Science In My Fiction

(Last in a series; see Part I, Part II, and Part III)

“Clever Hans” was a mathematician who lived a century ago. He was also a horse, a genius horse who could add, subtract, multiply, and even calculate dates, giving the answer by tapping his hoof.

But it was discovered in 1907 that Clever Hans was in fact no better at arithmetic than any other horse.  Has was just reading subtle, unconscious cues from his owner,  tapping until he reached the expected answer.

#

Is science real? Is it objective knowledge of a world independent of us? Or is it just a cultural invention, an arbitrary game, something we project onto the world, with scientists tapping out results until, like Clever Hans, we get the result we unconsciously want?

Some postmodernists think the latter is true, and point to experiments swayed by unexamined assumptions, including the “Clever Hans” effect in animal intelligence experiments.   They then conclude that all science is equally rigged.

The critiques have some validity, but the examples are heavily weighted towards the sociological and anthropological sciences; that is, we easily fool ourselves concerning issues that touch upon us as humans.

But on the other end of the spectrum the story is different.  Out among the cold reaches of the galaxies and nestled in the hearts of atoms, we have found disturbing truths so contrary to human experience that they can’t be the result of some Very Clever Hans, trying to please our subconscious prejudices. Read the rest of this entry »

(Part of a continuing series: part I and part II)

I love tales of serendipitous scientific discovery. A spot of mold in a Petri dish leads to penicillin, a spill on the stovetop becomes vulcanized rubber. The true hero is penetrating curiosity: instead of dumping a ruined experiment in the trash, the keen-eyed scientist frowns and wonders: what does this mean?

Most stories of serendipity occur among test tubes and Bunsen burners, but today computers allow numerical experiments and computational “accidents.” And one of the most paradigm-shattering accidents of the twentieth century involved neither dawdling clocks moving at the speed of light, nor slippery electrons dancing around an atom, but humble calculations of the weather.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Second in a series on the limits of knowledge; see the first post here.)

Of all branches of modern science, quantum mechanics is most seen as magic–either a nihilistic, quasi-Voldemortesque dark magic that needs to be overthrown, or else a wonderful wand that can be waved to justify anything, and I mean anything.

To be sure, Einstein’s relativity disquiets many people.  Without trustworthy, absolute clocks, who can boast about trains running on time?

But quantum mechanics is an order of magnitude stranger. The quantum world is fundamentally uncertain and fuzzy, with slippery wavefunctions leaping from one state to another. Even Einstein himself, who helped to father the field, hated it.

As I’ve written in an earlier post, many SF authors choose either to rebel and literally write quantum mechanics out of the equation, or to use quantum mechanics as a convenient justification for neato pseudo-scientific wish-fulfillment.

All of this is because of fundamental misunderstandings about quantum mechanics. Read the rest of this entry »

Science will not do your homework for you.

Some questions can be answered by science:  “What happens when I add an acid to a base?” and “What happens if I stick this fork into a wall socket.” Others, such as “Does God exist, and if so, why is He not running the Universe to my liking?” and “What is good? What is evil? Does this make me look fat?” can not.

In the ancient world, a business card reading “philosopher” gave one license to inquire into everything, and I mean everything. Aristotle (the Philosopher) wrote on topics ranging from ethics to politics to zoology to cosmology. For any question he had an answer.

But job descriptions change. Part of the evolution of natural philosophy, under nascent scientists such as Francis Bacon and Galileo, was to drop some questions, for example teleology (“for what purpose”), and  focus solely on reproducible, material observations.

Science is about limitations, but limitation is the source of the power of science. Indeed, the history of the physical and mathematical sciences in the twentieth century includes not only discovering the vastness of the cosmos and the infinitesimal secrets of the atom, but also making shocking discoveries what we cannot know.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every few years there comes from the distant Mountains of Science a new technological magic, a Panacea that will cure all ills, a Genie that will grant all wishes, a Silver Bullet that will slay all evils. In the 1950s it was nuclear power; later it was computers; later still the bounty of the Space Age; later still genetics. People still believe the Internet will make everyone fabulously wealthy for free (and yes this is a retread of computers, much as nuclear power was a retread of the idea very early in the twentieth century that Radioactivity is Good For You). And one technomagical fad still going strong in SF is nanotechnology: Teensy-Robots Who Will Turn Us All Into Gods, or Else Kill Us All.

Well, maybe.
Read the rest of this entry »

“Science fiction” is a sprawling, untidy genre, wearing so many masks it resists easy definition.  Even the “science” in science fiction spans a vast range, from incoherent technobabble to barely disguised excuses for magic to tightly constructed hard SF to Nebula and Hugo award-winning stories in which science makes no appearance at all. (Indeed, some have suggested the unifying thread is not science but history: James Gunn’s “the literature of change,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s “the histories we cannot know,” and David Brin’s “speculative history.”)  Some of the roles science plays in SF include:

* Scientific and technological advances signal that the world can and has changed, that history is in motion. This is especially relevant to the “speculative history” lens on SF.

* Advanced science and technology provide and justify exotic settings and characters, for example in many SFnal movies such as Avatar and Star Wars.

* Science can provide key plot points. This is particularly true in “hard” SF, where characters use science to reason their way out of a problem. Larry Niven at the height of his powers was a key exemplar, launching stories such as “The Coldest Place” and “Neutron Star.”

* Even the hardest SF is not really about science and technology but about our response to science and technological change. An example is the movie Gattaca, which critiques the danger of seeing people only through the lens of genetics.

What I want to write about today, however, is how science provides powerful symbols for SF, and how the imagery of science can echo the theme of a story.  And as befits SF, I’ll focus on stories that draw from a branch of science which is highly mathematical but which, deep down, appears as irrational and unreasoning as the Monster from the Id: quantum mechanics.
Read the rest of this entry »