Peter Cawdron's Blog, page 7

When Galaxies Collide

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Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith recently released a popular science book called When Galaxies Collide. I loved it so I reached out to her and she kindly agreed to a blog interview.

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There are a lot of popular science books about astronomy, but the thing I enjoyed about When Galaxies Collide is the down-to-earth approach you have to astrophysics. Interwoven within the book are numerous anecdotes covering everything from your time at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (which featured in Carl Sagan’s novel/movie CONTACT) to the remote Australian Outback (and Mullewa, home of ‘the bathroom at the end of the universe’). Did you ever imagine science taking you to the far-flung corners of the planet?

Thanks – I’ve always had quite a simplistic mind I think, I get bored easily with dreary explanations so I wanted to create a book that had a really human element and capture the reality of what it is to be an astronomer. That does include a lot of travel, often to odd and remote places where we (deliberately) hide telescopes from the light and radio pollution generated by big towns and cities. I don’t think I ever expected my life to turn out so interesting when I was growing up in a small village in Essex. Travel was for ‘other people’, people with money and choices. I find it astonishing how big my life is turning out to be in terms of travel and meeting incredible people.

Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Your book tackles complex subjects but with an air of simplicity. I loved the way you describe the spiral arms of a galaxy as a celestial traffic jam, moving as a wave rather than being any kind of actual structure—being caught in traffic is something we can relate to and now we know the cosmic version leads to star formation. Is there any one favorite fact or commonly misunderstood point you personally find fascinating that you’d like to share with us?

I think Einstein was annoyingly accurate in almost everything he said! But it’s very true that a lot of science is obscured with jargon and acronyms and complexity that need not be there. I do like explaining black holes – a lot of people think that black holes will suck everything in like a terrible pit of death. It’s not true at all, in terms of gravitational pull they simply behave as if a star were sitting there. They don’t have an unusually large gravitational pull. They are just a deep ‘hole’ so if you fall in, you can’t get out again.

It’s rare that an author admits to being a weirdo, even in jest, but you do while recounting an incident while out jogging with a wild emu running along the track ahead of you. For me, this was a Lisa moment rather than a professor moment within the book, and highlights something important about science—the need for people to relate to scientists. We live in fractured times. Sometimes, scientists are revered as high priests. At other points, they’re dismissed and ignored. Neither position is healthy, so I loved the way you gave us a glimpse into the person behind the astrophysicist. Is scicomm (science communication to the public) an important part of your role?  

Science communication is a very big part of what I do. It has evolved that way in recent years because I genuinely enjoy explaining and sharing science in a way that breaks down the barriers between a scientist as some sort of revered ‘keeper of knowledge’ and a perfectly intelligent member of the public who simply haven’t met that particular concept before.  Showing that scientists are real people with hobbies and faults is a big part of that. I like to talk about my sporting interests too – running and the like.  

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Why is astronomy important in modern society? In your book you talk about the history of astronomy and the awe people from around the world share when sitting by a campfire, watching sparks rise in the air with the Milky Way shining brightly above, but today we have Netflix and Candy Crush, mortgages and careers, nightclubs and football games. Why should people care about galaxies colliding billions of light years away? 

The stars have played a huge role in all our histories, from their role as gods and guides in ancient times to their use as maps, navigation tools and even as stories that guided our moral compasses.

The night sky is an integral part of nature, but we are losing our connection. Light pollution means that most of us cannot even see the Milky Way from where we live, so it is unsurprising that most people cannot identify a single constellation in the sky. 

Aliens are always a hot topic. Given the immense distances involved and the fact that potential alien signals are easily drowned out by stars, pulsars, quasars and the like, do you think we have or could develop equipment sensitive enough to listen in on ET? Given the (literally) astronomical sizes and timescales involved, are we likely to ever hear from extraterrestrials?

The search for extraterrestrial technological civilisations is a natural one since humans are curious to know whether we are alone in this universe. The methods we employ include ‘listening’ with large radio telescopes for signals from other nearby planets that are send towards us either deliberately or as a result of them communicating with one another. It is a sensible method but unlikely to succeed for now because our telescopes are only sensitive enough to ‘see’ them if they live on planets around the closest 100 or so stars to Earth. Unless their signals are extremely bright, or we build far larger telescopes, it seems unlikely to me that this method will succeed in the next 50 years. I hope I’m wrong! 

There’s a lot of interest in astronomy at the moment, with the Juno in orbit around Jupiter, Curiosity on Mars, the Parker solar probe on its way to explore our closest star, the Sun, the TESS exoplanet finder and grand projects like the James Webb Space Telescope launching in a few years. TESS and JWST in particular might find life elsewhere, perhaps not intelligent life, but if they do find evidence for any kind of exolife how will that change our world? Do you think such knowledge will transform our perspective on life?  

I would love to see us discover extra-terrestrial life and embrace the finding as a transformational moment in our collective human consciousness. Sadly, given the way we behave to one another on Earth, I think it would probably make us retreat further into our shells and spend more on ‘defence’. 

Does the sheer size of the universe boggle your mind? You’re dealing with colliding galaxies on a daily basis, but galaxies collide over hundreds of millions of years. As you note in your book, all we get is a snapshot of galaxies in freeze frame. It’s only by collecting and ordering images from tens of thousands of observations that we get to understand what’s actually happening. Do you ever feel daunted by that?  

I don’t think the human mind is designed to take in the size of things much larger or smaller than ourselves. So when I say ‘trillion’ I know what it means mathematically, but I don’t really have any more insight than anyone else as to its true meaning. Even flying across Australia from Sydney-Perth fills me with awe at the size of a single continent. The scale of the universe will never be comprehensible to me or any other astrophysicist.

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In your book, there’s a picture of you with Buzz Aldrin, one of the first men on the Moon. Would you like to go into space? It’s long been a dream in science fiction and within popular culture. Some, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, are trying to make spaceflight accessible, but it remains elusive. Do you think it’s a pipe dream? Or are we on the cusp of making spaceflight commonplace?  

Meeting Buzz Aldrin and spending three days with him introducing his first Australian live tour was an absolute thrill. He’s a global icon and was one of my biggest heroes when I was growing up. 

I think space will become more accessible once the price comes down sufficiently. It’s the same as air travel. ‘Make it available and they will pay for it’. Or something.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to this interview. I thoroughly enjoyed your book and rated five out of five stars. It’s beautifully written, so I was thrilled when your publisher allowed me to quote a paragraph (below). Keep up the great work making science easily accessible to the general public.

When Galaxies Collide is available in paperback and as an ebook. You can learn more at www.lisaharveysmith.com

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Grazing the Sun

The Parker Solar Probe launches today in what is an ambitious scientific endeavour, flying in to graze the Sun in an elliptical orbit comparable to that of a comet.

Falling seems easy. For us, it’s hard to avoid and we have to be careful climbing ladders, trees, etc, but falling into the Sun is hard. Seems counterintuitive but remember Earth orbits the Sun at 108,000 km/hr. That is crazy fast, but we don’t notice our speed in the same way someone sitting in the back seat of a car racing down the highway, lost in the glare of their smartphone, might not realize they’ve pulled out of the parking lot.

Imagine falling into the Sun like throwing a ball from a car on the highway. If you aim for a highway sign, you’ll miss. Why? Because the ball has your momentum. Your aim might be true and perfectly good if the car was sitting still, but as you’re in motion you’ll miss and the ball will sail past the sign. In the same way, the Parker Solar Probe needs to lose a lot of the orbital momentum it gets from Earth. To do this, scientists have devised a neat trick. They’re going to loop the probe around both the Sun and Venus. With each pass of Venus, it’ll lose a little more momentum and fall deeper in toward the Sun. This process will take several years to complete.

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Slowly closing in on the Sun with the orbits of Earth, Venus and Mercury shown

The Sun is massive. It’s far bigger than most people realize. We live on Earth, which is massive. We look at other planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus which all dwarf Earth, but the Sun is the monster powering this system, containing 99.8% of ALL the mass in our solar system. Yep, the planets are a rounding error in the formation of the Sun.

At its closest approach, the Sun will look something like this…

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Image credit: Spacecraft: ESA/ATG medialab; Sun: NASA/SDO/P. Testa (CfA)

The Parker Solar Probe is going to pass within roughly 4 million miles of the Sun, whereas Earth orbits at an average of 97 million miles. Falling in that close to such a massive body, the probe is going to pick up some tremendous speed, traveling at upwards of 700,000 kilometers an hour (or 430,000 mph relative to the sun)! That’s the equivalent of traveling from Philadelphia to Washington DC in a second, or New York to LA in 20 seconds!

Temperatures on the probe are expected to hit around 1370°C/2500°F in the sunlight and 30°C/85°F in the shade. While in sunlight, the temperature will be hot enough to melt aluminum, copper, brass, cast iron, nickel, etc and is right on the verge of melting silicon itself, making the design particularly tricky. It’s interesting to note that the probe will fly through a portion of the corona that reaches well over a million degrees, but as it is rarified (extremely thin) the temperature of the probe won’t exceed 2500F.

As with all scientific experiments, decades of planning has gone into the mission. We are yet again on the verge of unraveling more of the cosmic mystery surrounding our origins and how the universe works as we take our first close observations of a star.

The Parker Solar Probe is named after the 91 year old Eugene Parker who first proposed the concept of solar winds, and he’ll be watching the launch live!

Anti-Science Fiction

It comes as no surprise to anyone that science fiction is fictitious. It’s make-believe—speculative entertainment for our over-active imaginations, whisking us away to far flung worlds and allowing us to consider “What if?” But what happens when fiction transcends the page and enters popular culture? What influence does it have?

In this blog post I’d like to put forward the proposition that popular scifi that’s inherently anti-scientific has unjustly eroded our confidence in science.

Anti-science is popular, and not just in the absurd form of Flat Earthers. From creationists to anti-vaxxers and those that deny climate change, we’re surrounded by skeptics, but this isn’t healthy skepticism, where one challenges ideas to learn, but rather is based in stubborn ignorance, often to the detriment of those that hold these beliefs. And this isn’t hyperbole on my part. Those that chase “alternative” or “complimentary” medicine have TWICE the mortality rate. Why? Because there is no alternative or complimentary medicine. There’s just medicine—evidence-based and scientifically researched, and then there’s feel good guesswork. Which do you trust? Choose wisely, as your life literally depends on it.

Where do these notions come from? Why are we so ready to accept the latest craze and yet doubt hard-fought scientific research?

It’s really quite counterintuitive. Think about the times in which we live and the prevalence of science in everyday life. From smart phones to airplanes, we’re surrounded with the rewards of science. No longer plagued by Smallpox or Polio, we have significant proportions of the population questioning the need for vaccines. Why?

Consider this quote from James Henry Robinson’s The Mind in the Making.

We sometimes fine ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told we are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but fine ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem which is threatened.

Ego is the great enemy.

I often hear people say “science is just commonsense.” Nope. No it isn’t. If it was, the world would be very different. It wouldn’t have taken us thousands of years to figure out a few basic steps. Our natural “sense” is inherently biased by a whole raft of prejudices. Science is the discipline of removing those influences so we can see clearly, which makes it all the more galling when uninformed and ignorant people challenge it without any reason beyond their feelings.

Is science perfect? No, but it is self-correcting.

Science is a particularly human affair and is subject to the same foibles as any other endeavor, including cultural biases like racism and sexism, ala #metoo, the difference is, it ACCEPTS rather than defends these challenges (or it should and will given time). All these fearful conspiracies theories that scientists are some how in cohorts over climate change couldn’t be more wrong. There’s not a scientist alive that wouldn’t love to discover something that overturned their field. That’s what science is all about—challenging norms, seeing if they continue to hold. If they do, wonderful. If they don’t, change. Einstein did that to Newton.

Why is our ego so pernicious?

The little word my is the most important word in human affairs, and properly to reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force whether it is my dinner, my dog, my house or my faith, my country or my God. We not only resent the imputation that our watch has the wrong time or that our car is shabby, but that our conception of the canals of Mars is in error, or our pronunciation of Epictetus is subject to revision.

It’s me.

You can tell everyone else they’re wrong, but not me—that’s our nature. Ironically, that’s something that’s systematically challenged by university professors teaching the next generation of scientists. There are no absolutes in science. Everything is subject to revision if the evidence demands it.

We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to it. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists of finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

And that brings us back to our proposition: science fiction that is inherently anti-scientific erodes our confidence in science.

It’s an unpopular opinion, I know, but Michael Crichton was a luddite. More often than not, in his novels science was the enemy. Science was elitist, arrogant. And this isn’t just a writer’s ploy of building different characters, in several of his novels including Jurassic Park and State of Fear Crichton undertakes MAJOR information dumps shitting on science. For me, it’s no surprise to see the modern aversion to science as it was born out of the attitudes he fomented in the 90s. His perspective was unthinkingly accepted as true, and has been difficult to displace in popular culture.

Consider these sections from Jurassic Park.

…science is a belief system that is hundreds of years old. And like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world anymore.

Decades later, this is still a common retort. Science (apparently) is just another belief system. That’s a proposition that is so absurd as to defy reason. Belief is anathema to science. In the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Science doesn’t care what you believe.”

Oh, and it’s hundred’s of years old. Nope. Science is NOTHING like it was in the time of either Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein, and it continues to be refined further. The advent of professional scientists as we know them today is less than a hundred years old.

How about this section?

Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but it cannot tell us not to use it… [the challenges we face are] because of ungovernable science.

As pious and self-righteous as this section is, it’s utterly wrong and yet these attitudes are still perpetuated in our culture today.

Scientists were the FIRST ones to speak out against the dangers of nuclear proliferation. It’s the military and government that pressed their use, but who’s going to criticise them? No, let’s take cheap shots at science. Science quickly settled on the use of molten salt reactors, which are astonishingly safe and practical, but don’t produce weapons grade by-products. It wasn’t science that stopped the adoption of these.

As for pesticides, I do believe they’re made by corporations. Scientists were the one’s that raised alarm bells about the use of DDT. Why? Because they study these things! That’s what science does.

The phrase “ungovernable science” is laughable. Governments and corporations have been suppressing good science for decades, doing everything they can to bury genuine science from the harm of tobacco to the dangers of climate change.

Ironically, what’s needed is ungovernable science. Science shouldn’t be answerable to any political ideology. Doh!

Science… [is as] foolish and misguided as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.

Yep, Michael Crichton wrote that.

Oh, and how about this one? Everyone knows this one…

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Try substituting “politicians, generals and entrepreneurs” and you’ll get far closer to the truth.

Then there’s this pearl of wisdom.

We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power.

If we’re witnessing the end of the scientific era, it’s because Michael helped usher in an era of ignorance and distrust. It won’t be science that destroys itself, but we’re on the verge of destroying ourselves.

These quotes aren’t isolated quips, they’re constant themes throughout Michael Crichton’s works. State of Fear is a manifesto for climate change denial, loosely wrapped in a story about the laughable concept of “eco-terrorism.” While Next, Timeline and Prey are all science-gone-mad novels.

Fiction is, by it’s nature, untrue, and yet it’s still influential in ways few people recognize, shaping culture and attitudes. Popularity breeds acceptance, and perhaps nowhere is that more true than in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.

Of course, you’re free to disagree with me, but please remember the words of James Henry Robinson, and his warning about how heedless we are in our beliefs, and yet strident in their defense.

The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists of finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

Think for yourself. I did. It’s refreshing.

Sorry, Michael. You’re a dinosaur.

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One small step

Today marks the 49th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. What was one small step for Neil Armstrong was indeed a giant leap for all of humanity. Our ability to harness science as technology allowed us to reach into space with Gagarin and to the surface of the Moon with Armstrong, Aldrin & Collins.

Since then, the temptation has been to look at the stagnation of crewed spaceflight as defeat. A common complaint is, why didn’t we go on to Mars? For the past half a century, we’ve barely left a low earth orbit so it looks like NASA’s finest hour was in the 60s and early 70s, but that isn’t the whole story.

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NASA/ESA, etc make the impossible look mundane, the astonishing look routine. For all the talk of putting men and women on Mars, the reality is we’re incredibly fragile, needy, bulky creatures. Keeping us alive is both costly and risky. The sheer distances involved are phenomenal, far beyond what most people realize.

Consider this…

Distance
Miles (avg)
Kilometers (avg)
As a percentage of journey to Mars


Earth to Mars
140,000,000
225,000,000



Earth to Moon
240,000
380,000
0.1714%


Earth to International Space Station
255
410
0.0002%

If we scale these distances and compare it to a road-trip from New York to Los Angeles, look at where our Apollo adventure gets us, and where we are on the International Space Station.

Distance
Miles (avg)
Kilometers (avg)
As a percentage of journey to LA


New York to LA (by road)
2,790
4,500



Equivalent journey to Moon
5
7
Not outside of NYC


Equivalent journey to ISS
27 feet
8.2 meters
Not outside the building

To make it a little more visual, let’s consider visualise this…

Here’s our epic road trip to LA

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Here’s our Apollo journey to scale, which is barely a trip between two museums in New York.

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It’s basically an uber trip for tourists, right? It took 400,000 engineers and scientists to get just three of us downtown!

And our journey to the International Space Station, which is still a PHENOMENAL feat of engineering…

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Yeah, that doesn’t even get us from the reception area in the Hayden Planetarium out to Central Park West!

One day, we’ll walk on the surface of Mars, but it will take an astonishing amount of precision and planning, and yet look at what we’ve done with robotic explorers. New Horizons flew by Pluto last year. On our scale, that’s the equivalent of circling Earth roughly twelve times! Compared to wandering through the hallways of the Hayden Planetarium or even our trip to the downtown museum, that is remarkable, phenomenal, astonishing, breathtaking (I’m running out of superlatives). And it was done with pinpoint precision.

Imagine how exciting it would be to hit a hole-in-one on a golf course. Now, imagine hitting that hole-in-one from the other side of the planet, with your golfball orbiting the planet twelve times before rolling into the hole.

We may not have walked on Mars (yet), but what NASA/ESA and others have accomplished over the past fifty years since Armstrong and Aldrin took those small steps have continued to be gigantic leaps forward. Our exploration of the stars and planets has transformed our understanding of our origins.

We’d all love to see more Buck Rogers and space clippers like those depicted in 2001:A Space Odyssey, but that’s the icing on the scientific cake. What we are seeing with the likes of Hubble, Cassini, Curiosity and soon Tess and the James Webb Space Telescope is the equivalent of running a marathon following that one small step.

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Ad astra per aspera.

Hitchhiking with Neil deGrasse Tyson

How cool would it be to catch a ride with Neil deGrasse Tyson on the way to work? Well, you can. Using a 360 camera, you’re in the front seat with Neil, listening to him and his buddies chat on their way to work.

Although these are all on YouTube, the links are screwy, and you’ll end up jumping from part II to Part V, and then miss Part VII, etc, so I’ve listed them here sequentially to make the ride a little smoother

Retrograde is on sale!

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RETROGRADE is currently on sale for $2.99 as an ebook in the US and £1.89 in the UK, and available through the following online stores

Amazon
Apple iBooks
Barnes & Noble
Google Play
Kobo

And the verdict of readers from all around the world?

I felt like I was there

More than five stars are due this story

By the end of each of his novels that I’ve read, I’ve felt like I’d made new friends

the decisions made in this story are beautiful and ugly. Humanity at it’s finest and at its worst as well

If you’re curious, you can see what other readers have said about this novel on GoodReads

 

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Surviving on Mars

Recently, I got to catch up with Dr. Lazendic-Galloway from Monash University over coffee. We spent several hours delving into everything from her personal speciality, supernova remnants, to the subject of living on Mars.

Along with Professor Tina Overton, Dr. Lazendic-Galloway runs a free, public, online learning course called How to Survive on Mars, which covers the science essential to living on another planet. If you enjoyed The Martian, you’ll love How to Survive on Mars as, over the course of four weeks, it delivers instructional videos and learning assignments in short segments that will enrich your understanding of Mars and the challenges faced by explorers from Earth.

Dr. Lazendic-Galloway graciously agreed to review my novel Retrograde.

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How to Survive on Mars

As an astrophysicist, it is not surprising that I like science fiction. But while I can watch any sci-fi movie, I’m picky when it comes to sci-fi books. I like to read only “hard” sci-fi, where realistic science is applied to make a plot more interesting. It’s too easy to make a story work if you ignore physical laws or facts and make your own rules. It takes more imagination and skill to create a good story using the constraints (and also possibilities) of laws of physics. I met Peter through my massive online open course (MOOC) “How to survive on Mars”, and besides an interest in Mars, we share the same attachment to hard science fiction.

Retrograde is a type of book that, once you start reading, you won’t be able to put down!

The story revolves around an international colony on Mars made of scientists, engineers and doctors, who must face the outbreak of war on Earth. The colonist must deal with this situation for which they never trained. With no ability to communicate with their mission controllers on Earth, the colonists have to make all the decisions by themselves, without knowing who started the war. And while everyone is trying to get a grasp on the situation, strange things start to happen within the colony and we start to wonder: who is the enemy?

Like Andy Weir’s The Martian, Retrograde is heaven for geeks like me. It uses realistic Martian settings and the application of real science wherever possible. In addition, it has Agatha-Christiean murder-mystery-like story plot that will keep you guessing right until the end. You will be transported to an exotic world of lava tube caves and hydroponics, where every component of the life support system is carefully planned and maintained. You will experience how it is to run or sleep in a lower gravity on Mars.  There is a nice variety of characters, in gender and race, which are believable and portray scientist and space explorers very well, in my experience. The book discusses current issues regarding space exploration and searching for life on Mars, but also touches on other important issues like gender equity in science and the equitable access of all nations to space colonization.

Overall, the book has a seductive dystopian atmosphere, but it does leave a space for a hope. My favorite sentence from the book says it all: “We’ve got to stop thinking like Earthlings and start thinking like Martians.”

So if you’d like to learn more about Mars colonization and one possible future that humanity might face, I highly recommend Retrograde.

Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway,

astrophysicist

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Learn How to Survive on Mars with Professor Tina Overton and Dr. Lazendic-Galloway

 

 

 

 

The Fast and the Furious in Spacetime

The theory of relativity is counterintuitive. It defies our every day experiences with wild notions such as time dilation and length contraction.

It’s difficult to grasp the speed of light as a hard limit on how fast something can move. Why can’t I go faster? If I’m cruising down the freeway, a little more gas allows me to go as fast as I want. Eventually, my car reaches its engineering limit, but, hey, jump in a Tesla Roadster and I can go faster again. Why isn’t the same thing possible when it comes to spaceships?

“Punch it, Chewy.”

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Movie: Star Wars

Science fiction loves to toy with the concept of FTL—Faster Than Light travel, with stories such as Star Trek and Star Wars suggesting it’s simply a technical challenge to be solved, like breaking the sound barrier in an aircraft, but the theory of relativity reveals something astonishing about the nature of our universe, a fundamental aspect that defines reality—space and time aren’t two separate concepts, but rather one thing—spacetime. Reality is governed by (at least) four dimensions, not three. Up & down, left & right, forwards & backwards, past & future.

Why can’t we go faster than the speed of light? Dr. Sundance Bilson-Thompson of the University of Adelaide explains on Quora that the answer is quite simple. We can’t go faster than the speed of light because we’re already traveling AT the exact speed of light as we pass through four-dimensional spacetime. Regardless of what we do, we can never travel any faster or slower than the speed of light.

Wait? What???

Yes, we can’t go any faster or slower than the speed of light when viewed from the perspective of all four dimensions.

Perhaps an analogy in three dimensions will help.

Let’s have a race.

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Movie: The Fast and the Furious

Stay with me, and we’ll use The Fast and the Furious to explain relativity.

Mr. T. is going to race Dominic to settle once and for all whether The A-Team or The Fast and the Furious have the best drivers.

The rules are simple. Neither driver is allowed to speed. Both will drive at exactly 100mph, so this will be all about skill.

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On your marks. Get set. Go.

As neither driver trusts the other, they’ve fitted their cars with police radar guns, allowing them to monitor each others speed. In addition to the speed cameras, they have web cams inside each others vehicles watching the speedometer. With two ways of verifying their speed, there’s no way either of them can cheat.

As the race unfolds Dominic pulls ahead.

Mr. T. accuses him of cheating, but Dominic swears he’s only ever been traveling at 100mph.

Mr. T. calls Dominic a liar because he too has only ever been traveling at 100mph. Even though he climbed a mountain, he kept his van on exactly 100mph. Mr. T. is convinced the only way Dominic could get ahead of him is if he was going faster. Is he right?

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Mr. T. takes a shortcut over the mountains

When Mr. T. looks at the web cam inside Dominic’s car he sees the speedometer reading exactly 100mph, the same speed he’s doing, but if he points his radar gun at Dominic he gets a speed of 110mph. Confused, he asks Dominic what he can see looking back at the A-Team van.

Dominic looks at the web camera showing Mr. T’s speed and sees that he’s also traveling at 100mph, but with his radar gun, he measures Mr. T’s speed as only 90mph.

What’s happening? How can both measurements be correct when they’re clearly different?

The answer is… both vehicles have maintained a speed of 100mph throughout the entire race. Neither slowed down, but as Mr. T. travelled up hill (without losing ANY speed) he traded forward motion for vertical motion. He began moving in another dimension—up. He’s traveling 100mph, but on an angle relative to Dominic. From Mr. T’s perspective, he’s still moving at 100mph, but when he measures Dominic’s speed down on the open plain, it’s clear Dominic is moving faster relative to him even though Dominic too is only going at 100mph.

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High school trigonometry is much more fun with Mr. T.

Some high school trigonometry explains what has happened. Both vehicles left from the same point (O) and they’ve both travelled the EXACT same distance in a straight line (O-A for Mr. T and O-D for Dominic), but when viewed in only one dimension, Mr. T has fallen back to point B. It’s as though he’s only traveled the distance O-B, making it look like he’s fallen behind (or Dominic has pulled ahead). In reality, they’ve both travelled EXACTLY the same distance, but for Mr. T. one dimension has been traded for another. By going up hill, Mr. T. has effectively reduced his horizontal motion.

This is what happens when it comes to relativity. Motion in one dimension is traded for another, only instead of the trade occurring between spacial dimensions like horizontal or vertical, relativity involves trading with time.

Instead of racing along at 100mph we are all racing along at one second per second. Sounds strange to think of time itself as a speed, but it’s just another dimension in which we can move—and we are in motion within time.

So long as everyone’s “racing” along in the same direction (which in this context means sitting still next to you as time races along), there’s nothing to see. We’re tied for first place. But should one of us start moving off in any other physical direction, all of a sudden we’re trading our speed through time for our speed in a physical dimension.

Fly away from me in a spaceship and you’ll swear time moves at exactly the same pace for you as it did when you were sitting next to me, just like Mr. T. seeing his speedometer reading 100mph. But when I measure your motion, just like Dominic, I’ll see you moving slower—not physically, but in time—I’ll see time slow down for you.

In the same way as Mr. T. watches Dominic race ahead along the open plain, you’ll look back at me and see time appear to speed up. Sounds crazy, but it’s been experimentally tested and holds true. The faster you fly away from me, the more pronounce the effect becomes, giving rise to the concept that if you left Earth in a spaceship traveling close to the speed of light you could return one year later to find that twenty years had passed on Earth.

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Fancy a trip?

The key point is that both of us—you in your super fast rocket and me waiting here on Earth for twenty years—have ALWAYS travelled through four dimensional spacetime at EXACTLY the same overall speed. Like Dominic and Mr. T. we simply traded speed in one dimension for another. The net result, though, is always the same—always equal. A whole bunch of time and a little space equals a whole bunch of space and a little time.

Spacetime is elastic, stretching and squeezing so that the net result is you’re always moving at the speed of light in all four dimensions, regardless of what you’re doing in any one dimension. Speed up in this dimension, relative to me, and I’ll see you slow down in the dimension of time to equal things out.

Now it becomes obvious why you could never travel faster than light. Once you get that fast, there’s no time left to trade. You’ve hit the speed limit and maxed out.

But why is the speed of light a hard limit?

If we rephrase the question in the light of Einstein’s most famous equation: E=mc2, the answer becomes obvious.

Can light go faster than light? No. The notion itself is obviously absurd. But we think of matter as different, special, even though it’s not—the equivalence between matter and energy (ala E=mc2) means it too could never go faster than light.

Speed is distance traveled over time taken. Miles per hour. Kilometers per second. If you trade all of your motion through time for motion through space (ie, travel at the speed of light) then there’s no time in which to record your speed. You have the miles but no per hour.

Light travels at the speed of reality (which for convenience we call the speed of light) because it has no mass. Looking at Einstein’s equation, it’s all E and no M.

Remember, regardless of what speed you’re doing relative to someone else, light is ALWAYS traveling away from you at 299,792,458 meters per second. You, Dominic and Mr. T. will always agree on that speed regardless of where you are and how fast you’re going. 299,792,458 meters per second is you traveling through four-dimensional spacetime at one second per second. Others may see time slow down or speed up for you, but you’ll never see that yourself. For you, it’s absolutely constant.

Spacetime is the wonderfully weird way in which the universe unfolds. It may seem counterintuitive, but it is actually astonishingly consistent and describes the way the cosmos works with astounding precision.

Strange, but true.

 

 

 

 

Strange Survivors

Strange Survivors is a non-fiction book by Professor Oné Pagán from West Chester University, and examines the way natural selection has lead to an astonishing variety of attack and defense mechanisms in the game of life.

Strange Survivors is an example of scicomm—a book designed to communicate science in a clear and interesting manner. It’s designed for the general public and could be read by anyone from Grade 10 upwards. It’s easy reading. Professor Pagán has a light, breezy style of writing that is conversational. You get the feeling he’s chatting with you over a cup of coffee in a university cafe between lectures.

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At first, I thought this book would be about the oddities of life, focusing on obscure examples that are interesting curiosities, but don’t really resonate as I’m unlikely to ever see any of them in anything outside of a book or a nature documentary. Professor Pagán, though, shows us that we’re ALL strange survivors in that, after 3.8 billion years we’ve survived. Every species on Earth has survived against the odds to reach this point in time, eclipsing every other extinct species. Even you, personally, are here against all odds. I won’t steal his thunder, but the odds of you being the child of your mother and father are stupendously low. In this way, Professor Pagán uses Strange Survivors to enrich our appreciation of the wonder of life.

Strange Survivors is a guided tour of modern biology, looking at the surprising role of physical properties like electricity in producing and sustaining life. Professor Pagán makes the point that no single molecule in your body is actually alive. They’re just molecules—of water, various salts, chains of carbon forming things like DNA, but none of them are actually alive, no more so than if you were looking at them in a petri dish under a microscope—and yet, here you are—a survivor!

Confused about quorum sensing among bacteria? Professor Pagán’s answer is, “Let’s imagine a hockey team. Their ultimate objective is to get the puck into the net. To do so…” And with that he reduces a complex subject to a sports analogy, making it easy to follow.

Enjoy milk in your coffee? Or on your cereal? So do ants, but not in the way you think. They domesticate and raise aphids in a similar manner to how we raise cattle, and they milk them for their sugary excretions. See? Us and ants—we’re both strange survivors.

Strange Survivors is technically accurate and isn’t shy with scientific terms, but never in a manner that’s intimidating or overbearing. This isn’t fiction—you have to think as you read, but the reward is an increased understanding of the astonishing variety of life on Earth and the strategies species use to survive.

The thing I enjoyed most about Strange Survivors is its desire to impart a sense of awe about the natural realm. We’re time poor in modern life, accustom to sound-bites and sensationalism, but more than ever there’s a need for books like Strange Survivors as they remind us that science is the foundation of modern society. Science isn’t some new high priesthood, carried out behind closed doors by people in white coats chanting scientific terms in a strange tongue. On the contrary, science is the pinnacle of human achievement and should be accessible to all—and Strange Survivors shows us that science is merely a means of understanding the world around us. It gives us a glimpse into the weird, wonderful and strange world of biology that we’re all a part of.

Strange Survivors is available in ebook, paperback and hardback from the end of February 2018, and can be preordered now.

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Disclosure: I received an advanced copy of Strange Survivors in exchange for an honest review.

 

Book plates

Being an Australian author, it’s horribly impractical and horrendously expensive to sign books for readers in the US and the UK, so I’ve done a limited print run of book plates for fans of my writing.

Book plates are A5 size stylized stickers I can sign and post anywhere in the world. They can then be stuck inside any of my novels to give you a unique personalized book.

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Signed copies of The Great Gatsby have sold for US$90,000

My autograph will never be in high demand, but while researching this I was impressed to learn that signed copies of J.K. Rowling‘s first edition of Harry Potter are worth $24,000, while her hand written copy of The Tales of Beedle The Bard sold at auction for an astonishing $4 million!!

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J.K. Rowling clearly had a LOT of fun with this

If you’d like a book plate, please leave a message on this page with…

your postal address
and the name of the book you have

I’ll write something about that book and mail the book plate to you. Your comment/address will not be made public, and will be deleted once I’ve popped your book plate in the mail.

All the best,

Peter