Science and Society

Readers who hang out in the Southwestern quadrant of the U.S. should be aware of the lecture series at Caltech sponsored by the Skeptic’s Society. Past speakers include such luminaries as Richard Dawkins and Lisa Randall; future highlights include a debate between Frank Tipler and Lawrence Krauss on “Can Physics Prove God and Christianity?” That should be, how shall we say, somewhat surreal.

This Sunday at 2:00 there is a lecture on The Physics of Pouty Teenagers Fighting Vampires, or something like that. Apparently there is even a book along those lines. I’m too high-minded to think about such things myself, but I’ll probably go to this lecture, because the speaker looks like a total babe.

Quadruple digits! Yes, this is our 1000^th post here at Cosmic Variance. In honor of which we will — well, nothing special. But I will indulge in some shameless pluggery.

Today, you see, is the official publication date of The Physics of the Buffyverse, by the blogosphere’s own Jennifer Ouellette. I’m not going to offer a proper review of the book, because (1) I’ve only had a chance to skim it thus far, and (2) the author bakes me scones, which is a conflict of interest if ever I’ve seen one. But you could do a lot worse than buying a few copies for yourself and all your friends, let me assure you.

The construction of the title — The [field of academic inquiry] of [product of human imagination] — is by now well-known, inspired in large part by Lawrence Krauss’s The Physics of Star Trek. (In addition to the Physics, we’ve learned about the Ethics, the Art, the Computers, the Religions, and the Metaphysics of Star Trek, as well as corresponding studies of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and so on.) And as long as it’s been in circulation, the idea of subjecting TV shows or fantasy genres to scientific investigation has been the target of scoffing from curmudgeonly old folks who are taking a temporary break from chasing kids out of their yards. After all, they will tell you, how can you learn anything about science by studying fiction? Science is all about the real world! It has nothing to say about fake worlds that someone just made up.

Balderdash, of course. Neither physics, nor any other science, is some list of facts and theories to be committed to memory. There are a bunch of established pieces of knowledge that are worth remembering, no doubt about that, but much more important is the process by which that knowledge is acquired. And that process is just as applicable to imaginary worlds as it is to the real one. Any respectable universe, whether we find it out there or make it up ourselves, will be subject to certain internal rules of behavior. (When it comes to fiction, those rules are occasionally sacrificed for the sake of the plot, whereas in the real world they’re a bit more immutable.) Learning how to discover those rules, from the standpoint of an observer rather than one of the creators, is nothing more or less than learning how science is done.

I’ve long thought that video games would be a great way to teach the scientific method to kids. They’re playing them anyway — why not think of it as collecting data? The other day Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist linked to this gravity game.

Your job is to give initial conditions (position and velocity) to a little test body, which then moves around under the gravitational field of various heavier bodies, with the goal being to survive for as long as possible without colliding with one of the planets. But the “laws of gravity” certainly aren’t the ones that Newton came up with, as a bit of experimentation shows; for one thing, orbits around just one planet don’t describe conic sections, they decay in spirals. So what are the laws? Does the strength of gravity obey something other than the familiar inverse-square law? Or is there dissipation? Are energy and angular momentum conserved? Even better, is there some definition of “energy” and “angular momentum” such that they are conserved? What about those boundary conditions at the edges of the box? They are in some sense reflective, but the magnitude of momentum certainly isn’t conserved — what’s the rule? We know in this case that there certainly are hard-and-fast rules, as the programmers put them into the code. I would love to see kids in science classes using a game like this as a miniature “laboratory,” in which they designed experiments to test different hypotheses they came up with.

Somewhat more complex is N, the ninja game from metanet.

Here the physics is substantially richer. You are a tiny ninja, whose job is to jump around and avoid threats while doing what it takes to open a door and escape within a specified time limit. But, being a ninja, you have unusual powers — including the ability to alter your center-of-mass momentum in midair by sheer force of will. So: is the trajectory of the ninja uniquely defined by its initial data? Are there any conserved quantities? Are the laws of motion isotropic — are the rules governing left-right motion the same as those governing up-down motion? Can the ability to stick to walls be described in terms of a coefficient of friction? You can be killed by smashing into a wall or floor too quickly — but the allowed velocity depends on the angle of impact. So what quantity is to be calculated to determine whether a landing is safe or not?

You get the point. Those of us who have become enchanted by science see the world as a giant puzzle, and our “job” is to unravel its secrets. The universe is a giant video game that a few of us get to play all the time. Yet somehow we manage to give everyone else the impression that it’s all about pulleys and inclined planes. If we can enlist the help of some imaginary characters — whether Spock or Spike — in illustrating the excitement of science, we’ll have achieved something very real indeed.

“I’m too creative to do astronomy.” That was the line used, in all seriousness, by a student I once had in an astronomy lab course. The lab in question involved learning about the motion of the planets around the Sun. “If I could just write a play instead of doing the lab, I’d be fine.” Well, I replied, if you write a play demonstrating that you understand Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and have students in the class perform it, I’ll be happy to give you full credit for the lab.

Sadly, the requested play never materialized, as I suspected it wouldn’t. But happily, in a similar set of circumstances Lauren Gunderson responded very differently, as she explains in an article in The Scientist:

My career as a science playwright started when I asked my undergraduate physics professor to let me write a play instead of a term paper. Luckily he agreed, and the result was a time-twisting play called Background, based on cosmologist Ralph Alpher. Unexpectedly, the play not only satisfied my physics professor, it went on to receive awards and inspire productions across the country.

Lauren is a young playwright (and author of the occasionally-updated blog Deepen the Mystery) specializing in plays with scientific themes. She’s not the only one, of course; it’s become quite the cottage industry, these science plays. As Dennis Overbye put it at a conference in Santa Barbara, “Is anyone writing plays that aren’t about quantum mechanics any more?”

I’d be happy to summarize Lauren’s article, but she puts it better herself:

But what does it take to write a good science play? As a playwright, I believe in communicating science effectively, but not taking out what makes science hard. So it is absolutely essential to learn the relevant science well enough to represent it accurately — otherwise the whole play fails. I always do a lot of research from online magazines, scientists’ Web sites, and books on history and theory — everything from Brian Greene’s books on string theory to Newton’s Principia itself has passed across my desk. And many playwrights, myself included, consult scientists in person for critique, advice, and content.

In a science play, you want to make your scientists sound like real scientists. I’m not afraid to use a lot of jargon — I sometimes use what I call the “verbal wall of science” effect, in which I allow a character to speak freely like a scientist, without any further explanation. This isn’t to confuse a general audience, but to allow an appreciation of the character’s expertise. Yet I also try to combine effective science with effective poetry to create something that is true both in the concrete and the abstract. Science metaphors work best this way. For example, the particle physicist in my play Baby M explains her work this way:

We move in secrets. Fundamentals locked, related in code. What is obvious is not always what is. And what is isn’t always what is known. Essentially, we deal in thought made manifest, and this work represents the world.

The best scientific characters do all the things that make us human, not just the things that make us brilliant. So it is not enough for me to show you scientists doing science; I need to show you why they do it. Why do they venture into the essence of nature? Why do they subject themselves to deadlines and peer reviews and failure?

Okay, we wish that most scientists spoke as eloquently about their work as Lauren’s character does. But the point remains: if you’re going to have scientific themes, it’s worth the effort to get the science right, and — perhaps even harder — to get the attitude and language of the scientists right. Nothing different than would be expected if you were writing about lawyers or doctors.

Last year I gave two “literary lectures” at local theaters that were putting on plays with science themes. The first one was a production of Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy
at Remy Bumppo Theatre. The protagonist was a string theorist, who used physics as an escape from the messy complications of human interaction; it was a great play, in which the physics was scientifically correct and cleverly deployed to illuminate the plot. The second play will remain nameless. Its protagonist was also a string theorist, but the moral of this story was that the best way to make a breakthrough in string theory would be to give up all those bothersome equations and hike around the mountains in India seeking enlightenment. There’s a joke in there somewhere about the Landscape, but I don’t think that’s what the author was aiming for.

So it’s worth supporting the good stuff — for example, you could do worse than starting with Lauren’s book, a collection of three of her plays. As Sir Isaac Newton says, in words Lauren put in his mouth:

Men have died chasing what I’m after! Sacrificed life and loyalty. It is not funny. This consciousness is as serious as you can possibly come close to knowing. You should treat it as such.