Tag: Science

Wonders of the Solar System

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’ve been enjoying ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ because of Professor Brain Cox’s enthusiasm for science, for his relish of the great things we have achieved in throwing spacecraft millions of miles out to expand the frontier of human knowledge. It’s been good to see some of the newer pictures from that frontier and of course to see the superb graphics created. The program hasn’t really told me anything I don’t know – it’s really a Solar System basics class for those unaware of things like the order of the planets or how many planet Earths you could drop into Jupiter’s red spot, or generally what conditions pertain on each world. But it has seemed to be a return to the good BBC science program untainted by political ideology.
I mean, at one time I used to love Attenborough’s Life on Earth programs, but now I cannot watch them without feeling the urge to throw something at the TV when he delivers his regular-as-clockwork homilies about how we are destroying the planet with our profligate globally warming ways.
The first few episodes of Wonders of the Solar System remained pure enthusiasm and science so I watched with some trepidation when I realised this latest episode was about the ‘thin blue line’ – about planetary atmospheres. I enjoyed the stuff about Mercury’s lack of atmosphere leaving it open to direct meteorite collisions  and vast temperature changes, the stuff about Earth’s magnetosphere protecting it from the solar wind and how deep in Jupiter the pressure turns hydrogen into a metallized liquid. But then, with the inevitability of tax rises on petrol, booze and cigarettes, we got to the greenhouse effect, and Venus.
Cox gave a brief description of how the greenhouse effect works, perhaps annoying the faithful by pointing out how without it we would be freezing our butts of in temperatures 30 degrees lower than they are now. He then went on to say that the temperature on the surface of that world is hot enough to melt lead, apparently because of its CO2-laden atmosphere. I was there rooting for Cox because he did seem a little embarrassed to be mentioning this, and I was hoping he would also go on to point out some of the rather large elephants in the room.. But no, all we got was some nonsense about Venus being in the same ‘region’ of space as Earth. Rather disappointing really.
No mention then of how Venus being 26 million miles closer to a giant fusion reactor called the sun might have some bearing on its temperature. No mention how a ground level pressure of 93 times that of Earth’s might have an effect too, or that Venus receives over a thousand Watts per square metre more solar radiation than Earth. Nope, it’s all those Venusian coal-fired power stations.
I like to think that this was the minimum deal with the Devil Cox could make to ensure he would present the program. I like to think this was the minimum he could say to calm the political demagogues at the BBC so as to enable him to zip off to Africa to experience an English Electric Lightning jet flight straight up at 5 gees to the limits of the atmosphere to observe that ‘thin blue line’, or race across the Namib in a 4×4 to do a small piece about the sands of Mars, or race a speed boat across a lake to gather up some methane whilst talking about Saturn’s moon, Titan.

Anyway, I’ll continue watching the program, and just hope that the homilies are out of the way…  

Cargo Cult Science

Posted on by Neal Asher

Some remarks on science, pseudoscience and learning how not to fool yourself. Caltech’s commencement address in 1974 from Richard P Feynman (PDF).

Now in what branches of ‘science’ might this approach be applicable nowadays? One specific example springs to mind but, really, the answer is ‘all of them’.

Update: And in the spirit of Feynman (or should I say the bloody obvious), the Institute of Physics has come out of the closet.

These are the traits of groupthink (Janis, 1977). Where do we see them?

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”.
6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mind guards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

Incidentally, a ‘flat-earther’ is he or she who did not question the general consensus.

Thing You Need to Know.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Karl Popper on falsifiability:
A property of any proposition for which it is possible to specify a set of circumstances the occurrence of which would demonstrate that the proposition is false. Falsifiability is the crucial feature of scientific hypotheses: beliefs that can never be tested against the empirical evidence are dogmatic.
Bertrand Russell’s teapot:
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
If there is no way of proving something wrong, it’s not science. And if you can’t prove something wrong, that doesn’t make it right. Can you think of prime fat contemporary examples of both of these? I certainly can.

Alien Life

Posted on by Neal Asher

I just read an interesting article in the Sunday Mail’s Review and decided to do a little search on it over the Internet. Michael Brooks (a consultant at New Scientist) is having his book ’13 Things That Don’t Make Sense’ published this February. The first of those things is (both can be found here):

NASA scientists found evidence for life on Mars. Then they changed their minds
On July 20, 1976, the Viking landers scooped up some Martian soil and mixed it with radioactive nutrients. The mission’s scientists all agreed that if radioactive methane was released from the soil, something must be eating the nutrients – and there must be life on Mars. The experiment gave a positive result, but NASA denied an official detection of Martian life. Today, there is even more evidence that something is creating methane on Mars. Is it life? The Viking experiment suggests it was. Martin Rees, England’s astronomer royal, calls the search for extraterrestrial life the most important scientific endeavour of our time. But have we already found it? 

Apparently, the reason they changed their minds was due to readings from another instrument on the Viking mission that searched for traces of carbon in the Martian soil and found none. The verdict about life remains unchanged despite it being known that the second instrument couldn’t even detect large quantities of carbon here on Earth. It was a dud, but as we are learning every day now, scientists protecting their backsides quickly lose any acquaintance with the truth.

The next ‘thing’ was this:  

Has ET already been in touch?
It was an electromagnetic pulse that came from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. It lasted 37 seconds and had exactly the characteristics predicted for an alien signal. Maybe that’s why, on 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman to scrawl “Wow!” on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State University’s radio telescope in Delaware. The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that really is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event – or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter. More than 30 years later, its origin remains a mystery.

After much consideration, wondering what method aliens would use to attract attention, researchers decided that a radio signal at precisely 1,420 MHz – the vibration frequency of hydrogen, the most common molecule in the universe – would be the best choice. That’s precisely what they got. It also came from an area of space completely devoid of stars, maybe from a spaceship?

What do you think about this? The easiest thing to do is err on the side of doubt. I mean, lakes of methane on Titan aren’t immediately pointed at as evidence of life there. And frankly, that signal could have come from Earth and been bounced back by some phenomena much more likely than a passing alien spaceship.

Buzz Aldrin

Posted on by Neal Asher

On Facebook I got a message from one Geoffrey Utley, Yorkshire man who moved to Texas in 1979 for 2 years and stayed there. I found it fascinating, and maybe you will too:

Do you have a scientific background? The the science in your books seems “plausible” by the way. I was on a flight from NYC to Dallas the other day and Buzz Aldrin was sitting across from me in First Class. That was a huge thrill. I was re-reading Gridlinked at the time, and I thought about the beginning of space travel to a possible future. (I was reading it on a Kindle!)

My reply to that was:

Hi Geoffrey,
No I don’t have a scientific background. The nearest I’ve come to it in my career was a proper job in engineering. I was raised by a father who was a lecturer in applied mathematics and a schoolteacher mother, so grew up with microscopes, chemistry sets etc, and the best thing any parent can teach a child: how to think, be analytical, and a love of learning. Everything else comes from my heavy science fiction and science reading, and an undiminished interest in both.

I also asked him if I could copy his comments to here and was just going to leave it at the one. However, I like this next bit too:

“Returning from the NE Regional Meeting, flying from LaGuardia , NY, I found myself sitting across the aisle from Buzz Aldrin and his wife. There may be a couple of you who have to “google” his name. To me, it was the equivalent of being in proximity to Mickey Mantle, or Muhammmed Ali.

Buzz Aldrin was the second human being to step foot on the Moon. Along with many other honors, he and the other crewmen were given a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan and awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

I thought to myself, he was second, so is that like a silver medal in the Olympics, or only winning $100 million in the lottery instead of $250 million? Of course not, he and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon at the same time, but Armstrong as the commander was ordered by NASA to be the first.

I remembered going to my friend’s house in the summer of 1969 in Yorkshire, England . I was not old enough to drive, so I was allowed by my parents to ride my 5 speed to my friend Phil’s house to watch the lunar landing. This was unusual because when they landed, it was primetime in the USA , but about 4am in England. All the usual rules were suspended about riding my bike in the dark, and streets that were usually deserted had life and light.

We watched the fuzzy images on a black and white television, listening to England’s equivalent to Walter Cronkite, Richard Dimbleby. We heard the “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” and were still not able to relax, because of course, they had to come home. “Home,” being the Earth.

I keep stealing glances across the aisle, to watch an immaculately dressed man, looking like the retired CEO of a Fortune 100 company. I noticed he wore two very expensive looking wrist watches on his left and right wrists and wondered what time he kept them set-on. Eastern and Lunar maybe? The Captain and the First officer came out of the cockpit, (at separate times), to shake his hand, as discreetly as possible. I thought about the chances that 41 years after the fact, I was sitting close to the man I had seen step foot on our closest neighbour in the solar system. I thought about the fact that the device I’m typing this on had more computing power than a combination of all the computers on all the Moon missions’ vehicles. I thought about the bravery of his wife, who had to watch and wait.

I thought about the challenges we have in front of us and how insignificant they are compared to what they achieved with slide rules and graph paper.”

Damned right. And, really, how did we lose our way?

Article 18: Who Threw That?

Posted on by Neal Asher

  Here’s an article I wrote quite some years ago. I probably did it at around about the time films like Armageddon were doing the rounds since it seem likely the reporter or the news story concerned was looking for something ‘topical’.

WHO THREW THAT?

So, on February the 1st 2019 there is a chance, cosmically speaking, of a large lump of rock slamming into Earth. According to ‘expert opinion’, so the media told us on the morning of this announcement, this thing is a mile and half wide and will impact with enough force to wipe out a country the size of Britain. This was then upgraded, within an hour, to be one capable of wiping out the USA – a change I put down to both media hype and a dearth of information. Of course experts will vie with each other to predict greater and greater disasters to get themselves on television, so you can expect by the time you read this that the asteroid will destroy all life on Earth. But then maybe it could. What happens if it hits the oilfields, what changes might it make to the weather, might it perturb Earth’s orbit enough to sling us into an ice age or turn everything to desert? I’m not an expert, so I can’t really say. At present, measurements are not yet accurate enough to tell us precisely what will happen. The asteroid will probably miss us completely and go round for another try in ex-thousand years time. What is certain is that measurements will become more and more accurate as the asteroid draws closer. Personally, I hope that they show, in the near future, that the asteroid is certain to impact. This is not because I am a nihilist, but because such a state of affairs would impel the kind of hard technological advances not seen since the World Wars. We have the time and ability to stop this thing, but we would have to get off our arses to do so. Such a threat could pump huge amounts of cash, heretofore blown on military spending and idiot bureaucracy, into giving us a firmer foothold in space. Resultant developments would be hugely beneficial and solid – we would not be able to afford the dipstick mistakes that have wasted the last few Mars’ missions – and I can see that how once the rock is blown off course there’ll be no turning back. Suddenly we’ll be dwellers in a huge and hostile universe, not post-Copernican Earthlings. And even those grandads saying, “Well, we didn’t have those new-fangled asteroid thingies in my day,” will have to sit up and take notice. For the SF writer there are other situations to extrapolate. Taking the phrase ‘capable of wiping-out the USA’ it is almost inevitable that the Bin Ladens of this world will say that it has been sent to do just that. Let me predict that they’ll name the asteroid ‘The Fist of God’, and that fundamentalist terrorists will do everything they can to sabotage any project to change its course. Because there will be no guarantee that the project will be successful, a more careless attitude to life and liberty might prevail. Maybe the Western World would take this opportunity, in the purported interests of humanity, to flatten the Middle East and take control of the oil. Don’t doubt this possibility. It’s worth being reminded that the firepower of a couple of nuclear submarines could do the job. Have people already forgotten what atomic bombs can do, and more specifically, neutron bombs? Perhaps Pakistan and India will take this opportunity to settle their differences – end-of-the-world scenarios being an excuse for all sorts of mayhem. Will China just sit back and watch all this? And, there is always the most unlikely possibility: this could be a unifying influence on the entire planet. Taking an even larger and more tongue-in-cheek view, one might even wonder about the timing. Consider how fortunate we were to have a moon that strips away atmosphere thus preventing this planet going catastrophically greenhouse and ending up like Venus – a moon that also gives tides so that life developing in the water will certainly also end up on land. Previous impacts wiped out life forms that would not have led to us. The asteroid that drove the dinosaurs extinct ended the 160 million-year reign of creatures that showed no signs of growing brains larger than peanuts. Aptly-timed ice ages then led to the survival of creatures with an interest in banging rocks together. A hundred years ago we would have been unable to do anything about the approaching cataclysm, moreover, probably would not even have detected it. This is all obviously the determinist 20/20 hindsight of the bible-thumping trench survivor: “God loves me, that’s why the shrapnel took the top off of Harry’s head and not mine.” But it’s just as obvious that the aliens sent this rock, and that we have seventeen years in which to prove ourselves fit to join the galactic community.

Science Fiction Laser Beam Nonsense!

Posted on by Neal Asher


This was passed onto me from my brother Bob. It’s on Tom’s Guide.

In September, we reported that Boeing successfully defeated a ground target using its Advanced Tactical Laser aircraft. Now the company has shown its laser prowess again by tracking and destroying small, unmanned aerial vehicles in the air. A single laser beam, fired by the U.S. Air Force-sponsored Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX), shot down five UAVs at various ranges.

Squids in space next maybe?