FASTER THAN LIGHT? OR JUST TOO HARD TO MEASURE?

There was an earthquake this week. Not a real one, but a piece of news that shook the world of physics. A team of scientists claimed to have measured some particles moving faster than the speed of light.

The experiment involved a beam of neutrinos sent from a giant particle accelerator, the Super Proton Synchotron, at the facilities of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to a special neutrino detector under Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, 730 kilometers away. What shocked the researchers was that the neutrinos appeared to arrive at the detector 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have if they’d been travelling at the speed of light. Now, 60 billionths of a second may not seem like much, but Einstein’s theories of relativity say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So, if true, this experiment might not only prove the great Einstein wrong, but even force a significant shift in thinking about the laws of the universe.

Maybe that’s why so many reputable scientists don’t believe it.

There’s been endless speculation since the result was announced, including a lot of criticism that the findings should not have been announced until they’d been properly verified and duplicated. Even though the experiments took place over three years and the experimental data is rated as having a very high degree of reliability, most don’t believe it. They think there’s been an error somewhere. The results contradict earlier measurements involving neutrinos, including neutrinos from supernovae which were not found to have outraced the photons from the star explosions. And, after all, neutrinos are notoriously hard to measure. Besides, most scientists would rather bet on Einstein than some upstarts, even if they do have a particle accelerator.

But most importantly, there’s a lot at stake here. Relativity would have to be scrapped or seriously rejigged, and even causality—the law of cause and effect—would be on the trash heap. Then where will we be?

If my computer starts submitting posts before I even hit the ENTER key, who knows how much trouble I could get myself into?

ARE WE ALONE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD?

We look up at the stars and wonder if we humans are alone in this vast universe. It’s not a question we can answer yet (unless you’re a true believer in UFOs), but there sure are a lot of people working to estimate how much galactic real estate might support life.

Our Milky Way galaxy alone is thought to include 200 billion stars—maybe many more than that, and at least tens of billions of those are yellow-orange stars similar to our sun. But until the last 20 years or so, we really had no way to know if many of those stars had planets orbiting them. If we’re hoping to find life, the first step is to not only find planets, but planets in the habitable zone of their stars: the so-called Goldilocks zone: not too hot, not too cold. There are other considerations, like gravity and atmosphere, but even just finding rocky planets the right distance from their sun is a good start.

Since 2009 the Kepler spacecraft has been monitoring the brightness of more than 145,000 stars. Why? Because if a planet crosses in front of the star (between it and Earth) the light will dim just a tiny bit. Kepler can measure that. Another astonishing instrument called High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) in an observatory in Chile uses a high-precision spectrograph to also measure light, but in such a way as to detect motion. A planet orbiting a star will cause a tiny wobble in the star that HARPS can see. The Keck Observatory in Hawaii has been using a similar method to great effect for a couple of decades now. There are other efforts underway in the UK, Spain and elsewhere.

So with all this searching going on, how many planets have scientists really discovered around other stars? The number is approaching 700, and might even be higher than that by the time you read this. More than 1200 other possible candidates have been identified and are just waiting to be confirmed. Admittedly many of those are probably gas giants like Jupiter, but many are also smaller than Neptune and might be much closer to Earth in size and composition. But it’s the ones that appear to be in the habitable zone of their star that grab headlines. That number is still small, but growing. And even if only a small percentage of sun-like stars have a habitable planet, in a place as big as the Milky Way that still means potentially tens of millions of planets where life similar to Earth’s could exist.

It’s still not proof, but it sure does improve the odds. So if you’re getting tired of the Caribbean or Europe, have we got a long distance vacation destination for you!

FLY ME TO...SATURN

Just a short post to invite you to have a look at this amazing composite video clip made from images of the Cassini spacecraft as it passed through the rings of Saturn. It's one of the most impressive things I've ever seen, because it's REAL.

Be sure to watch it full-screen.

SUMMER'S END

It’s been an interesting summer, and a fruitful one. For me, the biggest news was the acceptance of my first novel, Dead Air, to be published by Scrivener Press in the fall of 2012. That’s been a long time coming. It follows a radio morning show host who finds himself the victim of harassment that escalates into attempts on his life.

But the news has been good on the short story front, too, with a couple more stories available or soon to be available in print. My story “Shakedown” appears in the anthology Canadian Tales of the Fantastic from Red Tuque Books, which can now be ordered through Amazon.ca . It’s a story about a prototype submersible the size of a virus, designed to travel the human bloodstream (yes, inspired by the movie Fantastic Voyage) except the virtual reality control system takes a terrible toll on the test pilot. “Shakedown” is a prequel to my novel Labyrinth which continues the story of the submersible Primus, and is currently looking for an agent and publisher. Here’s the anthology’s cover art to look for.

 

My story “Once Upon A Midnight”, about the disastrous consequences of a woman’s failing marriage, was previously made available on this site but has since been removed because it’s going to be included in the forthcoming anthology In Poe’s Shadow from Dark Opus Press. I still don’t have a publication date for that one, but I just approved the galley proof for the story and it looks good—a nice gothic font for titles etc. The cover art is interesting too. I’m eager to have a good look at both anthologies in print.

A couple of other stories have reached the final stages of the selection process on other fronts, so my fingers are crossed for those. Now, as I resign myself to the fact that the days will be getting cooler, I’m hoping that the writing career stays hot!

AH YES, I REMEMBER IT WELL

OK, so I’m dating myself quoting a song from the musical Gigi, but if you remember the scene from the movie, old lovers Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold sing their memories of the time they first fell in love. Of course, each remembers it very differently.

The process of memory has been and still remains mysterious, but there’s a lot of research ongoing in the field.

Brain cells, or neurons, essentially send messages by sparking to other neurons. Even as far back as the 1970’s it was discovered that there are certain neurons in the hippocampus (a structure deep within the lower part of the brain) that appear to be directly connected to our location in space. Researchers have called these “place cells”, because specific neurons will fire according to a specific location, and others will even fire in correlation to the direction travelled. New research has discovered comparable neurons associated with time sequences (quickly dubbed “time cells”). The lead author of the new study, Dr. Howard Eichenbaum from the Center for Memory and Brain at Boston University, revealed that not only did particular neurons of the hippocampus capture frozen moments of a sequence of events, but certain cells also marked out the gap of time between two separated events. The cells could reset that gap if the delay between the events was changed. Now I’m dying to find out how those neurons differentiate between events that seem to be short (like spending time with a lover) and events that seem to take forever (like spending time with the boss).

On a more general level, it’s been known for some time that the brain does most of its data storage during the night, while we sleep. A study released earlier this year involved volunteers who were asked to memorize 40 pairs of words, or perform some other memory task. Some were told that they’d be tested on the task ten hours later. Some were allowed to sleep before the test. As expected, the volunteers who caught some shuteye did better on the test, but the ones who really stood out were the ones who slept and knew they’d be tested. Obviously the brain treats information differently if it knows that information will be needed at some future time. So some advice to guys in a new relationship: understand that in twenty years your lady is going to expect you to remember the dress she was wearing when you first met. Maybe your brain will cooperate, and save you from the glare of death down the road.

One thing is clear to me: research into the process of memory will never be complete until it can explain why my wife can recall every detail of events I can’t even swear actually happened, and she always turns out to be right.

IF YOU CAN DREAM IT

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the connection between science and science fiction, as well as what distinguishes SF from fantasy. Of course science fiction has to have a basis in scientific reality, most will say. No unicorns or fairies (tell that to Anne McCaffrey, Roger Zelazny and others), no magic (forgetting Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) No gods, demons, leprechauns, dragons…you can carry the list as far as you like, and you’ll probably find exceptions to all of them in good, solid works of science fiction.

Many stalwarts would say that science fiction shouldn’t contain anything considered impossible by current scientific knowledge. Which rules out faster-than-light travel and time travel, two of the genre’s most persistent tropes (and dumps some of the past century’s best SF into the trash compactor). Some would say SF writers should extrapolate from current technology, rather than invent dazzling gizmos with no idea how they could possibly work. I can only say that such stick-in-the-muds must never have heard Walt Disney’s philosophy: “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Let’s remember that there are a lot of research projects around today that owe their existence to something someone saw in an episode of Star Trek.

It’s a delight to see some of the fantastic world-building that writers like Larry Niven and Canada’s Karl Schroeder can produce while playing with (and adhering to) the laws of physics. But I also get a kick out of voyagers who travel by wormhole or transporter beam.

So much depends on what we consider to be the purpose of science fiction. Canadian SF writer Robert J. Sawyer has told me, and many others, that SF is a literature of allegory and thereby a vehicle for commentary on contemporary society. I certainly agree that’s one of its primary functions, and when Pierre Boulle wrote La planete de singes (inspiration for the Planet Of The Apes movies) I doubt that he was much concerned about whether or not it was physiologically possible for apes to talk.

Am I saying that science fiction shouldn’t have any rules? No. I just think the genre is better served by not getting hung up on definitions, laws, edicts, preconceptions, or any of the other things that hamstring the imagination. Because, above all, science fiction is fiction of the imagination. It shows us where we might be going, and lets us decide whether we really want to go there. And it shows us ourselves as we are, though its mirror often requires a little deciphering.

I think those are the more important core values of what we call science fiction, rather than a set of rules that’s bound to change with each new leap forward in human knowledge.

Maybe that’s why it’s called fiction.

NEWS EVERY WRITER WANTS TO HEAR

It’s been a good week. On Tuesday I was told that my first novel had been accepted for publication. On Thursday I signed the contract.

My novel Dead Air isn’t science fiction—it’s a story about a morning radio show host who’s life is already falling apart when he begins to suffer harassment from an unknown source. As nasty pranks escalate into outright attempts on his life, he struggles to cope with the threat and find out who wants him dead. Before they succeed!

I wrote the novel while I was hosting a radio morning show myself, and the scenario is plausibly unnerving. It’s going to be published by Scrivener Press of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, a small press that does good work and has high standards. Scrivener Press is also the publisher of my friend and mentor, Sean Costello. It’s a perfect fit for Dead Air because the novel is set in Sudbury. The only downside is that Dead Air won’t be released until the fall of 2012, so you (and I) have a long year to wait before we can hold a copy in our hands.

On Sunday I was gratified to learn that my short story “Once Upon A Midnight” has been accepted for the upcoming anthology In Poe’s Shadow from Dark Opus Press. It’s a dark-humour story inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, about a woman having relationship problems while she’s working at a storage and research centre for deadly bio-agents. I’m not sure when that anthology will see print. There’s a chance you’ve already read the story—I had it available for download here on the website, but I’ve taken it down as a courtesy to the folks at Dark Opus. Now you’ll have to buy the book.

I’ve been meaning to make audio versions of my free stories available on this site for some time, and I finally got around to recording my story “No Walls”. So now you can read it online, download a PDF version, or listen to the MP3 recording. The audio is in two parts, available from the “No Walls” page. I hope you enjoy it.

Yes, it’s been a good week. Now if I only had time to get some writing done!

A STITCH IN TIME--WILL TIME TRAVEL EVER BE POSSIBLE?

One of the most popular tropes in science fiction is the idea of time travel. Wouldn’t it be great if we could witness the heyday of the Roman Empire? Or even the dinosaurs? Or jump ahead to a future time to find out how our great-grandkids’ grandchildren turn out? One of the best-known early fictional treatments of the idea is H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and one of the most popular recent efforts is Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, but the concept has inspired countless novels, movies, and TV shows.

So will time travel ever be possible?

In a sense, jumping into the future just requires us to go somewhere at really high speed, because of the effects of relativity. In Orson Scott Card’s book Speaker For The Dead his main character, Ender Wiggin, exists in a world more than 3000 years after his birth, but has aged only 36 years because he’s spent so much of his life travelling between stars at near light speed. But is that really time travel? After all, you can never go back! What we really want is a way to go back and forth in time, isn’t it?

The idea doesn’t belong to fiction alone—lots of legitimate scientists have looked into it. The laws of physics don’t rule it out, and there are some phenomena that might do the trick.

One such is a wormhole in space—kind of like a black hole, but with an entrance and an exit. Star Trek fans will remember a wormhole as the setting for the series Deep Space Nine, but a wormhole might provide a shortcut through time as well as space.

Some scientists are even trying to make time machines. One of those is Dr. Ronald Mallett at the University of Connecticut. Mallett’s concept involves making a circular beam of high-energy light that would stir empty space like a spoon in a cup of coffee, making it theoretically possible for a particle in that space to travel faster than light and, hopefully, into the past. Mallett isn’t saying he’ll be able to send humans physically into the past, but perhaps information at least. There are advocates of time travel who believe that information is enough: that we might be able to experience other eras through a kind of virtual reality using information from those other times.

So far, the concepts that do appear theoretically possible have their drawbacks. A wormhole couldn’t take you back to a time before the wormhole existed. Similarly, Mallett’s time machine wouldn’t allow matter or information to travel to a time earlier than the moment the machine was switched on. Does that make his machine useless to the impatient types among us? Not really. The moment Dr. Mallett gets his machine working, he might be flooded with messages from people in the future (or even himself) trying to contact our time. That could be pretty useful.

One of the questions most deeply-ingrained into the human psyche is: what if I had done something differently? How would my life have turned out? From there it becomes: what if the world had done something differently? That question has generated a whole sub-genre of SF: the alternate history story.

That’s why even if time travel never becomes a reality, for science fiction it will always be necessary just the same.

JUST TRYING TO KEEP UP

If you’re reading one of my posts for the first time, it may be because you’ve joined my new Scott Overton page on Facebook. Welcome! I’ve been posting/blogging on my webpage for some time, and you’re welcome to check out previous posts there as well as some samples of my short stories. Mostly I post about science and science fiction, sometimes about the writing process and the publishing business. I hope you enjoy them.

This week I’ve been thinking about the fact that I don’t see much science fiction that’s actually about space travel anymore. A big part of the reason might be that it’s becoming harder all the time for writers to keep up with new developments.

The publishing industry can be very slow—I’ve seen it take a year and a half for one of my stories to go from acceptance to its actual appearance in the magazine. Believe me, scientific research doesn’t wait!

I wrote a story that I set in a solar system known officially as Gliese 581—it’s a red dwarf star that got a lot of attention because one or two of the planets discovered around it are believed to be in the star’s habitable zone, meaning at the right distance for liquid water to exist on the surface, and therefore maybe Life As We Know It (also known as the Goldilocks zone: not too hot, not too cold). I cleverly placed a human colony on the fourth planet, Gliese 581d, but while I was sending the story out to magazines, another planet was discovered in the system, Gliese 581g, that’s a better candidate for a habitable planet. Fortunately, I’d made up my own names for the planets and my story didn’t have to be changed, but the news could easily have screwed up a story already in the publishing pipeline, and left egg on my face.

There have been lots of other developments like that in recent years, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, and numerous space probes to various corners of our solar system (including the Dawn probe that just went into orbit around the asteroid Vesta between Mars and Jupiter last week, and will eventually land on it). These are exciting times, but….

Have you written a story that takes place near Pluto? You think you’re up to date because you don’t call it a “planet” anymore, just a “dwarf planet” since its official demotion? Well, how many moons did you give it? Four, I hope. Most of us knew about Pluto’s moon Charon. But two more—Hydra and Nix—were discovered in 2005, and now the Hubble telescope has found a fourth moon probably only a few dozen kilometers across. Flip a coin before you give Pluto a ring, like Saturn’s—that’s not conclusive yet. Or maybe you should just wait until after 2015 when the New Horizons probe will visit Pluto’s corner of the solar system, and might shake things up even more.

It’s enough to give a science fiction writer a migraine.

Space Colonization Must Become More Than Science Fiction

Years ago I read an inspiring book called The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall T. Savage originally published in 1992. The title wasn’t frivolous—the second edition, in 1994, included an introduction by science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke. In great detail, Savage laid out eight practical steps for humanity to take to reach the stars, beginning with ocean surface colonies that would produce enough edible algae and other food products to end world hunger while they also used temperature differentials in the deep ocean to generate the electricity required for spacecraft launchers. The launcher he envisioned would use a long track and catapult system to fling transports into the sky, while giant ground-based lasers would power them the rest of the way to space (eliminating the need for the transports to have their own engines—reducing the cost of launching materials from Earth’s surface into space is probably the largest hurdle of all in space exploration). The remaining steps involved bubble colonies in Earth orbit, domed cities on the Moon, Mars terraformed to become habitable, asteroids mined and transformed to not only provide raw materials but also harness the power of the sun much more efficiently, and finally an expansion into interstellar space. Savage wasn’t just dreaming—in 1987 he’d formed something called the First Millennial Foundation to get the ball rolling, first with baby steps like a test aquatic colony/theme park in the Caribbean. Progress was slow.

Jump ahead to 2011: the First Millennial Foundation is now called the “Living Universe Foundation” and Marshall Savage has apparently permanently retired from any association with the concepts he originated. But the dream lives on. Many other possible technologies have been proposed to carry out Savage’s basic eight steps, and discussions continue (though, perhaps, not much concrete progress). On other fronts, there is an International Space Station in orbit, involving multi-national cooperation. The United States government has made announcements about returning to the Moon and then going to Mars—no longer stunts motivated by a political space race, but hopefully true research-based missions. This past Saturday NASA space probe Dawn entered into orbit around the asteroid Vesta, the first man-made object to orbit a body in the asteroid belt. But within the past decade NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker probe landed on the asteroid Eros, and the Hayabusa probe from Japan collected samples from the asteroid Itokawa. NASA has plans for a mission in 2016 to another near-Earth asteroid that has a small chance of one day threatening the Earth. These aren’t stunt missions either, but have to be considered as first steps toward someday making use of the asteroids in practical ways.

For now, human space travel remains horrendously expensive and dangerous, so we need pretty strong motivation to make it happen. If population pressure on one hand, and the benefits of space research on the other aren’t collectively enough, we should look at Marshall Savage’s original argument:

All intelligent life on Earth could be wiped out in a single cosmic catastrophe, whether by a mammoth asteroid strike, a genetic experiment gone-wrong, or any number of doomsday scenarios that are no less plausible because of their dire consequences. We know it can happen—there have been half-a-dozen mass extinction events in Earth’s history. And, for all our wishes, we still have no evidence that intelligent life exists anywhere else in the universe. Humankind may be all there is—all of the universe’s “eggs” in one “basket”. Until we know otherwise, we have a responsibility to preserve sentient life by taking it beyond this fragile place where it could be annihilated at one stroke.

Maybe that’s still too abstract for most people looking over their tax statements. Maybe the idea of cheaper materials or medicines is more appealing. Either way, space colonization can’t remain the stuff of science fiction. We dare not let it.