If you’re the kind of person who reads blogs about science fiction, then odds are you already know what a Dalek is.  For those of you who don’t, Daleks are aliens from the British TV show Doctor Who.  They’re green, slimy creatures living inside metal shells with an eyestalk and two appendages.

Despite the fact that they’re responsible for a great deal of death and destruction, Daleks are kind of silly looking.  One of their appendages looks suspiciously like a plunger. Doctor Who was a low budget show.

But maybe low budget sci-fi from the 60’s isn’t as silly as we thought.  Researchers have developed a new robotic hand that relies on suction to pick stuff up.  Most robotic hands imitate human hands, but computers can’t manage all those fingers the way our brains do.  I guess fingers and emotions have something in common.

The new design uses a beanbag that shapes itself around an object.  A little suction inside the bag forces it to squeeze around the object, allowing a robot to pick it up.  The beanbag hand works so well that a robot could pour drinks, use tools, and even write with a pen.  Best of all, this seems even more ridiculous than Dalek plunger hands.  At least plungers could be used as a weapon, but who’d expect to be attacked with a beanbag?

The lesson for science fiction writers is this: no idea is too stupid to be impossible.  The most evil aliens in the galaxy just might have plungers for hands.  Or beanbags.

Sources

Minogue, Kristen.  “Robot ‘Hands’ Write Without Fingers.”  Science October 25, 2010. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/robot-hands-write-without-finger.html?ref=wp

 

People in the future will talk differently than us, but as a sci-fi writer I still have to make sure my readers can understand them.  It’s a difficult balance, but I think I’ve found a way to make things easier.  The trick is to use scientific terms in ordinary conversation.

I don’t mean technobable.  That’s boring.  I’m talking about sneaking words and phrases that come from science into a character’s dialogue.  For example…

Normal: Our relationship was getting serious; soon, we’d have to get married.
Sciency: Our relationship was gaining momentum; soon, we’d have to get married.

Normal: We tried to be friends, but there was too much conflict between us.
Sciency: We tried to be friends, but there was too much friction between us.

Normal: These rumors are unstoppable.
Sciency: These rumors have too much inertia.

The words momentum, friction, and inertia all come from basic Newtonian physics, but their meanings are well understood by everyone.  Futuristic characters might use these words frequently, but they don’t sound out of place to the modern reader.

It would be harder to slip words like neutrino, carboniferous, or quantum mechanical into a normal conversation.  Maybe there’s a way to do it; I don’t know.  The point is scientific terminology does filter into people’s vocabularies.  Even more so for citizens of an intergalactic empire.

The airplane was invented by two guys working in a bicycle shop.  The PC was invented in some guy’s garage.  But the story of an ordinary person creating something that changes the world… that doesn’t happen anymore.

Most advances in science and technology require the vast resources of a corporation or government agency.  Companies like Apple and Lockheed Martin are building the future.

Except this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics proves everything I just said wrong.  Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov discovered a substance one atom thick, stronger than diamond, and able to conduct electricity faster than any other known substance.  They did it using a pencil, some sticky tape, and a flat surface.  It’s so easy anyone can do it at home, and there are even instructions on the Internet (see the first link below).

You make small amounts of graphene every time you use a graphite pencil.  It’s been all around us for centuries, but no one noticed it.  We can use it to make smaller, faster transistors, or use it in LCD screens, solar cells, and other electronics.  Mixed with plastics, it can make stronger, lighter airplanes, cars, etc… and it’s two-dimensional structure could change the way we understand quantum mechanics.

Graphene is made of carbon atoms arranged in a perfect hexagon.  These hexagons connect end to end.  In a graphite pencil, layers of these hexagons are stacked on top of each other, and when you write you shave several layers off to make a mark on the page.  Pressing a pencil mark between sticky tape can separate the layers further, creating pure graphene.

The next step is to find a way to mass-produce it.  Rubbing pencils and tape together is easy, but creating large sheets of graphene is hard.  We’ll probably need the vast resources of a corporation to do that.  But once we find a way, graphene will change the world, and Geim and Novoselov will be as famous as the Wright Brothers.

Links
Do It Yourself Graphene

Scientific American from 2008 on Graphene’s Discovery

Science Magazine: Graphene Wins Nobel Prize

I recently had the opportunity to visit the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Maryland.  It’s part of the NIH campus (National Institute of Health), where all sorts of exciting research is going on.

Any knowledge on any subject can be useful to my writing.  I would have been happy to find documents on the latest advances in Band-Aid design.  But I was much luckier than that.  The NLM has primary and secondary sources in many areas of health and biology, including the work done by NASA.

When we first started sending people into space, there were some big questions about safety.  Not just about whether or not the rocket would blow up on the launch pad, but could the human body survive the rocket’s sudden acceleration it would experience if it did work?  Could the circulatory system operate without gravity?  What about the lungs?

Even today, there is still a lot we don’t know about the human body in space.  As a science fiction writer, I love hearing that we don’t know something.  It means I can start making stuff up.  But first, I have to find out exactly where those gaps in our knowledge are.

I left the NLM with a book’s worth of photocopies.  I have chapters from a book called Space and Life by Hubert Planel, a safety report from the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement, and articles from the journals Science and Nature.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the entropy of any closed system will increase over time.  The universe, being a closed system, will become more and more disordered until it reaches a state called heat death (see last week’s post for more information).

In the real world, entropy is a depressing reality.  But when applied to a story, it can create a more exciting climax.  Stories are, in a way, closed systems that take place in fictional universes.  They have rules.  Whether they are the laws of nature, the rules of society, or the limits of a character’s personality, these rules must never be broken… until the end of the story.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is a perfect example.  Ender Wiggin grows up in a military school, one of the most orderly places any story could be set.  Furthermore, Ender’s education revolves around a certain game.  As the story progresses, the rules of that game are broken to greater and greater degrees, and we see the status quo of the school coming apart as well.

Things become increasingly unpredictable and even dangerous, at least for the characters and perhaps, in some way, for any reader who’s become emotionally attached to them.  “The system is breaking up,” the narrator tells us, relaying Ender’s thoughts.  “No doubt about it.  Either someone at the top is going crazy, or something’s gone wrong with the war, the real war, the bugger war” (Card, 157).

When fictional entropy brings about a story’s apocalypse, the main character is freed of all constraints and reveals his or her deepest passions.  He clings to the one thing that really matters while everything else falls apart.  In Ender’s case, it’s not the war or humanity or any other big concept; he just wants his childhood back.  This moment when the protagonist is 100% honest could only happen because the author gradually destroyed his world.

Sources

Card, Orson Scott.  Ender’s Game.  NY: Tor Books, 1991.

Hawking, Steven W.  A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.  NY: Bantam Books, 1998.

My apartment is messy and it keeps getting messier.  There are a lot of papers and books scattered about, and some dirty dishes too, but this isn’t my fault.  The laws of physics mean it has to be this way.  My apartment, my desk at work, and the rest of the universe all follow the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

About a century ago, scientists and engineers first developed thermodynamics to help understand how steam engines work and how to make them more efficient.  Over time, these laws have changed and we’ve found they apply to almost any natural or manmade system.

• The First Law: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can change forms.
• The Second Law: Entropy, the degree of disorder in a system, can only increase.  If you’re lucky, it will stay the same for a while, but it won’t decrease.  Also, if you combine two systems the entropy of the new system will be greater than the sum of its original parts.
• The Third Law: It is impossible to reach a temperature of absolute zero.

Using my apartment as an example, I could clean it, thus reducing the entropy; however, I would also increase the entropy in the garbage dumpster outside, and my work would generate heat, increasing the disorder in the atmosphere by some small degree.  In the end, the total entropy of my apartment, the dumpster, and the atmosphere would be greater than when I started.

The second law predicts that someday in the far distant future the combined entropy of the universe will be so great that no ordered systems will exist at all.  It’s called heat death, and it’s a depressing concept.  It will be the end of machines, the end of apartments (dirty or otherwise), and the end of life since life is an orderly system just like steam engines.

There is one good thing about entropy, at least for artistic folks like myself.  It’s a scientific principle full of potential symbolism and philosophical meaning.

Sources

Hawking, Steven W.  A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.  NY: Bantam Books, 1998.

Rubi, J. Miguel.  “The Long Arm of the Second Law.”  Scientific American November 2008.  Pages 62-67.

So much in physics and chemistry depends on how atoms interact with each other.  These interactions make life possible.  They make technology work.  They make stars burst into flames.  If only there were some chart with all the different kinds of atoms, listing some of the important information about them… such a chart would be very useful to scientists and science fiction writers…

Oh… apparently we’ve had this for over a century.  It’s called the periodic table.

I’m not a complete idiot.  I knew it existed.  I just never realized I needed it for something.  This is a little like the day I realized I could get books for free at the library.    It wasn’t until I discovered how much I love reading that this fact mattered to me.

Anyway, I’m looking for my own copy of the periodic table of elements.  I know that’s not such a hard thing to find.  There are plenty of them on the Internet.  But I want a large version, one that can include large amounts of useful data.  Furthermore, I want one I can write notes on, customizing the information for my own purposes.

I’ve checked out several options.  There certainly are poster-sized periodic tables available for me to buy, but I think my best option is to pull out a large sheet of paper and make my own.  If nothing else, the act of drawing one hundred and eighteen boxes and filling them with the information I need should be a good learning experience.  Also, my box on silicon will mention the Horta from Star Trek.

While writing about asteroids earlier this week, I didn’t get a chance to mention the different methods of classifying asteroid types.  One is called the Tholen system, created by David Tholen, and uses a combination of spectral analysis and measurements of the asteroid’s ability to reflect light.  The other method is the Small Main-belt Asteroid Spectrographic Survey (a.k.a. SMASS), and it only uses spectral analysis.  SMASS also does not use the same wavelengths for its spectral analysis as the Tholen system.

The important thing to know is that there is not currently one standardized system to classify asteroid types; at least two are in use, and there is no guarantee that either of them will still be in use in the future.  Which means that, as a science fiction writer, I have some flexibility whenever I write about asteroids.

When writing, it’s best to be specific.  Rather than say your setting has a lot of trees, call them elm trees.  Rather than mention a bird, mention a pelican.  Being specific makes whatever you’re writing about feel more real.  It adds detail without making the story longer.  For a science fiction writer, being specific means knowing specific things about science.  With that in mind, let’s talk about asteroids.

Some asteroids are big.  Some are small.  They’re rocky and tend to look like potatoes.  In fact, some of the asteroids in The Empire Strikes Back are potatoes.  But if my characters are going to fly a spaceship into an asteroid field, the scene will be more vivid if I can be specific.  Based on my research, I have learned that there are three main types of asteroids.

Carbonaceous asteroids, not surprisingly, contain a lot of carbon.  They tend to be darker in color, making them hard to find with a telescope, and look more like giant lumps of coal than potatoes.

Siliceous asteroids, also known as stony asteroids, look more like the ordinary Idaho potatoes you’d buy in the super market.  They’re composed of iron and magnesium silicates and are brighter than their carbonaceous cousins.

The third type, the metallic asteroids, have a more variable composition, but usually they have a mixture of iron and nickel.  Given their iron content, some might have the reddish coloring of sweet potatoes.

Modern science still has a lot to learn about asteroids, and the only ones available to study are in this solar system.  Asteroids in Alpha Centauri might have different compositions.  With this in mind, science fiction writers have some freedom to design new asteroid types, perhaps composed of lithium or uranium.  The important thing to remember is this: like potatoes, asteroids come in many different flavors.