The voice from space

So you think you’re original?

            Depending of what you are up to, originality may be something to aspire to but how likely do you think it is that an idea or concept is truly new? Not very, is the obvious answer. I had the pleasure of discovering this quite recently. And it really was a pleasure. I am not being sarcastic.

            What on Earth am I on about?

            Well... having written a set of short stories involving a bumbling Professor/inventor that seeks inspiration from science, I was curious to find out to what extent this part of the literary landscape had been explored before. I won’t go into stuff I was already aware of, as I want to focus on what I discovered in the process. After some googling and random internet browsing (truly professional “research”!) I stumbled on a series of kids books by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. The hero of these books, which were written in the 1950s-60s, is a boy called Danny Dunn. Danny is very keen on science, and he is fortunate enough to live with the very clever Professor Bullfinch. The Professor is a great inventor (uh, where have I heard that before?) that comes up with all sorts of schemes, usually leading to Danny and his two friends Joe and Irene having some kind of madcap adventure. There are, I believe, 15 Danny Dunn books in total, all now out of print. When I first saw the list of titles I was astonished. My own short stories had covered about half of the themes! Yes, some were obvious (like time travel) but nevertheless.

            Naturally, I ordered a couple of second hand Danny Dunn adventures. They arrived, I have read three so far and I am now a fan. This is great stuff. Why? Surely the world has moved on in the past 50 years and anything that was modern in those long gone days is boring old nonsense now? Well... in a sense yes, but good storytelling still has the power to keep your attention. There is another side to it, as well. Science may have moved on, but this does not mean that the actual ideas have changed much and sometimes there are funny and unexpected connections.

            Let me give you an example.

            In the story “The voice from space” Danny and his friends travel to England to use the fictitious Grendel radio telescope to listen to signals from intelligent life in outer space. (This is a theme I have been thinking about, but I haven’t managed to find the right angle yet.) The story is clearly inspired by the early days of what eventually became the SETI programme.

            I am not going to spoil the story by telling you what happens, but I would recommend the book to anyone that is keen on radio astronomy and needs to find some suitable reading material to corrupt their kids. Instead, I want to make an observation. The Danny Dunn book was written in 1967. It came out just a few months before... guess what? A young PhD student named Jocelyn Bell found some odd periodic signals in data from... What? A radio telescope. Initially the new objects were referred to as LGM (Little Green Men) but soon so many of them were found that they needed a proper scientific name. They became known as pulsars, and we now know that they are the remnants of dead stars. These are fascinating objects, and if we want to understand how they work we need to push the boundaries of known physics. I find this seriously cool.

            Anyway, I can’t help wondering if Danny Dunn would have had a different slant to his adventure if Nature’s own Little Green Men had been discovered just a couple of months earlier...

A man of principles

"By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox."

Galileo Galilei, born 15 February 1564

Last week saw the passing of two important dates. If you happened to forget the first of them, you may have ended up in domestic trouble. The second you may not have been aware of. The first date, the obvious one, was Valentine’s Day. Dating back to the days of the Roman Empire this celebration has been completely taken over by commercial interests. These days Valentine’s Day seems more about the purchase of roses and boxes of chocolate that any true sentiment. The other date, actually the day after, is more obscure. The 15th of February was the birthday of Galileo Galilei, often considered the father of modern science. This year he would have been 449 years old, so you might think it would have been wise to wait until next year to celebrate. I disagree. Since 449 is a prime, I think dear old Galileo would have been more keen on this celebration than the boring 450.

            I wasn’t really planning on turning this into an admiration session for a long dead Italian chap that may, or may not as the case may be, have dropped some balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa hundreds of years ago. But then a couple of things conspired to turn my attention in this direction. The first was a lecture I gave on the principles behind Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the one that uses wonky space and time to explain gravity. Key to this theory is something called the Equivalence Principle. This essentially goes back to Galilei’s apocryphal experiment, as it states that two falling bodies accelerate at the same rate (as long as you ignore air resistance). In my opinion, the most stunning demonstration of this fact was when Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, dropped a feather and a hammer to show that they landed at the same time. I don’t know who suggested adding the hammer and feather to the moonlander’s payload, but the video of the event is just great. I particularly like Buzz’s comment (“How about that!”) when things worked out as they should. I wonder what he would have said if there had been a different outcome....

            The scientific method, of which Galilei was an early supporter, basically decides what is credible and what is not in the world of research. Ideas are only valid if they can be backed up by experiment. The experiments don’t have to easy, they may require a future civilization with an arbitrary advanced technology, but they have to be possible in principle. If a theory is not testable in this way, then it is not proper science. As an example, consider Peter Higgs’ boson. This little thing has long played a central role in particle physics (explaining why particles acquire mass). Yet it was only very recently, and after the astronomical expenditure involved with building and running the Large Hadron Collider that there was any tangible evidence for this idea.

            The other side of the coin, an example of an idea that may remain more philosophy than science, is the so-called Anthropic Principle. This provides an answer to the vexing question of why the Universe in so fine-tuned, and why we happen to live on a planet that is so perfectly suited for humans. The explanation draws on a notion that is popular in string theory; the Multiverse. The idea is that there are many (read: an infinite number of) parallel Universes. We live in this one simply because we can. Most alternative worlds would be too hostile for us. This is undoubtedly an elegant way to argue yourself out of a corner. But... and this is a major reservation... it is not science in the sense of Galilei unless you can somehow demonstrate the presence alternative worlds. I guess all it would take is a portal to a different Universe. Wouldn’t that be something? It would, but I suspect we will have to wait for that arbitrarily advanced technology.

It's just a matter of time

A very odd thought came into his head. It was something he'd heard when he was young. Possibly part of some oddball scientific theory, perhaps complete nonsense. It didn't really matter. It was still an interesting thought.

            "We travel into the future at the speed of one second per second...", thought the Professor.

            "Nice thought," he mused.

            "Is it true, though?"

            He couldn't help wondering, and once he started thinking about it he couldn't stop.          

                                                from Professor Kompressor: The Time Traveller

This may be a bit confused, but I can always come back yesterday and fix it. You'll see what I mean in a while (or perhaps a while ago?).

            After thinking this through, it is about time that I write something down. No. Sorry. Having though it through, I want to write something about time. Time progressing like an unstoppable stream, second by second. Based on everyday experience this progression towards the future is inevitable. It is simply the way that Nature works. Cause and effect. In that order. Not the other way around. Why should it be like this? What would happen if it were not so?

            If one could figure out a way to reverse the flow of time, one might be able to do a whole lot of peculiar things. This has been well explored in science fiction where time travel remains as fresh a concept as in the Victorian days of H.G. Wells. A recent, and in my mind quite enjoyable, example is Mark Hodder’s The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack. The usual idea is that the time explorer ends up in trouble after doing something that in the extension affects his or her own existence. The classic thing to avoid, according to page 1 in The Time Traveller’s Guidebook (if it hasn't been written yet, it should be), is killing your grandfather. If you did this then you would make sure that you could not exist in the first place. But this is problematic because if you did not exist how could you carry out that heinous crime? You end up with the kind of time paradox that is often taken as proof that you can't travel into the past. Another common argument is that, if time travel is possible at some point in the future then why are we not swamped by time-tourists in odd futuristic clothing? Either our future selves have not cracked the problem, or maybe the present era is just too boring for tourism. A bit like Milton Keynes, perhaps?

            Anyway, I started thinking about this after making an interesting discovery. Not really new, although it was to me... It’s called the Tachyonic Anti-Telephone. The idea is simple. In Einstein’s theory of relativity there is an absolute speed limit, the speed of light. Nothing can go faster, no matter how hard you try. And you can’t accelerate anything up to this limit, either. The upshot of this is that the future is hardwired in and you can’t suddenly reverse to the past.

            However... physics may allow a loophole. You see, there are these hypothetical (no one has every seen one) particles called tachyons that always travel faster than light. If they exist, they have the opposite problem. You wouldn’t be able to slow them down. However, if you could catch and tame these guys then you could use them to communicate with the past. That’s the idea behind the Tachyonic Anti-Telephone.

            I don’t personally believe these faster-than-light particles exist, but I do like the idea of the Tacky-phone. So... I set out to write story involving this kind of device, aiming to end with a confused conversation between the inventor and his past self. The problem was... I got a bit tangled up in different timelines and the bits of the story did not come out in order. I guess I could do some work (Heaven forbid!) and fix this, but I’m not sure I should. After all, communication across time is supposed to lead to confusion so... is it not natural that a story like that is a bit confusing?

            Having finished writing and thought about this some more, I wonder if I missed a trick. I only considered what might happen if you tried to invent a device that would allow you to call back in time and make sure you avoided any trouble you had in fact already ended up in. I guess I wanted to highlight how it is actually quite good to have a few mishaps - as long as they don’t kill you - because it helps you learn and makes you wiser (at least in theory). What I didn’t think about was the chaos that would be inevitable if everyone had this kind of device. People would be changing their past all the time, as it were, and this would impact on everyone else they had ever interacted with. And so on... I’m not sure you could actually make anything out of that idea, but it does sound like beautiful madness!