Saving the day at any age

 kw: book reviews, fantasy, heroes, anthologies

When I saw the title, Never Too Old to Save the World, I first imagined something like this (the cover illustration of a woman with a rifle had some influence…).

On further thought, I wondered if there would be more of this. Bibbity bobbity boo, anyone?

As it happened, the editors, Addie J. King and Alana Joli Abbott, both of whom contributed stories to the volume, had a broader imagination, and had selected a broad range of stories by incredibly creative authors. Having read the stories, I find that all the protagonists but one are women, from middle age to old age, plus in two cases there is a handoff to a younger generation.

Also, there were at least a couple of stories that I would characterize more like this (The artist is Egle Bartolini. Sorry, I couldn't find clip art with an older host). The last story in particular, "The Mountain Witch" by Lucy A. Snyder, has the aging champion, who decades earlier lost a battle with the witch, who is thought capable of unleashing a dragon, trying again. But she is instead invited in for tea and conversation. This story, more clearly than the others, tells of changing views with maturity.

Every story includes magic or magical characters. The least magical is "Launch Day Milkshakes" by Jim C. Hines. The brain of a resourceful "cat lady" has been rendered immortal and is built into the first starship. On launch day, the mission controller is being bullied by a male (of course) administrator, but she holds him off while the starship fends off a terrorist attack in a very surprising way. To say more would be spoiling the very pleasant surprise.

The second-least-magical is "My Roots Run Deep" by John F. Allen. The woman, Mia, gains an infallible B.S. detector in the form of hearing what a speaker is saying inside. I think most of us would say that all grandmothers, and plenty of mothers, can read minds anyway. Allies prompted by Mia gather information needed to foil the plans of a predatory banker and have him arrested.

All but a few of the stories are better described as "…Save the Day", but a few really do portray saving the world. One is "Utopia" by Vaseem Khan. The Invaders in a starship fleet have taken over the world, abolishing all frivolity. Here the savior is an aging man, who earns the trust of an alien. The story ends before the denouement, but with it firmly in view.

I noted a big "+" or "++" alongside eleven of the nineteen stories, and a "–" for only two of them, two which went nowhere. For all nineteen, the writing is top tier, and I enjoyed reading them all.

If only one thing were enough

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, explanations, interdisciplinary

For Marcus Chown, explaining things isn't just a "man thing," it's a lifelong passion. He bites off a very big chunk to chew, to explain 21 science ideas most people find hard to comprehend, in The One Thing You Need to Know: The Simple Way to Understand the Most Important Ideas in Science. Dr. Chown seems to be used to juggling a passel of sciences.

The best I can do with a book this comprehensive is to limn a sampling:

• The Second Law of Thermodynamics – For the sake of background, the First Law of Thermodynamics is Conservation of Energy, or in cosmological terms, Conservation of Mass-Energy. The Second Law can be stated a few ways: "Work requires a flow of energy" and "Entropy must always increase" are two easy ones. Implied in these two statements is the prefixed caveat that "In a closed system…" Thus, building a house decreases entropy (a measure of disorder), but it does so only locally. In total, there is a great increase in overall entropy. Think of a huge pile of sawdust and other wastes… For you or I to grow from a fertilized egg cell into a baby, then to an adult, decreases entropy within our body, but increases entropy even more in the Universe as a whole. There's a curious statement on p61: "…the energy of a photon is proportional to its temperature…" The author is making the case that for each photon the Earth receives from the Sun, it emits 200 photons of lower energy. Photons don't really have a temperature, but in a thermal regime, it takes a hot object to emit photons of higher energy, so the statement is useful shorthand. The "average" photon from the Sun conveys a greenish color to our eyes and has a wavelength near 550 nm, and an energy of about 4.4 eV (look up electron-Volts). Of course, the Sun emits photons with a very wide range of wavelengths and thus energies. The average temperature of the Earth is 15°C (59°F), so it radiates infrared photons into space with and "average" wavelength of about 10,000 nm or 10 µ, and an energy of 0.124 eV. The ratio 4.4/0.124 = 35.5. That's rather different from 200, but it would take a much more elaborate analysis to produce a more definitive value, and that's not what this book (or this review) is all about.
• Atoms – This is a simpler concept, as long as we stay with pre-quantum-mechanical explanations. The word "atom" comes from the Greek word atomos, meaning "un-cuttable" or "indivisible". The philosopher Democritus 2,400 years ago asked, "If I cut this piece of pottery in half, and then do it again, and again…could I go on forever?" He declared, "No." But there was no way to prove it. Now we have abundant proof and demonstrations, including a microscope called AFM, for "atomic force microscope", that can produce an image, magnified several million times, of the atoms on a surface. X-ray methods allow us to visualize the arrangement of atoms in a crystal. But they are not longer "un-cuttable". When I was a physics student, "atom smashers" of a few types, including a synchrotron at my college, routinely banged ions against one another, "splitting" atoms into smaller pieces. Now, we think that electrons and quarks are the truly un-cuttable entities. Probably, but stay tuned…
• The Standard Model – I got out of physics because I was a college senior during the heyday of the "particle zoo", when the number of "-ons" and "resonances" and other items showering out of atom smashers had grown to a list of 100 or more. A few years later physicists proposed the "Eightfold Way", which was tweaked and modified and added to, until now we can make this diagram:

Ordinary matter is entirely composed of the leftmost column of 4 "leptons" and the 5 "bosons". There is a caution, though: all the leptons have anti-matter "twins", such as the positron, which is the anti-electron. The gluon, photon, Z, and higgs have no anti-bosons, or one can say they are each their own antiparticle. The W has an anti-W.

Thus, the particle zoo is smaller now, with "only" 30 "fundamental" particles, rather than a hundred or so.

This is a great synthesis, but it is still incomplete. We don't know if gravity is quantized, or what to do with a "graviton" if such a critter exists. I presume it would be a boson.

The introduction to this chapter (#15) includes the quote, "People want to know about what's going on with what's in the universe, what are particles like, what are the basic rules of nature. There's a lot of curiosity out there." by Sheldon Lee Glashow. I'd say, for "people" he really meant "scientists" or even "cosmologists." For the rest of the human race, the curiosity is mainly directed to "What's my next meal?" and "Where can I sleep safely?" and "Can I get laid tonight?"

• Quantum Computers – The hype about these is like entropy; it is ever-increasing. And so we find it here. One useful point is made, and this must be the "one thing" for this chapter: Quantum mechanical math only applies to an isolated thing, whether an electron, an atom, a buckyball, or anything else, in a very low-temperature vacuum chamber (i.e., isolated from the Universe; I guess gravity doesn't count). Constructs larger than single particles need to maintain "coherence," such as that seen in Bose-Einstein condensates. Anything at all from the outside that interacts with the "thing" will cause it to "decohere" and enter a fixed state that is described by classical mechanics, not quantum mechanics. That "anything at all" includes photons with extremely low energies, which is why Bose-Einstein condensates can only be created in an extremely rarefied vacuum at a temperature less than one degree above absolute zero. Apparently, thermal photons emitted by the walls of a chamber at such a low temperature are either too sparse to disrupt the condensate, or too low in energy to do so. Anyway, the math of quantum multiplicity shows that adding a single qubit to an array of qubits doubles the number of final states it can use, thus doubling the complexity of the problems it can solve. The trouble is, a quantum computer can only produce a single output, so it is best suited to doing something like cracking a single password. Like second-grade math teachers, for a quantum computer there is "only one right answer". I guess matrix math is out of reach. If you know how passwords are cracked with current equipment, you know that they cannot be tackled one at a time; a hacker typically gathers the "hashes" from thousands to millions of passwords and cross-matches them against a "universal hash generator". If a hacker can extract a few or a few hundred passwords that way, he can make a ton of money exploiting just those, and the uncracked ones can be left for a later, more rigorous attempt. I really haven't seen another problem that quantum computers are suited for, and the author doesn't suggest any either. But along the way he makes a wonderful statement about the current state of science: "Something physicists never like to admit is that they have only ever solved one problem exactly: the two-body problem." That's the orbit of two objects about one another under the force of gravity only. He is right! Everything else is approximated. Science has some distance yet to go.
• The Big Bang – If you begin with the current state of the Universe, and the observation that all the galaxies are separating from one another at a rate that varies primarily with their distance, you can "extrapolate to zero" and wind the Universe back to the initial state of zero volume and infinite temperature that "must" have begun everything. This was determined before 1930. More detailed observations and analyses since then have found three "hangups":
1. The background "temperature" is too uniform; it should express more of the initial turmoil unless there was time for the temperature to equalize. It is posited that a slightly slower start, during the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, was followed by a very brief period of enormous expansion, dubbed Inflation, for about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, at which time the Universe was the size of a softball, and then continued expanding at a more "sedate" rate comparable to what we see today. This is kind of like blowing up a weather balloon with C-4.
2. The gravity of all visible matter is too small for galaxies to have formed in the calculated time (13.8 billion years) since time-zero, and the gravity of all visible matter in a galaxy is too small to hold the stars in their measurable orbits. It is posited that the actual mass of gravitating "stuff" is about seven times as great as what we can see; the extra "stuff" is called Dark Matter. So far, we can only know it from its gravity.
3. Observations of distant Type 1a supernovae seem anomalous; calculations based on their brightness indicate that universal expansion is speeding up. It is posited that a kind of negative gravity extracted from "vacuum energy", dubbed Dark Energy, is responsible. I personally think that we don't yet know enough about how Type 1a supernovae behaved in the first billion years or so, when the "metals" content (everything except hydrogen and helium) of the Universe was very, very small.

The author concludes this chapter (#21) by saying, "…there is a strong suspicion that there is a deeper, more fundamental cosmological theory to be found, which will merge inflation, dark matter and dark energy into a more appealing, seamless entity." I would think that a proper theory would make all three superfluous. Time will tell

It's a very enjoyable book. I'd have preferred each chapter to begin with an introductory blurb, stating "the concept to be grasped" and "the one thing that'll help you grasp it". I don't really see any "one thing" in any of the chapters. But it's cool anyway.

Exoplanets survey

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy, astrophysics, exoplanets, surveys

Imagine what planetary astronomy would be like if there were frequently two or even three planets visible in the sky that appeared similar in size to the Moon as seen from Earth. And I do mean "frequently." The planet currently known as Trappist-1e, the fourth planet around the small star Trappist-1, has a six-day year. From a dark-sky location, on the side away from its sun, the next planet outward (-1f) would reach superior conjunction about every dozen days, having a visible size of 34 arc-minutes; we see the Moon as about 33 arc-minutes across. The apparent size of -1g, another step outward, ranges up to 19.5 arc-minutes, nearly 2/3 of a "moon unit". From locations near the terminator (the star-rise or star-set line), the next planet inward, -1d, approaches 32 arc-minutes at inferior conjunction, as a crescent, just as Venus at its brightest is seen as a crescent because it is nearly between the Sun and the Earth. Even when the other six planets are at opposition (on the other side of the star), they always appear larger than any of the planets in our solar system ever do: even Venus at near-conjunction is too small to show a visible disk, except to a few folks with test pilot vision. All the Trappist-1 planets are always seen as disks.

From planet -1e, however (and any of the others, from -1b through -1h) there probably is no star-rise or star-set. So far as we can tell, they are all in tidal lock with Trappist-1, the way the Moon is with the Earth. It is also unlikely that three big neighboring planets can be seen in the sky at the same time because the orbital periods are all in resonance, which keeps them from lining up in the sky simultaneously.

If you were on the brighter side of the planet, the star would appear much larger than the Sun, about seven times its size. But its surface brightness is lower, by far, than the Sun's. It would still be risky to look right at it. Imagine looking at a ball of near-molten tungsten at a temperature of about 2,560K (~2,290°C or ~4,150°F), just slightly cooler than the filament in an incandescent light bulb. Although astronomers call this star a "red dwarf", one of the reddest known, visibly it appears orange-white. It would be dazzling, even though our Sun is 1,800 times as bright.

All of these facts are consequences of the small size of the Trappist-1 stellar system. The outermost known planet, Trappist-1h, revolves at a distance of only 8.8 million km from the star (from Earth to the Sun is 149 million km). The star's faintness, however, means that the habitable zone is between 3 million and 5 million km. Both Trappist-1d and -1e are within this zone, and maybe -1f and -1g, while -1h is "out in the cold" and always frozen (like Mars) and -1b is rather like Mercury and subject to searing heat (from 125°C to 230°C, or 255°F to 505°F).

All of this has been learned from viewing the Trappist-1 stellar system using several telescopes (at least 3 of them in space) and spectroscopes. The procedures and the kinds of data needed to discover and characterize exoplanets are described in a very understandable way by Joshua Winn in The Little Book of Exoplanets. Considering that there are more than 5,500 known exoplanets presently known, Dr. Winn makes a good point that we need to set aside the term "exoplanet" and just call them "planets." Our stellar system, which includes eight planets, is just one of more than 4,100. More planets, and more systems having two or more confirmed planets, are being discovered daily.

All of the earliest discoveries were made using the Doppler method, which measures how much the star is moved back-and-forth by a planet. Naturally, the easiest sort of planet to discover, by nearly any means, is one that is large (that is, massive) and close to its star. Big Doppler shifts are easier to discern, and shorter orbits take less time to confirm (days or months rather than years or decades). For one method, though, direct observation using a coronagraph, big planets that are far from the star are easiest to see. Finding smaller, less massive planets, in years-to-decades-long orbits is between difficult and (so far) impossible. None of our current methods could reliably discover Mercury, Venus, Earth, or Mars, and also Uranus and Neptune. Saturn and Jupiter are on the "possible edge". So it is no surprise that systems similar to our own have not yet been observed. Proclamations that our system represents something very rare are premature. We don't yet have a way to know!

The most prolific method so far is the transit method. When the system is lined up just right, one or more of its planets will periodically cross in front of the star, which dims its light a tiny bit. This illustration compares observations of a transiting planet made from Earth's surface with observations made using the Kepler Space Telescope. The atmosphere, even using adaptive optics, is a big handicap to precise observation.

During the useful lifetime of the Kepler telescope I used Zooniverse to make some of the measurements in a Citizen Science project called Planet Hunters. I don't think I made any new discoveries, but I think my work helped others confirm at least a few of them; the stats show that I made 6,866 classifications. Most of them were "no planet".

This image, Plate 16 in the book, shows the Starshade concept: A space telescope will have a co-orbiting daisy-shaped shade that blocks the light of one particular star with sufficient efficiency that direct observations of planets near the star can be made. The shape of the bladed disk is optimized to "spread around" diffraction effects so that a star's light can be reduced by a factor of several million or even a billion, while the nearby space, within a fraction of an arc-second, is unimpaired.

Such a system could see Earth, probably Venus, and maybe Mercury. "Co-orbiting" in this case means the telescope and the shade are about 30,000 km apart in a very high orbit! They would need to be supplied with large amounts of fuel to allow for frequent re-positioning and re-aiming. Perhaps by the time these are commissioned, paid for, built and orbited, we'll finally have a successor to the Space Shuttle that can reach high orbits so they can be refueled. Running out of fuel is the bugaboo of space observatories.

This is more than just curiosity. Every space observatory since Hubble has had as part of its ambit, "Help find habitable planets and planets with life, even intelligent, communicating life". Whether or not Earth is utterly unique in the Galaxy (if not the whole universe) is the biggest question science can address. (My note: It's curious that the budget of NASA is in the range of 1/200th of the Federal budget. The yearly spend of SpaceX and all the other private rocket companies that have sprung up in the past decade or so totals between 1/10 and 1/5 of NASA's budget. To get a "supershuttle" into operation and to genuinely support "big space astronomy", these numbers have to increase by a factor of ten or more.)

I am quite enamored of exoplanetary science. This "little book" is packed with great info and stories about its current condition.

Loneliness and Solitude are on different dimensions

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, sociology, loneliness, short biographies

I was seventeen, a member of a folk music group, and I'd been asked to join a small (five-member) Dixieland band made up of boys at my high school. Their clarinetist wanted to play saxophone and I wasn't too shabby a clarinet player. I could also play banjo. The folk group was breaking up because two of the guys were going away to college, so I was glad to have another music group to join.

After a number of practice sessions over a couple of months, the other members held a meeting but didn't ask me; I heard about it almost by chance from one of them. I went anyway, thinking it an oversight. The other guys were all in Explorer Scout uniforms with numerous merit badges on their sashes and other insignia. There was also a cameraman there and a reporter!

I knew they were all Explorer Scouts, and they knew I'd been a Boy Scout but inactive for a few years. They'd never invited me to join up as an Explorer; I was soon to find out why. The five of them were the entire membership of an Explorer Post, and they had all achieved Eagle Scout status that year, the only such Post in history. A newspaper story was being prepared.

Once I'd taken in all the facts, I sidled away and went home. I never spent time again with any of them. That day was the loneliest day I'd ever experienced. To use a term apparently coined by Richard Deming, it was my first experience of Exquisite Loneliness: loneliness that can make or break you, but it will surely change you. Deming explores this dimension of loneliness in This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity.

Loneliness is not solitude. Being alone can be restorative (is sure is for me!). Being in a crowd is different from being with a crowd, or with some people in a crowded situation. Loneliness happens more frequently when we're among others than when we're alone. I've experienced perhaps the usual amount of loneliness, but, fortunately, only a few incidents of such overwhelming loneliness.

Several years after high school, bushwhacked by a different kind of betrayal, I was making plans to clean up my affairs and head for the hills. Vague ideas of being like Jeremiah Johnson (a movie mountain man) flitted through my head. Fortunately, I had one friend left, though we'd been out of contact for months. I wanted to see him before I left town. I called, and he came over.

As background for what comes next, it's helpful to know that I had been a Christian for nine years, but part of the betrayal I mentioned led me to pull away from the church congregation. I was badly enough hurt that I'd decided to abandon "church". My friend's first words were, "Guess what happened to me while you were away? I got saved!" I blurted, "How did that happen?" (I'd thought it impossible) He told me of a different church without the troubles I'd seen where I'd been. I went, and he and I have been "in the church life" for 51 years and counting.

Being active in a congregation of believers doesn't eliminate loneliness but it helps.

Richard Deming had things a lot rougher than I did growing up. I had a short spell of heavy alcohol use, then gave it up. I experimented with drugs just a tiny bit, and abandoned that. I don't like things that mess with my mind. Deming became a blackout drunk and at one point spent a night in jail over it. Having read his confessions to us, I am still not sure how much loneliness he suffered because of repeated, crushing experiences, and how much he is predisposed to more loneliness than "average", whatever that might be. His book explores the lives of six creative people—a psychoanalyst and writer, a painter, a photographer, two other writers of different genres, and a screenwriter; all of them celebrated in their time, or part of it—, all of whom experienced and expressed great loneliness. All of them morphed their loneliness into creative genius.

I also wonder, what is the proportion of people who experience "exquisite loneliness" and are broken by it, rather than motivated to heal? …or at least to grow?

As an introvert (INTP in Myers-Briggs terms), I enjoy social experiences, and I also enjoy periods of solitude. At a leadership training camp I was paired with my M-B opposite, a man who is ESFJ. He is almost compelled to sociality and suffers from solitude. I suppose the world needs us both.

Deming is a writer who, in self-revelation, motivates his reader to self-examination. That's valuable. Loneliness isn't a "problem" to be "solved". It's a signal that we need to reassess something. Over time, we might gain sufficient wisdom to know what to reassess.