Actual science in science fiction

[james_davis_nicoll]

Not applied sciences, I mean, or feats of engineering but the actual process of science. Is this a suitable topic for SF, by which I mean "can it be the seed for a story?" Or maybe better yet, "how does one use it as the seed for a story?"

One example would be the Steerswoman books. I think part of what makes that possible is that the protagonist is discovering scientific models that we are already familiar with, so the author is not saddled with the problem of coming up with a new scientific model.

I am not fussy about "Yes, this was cutting edge science 200 years ago and it still is today" stories, where whatever bit of pop-science that made the cover of DISCOVER is still new and exciting centuries from now.

Comments

I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[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.

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

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...."

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

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?

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

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...)

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[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....

for small values of significant

[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.

a new broom sweeps generalizations cleanly

[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. :)

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

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...

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

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....

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: I probably should have clarified that I meant non-nonsensical science.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

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?