Movies

Arrival Thoughts

drorzel — Sat, 19 Nov 2016 06:01:51 +0000

Arrival Thoughts

People 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 source material-- a lot of the raves were from people who had either never read the story, or who had forgotten its plot. As is often the case when watching an adaptation of a favorite, I was distracted by noting changes from the source material.

There are fewer of these than I feared from the first trailer I saw, which overemphasized soldiers and helicopters to a worrying degree. I wasn't really thrilled with those additions to the story, but they kept it to the minimum necessary for making a full-length movie out of it. I was much less happy with the resolution of the big crisis, which introduces a different sort of SF element that just confuses matters. And also makes the whole movie turn on an incredibly stilted and awkward conversation.

The thing I missed the most, though, you will likely be unsurprised to learn, was the physics. The original story justifies its premise not only with a Sapir-Whorf "learning languages changes your brain" sort of thing, but with a pretty good discussion of the alien's approach to physics, which starts from Lagrangians. This unfolds in parallel with the translation work, and the two reinforce each other, and the emotional impact of the story, perfectly.

The physics part is basically completely absent from the movie-- I caught one very brief reference to the aliens not responding to algebra, but showing interest in something more complicated, and that was it for science outside of linguistics. This has two negative effects: first, it shifts the story more toward "mystical aliens are mystical," and second, it means that Jeremy Renner as the physicist character really doesn't do much of anything.

Which is not to say that it's a bad movie, by any stretch. Amy Adams does a great job in the lead, and the supporting players are all good. And it looks amazing. Everybody should go see it, or at least buy a ticket at the multiplex before going into a different theater to watch something else, so they make tons of money and will make more smart, great-looking SF movies.

It's not going to displace the original Chiang story in my affections, though. It might seed a blog post over at Forbes about least-action principles, though...

drorzel Sat, 11/19/2016 - 01:01

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I've never read the book, but your remark about story changes you noted in "the first trailer I saw, which overemphasized soldiers and helicopters to a worrying degree" reminded me of a game my wife and I play when certain action-based ads appear on TV: movie or video game.

As video games have become more realistic, the two are becoming indistinguishable to the degree that any action movie has to have video-game elements in it simply as a marketing ploy.

I hadn't read the story, but nevertheless I missed the physics/mathematics. It seemed to me that communicating through shared science would have been/will be the more likely scenario if/when we actually encounter aliens.

I guess they needed to have Renner there for the sake of the future relationship, but otherwise he was just dead weight.

Interesting read about the adaptation process.

I am struck by Chiang's comments that he considered this story to be an unlikely candidate for conversion to the big screen.

I was remembering that David Mitchell said, essentially, the same thing when interviewed about Cloud Atlas.

http://www.vox.com/culture/2016/11/15/13625286/arrival-spoilers-script-…

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Two Weeks' Worth

drorzel — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 08:08:36 +0000

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Two Weeks' Worth

I 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 Quantum Physics: I did a bit of name-and-title-dropping at the Schrödinger Sessions, and a few of the writers asked if I had a list of books I would recommend (other than, you know, How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to your Dog). I didn't have one already put together, so I made a new post listing a dozen good books to read.

-- How Quantum Randomness Saves Relativity: Inspired in part by the many discussions of entanglement at the Schrödinger Sessions, a discussion of why you can't actually use entangled particles to send messages faster than light. "Spooky action at a distance" is impossible because of "God playing dice," a cute bit of historical irony.

-- What Has Quantum Mechanics Ever Done For Us? I know you get more and angrier comments on political posts, but for sheer "WTF?" weirdness in the comment section, nothing beats quantum physics. This is a short explanation of the quantum underpinnings of major modern technologies, in response to a crank who left a bunch of angry comments on a G+ link to the quantum randomness article.

Not a huge number of posts for two weeks of blogging, but I'm very happy with them. And the quantum randomness one in particular is a nice counter to some myths about science communication-- over 20,000 people have clicked through to read an article that builds up to a citation of the no-cloning theorem. I'm pretty proud of that.

drorzel Fri, 08/14/2015 - 04:08

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come correct my rant on reddit if you're so inclined. Cheers!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/3h2sh5/reddit_what_is_your_be…

First thank you for your on-going contributions to understanding the new physics such as the "How Quantum Randomness Saves Relativity".
Talking of which, in the video at around 1'12'' you talk of repeating the same experiment and getting the same result IF not interrupted by another experiment. I am writing a book which includes a section on time and that comment of yours is extremely profound. Do you know the name/authority for that observation?
It seems, at the quantum levels at least, as if that repetition is taken as one unit of time until interrupted.
.

Thanks Chad for taking the time to share your experience with this difficult arena of physics. One question please re what you said at about 1'12" of the video (How Quantum Randomness Saves Relativity). You say the experiment produces the same outcome until interrupted by another experiment.When reverting to the original experiment the outcome is again statistical in the first instance of the experiment.
This seems very profound in the understanding of time for the book I am writing. Can you please indicate the name or reference to that please?
It does seem by your example that time is a creation to keep events apart (when they are identical).

I am a regular reader but have not commented before. This post reminded me of a recent apod (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150615.html) about lunar corona. Where I got stuck was that they wrote "Lunar Coronae are one of the few quantum mechanical color effects that can be easily seen with the unaided eye." If this is standard diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized water droplets in an intervening but mostly-transparent cloud (as they explain) why are they singling it out as a "quantum effect"?

The Birth of BEC

drorzel — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 10:01:03 +0000

The Birth of BEC

I'm massively short on sleep today, and wasn't going to blog until I saw somebody on Facebook mention that June 5th 1995 is the date of record for the first Bose-Einstein condensate at JILA in Boulder. I couldn't let that pass, so I wrote it up for Forbes:

Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1995, I was a young grad student having just finished my second year at Maryland, and one morning I packed into the conference room at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg (where I worked in the group of Bill Phillips) with most of the rest of the Atomic Physics division to hear a primitive teleconference from our counterparts in Boulder. I don’t remember the exact date of the teleconference– I think it was in early July– but the event that led to it took place twenty years ago today, June 5, 1995, when physicists in the group of Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell at JILA (a joint institute between NIST and the University of Colorado) produced the first Bose-Einstein condensate in a dilute vapor of rubidium. This was the end of a quest spanning decades, all the way back to the first proposal of BEC in 1925.

So, you know, go check that out...

Earlier in the week, I also grumbled about the dominance of superhero movies, and how they get science very badly wrong. This is pretty similar to something I wrote here a while back, but with some new examples. So.

drorzel Fri, 06/05/2015 - 06:01

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Obligatory Age of Ultron Comments

drorzel — Sun, 03 May 2015 06:53:41 +0000

Obligatory Age of Ultron Comments

So, Kate and I hired a babysitter last night, and went to see the new Avengers movie. You might not have heard of it, it's kind of obscure...

(There will be some mild SPOILERS below; if you're intensely opposed to that sort of thing, don't read the rest of this...)

So, I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a big mistake to watch this excellent video about Jackie Chan's style yesterday morning:

(in a sorta-kinda related vein, this Max Gladstone blog post is also very interesting...)

Having watched that video in the morning, and its discussion of how Jackie Chan's fight choreography and directing contrasts with the American equivalents, because I spent a lot of the fight scenes thinking "Yeah, I can't tell what the hell is going on here..." And, you know, I realize this is a stylistic choice and in some sense the Hong Kong style as just as much an artifice, and that in this case the rapid-cutting style is forced in part by the fact that 80% of the combatants are CGI robots. But, in the end, noticing all the rapid cutting kind of undercut the spectacle...

So, anyway, the actual movie was... fine. It's a comic-book movie, and I don't really expect more from those than expensive spectacle. I can't quite decide whether it helps that the filmmakers are aware of the absurdity of some of these scenarios, and hang the occasional lampshade on it ("...and I have a bow and arrow."), or if that just makes it worse that they don't bother to fix the stupider bits.

Having grumbled about the handling of SCIENCE! in the previous installment, I will note that they get a half-point bonus this time out for nodding in the direction of specialization. They actually bring in an outside expert for some things, and in one scene Tony Stark admits that Bruce Banner is better at bioscience than he is. Which brings them up to, like 1.5/10 on the movie portrayal of science scale...

Of course, as I'm a huge nerd, I did inadvertently retcon one of the bits that made no sense, namely how they ended up over the ocean so that people falling down after the final battle landed in water. Which you could sorta-kinda try to attribute to the Earth's rotation-- that is, as the giant rock is boosted straight up, it continues rotating at the speed of the surface, which is not fast enough to keep pace with a point directly below it as the altitude increases. So, the Earth turns under it, and if you take their Ruritanian setting to be a Balkan country, that would carry you out over the Aegean Sea after a bit.

Of course, I suspect this doesn't actually work, because all the characters can still breathe at maximum altitude (including the non-super-powered Avengers and the civilians they're trying to save), and thus they aren't high enough for the speed difference to add up to much. Also, this is a universe where in the first Captain America movie it takes, like, fifteen minutes to fly from somewhere in the Alps into the remote Arctic, so maybe Marvel Europe is just a tiny archipelago of island nations.

At a much more general level, I remain pretty down on the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe project. Admittedly, this opinion is enhanced this morning by the fact that the two guys sitting to my left in the theater were big Marvel fanboys, and their delighted exclamations over tie-ins to other movies and comics got steadily louder and more distracting over the course of the movie. But ultimately, I've never been a comic-book guy, so the stuff that the massive tie-in structure adds for comic-book fans holds little appeal for me. Certainly not enough to make up for the problems it inflicts on the movie, which packs eight pounds of...plot into a five-pound bag. The need to find character moments for all of the over-stuffed cast makes the movie way too busy, and the need to tie into whatever grand cosmic plot is supposed to be going on without further bogging the movie down leads to thuddingly awful scenes like Thor's highly abbreviated Infinity Stones infodump.

Strip out the cosmic stuff, cut the team in half, and you have the elements of a really good movie here. Working within the strictures of the Marvel universe, though, it maxes out at... fine. It's very good for what it is, but what it is isn't a thing I particularly want.

In other "not what I want" movie news, the set of godawful trailers inflicted on us before this included one for the Superman vs. Batman movie. And, you know, grimdark is as much a valid stylistic choice as the cornball platitudes that form the core of the Marvel movies, but if we must have comic-book movies built around these opposing aesthetics, I'd really kind of like some that don't dive headfirst into self-parody.

Anyway, those are my reactions, for what little they're worth. Thus, I have met the statutory requirements to keep my blogging license for another year...

drorzel Sun, 05/03/2015 - 02:53

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There _is_ a comment from Cap towards the end of the sequence that he's starting to find it hard to breathe (and I think an addition that the rest of them must be having more trouble), but it's easy to miss.

The fact that they can breathe at all probably rules out an Earth-rotation effect. Back-of-the-envelope, the radius of the Earth is about 6400 km, so if you were at airplane-like altitides of about 10km, that would be a 0.2% difference between the rotation speeds. That would be about 3 km/hr at the equator, so the only way the final scene could've ended up over water this way is if the fictional city was a beach resort. And that's at the equator-- the effective speed is lower at European latitudes.

I decided many years ago that I wouldn't worry about the science in movies like this, and just hope to be entertained. In that sense I liked this one: I thought that it was much better paced than the first.
I did enjoy seeing the new (I think it is the new one) Audi R8 at the end, when Stark drives off. The new TT appeared too: wonder what Audi paid for that product placement.

as the giant rock is boosted straight up

I haven't seen the movie, but how do we know the rock was boosted straight up? That's a set of measure zero, and it wouldn't take much of a zenith angle to produce the desired drift speed. That's how launches from Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg work: you aim the rocket such that if something goes wrong with the launch, you hit the self-destruct button (if needed) and watch the debris fall into the ocean rather than a populated area.

There is also the question of prevailing winds. For a real rocket launch, the launch crew will adjust the elevation and azimuth of the rocket to take winds into account (the effect adds up for a long enough flight), and if winds are too strong or too variable, they won't launch. Of course, prevailing winds at the latitudes in question are the wrong way to push a rock from the Balkans into the Aegean, unless you boost it so high that everybody dies (because you need to be in the stratosphere to pick up the reversed winds at high altitudes).

My suspension of disbelief can stretch extraordinarily far, but the thing that broke it here for me was all the times that Tony says to Bruce "hey, let's go perform technological miracle X" and they do it in like five minutes. Reverse-engineering somebody else's technological miracle so you can reapply it your own way is essentially instantaneous. (The "synthesize the new element" scene in Iron Man 2 struck me the same way; it's kind of like the "checking the cell structure" dance in Sleeper, except that it really works.)

But that's comic-book technology, I guess.

Giant Ants and Illegal Acts

drorzel — Sat, 02 May 2015 06:08:35 +0000

Giant Ants and Illegal Acts

A 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-tall behemoths, dripping saliva from their jaws and chittering wildly. You pull your Browning automatic rifle out from underneath the picnic blanket and empty an entire magazine into the nearest ant, but it doesn’t even flinch. Instead, it crushes you between its pincers. Then the ants eat all of your potato salad.

This scenario played out countless times in 1950s science fiction films. The populace ran screaming from giant ants, enormous reptiles of various kinds, and even a 50-foot woman. One of the first of these films was Them, in 1954, in which radiation from the New Mexican atomic bomb tests causes ants to mutate to an enormous size. Them contains many of the iconic elements of the “giant creature” films (radiation-induced mutations, skeptical authorities, elderly scientist-father with beautiful scientist-daughter), and it holds up surprisingly well. Who can resist a film in which James Arness and James Whitmore share the screen with Fess Parker and the young Leonard Nimoy? Parker got his big break in this movie -- Walt Disney saw it himself and decided to cast Parker as Davy Crockett. And Nimoy appears with a thick New York accent! If you haven't seen Them, you should definitely rent it. Or better yet, buy it, so you can watch it over and over and over....

You might suspect something is wrong with the idea of giant creatures just by looking at the shapes of animals of various sizes. Insects have spindly legs, little more than toothpicks, to support their weight. Dogs and cats have much larger limbs in proportion to their size, while humans’ are even bigger. By the time you get to elephants, you find legs that look like tree trunks. So there is clearly something odd going on there.

I also got a kick out of a tv trvia question about the time Albert Michelson was on Bonanza:

Michelson grew up in Nevada, where Bonanza was set. In the show, Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) gets the young Michelson an appointment to the Naval Academy, thus setting in motion the train of events that would lead to Einstein's theory of relativity. Who would have guessed?

Amusingly, this is not a whole lot less likely than what actually happened-- Michelson was born in present-day Poland, and his family emigrated to the US when he was a baby. When he finished high school, he sought an appointment to the Naval Academy, but wasn't able to get one from his local Congressional delegation, so he traveled to Washington, DC to personally appeal to President Grant. Who, as it turned out, had already given out all of his allotted appointments to the Naval Academy.

The young Michelson sufficiently impressed Grant and his staff, though, that Grant decided to give him a spot in the Academy anyway, an "illegal act" that Michelson would chuckle over years down the road. So Michelson got to go to Annapolis after all, launching a brilliant scientific career that eventually earned him a Nobel Prize.

(Story via Dr. SkySkull...)

So, you know, what Twain said about truth and fiction...

Anyway, go check out Scherrer's new blog. And that pretty much exhausts what I'm capable of writing in my current pseudoephedrine fog.

drorzel Sat, 05/02/2015 - 02:08

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It was all those nature shows that led to these giant insects genre. They used to be me with all the claims that if that ant was the size of a human he would be able to lift a truck. Whereas the truth really is If SHE were made the size of a human, She would collapse under her own weight, and suffocate as her breathing system would be unable to deliver enough Oxygen. That used to bug me.

The fact that people tend to dislike bugs and fear bugs is useful when discussing climate change with people who don't get the science.

1) Bigger bugs. I don't have a cite for this but one of the predicted effects of climate change is an increase in the size of certain insect species. When you hear someone exclaim about a big nasty bug, you can always drop a casual comment to the effect that "they're getting bigger due to climate change."

2) Badder bugs. This one's easy to look up: insects that spread dangerous diseases are spreading further north and south from the Equator as a result of climate change. One example: mosquitoes that spread Dengue are now endemic in certain parts of the US. Another: Chikungunya is coming to the US next. Describe the diseases and the insect vectors and casually mention that these things are headed our way due to climate change.

3) Bugs for dinner: The expected agricultural impacts of climate change already have various agencies searching for replacement food sources, and one that is frequently mentioned is the use of insects as food. For most Americans, that prospect is as appetizing as telling observant Jews that they will have to start eating pork and shellfish. A casual mention here and there can help translate the impact of climate change to an immediate visceral feeling of disgust.

4) Today's "Them!" is/are bedbugs, a highly unpleasant pandemic plague of most urban areas. While not directly connected to climate change, yet, they are none the less a useful symbol of highly unpleasant "unintended consequences."

Michelson's story is nicely told in 'Master of Light'. He did some pretty impressive work measuring the speed of light including his famous ether experiment. He built some of the first sealed vacuum tubes for longer scale measurements. He also manufactured some of the first diffraction gratings for use in spectroscopy. When relativity was developed, he stepped back admitting that it was a new kind of physics.

The Pip: Future Comic-Book Movie Screenwriter

drorzel — Sun, 12 Apr 2015 05:19:36 +0000

The Pip: Future Comic-Book Movie Screenwriter

The Pip is in a big superhero phase at the moment, and all of his games revolve around being a superhero of some sort. He has also basically memorized a couple of 30-page Justice League books, after demanding them over and over at bedtime. As I did with SteelyKid, I make a game out of reading the wrong words from time to time, and as a result, he can now "read" at least two books all the way through, as you can see from this cell-phone video shot at bedtime:

His superhero pretend games have the bizarre inventiveness you expect from a pre-schooler, mixing and matching from all the various media continuities he knows. On the playground one day last week, he was Superman, I was Batman, and SteelyKid was Wonder Woman, and we first had to capture all the characters from Jake and the Never Land Pirates (including the puny pirate heros; asked why, he said "Well, Jake and Izzy and Cubby were going after the bad guys, but we're the superheros, so we're the ones who have the get the bad guys."). Then we had to rescue Elmo from Cookie Monster, followed by rescuing Big Bird from "the cookies that sprang into action" after the capture of Cookie Monster. Then we smashed Zach Bots from Wild Kratts.

Yesterday, he was either "Blaster" or "Blast Man" (he couldn't quite keep it straight), with the power to blast bad guys by striking the pose seen in the "featured image" up top and making a blasting noise. There was a lot of blasting of me in my role as the notorious villain, the Tickler, then I suddenly switched sides, as he asked for advice on who to blast next. I suggested he go to Sesame Street, hoping it would prove to be located in another room of the house. He liked the general plan, but did mention that it was a long way to Sesame Street.

"How are you going to get there?" I asked. "Can Blast Man fly?"

"No, Blast Man doesn't have flying power. I have BLAST POWER! I blast bad guys."

"OK, but how do you get to where the bad guys are? Do you have a plane?"

"Well..." (he starts most of his exposition with "Well...") "I make a loud noise, and then birds come, and they pick me up in their beaks, and fly me where I need to go."

I asked for a demonstration, of course, so he stood up, squawked like an angry blue jay, then spread his arms, and said "Look! They're carrying me! I'm flying!" and ran in happy circles around the house.

Now, you might be thinking "That sounds like a wildly impractical means of travel" or possibly "Are those African swallows?" but really, is it any dumber than Ant-Man? I rest my case.

Marvel Studios, hire this kid.

The Pip, striking the poses necessary for using his blasting power to blast bad guys.

drorzel Sun, 04/12/2015 - 01:19

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I think a good argument could be made that D.C. Comics is more in need of help.

True, but Marvel Studios is more likely to have the good sense to hire him...

Touche. :)

Favorite Quantum Physics in Fiction?

drorzel — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 08:34:08 +0000

Favorite Quantum Physics in Fiction?

We'll be accepting applications for The Schrödinger Sessions workshop at JQI through tomorrow. We already have 80-plus applicants for fewer than 20 planned spots, including a couple of authors I really, really like and some folks who have won awards, etc., so we're going to have our work cut out for us picking the attendees...

We're also discussing the program for the workshop-- more details when we have something more final-- which has me thinking about good examples to use of storytelling involving quantum physics. I'd like to be able to give a few shout-outs to already-existing fiction involving the ideas we'll be discussing. And while I know several already, I'm always happy to hear more...

Things on my mental list already:

-- Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity", probably the best fictional exploration of Many-Worlds that I've seen. Yes, I'm aware of Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways." This is better.

-- Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," though that's less explicitly quantum. It turns on the idea of the principle of least action, which is essential for Feynman's formulation of quantum physics, but originates in classical physics. It's an amazing story, though.

-- Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief and sequels make heavy use of ideas from quantum technology. He even specifically cites ion traps when talking about quantum computing infrastructure, which is a great fit with the labs at JQI.

-- Charlie Stross mentions quantum communications a lot in his SF. He's really hit or miss for me, and sadly most of what misses for me hits with a lot of other people, so he's evolving toward a less appealing state, but one of his early books-- either Singularity Sky or Iron Sunrise, I forget which-- had what's probably my favorite hand-wave involving this use of quantum entanglement for FTL communications, with the idea that FTL travel via hyperspace breaks entanglement, and thus the entangled qubits used for instantaneous communications are a precious resource shipped through normal space at great expense.

It's hard to think of on-screen examples of quantum technology, though, largely because it's been years since I've had the free time to watch many movies. Interstellar name-checks the need for "quantum data," but it's really about astrophysics, not quantum mechanics. I know the Coen brothers did a movie a few years back where quantum physics plays a metaphorical sort of role, but I haven't seen it. Quantum computing as a way of cracking encryption may have been a McGuffin in a thriller movie or two, but I don't recall specific examples.

Anyway, I would love to have a longer list of stuff to suggest/ cite/ name-drop. Please leave ideas in the comments...

drorzel Thu, 03/19/2015 - 04:34

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The Schrödinger Sessions: Now Accepting Applications

drorzel — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 13:10:08 +0000

The Schrödinger Sessions: Now Accepting Applications

I've updated the detailed blog post describing our summer workshop introducing writers to quantum physics to include a link to the application form. For the benefit of those who read via RSS, though, and don't follow me on Twitter: the application form is now live, and will be for the next few weeks. We expect to make acceptance decisions around April 1.

So, if you make up stories and the idea of spending a few days at the Joint Quantum Institute learning about quantum physics from some of the world's leading experts sounds like fun, well, send us an application.

drorzel Fri, 03/06/2015 - 08:10

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Announcing the Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

drorzel — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 08:53:44 +0000

Announcing the Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

A few years back, I became aware of Mike Brotherton's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and said "somebody should do this for quantum physics." At the time, I wasn't in a position to do that, but in the interim, the APS Outreach program launched the Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant program, providing smallish grants for new public outreach efforts. So, because I apparently don't have enough on my plate as it is, I floated the idea with Steve Rolston at Maryland (my immediate supervisor when I was a grad student), who liked it, and we put together a proposal with their Director of Outreach, Emily Edwards. We didn't get funded last year, but the problems were easily fixed, and this year's proposal was funded. Woo-hoo!

So, we're very pleased to announce that this summer we'll be holding "The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction" a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute (a combined initiative of the University of Maryland, College Park and NIST in Gaithersburg) to provide a three-day "crash course" in quantum physics for science fiction writers. The workshop will run from Thursday, July 30 through Saturday August 1, 2015, on the Maryland campus in College Park, with housing, breakfast, and lunch included. There's a fake schedule up on that web page, that we'll fill once we get JQI scientists signed up, but it gives the basic idea: three days of lectures and discussions with scientists, and visits to JQI's labs.

The web page is a little sketchy, because we were using a pre-existing template to speed things up, but that's why I have a blog: to provide much more information. Which we might as well do in semi-traditional Q&A format:

This sounds cool, but what does this have to do with public outreach? The idea is to bring in science fiction writers, and show them some of the latest and greatest in quantum physics, with the goal of inspiring and informing new stories using quantum ideas and quantum technology.

We know that science fiction stories reach and inspire their audience to learn more about science, and even make careers in science-- things like this astronaut's tribute to Leonard Nimoy are a dramatic reminder of the inspirational effect of science fiction. Our hope is that the writers who come to the workshop will learn new and amazing things to include in their fiction, and through that work, they'll reach a wider audience than we could hope to bring in person to JQI.

But why quantum physics? Well, because we think quantum physics is awesome. And because quantum physics is essential for all sorts of modern technology-- you can't have computers without Schrödinger cats, after all. And most of all because the sort of things they study at JQI-- quantum information, quantum teleportation, quantum computing-- could have a revolutionary impact on the technology of the future.

Isn't quantum too small and weird to make good stories, though? Hardly. Quantum physics has figured prominently in stories like Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity", and Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" (SPOILERS), and Hannu Rajaniemi just completed the trilogy that starts with The Quantum Thief, which you can tell from the title is full of quantum ideas.

The weirdness of quantum physics is a bit off-putting, but then that's the point of the workshop: to bring in writers to learn more about quantum physics, and see how it works in practice. The hope is that this will make writers who come to the workshop more comfortable with the subject, and thus more likely to write stories with a quantum component.

OK, but why Maryland? Well, because the Joint Quantum Institute is one of the world's leading centers for research in quantum mechanics and its applications. Just check out their collection of news stories about JQI research to get a sense of the range and impact of their work. If you want to see quantum physicists at work, it's one of the very best places in the world to go.

Yeah, but isn't the weather awful hot in July and August? Look, you can't have everything, OK?

OK, let's get to practical stuff. When you say "writers," you mean people who do short stories and novels? No, we're defining "writer" as broadly as we can. We'd love to have people who write for television, or movies, or video games, or online media. Really, anybody who makes up stories about stuff that hasn't really happened is welcome, regardless of the medium in which that work appears.

How many of these writers are you looking for? The budget in the proposal called for 15, though that depends a bit on how much money we need for food and housing; if more people than we expected are willing to share rooms, we might be able to take one or two more.

So there's going to be an application process? Yes. I mean, we'd love to have a huge number of people, but we have logistical constraints to deal with. We'll take applications online starting later this week (my other major task for today is to put together the application web form), continuing for a couple of weeks, and hope to make decisions around April 1, so attendees will have plenty of time to make travel plans.

Speaking of travel, what's included in this package? We plan to provide housing for attendees in the dorms on Maryland's campus, and breakfast, lunch, and coffee/snack breaks will be included. We left dinners open, in case people want to explore the DC area a little (great restaurants there, that's one of the things I miss from grad school...), but might look at doing one group dinner with a fun talk of some sort. The schedule is still being sorted out.

There is a possibility that a limited amount of funding might be available for travel support, but again, it depends on a bunch of other factors that affect the overall budget.

And what will the selection criteria be? Well, the ultimate goal of the workshop is public outreach, so we'll be trying to invite participant whose work will be able to reach as broad an audience as possible. That means we'll be looking for a mix of established and up-and-coming writers, and as much diversity as we can manage in terms of audience, subgenre, media, etc. I can't really be any more specific than that, though.

What if I'm busy on those days, or just can't afford it this year? Will this happen again? Can't you at least let us get through one of these before asking that?

If it goes well, we'd certainly be open to that possibility, but it'll depend on a lot of factors, mostly involving money, but also level of interest, success of the workshop, etc.

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And that is the big news I've been sitting on for a while now. I'm pretty excited about this, and hope it will be a great program. If you know anybody who might be interested in this, please point them in our direction.

drorzel Tue, 03/03/2015 - 03:53

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Advent Calendar of Science Stories 20: Dot Physics 1976

drorzel — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 08:53:40 +0000

Advent Calendar of Science Stories 20: Dot Physics 1976

We're going to depart from the chronological ordering again, because it's the weekend and I have to do a bunch of stuff with the kids. Which means I'm in search of a story I can outsource...

In this case, I'm outsourcing to myself-- this is a genuine out-take from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, specifically Chapter 2, which tells two stories from the career of Luis Alvarez, who I've talked about before in the context of his experiment to x-ray one of the pyramids at Giza, and the time I wrote him a letter when I was nine about his theory that an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs.

Those two experiments are featured in the book, but there used to be a third story, that got cut for length. This one is about how Alvarez was a sort of spiritual ancestor to Rhett Allain, using his physics expertise to do video analysis. The larger context of the chapter is about how scientists use expertise gained in working on one particular problem to make discoveries in a different field. Alvarez's expertise in particle physics-- he invented the hydrogen bubble chamber, which was the dominant detector technology in the field for decades, and won him the 1968 Nobel Prize thanks to the discoveries made using it.

In the 1970's, Alvarez put his years of work scrutinizing bubble chamber photographs to work in studying a very different problem: the 1963 assassination of JFK. Here's the section describing this that I cut out of the book in the late stages of editing:

Probably no segment of film outside a particle physics lab has been more scrutinized than the 27 seconds shot by Abraham Zapruder on November 22, 1963. The famous “Zapruder film” captures the moment when John F. Kennedy was shot while riding in an open limousine in Dealey Plaza. While this film was a critical piece of evidence for the Warren Commission investigation that declared that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, copies of the film have also provided fodder for countless conspiracy theories claiming that there was at least one more shooter on the famous “grassy knoll.” One claim is that the camera must have been running at a higher frame rate than the Warren Commission claimed, so the time between shots is too short for a single marksman to have fired three aimed shots. Another has to do with the motion of the President’s head after the fatal shot, when he appears to jerk backwards, toward the Texas Book Depository where Oswald was, rather than in the direction the bullet was supposedly moving. This is immortalized in Oliver Stone’s JFK, where Kevin Costner’s character spends an excruciatingly long time replaying the key frames, repeating “Back, and to the left… Back, and to the left…”

While Alvarez would later be part of a commission established by the National Academy of Sciences to study audio recordings of the assassination (where he played an important role), his most interesting association with the assassination comes from a 1976 paper in the American Journal of Physics. This was prompted by a former student who had become a conspiracy buff, and sparked Alvarez’s curiosity regarding the whole business. Like a good scientist, once he became interested in the question, he didn’t let it go until he had brought all his skills to bear on the problem.

The paper is a fascinating glimpse into the thought processes of a professional physicist, providing a detailed reconstruction of the motion of the limousine and the timing of the shots through careful examination of every frame of the film (as published in Life magazine and the Warren Commission report). His analysis goes beyond that of the professional photo analysts who testified before the Warren Commission (and he doesn’t shy away from expressing his low opinion of their work), showing the benefits of many years spent studying the minute details of bubble chamber tracks.

Two items in particular stand out. One of these is an ingenious solution to the frame rate question, using the images on the film itself(1). The frame rate had been in question because Zapruder’s camera offered two different settings, and there is nothing in the film that obviously serves as a “clock” to measure the frame rate. On careful inspection, though, Alvarez found a clapping man in the background of one sequence of twenty frames, and realized that the man’s clapping hands could serve as a clock.

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fn1: The frame rate questions was officially settled by examining the camera, at least to the degree that anything is settled regarding the Kennedy assassination, but Alvarez’s method is unique in relying only on the film.

The apparent rate of clapping, assuming the official value of 18.3 frames per second, is around 3.7 claps per second. Thinking about the physics of the clapping process, Alvarez concluded that the effort required to clap at a given rate depends on that rate cubed—so, doubling the rate from 3.7 per second to 7.4 per second would require eight times the muscle power. That restricts clapping to a rather narrow range of “natural frequencies:” very fast clapping requires a lot more work, enough so that most people won’t bother(2). Experiments with a metronome showed that 3.7 per second is within that range, but 7.4 per second is outside it—it’s just too much work to clap at that speed. This “cube law clock” helps confirm that the film was not running at the higher speed sometimes claimed by conspiracy theorists.

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fn2: It won’t surprise anyone familiar with the Internet to know that there are web sites and YouTube videos featuring people demonstrating their world record clapping speeds, claiming rates as high as 14 claps per second. Nobody would ever mistake these for ordinary clapping, though, such as one might do while watching the President’s motorcade go by.

The other, more impressive result was an explanation of the physics of that “Back, and to the left” head-jerk. At first glance, it seems impossible that an object hit with a rifle bullet could recoil toward the gun. The laws of physics seem to dictate that anything hit by a bullet must recoil in the same direction that the shot was fired: the bullet has momentum in the forward direction, which is transferred to the target, making it move forward.

This is true in collisions where the colliding objects do not change or deform due to the collision. This is a very strict criterion, but it works as an excellent approximation when thinking about collisions between billiard balls, or low-energy nuclear physics (as we’ll see in Chapter XXX). Such collisions are only one small class of collisions, though. Most collisions between real objects, including many of the high-energy particle collisions Alvarez made his career studying, involve some change of the colliding objects. In the particle physics case, this takes the form of the creation and ejection of new particles, producing tracks that physicists study to learn their composition. In the case of Oswald’s bullet striking the President’s head, the ejected material is blood and brain matter—the very disturbing frame of the Zapruder film capturing the fatal shot shows just such a spray.

When you consider the full physics of the collision, and take into account the momentum of the ejected material as well as the target and the bullet, you find that it’s not difficult to produce the counter-intuitive “backward recoil.” Alvarez worked out the necessary math on the back of an envelope, in keeping with tradition, but more than that, he devised an experimental demonstration.

With the assistance of some Berkeley colleagues, Alvarez went to a gun range with several melons wrapped in glass-fiber tape to simulate a human head, and fired rifle bullets into them. Exactly as predicted, bits of melon sprayed outward as the bullet exited, and the effect of these jets was to push the melon backwards, toward the gun. Six out of seven filmed melon tests showed backward recoil, proving that the backwards jerk of the President’s head is indeed consistent with physics, provided you consider it from the perspective of an expert in collision physics.

Of course, none of this is enough to convince the most dedicated of the crazy people who obsesses over the Kennedy assassination. But the 1976 paper Alvarez wrote is an excellent demonstration of the way that physicists approach problems, even when they originate well outside physics. And it's a useful lesson for applying scientific thinking to everyday life, as well: when confronted with a new kind of problem, think about what you already know how to do well, and it will often turn out that there are surprising applications of your existing skills that will let you make progress.

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(Part of a series promoting Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, Powell’s, and anywhere else books are sold.)

drorzel Sat, 12/20/2014 - 03:53

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