Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (21 page)

The last blend Rondell produced was called Simbah. "'The vines of Simbah,'" he quoted, "'whose clusters once made drunk the lords of nations.' Did you catch the reference?"

I lay on my stomach on his blue-sheeted bed, the quilt thrown over my legs and his warm hands tracing patterns down my spine. It was dark but he'd left the lamp on in the hallway, and his gold earring sparkled in the meager light like a tiny star.

"Book of Isaiah," I said. He kissed my hands where they rested on the pillowcase, fingertip by fingertip, and I began the next verse. " 'Therefore I weep for the vines of Simbah.' "

"You weep for everything, Isaya." He was smiling, one of his rare and magical smiles.

For joy and gladness are taken away from the fruitful field; and in the vineyards no songs are sung.
I turned my hand up and pressed it against his mouth, the soft lips, the hard straight teeth, as though I could capture his smile in my palm. "How come?"

"Hm?" "How come you named it after something that got destroyed?"

He took my hand in one of his and lifted it away from his mouth. He stared at it for a long time; at the pale brown palm with its deep and fractured lines, at the broad pink-polished nails. "Because they must have been precious," he said at last, "if people wept for them."

"Okay," I said.

And turned my face into his pillow to hide my tears.

In the darkness, a luminous torrent: the great sky river a hundred billion stars We are stranded on a lonely island marked by dust lanes a turbulent whirlpool moving inexorably through spaces too vast for comprehension flowing too slowly for mortal eyes to see.

Inside us, surrounding us: the river of life branching, flowing through our veins from generation to generation Warm, salty ebbing and cresting from heartbeat to heartbeat, surging inexorably, flowing to an invisible sea.

Before us, behind us: the river of time We long to gaze beyond the bend to that cataract that we can hear in the distance. We are caught in the rapids, borne downstream rushing inexorably to the future we will never see.

Confusion sets in
as the three old men,
pool cues in hand,
collectively can't remember
whose turn it is in a
friendly game of nine ball.

One of them jokes around,
saying, what we have here
is either another senior moment,
or, all three of us were just
abducted by aliens, probed, and
are now back home.

Of course none of the
three men are wearing watches,
or carrying cell phones,
to verify the missing-time theory,
so the game continues on,
nine ball sinking into side pocket.

Back home spam clogs the
3rd man's email account, the 2nd
man's cat continues to catnap,
and the 1st man's wife impatiently
awaits his return, puzzled by
strange lights in the sky.

We have tampered
with time far too much
and now our hours and days,
our minutes and seconds,

the temporal length
of a fleeting thought,
can change at random
like the wandering stations

of a holographic scanner
in a rift between galaxies.
We have tampered
with time far too much,

so that the time-honored
constraints of our universe
become relentless variables,
our generational histories

raveling thread by thread
until the terrain of our
everyday world dissolves
in an onslaught of chaos.

We have tampered
with time far too much,
and now we track a life
of transient tomorrows,

stealing away times
we should have lived
and delivering others,
each stray night rife

with unknown stars
in a treacherous sky,
each morning born
with a full set of teeth.

This article originally appeared on the Future Tense channel of
Slate Magazine
on January 2, 2013. At
Asimov's
we believe that every day is National Science Fiction Day. In honor of the Good Doctor and anyone else living in the future, we are delighted to have the chance to offer Ed Finn's essay to you now as a Guest Editorial.

It's 2013, people—we are living in the future. Since the news is still awash with problems we created for ourselves decades or centuries ago (the permanent fiscal crisis, gun control, the political powder-keg that is the Middle East), it may have escaped your notice that today is also National Science Fiction Day.

While you may still be rooting through your holiday gift pile searching for that long-promised jetpack, science fiction writers actually had some grim things to say about 2013. Jack London pegged the coming year for the arrival of the Red Death, a new pandemic. Richard Linklater's screenplay for
A Scanner Darkly
guessed one in five Americans would be hooked on illegal drugs (and if you count criminal hypocrisy, he would not be wrong). And David Brin pretty much called the whole civilizational ball-game with
The Postman
[first published as a novella in
Asimov's,
November 1982], imagining a postapocalyptic hellscape in which only Kevin Costner fans could survive.

And yet, so far, we are two for two on the world not ending in 2013. So let's take a minute to celebrate the idea behind National Science Fiction Day as embodied by the writer and scientist whose birthday it marks, Isaac Asimov. Science and the stories of science that Asimov loved to tell are going strong.

In 2012, we watched the Mars rover Curiosity and its spunky band of rock star engineers explore the red planet, saw the Higgs boson emerge from the ether, traced Felix Baumgartner's twenty-four-mile space-dive, and followed James Cameron seven miles down into the Mariana Trench. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ helped us share details, rumors, and excitement about these momentous events worldwide. The social media buzz surrounding these events were part of what the New York
Times
has called "an epidemic of science geekiness" that put millions in contact with the latest news from labs and research missions around the world. It also felt like the year in which science became a like-button topic, a zone of what I call "butterfly engagement" in which you watch a short video, share it with your friends, and move on to the next shiny thing.

Now, I'm all for this kind of enthusiastic conversation about science, but we also need interactions that last longer than a few minutes. It's not the fault of scientists (or science writers) that social media naturally encourage slacktivism, in which clicking a button or signing a virtual petition take the place of more substantive forms of engagement. But the rush to amass eyeballs and retweets runs the risk of eliding any actual thinking for the sake of special effects and sound-bites.

This brings us back to Asimov, a guy who took the long view about science and human progress, perhaps most
memorably in his Foundation series, which traced the long arc of human history across millennia. What Asimov knew about science fiction, and science writing in general, is that a good story sticks with you in part because it takes time to tell, and time to absorb.

Fortunately, I think the Internet offers its own antidote to slacktivism in the form of deeper dives: extended conversations, curated archives, long reads, and long tails. The same technologies that can cue up sixty episodes of
The Wire
on a moment's notice can also deliver extended meditations on Asimov's future history
,
habitable worlds
,
and thoughtful dialogues
com
about the world we ought to make for ourselves.

So why not make this the first day of 2013 that you spend living in a science fiction era? Let social media guide you to the incredible things humans are achieving on and off this planet, and then let science fiction and the deep riches of digital culture guide you to some new ideas, some better dreams, and better futures.

Ed Finn is the director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is also an assistant professor with a joint appointment between the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering and the Department of English.

The Center for Science and the Imagination brings together humanists, artists, and scientists to reignite humanity's grand ambitions for innovation and discovery. The center serves as a network hub for audacious moonshot ideas and a cultural engine for thoughtful optimism. It provides a space for productive collaboration across disciplines, brings human narratives to scientific questions, and explores the full social implications of cutting-edge research. Learn more at
http://csi.asu.edu.

My favorite scientific putdown—one that I often use myself, in various contexts not necessarily scientific—was the work of the Austrian-born theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), a Nobel Prize winner with a wicked and widely feared sense of humor. Pauli had a particular loathing for sloppy scientific thinking. His own thinking was coolly precise. Pauli was a severe critic of badly done work, a perfectionist who was able to put his finger immediately on a flaw in a theory's chain of reasoning and pronounce it, scathingly, as
ganz falsch,
"totally wrong."

But I would give Pauli's Nobel Prize citation a special footnote for his even more devastating response at one of those times when a fellow physicist showed him the paper of a colleague on which he wanted Pauli's opinion. Pauli read through the paper and said, looking up disdainfully,
Das is nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch:
"Not only isn't this right, it isn't even wrong."

What Pauli meant by that was the other physicist's theory was based on ideas so far from acceptable scientific reasoning that they could neither be proven nor disproven: there was no way to evaluate them at all. The essence of science is the testing of hypotheses. If a concept can't be tested against current scientific knowledge because its basic assumptions are located so far from anything that anyone considers to be scientific, then it can't be proven or disproven, and so is scientifically worthless, however elegant it might be mathematically.

Pauli himself was not unwilling to stake his reputation on bold theoretical concepts that may have seemed "not even wrong" to some of his fellow physicists. There was, for example, his solution to the problem of conservation of angular momentum.

This was a double puzzle. One part of it was the question of beta decay. A neutron that is separated from the atomic nucleus will, in about 18 minutes, decay into a proton and an electron by emitting a beta particle. But the neutron before decay is some 1.5 electron masses heavier than the proton and electron it decays into. In terms of energy, this is some 780,000 electron volts. Where does the missing mass (or energy) go? If it just disappears, the law of conservation of energy is in error—a frightening thought to a scientist.

There was also the issue of missing spin. All known atomic particles have been found to spin like tops. The amount of the spin can be measured, and a unit of spin established. The math shows that in any nuclear reaction, spin—like matter, energy, or electrical charge—can neither be lost nor created. This is known as the law of angular momentum, another term for "spin." But in beta decay the breakdown of a neutron, with a spin of 1/2, produces a proton and an electron,
each
with a spin of 1/2. An extra spin of 1/2 has been created, seemingly. Or, if the proton and electron have opposite spins that balance out, half a unit of spin has been lost. Either way, the law of conservation of angular momentum seems to be violated.

It was Pauli, in 1933, who saved both conservation laws, that of energy and that of angular momentum, by something that looked very much like cheating. He invented a particle that no one had ever seen. It had no electric charge, nor even any mass while at rest. But it had a spin of 1/2. During beta decay, Pauli said, this ghostly particle is emitted by the neutron along with the beta particle. The missing 780,000 electron votes of energy are carried off, said Pauli,
by his particle. And its spin of 1/2 cancels out the spin of one of the other particles, leaving a total spin of 1/2, the same that the neutron had had originally.

It was a very pretty solution. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi dubbed the new particle the
neutrino,
meaning "little neutral one." The only problem was that there was no experimental evidence that neutrinos really existed. And how could you detect a particle that had no charge and no mass? For a long time it seemed as though Pauli's neutrino fell into his own "not even wrong" class—an idea that could neither be proven nor disproven, but remained simply hypothetical, a convenient mathematical construct that permitted a plausible workaround for a nasty problem but lacked any verifiable reality.

In 1956, though, two American physicists, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, built a neutrino detector out of some six-foot-long tanks of water into which atomic particles from the Savannah River nuclear reactor were discharged. If neutrinos existed, they would stream into the tank and some would occasionally be captured by protons, turning each proton into a neutron and a positron (the positively charged equivalent of an electron). It was the precise reverse of beta decay. Each collision would cause flashes of light, which could be measured by electronic recorders. Reines and Cowan counted the flashes for 1,371 hours and found that they occurred at predictable intervals—which had to signify the emission of a neutrino. Pauli's theory was validated after twenty-three years. When Pauli was told of the experimental result he sent this telegram by way of reply: "Thanks for message. Everything comes to him who knows how to wait. Pauli."

More recently, the Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit has attacked one of the most hotly disputed ideas of modern physics, string theory, in a 2006 book called, appropriately enough,
Not Even Wrong.
String theory is a dazzlingly brilliant concept that I will not even pretend to understand, let alone explain here, because I am no physicist. A few sentences from its Wikipedia entry should give you a taste of it:

String theory posits that the electrons and quarks within an atom are not 0-dimensional objects, but are made upu of 1-dimensional strings. These strings can oscillate, giving the observed particles their flavor, charge, mass, and spin. Among the modes of oscillation of the string is a massless spin-two state—a graviton.... Since string theory is widely believed to be mathematically consistent, many hope that it fully describes our universe, making it a theory of everything.... String theories also include objects other than strings, called branes.... The strings make closed loops unless they encounter D-branes, where they can open up into 1-dimensional lines....

And so on and on and on. Peter Woit argues that there are no tests that can prove or disprove the existence of strings, branes, and all the rest, and so, however beautiful the theory and however eminent its proponents, it falls into the "... not even wrong" category.

Perhaps so. I am not the man to ask. The physicists themselves disagree. But I see where this elaborate hypothesis might cause uneasiness among the more conservative members of the profession.

My own favorite "... not even wrong" examples comes not from physics—as I say, I am no physicist—but from medieval scholarly disputation, a fertile area for such things. Consider the celebrated arguments over how many angels can dance on the head (or the point) of a pin. This seems to go back to Thomas Aquinas'
Summa Theologica
of 1270, which discussed such questions as "Can several angels be in the same place?" Aquinas did not in fact speak of angels on pinheads (or pinpoints), nor did any of his contemporaries or successors, and it may be that the whole topic was simply a scholastic training exercise. Never
theless, the seventeenth-century theologian William Chillingworth refers in his
Religion of Protestants
to an argument, source unspecified, over "Whether a Million of Angels may not fit upon a needle's point?", and Richard Baxter, in a 1667 treatise on Christian belief, notes that some scholars have asserted "that Angels can contract their whole substance into one part of space.... Whereupon it is that the Schoolmen (again, unnamed) have questioned how many Angels may fit upon the point of a Needle." And it has, ever since, been pointed to as a prime example of the unanswerable theological question that grows out of a total absence of verifiable data that might allow proof or disproof.

A proper scientific answer to the question would require the researcher to measure the area of a standard pinhead and also to measure the feet of a sufficient number of angels to provide an average foot size for the entire angel population. Then one need merely divide the space available on one pinhead by the size of one average angelic footprint, see how much of the pinhead that would occupy, and multiply by two to get the space a single angel would take up, and then multiply again by the number of angels it would take to fill the entire pinhead. Thus if one normative angel would take up one tenth of a pinhead, it's easy enough to see that ten angels could dance (moving carefully, I suppose, in such a crowd) on that pinhead. If angels turned out to have smaller feet, more of them would fit on the same pinhead. It's just a matter of simple arithmetic.

An easy solution, yes, except for the problem of gathering data about the size of angels' feet. Since angels, like strings and branes, can't be rounded up in any useful quantity to be measured—in fact, their very existence is a matter of some doubt—we can't calculate the space that a single angel would consume on a pinhead, and so we can't go on to calculate how many angels
in toto
would fit on that pinhead. We could say, speculatively, that ten angels, or a thousand, or ten thousand, or an infinite number of angels might fit on one. But we have no way of proving it. It would just be a guess, and one guess would be as good as another. We can't even prove that angels exist at all—or disprove it, for that matter. So any calculations about angels and pinheads can't be accepted as correct, but neither can they be rejected as scientifically false. They aren't even wrong. There's no data to work with.

Peter Woit feels the same way about string theory. What the brilliant, acidulous Wolfgang Pauli would have said about that and other recent speculations in physics, I have no idea. For all I know, he would have embraced string theory in full fervor—or maybe not. (He isn't here to ask, so whatever guess I might make would be not even wrong.) His own neutrino theory seemed like a wild plunge into the unreal to many physicists, after all. But it turned out that neutrinos existed. And his 1945 Nobel Prize, for which he was nominated by Albert Einstein himself, was for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle," which involved spin theory and the whole structure of matter. Measuring the spin of an invisible particle might very well seem like measuring the number of dancing angels on a pinhead. But, again, Pauli was on to something real.

And so we should not think that his famous "... not even wrong" putdown meant that he was the enemy of all speculative thinking in physics. Far from it. But it is not only a funny line, it is an instructive reminder that the essence of the scientific method is proof. If an idea, however brilliantly it's argued, can't be proven (or disproven) because it's based on concepts that can't be tested in any rational manner, there's no way to incorporate it in the body of scientific knowledge. It can't be accepted as right; it can't be dismissed as wrong; it must simply be set aside, because it's... not even wrong.