More Words, Deeper Hole

That's applied biotechnology, I think.

There are some bits in GETA where one of the protagonists is trying to develop evolutionary biology, despite not having very important a piece of information.

There's something I imagine exists in real science, that little mental click when you turn the model half a degree and suddenly what looked like a handful of unrelated phenomena turn out to be related on a fudamental level. One of Stableford's recent books had that, when the protagonsit suddenly realizes everyone was making an incorrect assumption about the scale something was happening on.

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rosefox

Blood Music has at least one of those little mental clicks that I recall off the top of my head. I can't think of any other books that feature such moments specifically in a scientific context, but I am reminded of a writeup I read recently on Apollo 13; I think those clicks are much more likely to happen when the thinker in question is under a lot of stress or pressure of some kind.

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To dig up the old standby: Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

ISTR Cryptonomicon (which I haven't read in a while, so take with note of caution) having a couple of those moments with one of the characters and mathematics, although I may be being too kind to an expository textdump.

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lcohen

i recently saw a play, called humble boy, that referenced just such a click. or rather, the absence of same. "the eureka moment," i believe they called it.

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GETA = Courtship Rite? Ken MacLeod used something similar in the backstory to the Croatan book. (What a peculiar trilogy, btw.)

What I wouldn't mind seeing is more interplay in the history and development of ideas. Might be why I respond so well to Delany's stuff. Ted Chiang had a sort of AH story that explored this rather well, I think, backwards-looking only because Chiang seems too honest to use faux-aliens (e.g. Sawyer's people in lizard masks).

How about a series of naturalists' journeys exploring an ecosystem? The first expeditions start with earlier ideas -- I was going to say "primitive", but they might be quite complex (and wrong) -- while later ones get closer to the truth. To make it more human, you might have periods of ideological backsliding, a la social Darwinism and anthropology, or Lysenkoism and botany. X-treme libertarian selfish gene types investigating something closer to Gaia than what exists on Earth, perhaps.

(I just realized: was that the effect you were trying for in the Green Door vignettes?)

Harder to do with interplanetary exploration, but I think still possible while keeping a semblance of scientific verisimiltude.

Carlos of "Halfway down the Danube", a blog

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http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5341/barbie.html

Come to think of it, the book I refered to in my first entry today used archaeology. That's a handy field for SF, because we are producing new past all the time and thanks to computers, most of it is being documented in ways that guarentee our descendents in a few thousand years will be left trying to figure out exactly _when_ Micky Mouse became the tutelary god of California or if Marilyn and Madonna are two names for the same deity.

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rosefox

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wdstarr.livejournal.com

Come to think of it, the book I referred to in my first entry today used archaeology.

Hmm, Used archaeology, was set in the far but not deep-time future, and had character names and cultural references contemporary to the 20th/21st century... Jack McDevitt?

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Darwin's Radio?

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Allow me to illustrate the problems with that book by locking Stephen Jay Gould in a small room with that book. Ah, I see the book's theory is so awful that Gould has constructed a time machine so as to give himself terminal cancer before the experiment began [1].

In SF, biology is the sad-eyed child with the mysterious bruises and the unexplained fractures.

1: You don't want to know what happened when I tried something similar with an elderly Galois and a copy of WORLD OF NULL-A.

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ritaxis.livejournal.com

Thank you. You have expressed my feelings exactly.

However, there are stretches in Darwin's Radio where the scientists, while saying pretty ridiculous things, act like scientists. There are other stretches where they act like characters from a popular novel, unfortunately.

Some of the things about how scientists act that are usually missed in novels are:

-- modern scientists, and in fact scientists in history as well, almost never work in isolation. They may work in secret, but in that case, there is a secret group, probably with a legitimate connection to a public institution, hidden in plain sight. The sure sugn of a nutcase who is wrong is one who has a hidden laborsatory, one assistant, and no correspondents.

-- modern science is expensive. there are institutions involved which have to approve the expenditures. scientists spend a lot of time on administration of finances, either getting the money, allocating the money, or defending the expenses. A consequence of this is that scientists don't like to work in secret, because publication is one of the things that gets them money. So if you're doing evil secret work, you do want to have aspects of it which can be boken off and published with some of the implications filed off.

-- modern scence is distributive. most scientists are working on pieces of problems and some scientists are mainly working on integrating the work of others and all scientists have to be aware of other work.

-- science always has involved a lot of tedium, a lot of plodding along making observations and notations and calculations. Your wild-eyed ranter is probably not the guy to be scared of: it's the calm, businesslike, conservative guy with the great big interconnected set of labs funded by the Pentagon under a black box clause, who spends his time quietly administering a bunch of bland-looking projects. The guy whose projects always seem to involve defense against bizarre, lethal, and highly unusual, or unlikely, or unheard-of threats.

And yes, we need to defend biology and its allied sciences from people who think that the existence of the quantum means that you can get away with anything you want. Somehow. Yes I meant to say the quantum.

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Your wild-eyed ranter is probably not the guy to be scared of: it's the calm, businesslike, conservative guy with the great big interconnected set of labs funded by the Pentagon under a black box clause, who spends his time quietly administering a bunch of bland-looking projects. The guy whose projects always seem to involve defense against bizarre, lethal, and highly unusual, or unlikely, or unheard-of threats.

I remember reading a comment by someone or other that he could always tell when an epidemiology paper had originated in Fort Deitrick (sp?) because the diseases used vectors that those diseases rarely or never used in nature. "Leprosy spread on bird feathers? Yep, that's the biowarfare guys...."

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Considering your points above, would this make Forty Signs Of Rain - where IIRC the protagonists are mostly scientists, mostly doing paperwork - class as what's being looked for?

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As I recall, and lord knows I never allow my personal beliefs to bias my perception of KSR's fiction, that book ends with a rousing call to make the NSF more responsive to the *right kind* of political agenda, something that worked out so well for Lysenko.

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I've taken to quietly pushing the Clever Conclusions of any given KSR work aside and enjoying the story. I suspect this may not be the intended way to read them, but hey, it works. (Actually, as soon as they had the big flood I had to go collect someone from the station and stop reading, so I tend to forget the end...)

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nancylebov.livejournal.com

Afaik, there has never been a real-world mad scientist in the sense of someone making significant discoveries in secret without institutional support and using them for malice[1].

It's odd that mad scientists weren't all that rare in fiction--I have a theory that it was actually repressed fear of government scientists.

[1] Though I suppose that if the secrecy were deep enough and the discovery was subtle....

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twoeleven.livejournal.com

some evil genius adapted a lab synthesis of amphetamines to produce the well-known street recipe for "crystal meth". it's a beautiful piece of work, as it replaces expensive and hard-to-get materials with stuff anybody can buy legally, and simplifies the process to the point that any junkie can follow it. if it had been done for any legitimate product, it would be considered a major improvement in process chemistry.

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twoeleven.livejournal.com

which is to say, you're right, except for all the other cases. :)

i don't know of anybody who works in a "secret" lab (what's that anyway?), but i personally know seven people who work for four startups that could be described as "a laboratory that isn't publically known, one assistant, and no correspondents". in two cases they're guys who got laid off from a big company and decided to see if they can turn their ideas into money.

the cost of doing science varies dramatically. in most of the labs i've been in, salary was the dominating expense, so it's no more expensive than any other professional work. where one has cheap labor (grad students, or guys chasing their dreams w/o pay), good science can be done on the cheap. otoh, sure, if the experiments need exotic materials or equipment, it's very expensive. one project i worked on was the country's largest consumer of ³²P. *that* wasn't cheap.

the control of the money varies pretty dramatically, too. a lot of work is done as you describe, with scientists running around looking for funding. but in a fair amount of industrial science, the scientists think and their managers run around looking for money. this is true of the part of the government i worked for, long time passing. other research is done on a command-and-control basis, where the company or part of the government picks the scope of the project and assigns people and resources to it.

otherwise, a fine post. :)

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Well, it had ah-ha moments, and my father (who was a research toxicologist and public health director) read it without complaint, so it was probably as 'ok' as forensics in the average mystery novel...

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Yeah but "forensics in the average mystery novel" includes things like a pathologist deciding to go check out a possible body-dumping site by herself, in the middle of the night, without mentioning her idea to the police for whom she works....

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People do do incredibly silly things, though. Including people who should know better.

Especially if they are very tired and stressed. Dad worked in infectious diseases -- some of the close calls they had were scary.

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I find that hard to believe.

On an unrelated note, does anyone know if chronic first and second degree burns on the right calf of the leg can have long term health implications?

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kalmn.livejournal.com

the first time i read the title of this, it said actuarial science in science fiction, which is also underrepresented.

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Coincidentally, I just read Year Of The Jackpot...

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What are the odds of that?

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Probably slightly higher than an unprompted spasm war, massive earthquake, and roving Russian paratroopers.

Although, you know, he's gotta be right some day...

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Although, you know, [RAH's] gotta be right some day...

There is that bit in his futurology essay where he says that something currently in existance will revolutionize society, even though it is not presently obvious what this something is. He then speculates that it might be the computer chip.

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Given that ISTR his contemporaries were hedging with "nuclear power!!1!", as a rule, I guess we can call that one a hit.

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It provides 80% of _France's_ power.

Wait a few decades and I am willing to bet the hiatus in atomic power development will end, and the lifestyles of the billions of poverty stricken peasants around the world will be quite different.

Actually, we're currently undergoing one of the greatest transformations in human history, as people swarm into cities. It's really quite amazing at how unnewsworthy this seems to be.

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ritaxis.livejournal.com

people have been swarming into cities for milennia, James.

The hiatus in atomic power development might end if somebody can figure out something to do with the waste besides pile it up and pour concrete on it and hope for the best.

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james-angove.livejournal.com

Scientists doing science, or stories where the focus is on the science? For the later, some baxter might qualify, although he's going to be mostly applied astrophysics.

For the former: some Jack McDevitt, for archeology and anthropology.
Charles Sheffield must have had someone doing science, but I can't seem to think of anything.
I never read much Robert L. Forward, but I seem to recall _RocheWorld_ as a book mostly about the science of planetary systems. IIRC _Alpha Centauri_ had some scientists doing science as well, I thought, although it was of course mostly background for Barton and Capobianco's gedankenexperiment in social dysfunction.

There is probably a fair bit of short fiction from Analog that fits the bill, most likely involving an iconoclastic lone scientist overthowing the established order.

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ritaxis.livejournal.com

There is probably a fair bit of short fiction from Analog that fits the bill, most likely involving an iconoclastic lone scientist overthowing the established order.

Thar most specifically does not fill the bill. It's not how science works.

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What about Sir Fred Hoyle? Someone has to provide the hypotheses for the other guys to disprove....

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james-angove.livejournal.com

I did not suggest that that was how science worked. I was suggesting that that was the model of science working that was most likely to grace the pages of Analog, since I suspect such a model is most likely to fit the prejudices of the Analog readership and/or editorial board, who so far as I can tell say "science" when they mean "magic that will make the world as I wish it to be". It’s possible I’m insufficiently charitable to Analog, but there you go.

What follows is neither fair nor altogether accurate:

This brings me to a thought that has been coursing through my brain since James started his recent flurry of posts[1]. There seems to me to be a large and growing amount of hostility toward empiricism within the science fiction community. This may be reflected in the diminishing quantity of science in SF, and especially of good science, the kind that doesn’t support wish fulfillment about the plucky individual doing it on their own without meddling from a society that just doesn’t understand them.

[1] My only basis for what follows is the content of rassf and rasfw, which is as close as I'm likely to get to the "science fiction community" at large. So, a grain of salt and all that.

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This brings me to a thought that has been coursing through my brain since James started his recent flurry of posts[1]. There seems to me to be a large and growing amount of hostility toward empiricism within the science fiction community.

Much as I hate to admit this, there's always been a faction of SF that was hostile to empericism, especially but not exclusively [1] over in the ANALOG wing of SF.

1: If I had not expunged my memories of this, I'd cite a particularly dreary Le Guin short story.

From: (Anonymous)

I just struck me that while the iconoclastic scientist slaving away in his lonely lab isn't anything much like the real experimental scientist, it's much closer to the essentially solitary working life of a professional writer.

Analog-style scientist heroes: the original Mary Sue? Threat or Menace?

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chance88088.livejournal.com

Probably not what you are looking for, since the focus is really as a memoir (though I found the chemistry and learning to be a chemist bits rather interesting) Primo Levi's The Periodic Table?

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da-lj.livejournal.com

A number of novels by Greg Egan are science-related. For example "Teranesia" involves scientists trying to explain something that looks like directed evolution, with lots of similar "aha" moments like you're describing, and "Distress" has a number of plot-points revolve around scientific understanding of a Theory of Everything. "Schild's Ladder" is quite possibly as well, though it was a while ago that I read it.

Greg Bear uses similar plot twists in "The Forge of God" as scientists try to figure out how the Earth will be destroyed, though the developments are mostly a "oh shit, we're in trouble" "oh shit, it's even worse" kind.

...and I'm amused that both the recent posts I've made in your journal were about Greg Egan and Greg Bear. :)

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Teranesia was the one I was looking for -- but I'd misremembered it as being by Bear (and Bear and Egan aren't shelved near each other).

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sraun

Would Thrice Upon A Time by James Hogan qualify? Maybe the first one or two of his Giants books?

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