Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014

by Penny Publications

  This sounds like the format for an SF short story, doesn't it, focusing on a single aspect of a problem? Or a high school physics problem that necessarily neglects factors such as friction? Personally I felt the show was pretty good. There was some hand-waving and a few unrealistic images, but no pseudo-science.

  Science fiction fans like both science and fiction, so when the two are combined we expect a mind-expanding experience along with some ocular frosting. We instinctively know hard from soft SF, so when television mixes these freely, our shields go up.

  Is this merely a problem of audience expectation, or is science being sold out? I suspect most Analog readers would say that pop science can be damaging by spreading misinformation, fueling non-existent "debates," or just sucking oxygen from better programming.

  A counter argument is that even sloppy science can serve to raise awareness. Does this vague assertion bear up? I think it can. While my generation of geeks cut our teeth during the heyday of the U.S. space program, many cite Star Trek as inspiration. Certainly SF can lead people to science, but how far down the road to pseudoscience can that be said?

  To help delineate the battle line, let's make a furtive digression to pseudoscience. Searches for Bigfoot and Nessie could fit into the respectable milieu of cryptozoology, but that rigor leads to disappointment, not "good television." Do ghosts and UFOs lead to serious science? Seldom. For example, adherents are quick to tout the power of paranormal "energy," but under no circumstances attempt to understand or even define this "energy." (If it really is energy, it would have been dissected and harnessed into useful technologies long ago.) No matter; if the paranormal has an appearance of authenticity, many viewers are satisfied.

  That's the litmus test: is the provocative claim subjected to the scientific method?

  Television producers are not gullible; they view this as entertainment, however exasperating to us. I recently spoke with an "investigator" for a show of the ghost hunter variety. I learned that while they try to convince the viewers that ghosts do exist, there are lines they do not cross. They screen out charlatans and do not knowingly televise hoaxes. They sometimes omit the more dubious evidence. For example, a "ghost" seemed to obey the investigator's verbal commands to turn on an infrared-activated sink. The camera crew pointed out that their equipment also caused the water to run when they focused on the sink. The producers did not air the "haunting."

  But integrity may be the exception. Damningly, the ghostly manifestations are not given the attention such discoveries demand. What they were looking for, I concluded, was sufficient evidence to suggest a haunting—and nothing more. If they truly believed they had filmed a ghost, they would not have flown off to their next assignment with such a stunning lack of curiosity. Imagine that the Apollo astronauts met an alien race on the Moon, sold a few fuzzy pictures to a tabloid, and then flitted off to Mars in hopes of finding life there, too!

  Thus another litmus test: is the investigation designed to plumb a particular mystery, or to perpetuate a broader one?

  All this serves to illustrate how the line between science and pseudoscience is blurred to a litmus-less public. Pseudoscience defames science. End digression.

  Now, it is necessary to water things down for public consumption, but doing so well is a rare skill. And the integrity can be lost anywhere along the information chain—science can turn to junk with a single headline.

  In a recent interview, Harvard geneticist George Church discussed the hypothetical difficulties of cloning a Neanderthal from preserved DNA. He was labeled a "mad scientist" by the tabloids. One falsely claimed that he was looking for an "extremely adventurous female human" to bear a Neanderthal baby!

  "We really should get the public of the entire world to be able to detect the difference between a fact and a complete fantasy that has been created by the Internet," Church said. But he added that discussing the possibility of Neanderthal de-extinction might be a better teaching method than rote memorization.

  Is it possible to have our cake and eat it? The entertainment industry is openly wrestling with this issue. A January 2013 television conference tackled it in a session billed as: "Filmmakers and commissioners will illuminate how to balance information with entertainment."

  In penance for the sins of my own talking head, I cobbled a little e-book, Worst Case Scenario: Evacuate Earth! and posted it for free on smashwords.com. It details my nitpicks of the show and outlines omitted ideas. This ploy is common. You've seen the books: "The Real Science Behind [SF blockbuster title]."

  Evacuate Earth was developed into How to Survive the End of the World, a series on which I consulted. I mid-list this as "popcorn science," a treat of lurid visualization salted with science. It's fun to weave science and speculation from both ends to the middle, rationalizing an improbable premise. That's how a lot of SF is created, but in this case the goal of selling popcorn is often in discord with good science.

  Therefore this epiphany: a science consultant can only advocate, not police.

  Motion pictures also value technical accuracy. "In the gap between science fact and science fiction stands the motion picture and television science consultant." So begins a blurb by SF blockbuster writer/producer Zack Stentz, writing about David Kirby's book Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema, perhaps the first serious study on this topic.

  Like SF, Kirby points out that popularized science can "make" knowledge, creating the illusion of science by using a convincing framework. A number of studies conclude that this has been detrimental to public understanding. (Has there ever been an archetype as destitute of actual specimen as the mad scientist?) Other studies show that television viewers tend to mistrust science, and suggest that the positive portrayal of the paranormal on TV has resulted in more acceptance of it.

  Such findings lead to an important insight: it is not the details of scientific accuracy that are the problem. Think about it this way: If nuclear technology is shown killing millions, while a smiling medium connects the grieving to their dearly departed, which appears more beneficial to humanity?

  Enter the National Academy of Sciences, (NAS) 2 which created the Science and Entertainment Exchange to "create a synergy between accurate science and engaging storylines in both film and TV programming." This and other collections of volunteer scientists are available to media producers as needed. NAS has advised such projects as The Amazing Spiderman, Battleship, Fringe, House, and Lost. Chris Luchini of JPL has confessed surprise at how much of his input influenced Deep Impact.

  Yes, Hollywood wants good science, but as with good SF, it must serve the story and never the reverse. This suggests that the problem is not so much with the way science is distorted but the way it is generally respected.

  Scientists have their own biases, and these inform the discussion. For example, NASA consulted on Mission to Mars knowing that the script included an inaccurate portrayal of the infamous "face" on Mars. Evidently that wasn't a deal-breaker, but they reportedly refused to be associated with the movie Red Planet because of a scene in which one astronaut shoots another. Similarly, scientists objected to a part of the Deep Impact script where a quirky scientist ran around an observatory in the nude.

  Apparently it is better to fudge the science than to malign the scientist. That's getting personal!

  Another bias of the scientific community is the "deficit model," an assumption that the public is uninformed, and scientists are purveyors of facts. That sounds perfectly logical, but a number of studies challenge the model on the basis that minutia in pop science add little to science awareness. Studies by George Gerbner show that if science in a film has a negative impact, viewers will view science negatively. Maybe NASA wasn't being so inse cure back there on Mars.

  What matters is that the viewer is inspired by the mysteries of the natural world and mankind's valiant attempts to lay them bare. An audience doesn't learn much science from a few facts painstakingly portrayed; there's a different venue for that.

&
nbsp; If there is a war on science, I don't think popcorn science is its theater 3 . Analog sometimes prints science articles as companions to a story, as well as the Science-Behind-the-Story tie-ins on its website. Think of popcorn science as shuffling the pages of these together.

  Popcorn science may cross blurry borders into heretical hinterlands, but that's not necessarily bad. As Arlan Andrews puts it, "Reality is a lot broader than we have been taught." If that were not true, there would be no such thing as discoveries, would there?

  Personally, I consider popcorn science a guilty pleasure that lets me have my cake (science) and eat it (things blow up) with a slightly positive education value. More importantly, it may inspire the next wave of scientists who might actually have to stave off Doomsday.

  Footnotes:

  1 How's that for a tri-oxymoron?

  2 Penned into existence by none other than Abraham Lincoln—you can look that up on the Internet!

  3 Is it really obligatory to note whether a pun is intended?

  * * *

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW

  PAST MASTER OF ELECTROMAGNETISM

  Jeffery D. Kooistra | 1830 words

  In an episode of the original Star Trek ("The Ultimate Computer"), Captain Kirk quotes a line from a poem: "(A)ll I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by." It's from "Sea Fever" by John Masefield, first published in 1902. Kirk goes on to say, "You could feel the wind at your back in those days, the sounds of the sea beneath you." Now, I don't know about you, but something about that line and Kirk's comment sings to a longing in my soul. It is a longing born not out of my past or my memories— I have never sailed on a tall ship—but purely from my imagination.

  That's probably for the best. For all I know, on a real sailing ship I might spend the entire time seasick, hanging over the rail and vomiting my guts out. I'm a fan of central heating, I appreciate modern plumbing, and for me nothing would kill the romance of the high seas more than the inevitable long hours of boredom on a merchant sailing vessel. Imagination lets us cherry pick the parts we find appealing, and if it didn't there'd be no such thing as fiction.

  Wistful thoughts about imaginary maritime adventures have a wide appeal, but my guess is that most Analog readers have a few idiosyncratic interests, underrepresented in the general population. Technogeekazoid that I am, one interest that makes me pine for an imagined past is the experimental work done in electrical science back at the turn of the previous century, 1900 through WWI. That's the era of Tesla and Marconi and Edison, something of a subgenre in the Steampunk world, and I like that just fine. But what I'm talking about was largely confined to university labs, where battles were waged on benches with wound wire coils and magnets and primitive electronic test equipment, and dispatches from the front were limited to the physics journals of the day.

  What prompted me to write this column was my stumbling upon an online article at phys.org called "Manipulating electron spin mechanically." The piece itself was no great shakes and described an experiment wherein electrons were prompted to flip their spins via high frequency mechanical vibrations rather than the usual magnetic fields. I was annoyed because it seemed clear to me that the author thought "mechanical means" were previously unheard of, and I happened to know of one discovered a century ago.

  You've probably never heard of Samuel Jackson Barnett, or of the effect that bears his name. Wikipedia has only a few lines about him (14% of which inform us that when he died, it was a month after his wife did), but it does link to their "Barnett Effect" entry, which is also only a few lines. You may have heard of the Einstein-de Haas Effect (which in fairness should be called the Richardson Effect, after Owen Richardson who suggested it first in 1907), likely only because Einstein was associated with it (and this may be the only experiment Einstein himself participated in).

  Take a cylinder of, say, iron, and suspend it on its long axis so it is free to rotate inside a coil of wire. Run current through the wire and this will put the iron cylinder in a magnetic field. The field will induce the spins of the electrons (because electrons are little magnets themselves) in the iron to line up. Since electrons have angular momentum, lining them up a bit with a magnet will cause the iron cylinder to rotate. That's the Einstein-de Haas Effect, first demonstrated in 1915. The Barnett Effect is the converse of this. Take that cylinder of iron and spin it on its axis, and it will spontaneously magnetize. The amount of magnetization depends on the rate of rotation and something called the gyromagnetic ratio, which varies from one substance to another and is just one of those values condensed matter physicists measure. Barnett demonstrated this effect in 1914.

  So there you have it: a mechanical method to manipulate electron spins (though not a spin-flipper) first found a hundred years ago.

  I first heard of Barnett while working on the Marinov motor stuff (see my columns from February and April 1999 and June 2008), while interacting with others who played with magnets and wire in their home shops. A few years later, while consulting, I often combed through old physics journals looking for geeky stuff. A lot of Barnett's papers made the trek to the copy machine. I delighted in reading about what he and his contemporaries researched, and even more about how they did it. Oh, to inhabit those laboratories myself! I wish I'd read his papers a few years sooner. One thing that helped immeasurably in the Marinov motor work was my decision to suspend the armature from the ceiling and stop trying to support it from below. This went from being my eureka! moment to the "oh, duh" kind when I found out Barnett had relied on suspending similar dinguses a century before.

  As I read through some of Barnett's papers (and as I reread them recently), I couldn't help but sympathize and identify with him as he dealt with some who disagreed with the results of his work. A fine scientist, he didn't object to being shown if he was mistaken. But I detected an all too familiar sense of weariness in his written tone as he replied to spurious complaints hatched from experiment-inexperienced minds.

  You see, for a while Barnett was involved on one side of the "moving magnetic field lines" controversy as it applied to spinning magnets, and Earle Hesse Kennard on the other. (They were not the only ones.) Barnett was an experienced experimentalist when their disagreements began, and Kennard had yet to receive his doctorate in theoretical physics. (Kennard went on to enjoy a fairly distinguished career, good enough for two short paragraphs on Wikipedia.)

  I need you to picture an ordinary bar magnet, north pole up. Now picture the magnetic field lines of the magnet, by convention emerging from the N pole and reentering at the S pole. Move the magnet from left to right. What do the field lines do? Historically, and certainly in Barnett's time, that the field lines move with the magnet has been the conventional understanding.

  Now imagine a dozen or so bar magnets, attached and evenly spaced, all pointing north pole up, to the rim of a horizontal bicycle wheel, and let the wheel rotate. Again, these are just magnets moving along as in the first case, so there's every reason to think the field lines move with the individual magnets.

  Finally, imagine cramming the entire region of the wheel from axis to rim with more magnets until you have the equivalent of a single short, cylindrical magnet, and let it spin. Do the field lines still move with the magnets (or composite magnet)? Barnett and others said yes. I say yes. Kennard and others said no, and it was this dispute among the leaders in the field of electromagnetism that is known as the moving magnetic field lines question.

  As it turns out, it is not at all easy to design, let alone perform, an experimental test that will demonstrate once and for all whether or not the field lines move. Most methods tried relied on the fact that an electromotive force (EMF) is generated in a wire moving perpendicularly through a magnetic field, and likewise in a stationary wire when the field is moving. Unfortunately, with a spinning magnet the EMF produced is very weak to begin with, and when you add up all of the EMFs produced in each part of a closed circuit (that is, when you integrate around the closed circuit), you get a big fat zero. A
lot of paper was stained with ink in the journals of that day, debating whether or not a particular experimental method predicted a net EMF of zero in both the moving and the stationary field line cases.

  A full discussion of the moving lines controversy would fill a book (which I may write) and is outside the scope of this essay. But a specific example of the sort of weary reply Barnett would offer to Kennard that drew me to him is this one from The Physical Review back in 1913 (Vol. II, No. 4), in a piece called "On Electromagnetic Induction."

  "The brief statement of fact, without reference to authority, in my first paper drew from Mr. Kennard the criticism to which he refers. He said that I had failed to give experimental proof of my statement. References to the experimental work having been given later, however, Mr. Kennard now objects to the experiments of Blondlot, Wilson, and myself on insulators on account of sliding contacts, stationary connecting wires, absence of a conducting screen, etc. These objections are entirely inconsequential and irrelevant and I shall not consider them further. No one will object to the repetition of any or all of these experiments, either modified or unmodified, by anyone who is sufficiently interested in them; but it is quite certain what the results will be."

  At the start of this paper, Barnett said it would be his final reply, and you can see why. Kennard had originally accused him of making things up. Then, after references were provided, this kid theorist Kennard, unskilled in the craft himself, dumps on the experimental tricks of the trade in common usage by the boys who call the laboratory home. How annoyed I used to get when the armchair experimenter set would offer up criticisms to my Marinov motor work, which were "entirely inconsequential and irrelevant." Sam Barnett, I feel your pain.