Scientists and Engineers in SFF

 

Here are my notes from the Scientists and Engineers in SFF panel at Arisia 2023.

 

 

 

 

(Picture from here.)

Observations:

1.   While science is often prevalent in SF, scientists are less so.
2. My experience is that while you might find scientists in SF, you don’t often find engineers as such. That said, characters can be labelled scientists but act like engineers.
3.  Scientist: searches for objective truth. Engineer: uses the objective truth discovered by the scientists and, combined with engineering lore, creates systems/devices/objects for use in the real world. E.g.: discovering 2d hexagonal carbon was discovered by scientists. Use of that structure in integrated circuits or high tensile string material is engineering. Pulling the material out of the lab into industry is the product of work by both.
4. Exceptions:
1. When HARLIE was One, David Gerrold.  David Auberson is the psychologist in charge of the project and Don Handley the system engineer. But both act like engineers.
2.  Primer: the main characters are really engineers
5. Frankenstein vs Brave New World. Mad scientists affecting the personal and the political. In the former, you get the Baron creating miracles through obsessive intellect. In the latter, the scientists aren’t really on stage but the world they create is.
6. Teams are useful but often not central to portrayal of scientists or engineers
1. E.g., Chain Reaction where a single individual magically finds the magic bullet for splitting water into o2 and h2 versus the Large Hadron Collider. Individual contributions supersede group contributions.
2. Hollow Man the team aspect is much more shown. Kevin Bacon’s character is a scientist that becomes unhinged because of his circumstances—in line with the HG Wells novel.
3. The lack of teams could be more a function of narrative and dramatic technique than failure of understanding. In When HARLIE was one, Auberson and Handley both play off one another in trying to figure out what’s going on—very much a team-like interaction even though it is just two people.
7. Note that often knowledge is gained without effort. Chain Reaction is an example of this, where the important technique is found by a machinist. The Manhattan Project, where the material for the bomb is stolen. This is kind of Promethean in origin and individuals pay for it. However, though this can happen it rarely does in this way. As Picasso said, it is not enough to make a pretty mark. That pretty mark has to be repeatable and therefore has to be understood. That understanding is often lacking.
8. I have tried to portray scientists and engineers truthfully. In God’s County, I did have a young genius but his full flower did not happen until he was working with a more seasoned scientist. They actually had animal models and experiments. The lack of a full-fledged team was a product of narrative.
9. Engineer as alchemist: Scotty in Star Trek, who has the magical ability of creating exactly the right magical device (always coupled with the proper magical words) to save Kirk’s ass.
10. Ethics are only foils as impediments to success, mad or otherwise. Indy doesn’t think twice about stealing a valuable Mesoamerican artifact from its country of origin
11. An odd consequence of the “scientist as hero” trope is that the stakes have to become unrealistically high for that to occur. In Interstellar, the world is dying. In The Silent Sea, the world is dying. SF is broader than this.
12. I wonder if the problem is that many in the media do not understand science, scientists, or science fiction. Or, possibly, they don’t care.
1. I’m reminded of an article on the Game of Thrones show describing how in the latter seasons, drama trumped logic. The idea was that creating personal drama was so important that logic would be broken to attain it. It wasn’t enough to generate drama from the circumstances of the situations. Drama had to be manufactured to the cadence of a TV show.
2. Scientists are largely portrayed negatively in The Expanse. Partially because most of the scientists we see on the show are the sociopathic ones. Not all of them, of course. But in the first arc, the balance is clearly tipped towards evil. Later, the balance tips more towards the middle.
3. That said, they never had to manufacture drama. It was already there.

Source Notes:

The Portrayal of Scientists in Science Fiction, Lucy Snyder, Strange Horizons, 2004

1. Hirsch: Analysis of SF magazines 1926-1950, steady decline in stories featuring scientists as heroes vs their portrayal as villains.
2. Later representation (90s) are shown to be human but not negative as scientists
3. Scientists as flawed human beings that happen to be scientists, vs. mad scientists that are representative as scientists.

Of Power Maniacs and Unethical Geniuses: Science and Scientists in Fiction Film, Public Understanding of Science, 2003

1. Shelley’s Frankenstein initial icon of the mad scientist
2. Science is about objective truth. Fiction is about illusion. However, in the best media, that illusion is an attempt to pursue subjective truth. Therefore, one can say that Science is about objective truth and fiction is about subjective truth.
3. Mad scientists working in isolation: Frankenstein. Moreau.
4. Portrayal of scientists as problematic may stem from people having problems with how “science” (really, engineering) is invading society and changing norms. E.g., The Boys from Brazil, cloning Hitler. The Manhattan Project, high school student creates atomic bomb.
5. Drama trumps process. In many works, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, the mundane, necessary activities of the scientist or engineer is reduced in favor of engaging theatrics. Indy spends 90% of the film engaging in unlikely heroics and about 10 minutes teaching. We don’t even see him examining material in the university lab.
6. Science projects into both utopias and dystopias—regardless of the relevance of science to those institutions. (Side note, A Canticle for Leibowitz has scientists being vilified for atomic war leaving the politicians and military that actually engaged in it seemingly released from responsibility.)
7. Portrayal of scientists and engineers differ from actuality because they are representing the anxiety of the moment.

 How “Don’t Look Up” plays with the portrayal of science in popular culture, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2022

1. First, it’s real science. It’s real scientists.
2. It presents the science and scientists within a cultural context where it is mishandled, misappropriated, and not understood. (What a surprise. Remember COVID?)
3. To be heard, the scientists become storytellers, celebrities, and counselors. They do not want the responsibility of fixing this. That’s not their job. But they are forced into trying to do something. And it completely messes them up, doing so. Shades of Oppenheimer.
4. Don't Look Up reflects perfectly the COVID and Climate Change issues. Too well, I think.

Scientists aren’t evil in movies anymore make sci-fi more believable, Deseret News, 2017 

1. Even when they don’t get it right. E.g., Interstellar. Though, again, the characters here are more engineers than scientists.
2. Arrival is a particularly good example since the Amy Adams character does, actually, act like a scientist and not an engineer.
3. Hidden Figures is all engineering.

Scientists as Hollywood Heroes, The Conversation, 2014

1. Interstellar. See above.
2. Real science consultants—though, I would have thought if they were real scientists they would have been able to figure out the time dilation problem without ever landing. Hm. Go down onto the planet for seven years or take six months to go to the next system. Gee. That’s hard.
3. Contact is another one where the team is important. Scientists are much better portrayed.

Steven Popkes at Arisia this coming weekend

 

 I’m going to be at Arisia this weekend, 1/13/2023-1/15/2023, the Science Fiction convention in Boston. All details at the link.

 

Come on down and join the fun.

 

These are the panels I’m on.

 

2:30pm Saturday

Scientists, Mathematicians, and Engineers in SFF - Literature, Panel - 1hr - Stone (2W)

Scientists, engineers, and mathematicians make their appearance as characters in speculative fiction—naturally! Share your thoughts about superb, and awful, examples, as well as your suggestions for representing these professionals with greater realism, diversity, and empathy.

Kristin Janz (m), Siobhan Flanagan, Steven Popkes, Craig W Stanfill, Stephen R. Wilk

 

11:00am Sunday

Plagues in Fantasy and Science Fiction - Literature, Panel - 1hr - Stone (2W)

From the Andromeda Strain to spattergroit, not to mention those adorable plush plague rats in dealers’ rooms everywhere, epidemics are common themes in speculative fiction. Which classic and current plague fiction stands out from the rest? What are the most common biomedical blunders SFF writers have, um, afflicted readers with? And has the pandemic breathed new life into this perennial theme in medical SFF...or turned readers (and writers) completely off the subject?

Alexander Jablokov (m), Amy Chused, Shana Jean Hausman, Joey Peters, Steven Popkes

 

Cheese Ends, 20230102

What better way to start the year than with Cheese Ends?

 

(Picture from here.)

 

I’m getting older every year, so we’ll start with a possible approach to human longevity.

 

Anyone who has worked with culturing cells has noticed that after a number of generations—say 50, or so—the cells get bloated, sick, and generally unhappy. They quit reproducing. They become senescent cells. It’s not entirely clear why this happens or even if, in all cases, it’s a bad thing. Senescent cells have been shown to contribute to the healing of injuries, for example.

 

But if they—like a dinner guest that has overstayed its welcome—linger too long, they begin to have bad side effects. They produce noxious chemicals and tend to cause a continuing and deleterious immune response. They can also turn cancerous. In some aging tissues the number of senescent cells can approach a third.

 

So: if senescent cells are bad, getting rid of them would be good, right?

 

This was the approach in an experiment at the Mayo Clinic. In the experiment, they genetically engineered mice such that when cells became senescent, they became susceptible to their target drugs. Then, they raised the mice to middle age and began injecting them regularly. The mice lived longer and better. They had less issues with heart, kidney, and other organs. They were still susceptible to cancer.

 

There are a lot of potential issues. For one, it’s hard to genetically engineer human beings so a senolytic drug needs to be developed. One that targets senescent cells. For another, these things would have to be done delicately.

 

A long time ago I was at a presentation by a researcher that was chasing a general antiviral drug. His method was to link a virus recognition mechanism to a signal to the cell to self-destruct—apoptosis. The plan was to kill the virally infected cells.

 

(I went looking for a publication for this and couldn’t find it so I’m reciting the presentation from memory.)

 

He infected mice with a singularly fatal virus and administered the drug at intervals—one population of mice at one day infection, the next at three, etc. The mice recovered well enough until towards the end of the experiment, when the mice were close to death, the mice died more quickly with the drug than with the disease. What was happening was the number of cells that died from the drug were so great, the impact of all of those dead cells overwhelmed the animals’ ability to recover and they died of a kind of shock.

 

This could be a problem in treating an older population where organs can have a substantial population of senescent cells in their organs. It’s not good to kill Granny with the thing that is intended to prolong her life. Conclusion: hopeful.

 

Climate change is happening and its effects are, as has always been predicted, showing in the intensification of weather events. No surprise there. Here is an article that reviews 2022. I’m not going to talk about it. I find perfectly avoidable catastrophes depressing.

 

As we go forward studying the neurological behavior of animals, we keep getting thrown by them showing themselves to be more sophisticated and smarter than we expect. This happened first with primates when we realized that other primates had way more cognitive horsepower than we realized. Then, it happened with birds. Now, it’s happening with insects.

 

It turns out bees seem to play.

 

In the course of some experiments, some researchers in London were training bees to roll wooden balls in order to gain a reward. This, in and of itself, shows that an insect with the brain of 0.5 mm is smart enough to connect pointless activity and reward. During the course of the work, they noticed some bees that were not trained to a reward rolled the balls, too. They wondered if this could be play behavior.

 

They set up the experiment so the bees had plenty of food and left the wooden balls around. Then, they measured how often they interacted with the balls and whether or not there were possible associated rewards unconsidered by the scientists—i.e., there could be a reward the bees were getting of which the scientists were unaware.

 

The bees “played” within the parameters of the experiment. By this, the bees interacted with the wooden balls without any obvious reward or association with something the bees might consider inviting like a flower or something.

 

Did they play? By this, did they indulge in spontaneous activity that had no obvious reward or incentive and then return to the same activity? Well, yes.

 

Go figure.

 

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, there’s a startup that allows you to buy your way into geoengineering.

 

I’m not going to mention the company since I don’t want to promote them—you can find them if you want. Instead, I’m going to call them Idiot Engineering for my own demented purposes.

 

Idiot Engineering is proposing—and may have begun—to inject sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere.

 

SO2 reflects back a certain amount of the sunlight received by the earth. Reduce the sunlight, reduce the warming, so the thinking goes.

 

This does work in the broadest possible sense. We’ve observed this when a given volcano erupts and sends gigatons of SO2 into the atmosphere. I’m looking at you, Mount Pinatubo.

 

Human geoengineering has a lot of pitfalls. SO2 + H2O yields sulfuric acid. We just managed to reduce acid rain so that’s not a great idea. It’s temporary because the sulfuric acid rains out. And it avoids correcting the cause of the problem. Even if it provided a viable solution—which is highly unlikely—we’d have to keep increasing the amount because we keep introducing more and more CO2. Remember, even if we stayed at the current level of CO2 emissions, we still haven’t reached CO2 equilibrium.

 

But where there’s one idiot with an idea, there’s always a venture capitalist right behind. Idiot Engineering has attracted money. They claim to have launched their first SO2 clouds and substantially reduced global warming.

 

I doubt it. But I’m still keeping my houseplants indoors.

 

Finally, to end on a good note, J. Robert Oppenheimer has been exonerated from the charges that were brought against him back in the fifties.

 

Oppenheimer was a very good physicist long before he was tapped to head the Los Alamos portion of the Manhattan Project. He was one of the first to predict quantum tunneling, something that enables fusion on the sun. His contributions before the Manhattan Project might ultimately have led to a Nobel Prize had he lived longer and didn’t fall under the anti-communist shadow of the fifties. His associated with Nobel winning work is quite prominent. For example, he predicted the existence of the positron in 1930 and six years later, Carl David Anderson discovered it. Anderson won the Nobel Prize.

 

Oppenheimer supported what would now be called progressive reforms. Since many of these reforms were supported by the Communist Party, he was guilty by association.

 

What Oppenheimer excelled in was scientific organization. After the Manhattan Project, he became director of the Institute for Advanced Study and later, chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. At the IAS, he was involved in the cat-herding of such as Einstein, von Neuman and Gödel.

 

Those communist sympathies and associations came back to haunt him in 1949 when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1953, Oppenheimer was accused of being an agent of the Soviet Union. Subsequent investigations did not show any such direct connection but in the heat of the times, actions that today might seem innocent here painted with dark overtones. “Left wing”, in 1953, was synonymous with communist—a taint that seems to persist to this day. He lost his security clearance and that pretty much ended his government career.

 

He did continue to work, write, and lecture on the implications of nuclear war, nuclear weapons, and world policy. In 1963, John Kennedy awarded him the Enrico Fermi Award, presented to him by Lyndon Johnson after the Kennedy assassination. This was meant to be a symbol of political rehabilitation, though it seems to me, more a rehabilitation of authority over Oppenheimer rather than of Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer died in 1967.

 

Fast forward nearly seventy years.

 

In December, US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm restored Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and stated that the revocation had violated the AEC’s own regulations, saying:

 

“As a successor agency to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Energy has been entrusted with the responsibility to correct the historical record and honor Dr. Oppenheimer’s profound contributions to our national defense and the scientific enterprise at large. Today, I am pleased to announce the Department of Energy has vacated the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1954 decision In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

 

So, only a little over a week late, Happy Christmas to All and to All a Good Night.

Book View Café Sale

 

Sorry about not getting this out earlier.

 

Book View Café is having a year end sale for all the books, including mine.

 

Go get those books here!

Announcing Winters are Hard

My new story collection is now available on Amazon, among other places.

 

The universal book link is here.  

Print version here. BVC Version here.

 

 

 

 

Merle is homeless on Coney Island. He keeps remembering things from long ago.
 

Harry Linden owns a failing parking garage and has to hire an alien to make ends meet.
 

Tomas Coban is a retired dictator that was never quite sure he had done those things for which he was blamed. He meets someone that is certain of it.
 

Jack Brubaker just wanted to be with and protect his wolves.

They all have one thing in common.

They know winters are hard.