Tag Archives: popular science

The Endpoint of All Future Technology

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Science fiction writer Karl Schroeder’s intriguing answer to the Fermi Paradox, which basically asks, the universe is so big, so where are all the aliens at?

“If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals.”

Read the rest at Karl Schroeder’s blog.

P.S. Back from Panama today, but this is still an auto-scheduled post from before I left.

Long Exposure

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Apropos of nothing, this extremely cool image, which was not digitally manipulated to look this way (other than, perhaps, adjusting white balances and such). The stars are streaking because of the long exposure time of the camera (probably several minutes, at least). The figures were drawn by the photographer with flashlights. Click on the photo to see the rest of his photo set.

Much in the same way you can draw figures in the dark with a sparkler, by leaving an afterimage in your retina from the bright light, he went into the frame of the photograph, waving a flashlight around to make these patterns, which appear in the final exposure.

How come the light appears in the final exposure, but the blur of the photographer and, indeed, the flashlight itself, do not? Although they were all in frame for the same period of time, the intensity of the light allowed it to leave a lasting impression. An exposure is all about collecting light. A bright light that is present for part of the exposure may contribute as much to the final picture as a less-bright object that is there the entire time.

Billions and Billions

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I’ve just finished the final chapter of Carl Sagan’s final book, “In the Valley of the Shadow”, in Billions and Billions. He died shortly after completing it. What a remarkable human being he was. Isaac Asimov, the prolific writer who was also (briefly) a Ph.D chemist famously said that Carl Sagan was one of only two people he had ever met who was clearly smarter than himself (the other was Marvin Minsky). However, it’s not his intelligence that I most admire, but he was remarkable ability to understand and empathize with other people.

Only Carl Sagan could bring together people from both ends of both the political and religious spectra, by being, apparently sincerely, genuinely able to understand all points of view in a largely non-judgemental way. Things have been so divisive in both American and Canadian politics the last 10 years, I think we really feel the loss of someone like him.

Book Review: The Manga Guide to the Universe

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The Manga Guide series began modestly with a single title near the end of 2008, The Manga Guide to Statistics, and it was a surprise hit. Now here we are on book eight of the series, with book nine just around the corner. We’ve had Manga Guides to Databases, Calculus, and Molecular Biology. It seems there is no scientific topic that can’t be improved by adorable comic illustrations. Now we see if that even applies to the universe itself.

The premise is quite brilliant. Japanese high school students Yamane and Kanna are the only members of their struggling drama club. They’ve committed to putting on a show at an upcoming arts festival to justify their existence, but are at a loss as to what they will do. Just then, an American exchange student, Gloria, walks in, eager to join the club and displaying a deep enthusiasm for Japanese culture. The three of them put their heads together and settle on doing an adaptation of “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”, wherein a tiny girl is discovered inside a stalk of bamboo, only later to be discovered a princess of the moon.

There’s only one problem, this tenth-century tale needs some updating, today’s post-Apollo program audience won’t buy the idea of a kingdom on the moon. Yamane needs to update the story with a more distant, mysterious location. But knowing little about the heavens, more research is needed. Fortunately, Kanna’s brother is an astronomy major at the university, and his favourite professor is more than willing to share the wonders of the universe with an interested audience. But just how far will they need to go to find a home for their princess?

An introductory astronomy course or textbook normally surveys such a wide array of different disciplines and reasoning techniques that most of them can be covered only qualitatively. The hodge-podge nature of the topic thus provides a less obvious intellectual progression than something like molecular biology, calculus, or chemistry, wherein each new topic builds on a previous one. Ishikawa’s chosen narrative arc is both historical and natural to new students of astronomy, first focusing on the skies as seen from the Earth (especially our own moon), then expanding to the rest of the Solar System, our Milky Way Galaxy, other galaxies, and then the overall shape, history, and future of the universe as a whole. The final chapter discusses a number of open problems in astronomy, including the theory of other universes, and the mysteries of dark matter and energy.

Although I wasn’t expecting to learn about Japanese literature in this book, it was really a nice fit, and in retrospect, it’s quite natural to discuss how cultural views of celestial objects and the universe as a whole have changed over time. Ishikawa also ties the birth of new universes back to the original story in the final chapter in a brilliant and very satisfying way.

Throughout the book, we get a good view of why astronomers believed the universe was a particular way, as well as why they were proven wrong, from discarding the Earth-centered model, to recognizing the vastly greater distances of the stars compared to the relatively nearby objects of our Solar System. The text engages the reader with leading questions and logical implications, and the data and thought experiments are well served by the visual illustrations. Ishikawa uses both some classic analogies and some fresh, unique ones to get some difficult concepts across.

I was delighted that he also took time to cover some hot-button topics that a traditional textbook may have left out: Kanna discovers a UFO and by the end of a chapter, she has learned enough astronomy basics to figure out what it really was and why it seemed to be following her; the possibility of life either in our Solar System or elsewhere in the galaxy is discussed, including the specific details of our best nearby candidates, and the more general statistical argument made famous by Frank Drake.

The Manga Guide to the Universe is a perfect blend of lucidly argued basics and unfettered, cutting-edge possibility. One of the best yet in the series (which is saying a lot).

(No Starch Press, 2011)

Article first published as Manga Review: The Manga Guide to the Universe by Kenji Ishikawa on Blogcritics.