Sciency Words: Love Numbers

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Sciency Words: (proper noun) a special series here on Planet Pailly focusing on the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

LOVE NUMBERS

My friends, I was recently doing research about the planet Neptune.  Astronomers have a new model for the Neptune system, a model that seems to do a better job predicting the orbits of all those unruly and rambunctious Neptunian moons.  While reading about this new model, I came across the following statement: “We also investigated sensitivity of the fit to Neptune’s Love number […].”  And that gave me a delightful mental picture:

“Love numbers” are named after English mathematician Augustus Edward Hough Love.  They’re also sometimes referred to as “Love and Shida numbers” to recognize the contribution of Japanese scientist T. Shida.

In the early 20th Century, Love introduced two ratios—traditionally represented by the variables h and k.  h has to do with the elasticity (stretchiness) of a planetary body, and k is related to the redistribution of mass within a planetary body as it stretches.  Shortly thereafter, Shida introduced a third ratio—represented by the variable l—involving the horizontal displacement of a planetary crust.

Taken together, h, k, and l tell you how much a planet, moon, or other celestial body can flex due to tidal forces.  As explained in this paper on Earth’s Love numbers:

If the Earth would be a completely rigid body, [its Love numbers] would be equal to zero, and there would be no tidal deformation of the surface.

But of course Earth is not a completely rigid body.  Tidal forces caused by the Sun and Moon cause Earth to flex “up to tens of centimeters,” according to that same paper.  Tens of centimeters doesn’t sound like much, but as we all know, it’s enough to keep the ocean tides going!

In conclusion, I guess you might say that what’s true for planets is also true for people.  Being completely rigid produces Love numbers equal to zero.  So be flexible.  Allow yourself to stretch a little, and your Love numbers will go up.

P.S.: Being flexible is healthy in any relationship, but at the same time don’t let others tug on you too hard.  Know your limits—your Roche limit, I mean—because you don’t want to end up like this:

Origin Stories: The Hype About Hyperspace

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 19 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to another episode of Origin Stories, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we trace the origins of popular concepts in science fiction.  Today on Origin Stories, we’re making the jump into:

HYPERSPACE

As you know, nothing can travel faster than light.  Or it least, not in our universe.  But what if there were another universe next door to our own where the laws of physics were different, where faster-than-light travel were possible.  Wouldn’t that be convenient?

At least that’s how the concept of hyperspace was first explained to me.  I can’t remember if I picked that up from a Star Wars novel or an episode of Babylon 5.  Either way, I remember having an instant dislike for this idea.  It’s always seemed to me to be a little too convenient.

But then I started researching this post and learned that hyperspace is—or at least used to be—a much more interesting concept.  Let me explain by telling you a story:

Once upon a time, there was a happy little square living in a two-dimensional world with all his two-dimensional friends.  Then one day, this square met a rather extraordinary circle, a circle that had strange and mysterious powers.  The circle could grow larger or smaller at will, expanding out to a certain radius or shrinking down until it completely disappeared!

“What are you?” the square asked in awe.

In a booming, god-like voice, the circle answered: “I am a sphere.  As I pass through the two-dimensional plane of your realm, you perceive two-dimensional cross sections of my three dimensional form.”

This is the story of Flatland, by Edwin Abbott, published in 1884.  Or at least that’s part of the story of Flatland.  Our protagonist square also encounters one-dimensional beings living in a one-dimensional world (Lineland) before learning about the world of three dimensions (Spaceland) from the sphere.

Flatland was one of many books published in the late 1800’s toying with other dimensions.  Another is, of course, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, which postulates that time might be the fourth dimension.  But other writers assumed the fourth dimension would simply be another spatial dimension.  And just as the protagonist of Flatland struggled to understand the third dimension, we humans, as three-dimensional beings, can never fully comprehend the fourth dimension.

A linguistic convention soon emerged.  If you wanted to talk about a four-dimensional sphere, you’d call it a hyper-sphere.  If you wanted to talk about a four-dimensional pyramid, that would be a hyper-pyramid, and a four-dimensional cube would be a hyper-cube (or a tesseract, as Charles Howard Higgins proposed calling hyper-cubes in 1888).  And where would all these hyper-shapes exist?  Why, in hyper-space!  Where else?

According to Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, it would still take a while for hyperspace to make the jump from mathematics and philosophy into the pages of science fiction.  Initially, the term seems to have retained its esoteric, philosophical sense of a world beyond our limited human perception.

Are we not justified in supposing, […] that the boundary lines of space and hyper-space may not be so rigidly drawn as we have supposed?

“Invisible Bubble” by K. Meadowcraft, 1928.

But Sci-Fi writers quickly started exploiting hyperspace as a plot device to allow faster-than-light travel.

Well, in this hyperspace we are creating, matter cannot exist at a velocity lower than a certain quantity […].

“Islands of Space” by J.W. Campbell, 1931.

Speeds, a mathematician would hasten to add, as measured in the ordinary space that the vessel went around; both acceleration and velocity being quite moderate in the hyperspace it really went through.

“Legion of Space” by J. Williamson, 1934.

I’m still not a big fan of hyperspace, or at least I’m not a fan of consequence-free hyperspace.  If you’re going to pop out of normal space—whether you’re entering another universe where the laws of physics are different or you’re taking some sort of four-dimensional shortcut—I feel like there should be some side effects, either for you or your spacecraft (or both).  Otherwise, hyperspace just seems a little too easy, a little too convenient.

At least that’s how I feel about it.  But what do you think?  Am I being too picky?  Am I overthinking things?  Or do you also roll your eyes whenever hyperspace comes up in science fiction?

Moons Gone Wild: Naiad and Thalassa

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

Naiad is one of the more rambunctious and troublesome moons in our Solar System.  She was first discovered in 1989 when NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Neptune.  Naiad then spent more than a decade playing hide and seek with us, to the annoyance of many professional astronomers, I’m sure.

In 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope happened to catch Naiad in a few images of Neptune, but no one noticed she was there.  It wasn’t until 2013, thanks to new and improved image processing techniques, that astronomers found Naiad in those pictures.

Articles from the time (like this one or this one) described Naiad’s orbit as “wibbly wobbly” or said Naiad had somehow “drifted off course.”  That’s why we’d had such a hard time finding her.

But new research published this month in the journal Icarus gives us a clearer sense of what Naiad’s been up to all this time.  Naiad’s orbit is just… I don’t know how to describe it.  Just look at this orbit!  It’s bizarre!

According to that paper in Icarus, Naiad is caught in an orbital resonance with the neighboring moon of Thalassa.  That orbital resonance, combined with a high inclination (orbital tilt), causes Naiad to travel in a “sinusoidal pattern,” as the authors of that paper call it.

Naiad and Thalassa orbit dangerously close to each other.  Naiad zips past Thalassa every seven hours, approximately.  But because of that weird sinusoidal thing Naiad’s doing, Naiad always passes safely over Thalassa’s north pole or safely under Thalassa’s south pole.  The two moons are in no danger of getting into any sort of accident with each other, at least not in the near future.

But there are still a lot of uncertainties baked into our models of Neptune and his family of moons.  Even our newest, most up-to-date model—the model that revealed Naiad’s orbital resonance with Thalassa—still depends heavily on data collected by Voyager 2.  And as the authors of that Icarus paper note: “The orbital uncertainties show that the positions of the satellites are known within several hundred kilometers until at least 2030.”

But beyond 2030?  I guess we can’t accurately predict where Naiad, Thalassa, or any of Neptune’s other moons might end up.  If only somebody would send another space probe out to Neptune!  I’m really glad we have Voyager 2’s data, of course, but that data is from 1989.  A follow up mission is long overdue!

Sciency Words: Dial Tone

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 10 Comments

Sciency Words: (proper noun) a special series here on Planet Pailly focusing on the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

DIAL TONE

Some of you may be too young to know what a dial tone is, so here’s an instructional video explaining the concept.

According to this article from Teletech Services, it was German engineer August Kruckow who invented the dial tone back in 1908.  A dial tone is a buzzing or humming sound that landline telephones make to let you know they’re connected and working.

It’s hard to say when “dial tone” became a SETI term, but the earliest usage I was able to find is this 1995 paper by Steven Dick entitled “Consequences of Success in SETI: Lessons from the History of Science.”

In that paper, Dick draws a distinction between extraterrestrial signals that communicate information vs. extraterrestrial signals that serve essentially the same function as a dial tone.  The general public, Dick argues, would react quite differently if we picked up some sort of intergalactic dial tone instead of a “Greetings, Earthlings, would you like to learn more about calculus?” type of message.

Later papers (like this one or this one) continue to use this dial tone metaphor, and in 2018 a special committee on SETI nomenclature adopted the following as the official definition for the term: “A content-free beacon, i.e. one that communicates only the existence of technological life.”

That same committee goes on to note some concern that the conventional meaning of “dial tone” may soon become obsolete; if so, the committee worries, then the continued use of “dial tone” as a SETI term might become problematic.  I’m not sure I agree with that concern, though.  Lots of terms and phrases have stuck around even after their original meanings have faded into history.

In the near future, maybe it won’t be obvious to everyone that “dial tone” originally had something to do with telephones, but if SETI scientists keep using the term, I don’t think it’s that hard for people to understand what the term means… is it?

The Second Law is Safe

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

There’d been nothing but glowing praise for Dr. Trikowski and his miraculous invention.  The Trikowski generator was 100% efficient.  It produced no waste.  None at all!  It would save the environment, and it would save human civilization.

Some in the scientific community had expressed skepticism, but they were shouted down by Trikowski and his admirers.  “So called scientists!  They’re being paid off by the oil companies!” Trikowski would say.

Carlos seemed like just another reporter, someone with a fancy degree in communications but with absolutely no background in the sciences.  Except Carlos was not just another credulous journalist ready to lap up Trikowski’s sales pitch.  There were two things Carlos understood well:

  • The First Law of Thermodynamics: neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed.
  • The Second Law of Thermodynamics: but they can be wasted.  In fact, they must be.  No system could be 100% efficient.  Energy must be lost somewhere, somehow.

But Trikowski’s P.R. people obviously didn’t realize how much Carlos knew.  They’d let him into the doctor’s lab for an exclusive interview, and there was the generator.  Carlos approached it in awe.

He could hear a very impressive thrumming sound coming from somewhere inside the machine, and he could see a very pretty blue glow shining through the front panel.  Carlos placed his hand on the generator’s smooth, metal surface.  It felt warm, considerably warmer than the room’s ambient temperature.  Energy lost in the form of heat, Carlos thought.  The blue glow—that’s energy lost in the form of light.  And the thrumming sound is energy lost in the form of vibrations of the air.  However the Trikowski generator worked, however impressive and revolutionary it might be, one thing was certain: it was not 100% efficient.  Nowhere near it.

“So,” Dr. Trikowski said with a used-car-salesman grin, “aren’t you going to ask me any questions?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Carlos said, removing his hand from the machine.  “The empirical evidence speaks for itself.  I can see—and hear—and feel—that the second law of thermodynamics is perfectly safe in this lab.”

At that, Dr. Trikowski’s grin faltered.

Sciency Words: Time

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 11 Comments

Sciency Words: (proper noun) a special series here on Planet Pailly focusing on the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

TIME

How would you define the word time?

I recently read a book called Time Travel: A History by James Gleick.  This is one of the big questions raised by that book, and it’s a question that’s kept nagging at me.  What is time?  We all know what time is, don’t we?  We use the word all the… well, all the time.

But if you had to write a dictionary definition, what would you say?  Keep in mind the first rule of dictionaries: don’t use the word your defining in the definition of that word.  Gleick offers several interesting suggestions.  Time is the experience of duration.  Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.  Time is the thing that clocks measure.

These are fun definitions, but I don’t find them fully satisfying.  Maybe we could turn to this classic explanation of time given in Doctor Who:

People assume time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.

In my own science fiction writing, time is often described as “a living thing,” something that’s constantly shifting, constantly changing.  History keeps rewriting itself, and time travelers speak of time in almost adversarial terms.  But while that might work for the kinds of Sci-Fi stories I want to tell, I don’t think this “living thing” notion is an actual, practical way to define what time is.

The closest I’ve come to finding a satisfying definition of time is an idea that goes back to Aristotle: time is a measure of change.  The sun changes its position in the sky.  So do the moon and all the stars.  The seasons change, one into the next into the next, until the cycle repeats.  All these cyclical changes set the standard by which we measure non-cyclical changes.  That’s what time is!

Or is it?  I said this is the closest I’ve come to finding a satisfying definition, but it still feels incomplete.  Thanks to Einstein and the theory of general relativity, we now know that time itself changes relative to acceleration and/or gravity.  So how can the measure of change be changeable?  There must be more to it than that, right?

#IWSG: Contract with a Muse

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 29 Comments

Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group!  If you’re a writer, and if you feel in any way insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this awesome group!

Ladies and gentlemen, I have an imaginary friend.  Those of you who regularly read my Insecure Writer’s Support Group posts have already met her.  She’s my muse.  Here’s her picture:

And here’s her picture sitting in my writing zone, next to my coffee mug full of pens.  I always have a picture of my muse with me when I’m writing.

But not all writers believe in muses.  In fact, not all writers even approve of the belief in muses.  I was recently listening to a writing podcast where the host went off on a tirade against the very concept of muses.

You can’t sit around waiting for your muse, this podcast host said.  You’ll never get any writing done that way.  Writing is work.  You have to do it every day, whether you feel inspired or not!

Of course my muse and I have heard all this before.  Perhaps you have too.  But I think all this anti-muse stuff is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about how muses do their jobs.  You see, my muse and I have something like a contractual relationship.

I do have to do my writing every day.  That’s the promise I made to my muse, and in exchange she has promised to keep bringing me the shiniest of shiny new ideas.  If I don’t fulfill my side of the bargain, why should my muse fulfill hers?

So writers, you can’t sit around being lazy and expect your muse to do all the work for you.  Show some initiative.  Go write.  It might feel like a struggle, but the muse will reward you in the end.

P.S.: And muses, remember you have an obligation to your writer too.  If your writer is making a real effort, do not be stingy with the good ideas!

Sciency Words: Facies

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Sciency Words: (proper noun) a special series here on Planet Pailly focusing on the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

FACIES

So I’m currently reading a paper entitled “A Field Guide to Finding Fossils on Mars.”  Basically, if you’re hoping to dig up some fossils on Mars, you need to know where to look.  This paper is all about which “facies” are the most likely to have well preserved Martian organisms inside them.

I have to admit I’m having a tough time with the paper.  My first question, and perhaps your first question as well: what the heck is a facies?

The word facies comes straight from Latin, where it meant (believe it or not) face.  It could also mean facial expression or the generalized appearance of a thing.  According to this article from the Encyclopedia Britannica, Danish scientist Nicholas Steno was the first to use facies as a geology term in 1669, but it was Swiss geologist Amanz Gressly who reintroduced the term in 1838, leading to its modern usage.

Gressly was conducting geological research in the Jura Mountains, which lie along the border between France and Switzerland.  It was already known that there were different layers of rock stacked on top of each other.  We call these strata, and it’s now widely recognized that different strata correspond to different time periods in Earth’s past.

But Gressly noticed that, in addition to the strata stacked vertically on top of each other, there were also different “stratigraphic units” arranged horizontally beside each other—the facies, as Gressly decided to call them.  Gressly is quoted in this book as having written:

I think that the petrographic or paleontological changes of a stratigraphic unit in the horizontal are caused by the changes in environment and other circumstances, which still so powerfully influence today the different genera and species which inhabit the ocean and the seas.

In other words, if you find different facies within the same strata, then you’re looking at different environments or ecosystems that existed at the same time, side by side: a lakebed next to a forest, for example.

Or at least that’s what Gressly originally intended the word facies to mean.  But according to that same Encyclopedia Brittanica article, the term has since been generalized “[…] to encompass other types of variation that may be encountered as one moves laterally (e.g., along outcroppings of rock strata exposed in stream valleys or mountain ridges) in a given rock succession.”

So if you’re going fossil hunting on Mars, you want to look for rocks formations dating back to Mars’s Noachian Period—that’s when Mars had lakes and rivers and oceans of liquid water on its surface.  Rock formations from the very early Hesperian Period would also be good.  There was still some liquid water sloshing around at that time.

But within Noachian or Hesperian-aged strata, which facies should you look for?  Well, I’ll have to get back to you on that one.  As I said, I’m having a tough time with this paper, but I am determined to get through it!

P.S.: Bonus Sciency Word!  Those same Jura Mountains where Amanz Gressly did his geological research also gave us the name for Earth’s Jurassic Period.

Learning More About NASA’s New Spacesuits

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Following my recent Sciency Words post on “bunny hopping,” I got a lot of questions about NASA’s new spacesuit design.  I wasn’t really able to answer those questions, so today I’d like to share a video from someone who’s a little better qualified to talk about this stuff.

Scott Manly is an astrophysicist and YouTuber.  On his channel, he plays a lot of space-themed video games and talks about scientific accuracies (or inaccuracies) in said video games.  I started watching Mr. Manly back when I was obsessed with Kerbal Space Program.

I think the big takeaway from this video is that NASA’s new spacesuit is not quite finished yet.  It’s still a work in progress.  That might explain some of the confusion over what the new spacesuit is supposed to do for astronauts once they’re on the Moon.

One thing I’m still wondering about: the new space boots.  Several articles I looked at (like this one) describe the new boots as “hiking-style boots with flexible soles.”  That doesn’t really satisfy my curiosity about these boots, so I’ll have to do more research on that.

Quick, Name Those Moons!

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

I haven’t done enough research this week to put together a Sciency Words post.  I’ve been too busy with other writing.  However, I do have some name-related news to share with you today.

As you may have already heard, astronomers recently discovered twenty new moons orbiting the planet Saturn.  This brings Saturn’s total moon count up to 82, surpassing Jupiter’s total of 79.

These newly discovered moons are each about five kilometers in diameter, according to this press release from Carnegie Science.  That’s really small for moons.  These objects are more like asteroids that happen to be caught in Saturn’s gravity.  Or they might be rubble left over from the destruction of older Saturnian moons.  Saturn may (or may not) have a long history of destroying her own moons.

Now astronomers are asking for you (yes, you!) to help name these newly discovered moons.  Due to established naming conventions, these particular Saturnian moons must be named after giants from Inuit, Norse, or Gallic mythology.  Tweet your suggestions to @SaturnLegacy using the hashtag #NameSaturnsMoons.  Name submissions are due by December 6, 2019.

So go crack open some books on Inuit, Norse, and Gallic mythology, and may the best names win!