CERN vs Science Scares
I was reading the latest issue of Symmetry Magazine when an article caught my eye. This is a publication that presents news from Physics in layman’s language, written by SLAC National Lab (where I spent 25 years) and its sister lab Fermilab. In the article, the former director of communications at CERN reminisced about the challenges of explaining the science that they do, especially in the face of public misconceptions.
There was, of course, the furor over turning on the LHC, because the possibility that the intense beams could create microscopic black holes had morphed into the fear that the machine would create a black hole that would consume the entire earth. Even if quantum black holes had been created, they would have evaporated almost instantly. So far, none have been detected. CERN addressed the public fear by inviting the press into the control room to view the machine’s startup, changing it from a scary event hidden deep underground to a media event like a moon launch. You’ll never win over everyone, but it did sway public and government opinion enough to head off demands that the startup be halted. A win for openness and education.
Then there was Dan Brown’s terrible early novel Angels and Demons. It justifiably got little traction on its initial release but then became better known upon the publication of his more famous The Da Vinci Code. It was a decent enough thriller, I suppose, even with Brown’s penchant for wielding the English language like a blunt instrument. Its real sin was a lack of homework about its subject matter. CERN was depicted as a campus of stately brick buildings where scientists floated on air columns for recreation. In reality, it’s a city of very functional, fairly industrial buildings. Needless to say, it neither owns a space plane nor does it produce anywhere near the amount of antimatter required for the book. The communications department again responded with an educational website to capitalize on the attention and then helped the movie producers get the lab’s portrayal a lot more accurate. The movie still required a quarter gram of anitmatter, which would take CERN about 250 million years to produce, but we’ll let that slide.
It’s a good reminder that humor and education can do a lot more to remedy misinformation than outright denial. It’s a great article and I recommend that you read it if you have time.
Our Books
Knots
Chuck Boeheim
Monsieur Resche is an art thief. He has crossed a bridge into a quaint town that disappeared from Switzerland four centuries ago. All the magic that our world once had has ended up there. A precisely tied knot, an exactly folded paper, or a cunningly drawn figure can unlock wonders and horrors.
Resche has a mind that lets him excel at this new craft, but that brings him to the notice of powerful mages who play a great game of geomancy with tiles the size of countries. And when he looks for the bridge back to Geneva, it is nowhere to be found.
The Fractalist priest offers aid that may not be what it appears, the Jeweler has intricate schemes, the newspaper editor has taken an interest, the Astromancer had good advice before she was murdered, and Resche’s cat just makes wisecracks.
Knots is a compelling story filled with unexpected characters, plot twists, literal location twists, mystery, and redemption.
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Of Gods and Globes III
Lancelot Schaubert
The authors of this anthology were challenged to write a story connecting our ancient mythology of the cosmos to a science fiction setting that incorporates elements of that mythology. These 23 stories explore everything from Venus out to Castor and Pollux and everything in between, including a few non-Western mythologies.
My own contribution, Charon, is a poignant tale of loss and reconciliation. It follows Simon Aeneas Kost on his solitary voyage to Pluto and its moon, Charon. He confronts his deepest fears as he encounters our first interstellar visitor while far from human company, wandering the desolate banks of the river Styx.
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The Algebraist
Iain Banks
This is a vast and intricate space opera where star systems are linked by engineered wormholes. These wormholes are the lifeblood of commerce, but they can be destroyed as an act of war, isolating a system for centuries until a new one can be created and dragged into place at sublight speeds. There is a legend of an ancient hidden network of wormholes that sparks a race to find and control that immensely valuable resource. The legend suggests that the Ulubis, currently waiting out such a period of isolation, may harbor the key to finding this network.
Fassin Taak is sent to find out what the Dwellers know about the wormholes. The Dwellers live in the clouds of gas giants across the galaxy, and are the oldest and most numerous intelligent species that is known. Some individual Dwellers are millions of years old. They live so slowly that humans must step down their sense of time just to converse with them. Surely the Dwellers have heard of this network if it exists?
I found the Dwellers to be one of the most interesting parts of the novel. They live so long that they have a hard time taking interest in species that are likely to go extinct before they can finish a good conversation. Yet they have an extremely elaborate social structure and crave entertainment of all sorts. Their sense of humor is whimsical and oblique, so it’s hard to get a straight answer out of them. But Fassin finds evidence that Dwellers might once have recorded a map of the wormhole network if only he can find it before two vast space armadas sweep into the system to subjugate/liberate it and take possession of this ancient secret.
If you enjoy vast space opera with big ideas, check out this book.
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Wedding of the Torn Rose
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Journey with Kaine and Lydia as they attempt to prevent a war and save a kingdom in the first volume of the Symphony of Crowns and Gods series.
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Underground Planet
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