Eric Flint. This comes as a mild surprise, as I've always mentally lumped him in with the folks whose incessant political wrangling was a blight on Usenet's rec.arts.sf.written back in the day; now I can't remember if he was actually one of the annoying idiots, or if I've mistakenly put him in with…
drorzel | April 14, 2015I've been falling down on the job of informing you about promotional events for Eureka, mostly because the pace of these has slackened. But I'll be on the radio today, on WYPR's "Midday with Dan Rodricks" based in Baltimore (I'll be in the usual studio in Albany for this...). This is scheduled for a full hour, 1-2pm Eastern time.
So, if you're in Charm City, tune in. Or listen via the Internet from basically anywhere.
drorzel | April 13, 2015I continue to read way too much about the ongoing Hugo mess, and will most likely eventually lose my battle not to say anything more about it. In an attempt to redirect that impulse in a productive direction, I wrote a thing for Forbes about some of my favorite treatments of science in SF:
Of course, now that I’m a professional scientist, I end up finding a lot of stories about science to be lacking. Not just in the usual “the laws of physics don’t apply” sense, where science is bent to serve the purpose of the story– I’m generally pretty accepting of that, because sticking too strictly to…