Science Made Cool

A Hot Time In The Old Town

December 2 marks the birth of the Atomic Age. It's the 66th anniversary of the first self-sustaining artificial nuclear chain reaction. That reaction was accomplished using the "atomic pile" -- literally a big pile of graphite bricks and uranium -- in a disused squash court under the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. (The stadium was available for potentially lethal experiments because the U. of C. had abandoned varsity football in 1939, after more than a decade as the doormat of the Big Ten conference.)

At 3:25 p.m. on December 2, 1942, the pile CP-1 ("Chicago Pile 1") went critical -- it began a self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reaction, in which the neutrons from uranium atoms breaking up flew off and split other atoms.  The scientists who created the experiment, led by Enrico Fermi, let it run for half an hour before shutting it down by inserting neutron dampers.

Since then, nuclear energy has been used in peace and war. It has wrecked two cities, keeps dozens of cities lit and warm, poisoned a chunk of land in Ukraine, and may be our best hope for seriously reducing greenhouse gas emissions without having to live like medieval peasants. 

So lift a glass of a nice Italian wine in honor of Fermi and the CP-1 atomic pile. Salute!

Congratulations, Chandrayaan!

There's a new player on the Moon. Today the Indian Space Research Organization landed its first probe on the surface of the Moon. The Chandrayaan-1 probe touched down at 11:21 Universal Time (when we here at Zygote Games World HQ were just waking up). This isn't just a flag on the ground, either -- Chandrayaan is a serious science payload, with experiment packages aboard from four countries. In addition to the lander it has a lunar orbiter which will study the Moon for several years to come. As an added bonus, the landing happened to fall on the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru, the founding father of modern India.

Monster Mash (5)

I've always wondered why ghosts are supposed to be scary. Most other legendary monsters are "predators" or "parasites" of some kind -- if you encounter them, they want to harm you, no matter who you are.

But ghosts, in the sense of restless spirits of the dead, always seem to be agents of vengeance or justice. You get haunted because you did something, or because someone else did something that made the soul of a dead person so unhappy it haunts the living. If you think about it, ghosts are really a reassuring legend rather than a source of horror. Ghosts prove the universe is moral. That evil cannot be hidden, even by death. 

Which is why it's such a shame that ghosts don't exist. For nearly two centuries, scientifically-minded sorts have been looking into ghost sightings, wondering if there's any truth to them. And they've found precisely nothing. Outfits like the Ghost Club, the Society for Psychical Research, the Ghost Research Society, and dozens of free-lance individuals have poked around haunted sites, and what have they found? Some patently faked photos, some patently faked audiotapes, and some patently bogus chatter about "cold spots" and "presences."

There's a paradox here, as in most paranormal investigation. Tales of the supernatural describe vivid, terrifying, physical events -- a ghost appearing to someone, fairies doing mischief, flying saucer aliens manifesting themselves, whatever. Inspired by these amazing reports, "paranormal investigators" look into the situation. What do they find? They don't find showy ghosts, flying saucers, fairies, or werewolves. What they find are vague, barely-measurable, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't traces. They announce these as proof -- but the "proof" isn't anything like the phenomena as originally described!

This has a perfect parallel in Creationism. For Creationists, the big paranormal event is God making the world in seven days, approximately 6,000 years ago. But when supporters of "intelligent design" try to demonstrate it scientifically, all they can produce are minor inconsistencies in the fossil record, blatant misunderstandings of how natural selection works, and undisprovable "alternate theories." In most cases they've retreated completely out of the Biblical account and are reduced to looking for God hiding in the cracks of geology and cosmology.

And ultimately, God and ghosts have a common origin: people want to believe in a moral universe. They want to believe their lives have meaning that will endure past death. The creationist and the ghost hunter are both struggling to find scientific proof for something which is entirely outside science's realm. But because science has done such an amazing job of describing and recording the universe we live in, anything it can't describe no longer seems real, even to believers.

This suggests that the true solution for conflicts of faith vs. science is for the believers to have more faith rather than less! A sufficiently faithful Christian (or whatever religion you prefer) can believe in God even if the Bible is proved wrong word for word. Perhaps the ones who attack science or try to twist it aren't real fanatics, but instead are tormented by doubts.

Another Tangled Bank

The 116th edition of the Tangled Bank blog carnival is up at Pro-Science. Lots of links for everyone to enjoy.

Monster Mash (4)

I believe it was Stephen King (though I can't find the reference) who said that vampires, werewolves, and zombies respectively represent the upper, middle and lower social classes. Vampires of course are aristocrats, battening on the people but looking mighty stylish while they do. Werewolves are the middle class, struggling to retain the "right" outward appearance. And zombies are the upper-class nightmare of the poor:  they're smelly, dirty, inarticulate, and concerned only with getting food.

This is surprisingly similar to the origin of the zombie legend in the Caribbean. In Haiti and elsewhere, the fear wasn't that zombies would eat your brain, it was that you would be made into a zombie and labor mindlessly forever. In a slave society, zombies were the ultimate enslavement.

Wade Davis, the Canadian ethnobotanist, has speculated that some Haitian zombies may have been real -- people dosed with plant or animal toxins which created a death-like state so that when revived they believed they were zombies. Other scientists think Davis is a borderline nutjob. Here's a good survey of Davis's work and the controversy.

Given how much symbolic political weight zombies carry, it's interesting to note that the past few years have seen a boom in zombies across all media. There have been zombie movies (I Am Legend, Shaun of the Dead ), a cracking good zombie novel (World War Z), a zombie roleplaying game (All Flesh Must Be Eaten), zombie comics (The Goon, Marvel Zombies), and of course the indispensable Zombie Survival Guide.

Why the zombie boom? I've heard one hypothesis that it's an offshoot of the war against terrorism -- a hidden enemy, potentially lurking anywhere, implacable as a walking corpse. A related suggestion, given recent worries about bioterrorism or a bird flu pandemic, is that zombies represent a fear of disease. Or, more generally, they just reflect a mistrust or dislike of one's fellow humans. How often do we see, for example, supporters of a rival political party described as "mindless" or "zombies?" They don't have the right ideas, they must be undead!

Monster Mash (3)

The legend of the werewolf is quite old -- there are cave paintings of shamans wearing animal skins, suggesting that the idea of men being able to become animals is as old as humanity. Whenever humans first became aware that there was a difference between men and animals, the idea of blurring that distinction must have followed about five minutes later.

In most werewolf lore, the change from human to beast is voluntary, and the person likes turning into a deadly predator. The legendary King Lycaon of Arcadia (whose name gives us the word Lycanthrope) was cursed by Zeus to become a wolf -- but Lycaon earned the god's displeasure by serving him a banquet of human flesh, so the curse just made his bestial nature apparent to all. (It's possible that the Lycaon legend is a garbled memory of some ancient Greek cult with shaman-priests ritually garbed in wolf skins.)

It was only with Curt Siodmak's screenplay for Lon Chaney's film The Wolf Man that the legend finally crystallized around the notion of an involuntary change -- a curse which turns a rational, humane person into a killer. It's no coincidence that Siodmak was writing during the golden age of Freudian psychology.

A number of students of folklore and the occult have tried to discover the "real" explanation of werewolf legends. The late Avram Davidson suspected rabies was the origin. I am suspicious of all such explanations -- surely every person at times has felt himself becoming a beast. The werewolf legend is an object lesson in what happens when we don't master those feelings.

As a writer, I've found werewolves one of the hardest monsters to rationalize. Vampires can be explained as some kind of infection or parasite (as long as you leave out the turning-into-bats part). Lycanthropy is different. At the very least it requires pretty major and rapid body changes -- the kind of wholesale reconstruction one sees when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly or a tadpole becomes a frog. In the natural world such changes take days or weeks, but the werewolf transforms quickly enough to go out, ravage the countryside, get home and change back before the torch-bearing mob can arrive. It gets worse if the person turns into a really big wolf, because the law of conservation of matter raises its ugly head.

Plus there's the issue of only silver weapons harming a werewolf. It's pretty hard to explain why, for example, a bullet or a spear wouldn't hurt someone in wolf form. They seem to affect wolves pretty well. Even giving werewolves improbably fast healing can't quite compensate for the immense damage even black-powder muskets can do, let alone modern weapons.

Still, the pure thematic power of the man-into-beast story means that werewolves are likely to be around in fiction for as long as humans have to worry about controlling the beast within.

Too Cool For Words

...but not for music. Il Trovatore and exploding fungi.

Monster Mash (2)

Vampires are the "breakout success" of the monster world. Back in the middle ages, vampires were just another supernatural menace -- walking corpses that fed on the blood of the living. Sure, they were scary, but so were the fairies lurking in the wood, the Devil loitering at the crossroads, and the ghost in the churchyard.
   
Vampires would have remained just another quaint superstition had it not been for an amazing house party at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland in 1816. That was an unusually cold summer, possibly the result of the Mt. Tambora eruption the previous year. So a group of literary-minded British travelers were stuck at the villa with nothing to do but make up ghost stories. Percy Shelley didn't write anything. His wife Mary wrote Frankenstein. Lord Byron wrote a fragment but abandoned it.

And Byron's doctor, John Polidori, wrote "The Vampyre." Polidori's story got rid of the icky walking-dead vampire covered with grave dirt and reeking of decay, and replaced it with a sinister, urbane, upper-class vampire remarkably similar to his famous patient Byron. In fact, when the story was first published in Britain it was attributed to Byron himself.
   
More than half a century later Bram Stoker, a theater-mad Irish lawyer, wrote the ultimate vampire novel, Dracula, which cemented the vampire's position as the aristocrat of the horror world.

A hundred years after Stoker, Anne Rice cranked up the sexiness factor, finally dispensing altogether with any graveyard paraphenalia. White Wolf games adapted Rice's vampires to the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade, which organized vampires into tribes and concentrated on the political interplay among vampires in the modern world.

Nowadays, vampires aren't smelly walking corpses -- that role has passed to zombies, which is a subject for another day. Instead, in modern fiction vampires are attractive, immortal beings who just happen to suck a little blood now and then.

Vampires, considered objectively, are parasites -- they have the feeding habits of ticks or leeches, but happen to be spirits or walking corpses. Like all parasites, they have a great many specialized adaptations to their lifestyle: specialized mouthparts (fangs), and a method of tranquilizing or controlling prey (possibly via pheromones). This has several interesting implications: vampires are likely host-specific, which explains why they insist on drinking human blood. (This also suggests there should be analogous species preying on other mammals.) In addition, vampires aren't generalists -- they can't do much that isn't related to blood-drinking.

If you have a persistent vampire problem, talk to these guys.

Not-So-Giant Rock Alert!

Grab Aunt Nelly and head for the bomb shelter! A huge rock from space is . . .

Well, okay, not a huge rock, a rock about the size of a middle-aged game designer. But it's going to hit . . . er, pass really near the Earth! TODAY!

Space.com has the story.

Monster Mash (1)

It's October, Halloween is coming, so for the next four weeks I'm going to talk about monsters (not exclusively -- there will still be room for pirates, robots, and robot pirates).

The mighty Io9 science fiction 'blog has an interesting article on "real-life Frankensteins." Frankenstein, of course, is the overreaching student of science in Mary Shelley's novel, who tries to create life but only produces a monster. We use the term "monster" here in its original, technical sense -- an abnormal birth. Frankenstein's monster isn't evil, at least not at first. It turns evil after Dr. F. rejects it, which to me suggests that the creator is the true villain of the story.

Among the "real-life Frankenstein" contenders are some Russian doctors from the middle of the century who monkeyed around transplanting heads and trying to keep them alive. Sounds ghoulish, but the medical applications are pretty obvious. C.S. Lewis was struck by both the ghoulishness and the symbolism, and used a reanimated head as the head (heh) bad guy in his dystopian SF satire That Hideous Strength.  You can read what George Orwell thought about it here. 

Frankenstein has also become the patron saint of people who think genetic engineering is scary and icky. They like to toss around the term "Frankenfoods" to describe genetically modified crops, as if evil scientists are trying to create a nightmarish lumbering beast with the head of a parsnip. Here's Brian Dunning's masterful refutation.

The horror of Frankenstein is the horror of human power unleashed. Dr. Frankenstein literally has the power of God -- but he screws it up because he's a ninny, and the result is a pile of bodies. Mary Shelley was married to Percy Shelley, one of the first big-league atheists of the modern era. The novel may have been her little cautionary tale about what people could get up to without a supernatural nanny to make us behave. History has not proved her wrong.

Brian Aldiss considers Frankenstein to be the first science fiction novel, but I disagree. Most science fiction follows H.G. Wells in taking the opposite position: "Wouldn't that be cool?"