Fusion Reactors

As I have mentioned previously, I was very conscious in writing Newton's Ark to keep the science as real as possible. The most speculative technology I included was probably the micro fusion reactor - a small, highly portable fusion reactor that could power a sattelite for decades.

This technology requires us to find a way to build a self-sustaining fusion reaction that produces positive net energy. And then you have to miniaturize it - I'm going to ignore that challenge assuming we can solve the main problem.

This technology has been a decade away for the past sixty years. Will we ever solve this problem? Who knows. It may really be a only decade away, it may be another sixty years away or it may never happen. It's hard to extrapolate from the experience to date. There has been some progress but not enough to be completely confident that the fundamental challenge can be overcome.

It is still an active area of research though. In fact I recently received an assignment to design a biometric security system (iris recognition) for an experimental fusion reactor facility!

More on keeping sci-fi real

I posted recently on keeping the sci fi real in my first novel Newton's Ark.

I just ran across this article talking about prospects for stopping an asteroid, specifically debunking the scenario presented in the movie Armageddon of using a nuke to split it in half.

Here's a relevant passage from my book:

“Despite all the holo-movies you might have seen where they destroy the asteroid before it hits the Earth and everyone lives happily ever after, it isn’t possible with the technology and time we have available. To nudge the asteroid off course we have to hit it far enough out that we would need to launch now. Problem is we don’t have anything with the range and payload required....”

“Can’t we just nuke the damn thing when it gets closer to Earth?”

“Yes sir we can, but we risk turning a single very large asteroid into multiple asteroids, each still plenty big enough to wipe out a large city. Better to have only one object to track and to limit the impact to a single location.”

I think this quote from the article nicely captures my philosophy:

...fiction is all about the make-believe. But good science can make for a more plausible narrative, making it easier to suspend disbelief.

"Plant Our Brains in Robots"

If you find the ideas in this article from Wired magazine title Russian Mogul’s Plan: Plant Our Brains in Robots, Keep Them Alive Forever interesting, then you should read my book Newton's Ark (and the forthcoming sequels).

I'm attempting to explore similar concepts through fiction, with the goal of trying to understand how these sorts of technological developments might affect the human experience. My view is that when confronted with ideas this radical, stories are the best way to explore the possible implications. Otherwise it's all too abstract, all to clinical, all too remote, and therefore all too easy to ignore, at least until it actually begins to happen and we're totally unprepared.

Still the speed limit

C that is, as in E = MC², the speed of light.

Newspapers are breathlessly reporting that scientists have measured neutrinos travelling at faster that the speed of light, in seeming contradiction to the theory of relativity which tells us that the speed of light is the universe's speed limit.

I'm no particle physicist, but I'm sure that this result will not be reproducible, which is of course the standard for validating a scientific finding, and will prove to be a measurement error.

How can I be so sure? Simple logic (Or should I say "elementary my Dear Watson?")
If C isn't really the speed limit and the neutrinos really were able to exceed the speed of light they could pick any speed between 299 792 458 m/s and well, infinity. They they would pick a speed that is only just a tiny teeny bit bigger than what the scientists think is their margin of error simply does not pass the somebody screwed up somewhere test.

Intelligent Design? Unintelligent idea

Anyone tempted to support the move to teach Intelligent Design as a scientific theory of similar stature to evolutionary theory ought to begin by reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Interestingly it's subtitled "Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design".

The argument against Intelligent Design is not all that difficult. In fact it's simple: it doesn't explain anything. To answer the question "where does the complexity of nature come from?" with "from pre-existing complexity (in the form of a creator)" is to provide no answer at all, because it brings you back to the same question - "well where did that complexity come from?"

As Dawkins explains so eloquently, evolutionary theory explains how complexity requires only simplicity, randomness and time to evolve. And the test of evolutionary theory is simply this: it explains the observable facts. Not perfectly, but that is why open minded and skeptical scientific enquiry continues to drive refinement in the theory. That's how science works.

Intelligent Design deserves the same status in the teaching of science as Lamarckism; as a discredited theory which very superficially makes sense but actually fails to explain any of the great body of evidence that is explained by evolutionary theory.