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Sciency Games: Fe [26]

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Today’s post is part of a series of posts profiling sciency video games.  These are educational games, most available for free online, that can really help you gain a deeper understanding of science.  Click here to find out more about this series.

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After several failed attempts, I've finally made carbon in the game Fe [26].
After several failed attempts, I’ve finally made carbon in the game Fe [26].
If you have not yet played Threes or the conceptually similar 2048, turn back now.  These games are highly addictive!  However, if it’s already too late for you, then maybe you should try Fe [26].  It functions much like 2048, but instead of adding numbered tiles together, you “fuse” atomic nuclei in the heart of a star.

In 2048, the game progresses thusly: 2 + 2 = 4, 4 + 4 = 8, 8 + 8 = 16, etc.  That’s fairly easy to understand, but in Fe [26] things get more interesting.  Hydrogen + hydrogen = deuterium (or deuteron as it’s called in this game).  Deuterium + hydrogen = helium 3.  Helium 3 + hydrogen = helium 4.  Helium 4 + helium 4 + helium 4 = carbon 12.  What could be simpler?

You win the game if you create iron 56, one of the most stable isotopes of any chemical element.
You win if you manage to create iron, specifically iron 56, one of the most stable isotopes of any chemical element known to exist.  I’ve only pulled it off a few times now, and only with the help of the cheat sheet at the bottom of the Fe [26] webpage.
What excites me about this game is that, even though it’s frustrating at first, eventually you start to see patterns.  You start to learn which combinations of atoms work and which ones do not.  After checking with Wikipedia, I discovered that the knowledge I acquired from this game is fairly close to reality.

So if you write science fiction or have more than a passing interest in science, I recommend giving this game a try.  It might help you learn something about what really goes on inside stars.  Best of all, the game is free!

Click here to start playing Fe [26].

P.S.: In addition to teaching me a little nuclear physics, Fe [26] has also taught me to hate beryllium 7.  I keep making it by mistake, though I don’t hate it nearly as much as magnesium 24.  Accidentally creating magnesium 24 is the worst!

Let the Sciency Games Commence!

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 7 Comments

I started this blog as a way to force myself, as a science fiction writer, to do the kind of research that I and so many other aspiring Sci-Fi authors neglect to do. I’ve learned a lot since Planet Pailly began, and I hope you’ve learned something too. Today, I want to share a few tools that have helped make learning a little easier.

I say tools, but what I really mean are video games. It’s amazing how much you can learn from a game when that game is scientifically accurate (or at least accurate-ish). Here are three examples:

  • Fe [26]: Atoms are important, but where do they come from? In Fe [26], which is modeled on the popular smart phone game 2048, you control the fusion reactions that occur inside a star. The real fun is figuring out which combinations of particles work and which ones don’t. Click here to play Fe [26].
  • Super Planet Crash: The planets in our Solar System exist in a delicate balance. Subtle changes in gravity or momentum can have disastrous consequences… which is what Super Planet Crash is all about! Your goal is to create a stable star system. You score points based on how long your planets stay in orbit around their parent star. Click here to play Super Planet Crash.
  • Kerbal Space Program: The people of Kerbin are cute, squishy green guys who are hyper excited about space exploration, and for some reason they’ve put you in charge of their space program. This game simulates not only the physics of space flight but also the logistics of running a NASA-esque organization. Of all the games on this list, this is the only one that isn’t free, but if you’re interested, click here to check out the demo version of the game.


The important thing about all these games is that you learn by doing. That makes them far more effective teaching tools than any lecture, book, or sciency blog post.

For the rest of this month, I’ll be taking a closer look at each of these games. Here is the itinerary for those upcoming reviews as well as special editions of Sciency Words featuring words I learned because of these games.

Wednesday, May 14: Review of Fe [26]

Friday, May 16: Sciency Words: Triple Alpha Process

Wednesday, May 21: Review of Super Planet Crash

Friday, May 23: Sciency Words: Eccentricity

Wednesday, May 28: Review of Kerbal Space Program

Friday, May 30: Sciency Words: Orbital Vocabulary

When Humvees Fly

~ J.S. Pailly ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I told you about Terrafugia, a company that’s on the verge of putting the first ever flying car on the market. Of course, their car is not a true flying car à la the Jetsons; it’s more like an airplane with retractable wings, making it street legal. It’s the kind of vehicle that would still require you to earn a pilot’s license, so I doubt it will become the common man’s vehicle of choice.

Well, there’s another company working on flying car designs. Advanced Tactics Inc., a California based aerospace company, is reporting the first successful test flight of their Black Knight Transformer. The technology appears to be similar to those little, toy quadcopters you’ve probably seen, but on a much larger scale. It has big rotors and big blades, big enough to lift a small truck off the ground.

According to the company’s website, the Black Knight Transformer will be used primarily by the military for quick extraction of casualties and for cargo resupply missions. The advantages of this vehicle on (or above) the battlefield are obvious. When you need to cross hazardous terrain, you can just fly over it. When flying makes you an easy target, you can drive.

Best of all, the Black Knight apparently has an autopilot feature. Articles from Singularity Hub and Scientific American suggest that means a pilot’s license isn’t necessary, leaving only one question unanswered: how soon can I buy one?

Photons and Ice Cream

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 1 Comment

How can light be a particle and a wave?  I have no freaking idea.  This has perplexed scientists for generations now, but experiment after experiment have proven it is true.  Somehow, the individual photons that make up light are particles sometimes and waves others, depending on how you look at them.  Even weirder, sometimes photons seem to have the properties of both particles and waves at the same time.

Asimov

A few years ago, I read a simple analogy that makes particle-wave duality a little easier to understand.  This comes to us courtesy of Isaac Asimov’s book Atom: Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos.

Asimov asks us how we might describe an empty ice cream cone (other than disappointing).  Is it a triangle or a circle?  Somehow, it appears to be both.  When observed from one perspective, it’s clearly a triangle; from another, it’s obviously circular.  And sometimes, if viewed under certain special circumstances, the ice cream cone appears to exhibit properties of both a triangle and a circle at the same time!

I had planned to include a picture of an ice cream cone here, but it mysteriously disappeared. Such strange things are known to happen in quantum physics.

Of course, light’s dual nature is far more complicated than that of an ice cream cone.  Our limited, human minds may never learn how to visualize photons doing their quantum voodoo particle-wave thing, but the ice cream analogy might make this bizarre concept a little easier to digest.

P.S.: A few years ago, I wrote a review of Atom: Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos.  If you have any interest in learning about science, this book is a must read.  I cannot emphasize enough that it is the best book on science I have ever encountered.

Wisdom of Dune

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 5 Comments

The sequels to Dune are not, perhaps, great works of science fiction.  They don’t even come close to the literary masterpiece that is the original Dune.  However, these books do offer a few kernels of wisdom.  Here are three of my favorites:

One cannot have a single thing without its opposite.

– Children of Dune

It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.

– Chapterhouse: Dune

Silence is often the best thing to say.

– Chapterhouse: Dune

Take these quotes as you will.  I have found them to be true, sometimes frustratingly so.

What are some of your favorite quotes from science fiction?

Love Hurts: New Research on Spider Mating Behavior

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 3 Comments

Today’s post is for the ladies.  Have you ever been sitting in a bar minding your own business when some sleazy guy saunters over to you looking for “a good time”?  Well, here’s one way to handle this situation: murder that scumbag and eat his corpse.  That’s what certain female spiders do.

Researchers in Spain report that when a male spider approaches a female, if the male is judged undesirable, the female will simply eat her suitor.  Delicious.  Undesirable male spider traits include diminutive size, unhealthy appearance, and presumably lame pick up lines (the one about “spreading all eight of your legs” is really getting old).

This new research also showed that some of the more aggressive females ate their suitors regardless of how desirable those unfortunate suitors may have been.  It’s worth noting that the research was conducted on the species Lycosa hispanica, a wolf spider native to Spain, so we don’t know if this behavior is universal to all spiders.  For the sake of all those lonely, lovesick male spiders out there, I hope it is not.

Spider Cold Feet

For more information on the sexual cannibalism of Spanish wolf spiders, click here.

Einstein’s Old Envelopes

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

The other day, I came across an amusing story about Albert Einstein. He and his wife were visiting the Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California, and several of the astronomers there were bragging about how powerful their telescope was. They said it could reveal the secret workings of the universe. Elsa, Einstein’s wife, laughed and said, “My husband does that on the back of an old envelope.”

Today, we think of scientists working in big laboratories with lots of expensive equipment. To make any meaningful scientific discoveries, we assume you first need a large budget, subsidized either by the Federal Government or a major corporation like Lockheed Martin or Kaiser Permanente. And yet Einstein required none of that. All his greatest contributions to science were made using nothing more than his mind—and apparently some old envelopes.

Einstein Time

P.S.: I found this anecdote in a recent special edition of Time Magazine profiling Einstein. I highly recommend reading it. Einstein is a far more fascinating and complicated historical figure than popular culture has portrayed him to be.

The Periodic Table: A Source of Conflict

~ J.S. Pailly ~ Leave a comment

In Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, the plot revolves around the discovery of a new isotope of plutonium known as plutonium 186. As anyone familiar with chemistry already knows, such an isotope cannot possibly exist (at least not in our universe), but it turns out that by acquiring it from a parallel universe, we are able to create a cheap and highly efficient new source of power.

In last week’s edition of Sciency Words, we talked about “conflict minerals.” These valuable minerals are essential to our technologically advanced society, but they’ve also become a source of conflict in the world. The most noteworthy example is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the mining of four specific metallic elements has funded a bloody and protracted civil war.

Right now, real people are suffering and dying because of gold’s exceptional ability to conduct electricity and tungsten’s extremely high melting point. To understand why this is happening requires a little study of the periodic table of elements, which reveals the special properties of these and other metals.

Whether we’re talking about the minerals mined in Congo or mythical isotopes like plutonium 186, the lesson is the same. We cannot deny the importance of science in our world when the information contained in the humble periodic table of elements can spark so much conflict, both in science fiction and real life.

Baby, You Can Drive My Car

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 3 Comments

Perhaps the greatest disappointment of the 21st Century is that we still don’t have flying cars.  We were promised, damn it.  Old timey Sci-Fi lied to us.  This should have happened back in the year 2000!  However, the 21st Century is young, and maybe—just maybe—we’re starting to catch up.

Introducing the Transition by Terrafugia.  According to the manufacturer’s website, the Transition is a street-legal aircraft currently in development.  The anticipated price tag is a mere $279,000.  Check out the video:

Based on the video, the Transition doesn’t appear to be a “true” flying car but rather a hybridization of car and airplane.  This isn’t a vehicle that levitates.  It does not hover in the air like Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder.  I would assume that to purchase one, you will first have to earn your pilot’s license, and I can tell you that is a much more complicated process than a relatively quick and painless trip to the D.M.V.

However, this is the beginning.  The fact that a company now exists and is working toward the ultimate dream of the 21st Century hints at more to come.  According to Terrafugia’s website, other flying car designs are already in development.

P.S.: Don’t forget that levitating trains already exist!

Seriously, the Solar System is Enormous!!!

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Today, I want to share a few interesting links related to our topics of science and speculative fiction.

First off, we have a map of the Solar System.  This is no ordinary map of the Solar System, though.  This map is to scale, with the size of the Moon represented as a single pixel and the distances between planets accurately portrayed.  It took me about twenty minutes to explore the entire map, and I strongly recommend reading all the notes.  They get pretty philosophical once you pass Jupiter.  Click here for “If the Moon were One Pixel: A Tediously Accurate Map of the Solar System.”

Next, Michelle Joelle compares J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” with William Desmond’s God and the Between.  The important lesson here is that fairy tales and other forms of speculative fiction should not be dismissed as escapism.  They may in fact be tools to help us understand that which transcends the crude, material world we see around us.  Click here for part one of Joelle’s series.  Click here for part two.  And click here for part three.

Lastly, if I gave you the numbers 2, 4, and 8, would you be able to predict what number I’d give you next?  You might assume I’m following a simple mathematical pattern, but that’s not the pattern I’m thinking of.  The video below takes a look not so much at math tricks but at how difficult it is for us to escape our assumptions once they’re made.