Compliance among Auto Art programs

 kw: ai experiments, simulated intelligence, automatic art, comparisons, generated art

I like caves. In the post Troglodyte Fantasy I reported on a project to generate images of about a dozen rooms built into cave spaces, using two different art generators. I experimented with several others, and I conclude that the various programs vary significantly in how much they conform to or comply with the details of a prompt. I used long prompts in particular for this project. Here is the first one, which was intended to reify my ideas for a "man cave":

A room in a spectacular cave that has many stalactites and stalagmites, with flowstone on the room's walls, fitted out as an office with a desk and chair and desk lamp and two large computer monitors, with a bookshelf full of books to one side and two smaller side chairs.

Note that the room inventory is one desk, one desk chair, two side chairs, a desk lamp, two computer monitors, and one bookshelf. The milieu is a cave as described.

So far, I have produced images for all the rooms using three programs: Leonardo AI, ImageFX, and most recently DreamStudio. I also produced several versions of the Cave Office image using Gemini, Dall-E3, and Playground. The degree of prompt compliance these programs exhibit is quite variable, both from program to program and within the various "styles" or other toolsets of a program. I show some findings below, first for the four programs that I managed to "persuade" to hit nearly all the goals. Here is an image montage:

DE3: Dall-E3 – Everything is there, plus an extra bookshelf and several extra lamps in addition to a tiny desk lamp. We also see a view outside the cave through an archway.

DS: DreamStudio – There is only one side chair. There is a bonus monitor and floor lamp. However, it took the production of dozens of images to get this one.

GEM: Gemini – No side chairs, but everything else is there. The desk lamp is off, and the cave in general is the darkest one of these four. This was cropped from a square image.

IFX: ImageFX – Everything is there, plus an extra bookshelf and extra desk lamp. I understand that both Gemini and ImageFX use Imagen 3 to generate images, but there must be different training sets in the background.

The other two programs have numerous "style" settings, so in the second montage I showcase two variations for each program:

Leo: Leonardo AI. On the left, style and substyle "Phoenix" and "illustration", which explains the drawn appearance. Everything is there, although the two lamps stand beside rather than on the desk, so there is no real desk lamp. I am not sure what the green tree in the corner is doing there! "Phoenix" is billed as being extra-compliant to prompts. 

On the right, style and substyle "Lightning" and "vibrant", so color and contrast are enhanced. It's hard to see where a second monitor might be. Everything else is there, with added chairs and tables and table lamps, like a mini-conference sidebar. Note that Leonardo AI has various levels of credit usage for different styles, and Phoenix costs 2.4 times Lightning, while most other styles cost 1.4 times Lightning, which is promoted as fast and cheap.

PG: Playground. On the left, using the SDXL (Stable Diffusion XL) engine, probably version 1.0. There is only one side chair, but an extra bookshelf opposite, and a smaller bookshelf at the far end of the room.

On the right, using the PG30 (Playground 3.0) engine, which is billed as "very compliant to prompts". That is apparent here. Everything is there, with nothing extra. Sadly, Playground has dropped its image generation interface and announced it is going into graphic design. I'll miss it. It had the most options, but a big learning curve.

This doesn't get very deep into the use of these programs. At present the only program I have paid into is DreamStudio, because they have a pay-as-you-go plan, similar to the one Dall-E2 had. The others have various subscription plans, which I avoid. I haven't tried editing or outpainting with any of these except Playground. 

It is likely I could edit an image to add something I think is missing. But I prefer to get an image that is closer to what I want from the start, so little or no editing is needed. In the past I used outpainting to turn a square image into a wide-format image. That is not needed now, except for Gemini, but when asked for "wide format" it produces an image a little zoomed out so you can crop it, and its original images are 2048x2048, which helps.

Twenty mystery stories – that will hold me for a while

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, mystery stories, crime fiction, anthologies, collections

I read mystery stories from time to time. Not novels; I prefer the short form because the author has to make a point and be done with it. Seeing that The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024, edited by Anthony Horowitz, was available, I checked it out.

Twenty stories, and I have to say, all over the map. I like variety. With one exception I liked these stories. Here is my breakdown:

• ++ : 3
• +   : 9
• ~   : 7
• x   : 1 (skipped this one)

Not all of these are "murder mysteries", only about half. To me, that is a relief. "True crime", in all its variety, is more to my taste. Herewith, the three I liked the best:

"Beat the Clock" by Michael Bracken. The solution to a murder hinges on the vagaries of what clocks do—or must have done for them—when Daylight Time starts or ends. Motive? A big inheritance, that all expect will go three ways.

"How to Teach Yourself to Swim" by Fleur Bradley. The narrator can't do much to help an abused boy, but the boy rescues himself from a drug-dealing family by learning to swim.

"A Family Matter" by Leonardo Padura. Here I must digress. This is about someone wishing to escape from Castro's Cuba. A dear friend of mine swam overnight from a city near Guantanamo Base to a little offshore island, laid doggo in the water while the sun was up, then swam to the Base and obtained asylum in the US. This was more than 50 years ago. He still lives, now in California. In the story, the escapee is being helped from an unexpected direction, and the narrator, a retired cop, relies on the importance of family in Cuban society to find him, and then the twist occurs and I must leave it to you to see that for yourself.

A few of the notes I wrote after reading the stories:

Hidden heroism.
One too many snap decisions.
"Never not a cop" can be good.
Outliving the forensics.
Single mom gets away with killing (not her ex).

The last story, called a Bonus by the editor, is "The Suicide of Kiaros" by L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz series. The editor called it "the darkest story in the book," so I skimmed it without missing much. It's another gotaway story. It is not the story I skipped entirely; that one I could see right away hinged on deadly danger to a family, and I can't stomach those.

Great writing, from end to end. Now, back to science and scifi.

Strong support for blue sky research

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, serendipity

To abbreviate a saying usually attributed to Isaac Asimov: Science begins with the phrase, "Hmm, that's funny!" 

I once worked as a machinist at Cal Tech, often in the big room where the mirror for the Palomar Telescope was formed and polished decades earlier. Later half the room was taken over to build an early synchrotron (atom smasher), which had been disassembled but big concrete rings remained. Also, a cabinet in a corner of the room was filled with manuscripts of experiments that had been performed using the synchrotron, often attached to copies of PhD dissertations, which indicated the student had been awarded the degree. We were assembling an innovative radio telescope in the room, and its reflective surface was being machined semi-automatically. I had to be present to monitor and adjust the machinery, listening for anomalies in the process. During chunks of semi-free time I read here and there in the manuscripts. I found that many of the students using the synchrotron had eventually proved their original idea to be incorrect, but had discovered something else along the way, so they got their Doctorate anyway. Scientific serendipity at work!

Scientific serendipity is the theme of Accidental Astronomy: How Random Discoveries Shape the Science of Space by Chris Lintott. I would broaden the scope of the title, because much science is built on "random" discoveries, things found while looking for something else. Recent case: A medicine for treating Type II Diabetes, semaglutide, marketed as Ozempic® and Wegovy®, was found to promote weight loss, which is now the biggest market for it. Weight loss is making billions for the drug companies.

In nine chapters Professor Lintott leads us through the history of several important discoveries. One amazing example is the Hubble Deep Field. Several astronomers took a big risk and managed to convince the folks in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope to have it point towards a spot in space near the Big Dipper, where nothing could be seen on earlier photographs of the sky. For four days!

This is part of the result; it is about a quarter of the whole image, which included an area of sky about 0.6% the area of the Moon. Thus this image is about 0.15% of the Moon's apparent area.

This is at 1/3 the scale of the original image, so each pixel here is the average of 9 original pixels. I darkened the background to get rid of very low-level jitter. Just left of center, the bright white item with spikes is a star. Near top center is a dimmer, more yellowish star. Both stars are too dim to be seen by most telescopes. Besides these two stars, everything else in this image bigger than a single pixel is a galaxy. Hundreds are shown here, and nearly 2,000 galaxies have been enumerated in the entire full-scale image. Each galaxy contains billions to hundreds of billions of stars.

This Deep Field image triggered deeper and deeper-field images, because the longer a telescope records the light from an area, the more stuff is seen. More recent work with the James Webb Space Telescope (hereafter JWST), including infrared deep fields, shows that we can record information for at least a few trillion galaxies in the visible universe. The tiniest (apparently tiniest!), and thus farthest, galaxies shown may be at a distance of 12-13 billion light-years, showing us what things were like when the Universe was one or two billion years old.

For "older" light than that, we must rely on microwaves. The continuing expansion of the cosmos means that older light has been red-shifted, and at 12.5 or 13 billion years back, any "light" that could be visible here and now has been red-shifted to far infrared or even to microwaves. We have pigeon droppings and the unstoppable determination of two scientists to thank for first recording those microwaves, depicted here over the whole sky:

The features of this image are the highly amplified variations in a generally uniform radiation field, over the whole sky, that is characteristic of a blackbody with a temperature of 2.73K, or -270.42°C or 454.8°F. This corresponds to a peak microwave frequency of about 160 GHz, a wavelength of about 1.9 mm. This can be compared to the microwaves in your microwave oven, with a frequency of 2.45 GHz and wavelength of 120 mm.

In 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson weren't looking for anything astronomical. They were trying to reduce the noise in a large antenna being used to bounce signals off the Echo satellite. At one point, they evicted a nesting family of pigeons and cleaned out the droppings. That did reduce the noise, but some remained. The "stray" signal was eventually found to be coming from literally every direction at the same frequency range and intensity. That meant it was not on Earth, and probably outside the Solar System, or even the Milky Way galaxy. It is actually "light" (originally X-rays and gamma rays) that was emitted when the age of the universe was about 360,000 years, red-shifted to microwave radio frequencies.

The features of the image above represent variations of only 0.01% of the total intensity. They were measured by spacecraft, because there are too many noisy microwave emitters on Earth.

I love astronomy, and I could go on and on, but I'll leave it to you to read the book. We haven't found solid evidence of aliens, visiting or elsewhere, but that would be the biggest discovery of all. And I suspect further serendipity will lead to it.

Eight good tales in a row

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories

In the busyness of the end of the year, I still caught the odd moment to read, and finished the last eight stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke. All are worth reading. This image doesn't relate to any story particularly, but is Dall-E3's take on the prompt, "The ultimate space fiction image."

As I read I noted a core idea from each story, or a thought that it prompted. I'll list these core ideas, and make an added comment on just a few of them.

• "Down and Out in Exile Park" by Tade Thompson – "Plastic island and pheromones" – The best of the 8. One of the great oceanic plastic garbage patches has been anchored off Nigeria. A thriving society of "fringe folk" has developed there. A very elderly woman who has the strange characteristic of emitting pheromones that make someone nearby feel euphoric and empathic may be the "glue" that holds it all together. When she dies, then what? (This one doesn't have the sad ending one might expect)
• "Two Spacesuits" by Leonard Richardson – "A cool take on indwelling aliens"
• "Nonstandard Candles" by Yoon Ha Lee – "Map as a creative tool" – These cartographers map an empty volume of intergalactic space, then begin adding structure to it, with interesting results.
• "Inheritance" by Hannah Yang – "Inheriting memories"
• "A Hole in the Light" by Annalee Newitz – "Semi-amoeboid creatures that smell chemistry"
• "Letters to my Mother" by Chnelo Onwualu – "Post-apocalyptic; how telepaths deal with grief" – I used the word "telepath", but what do you call the clairvoyant talent for reading emotions of a writer by touching handwriting?
• "In the Dream" by Meg Elison – "Unexpected consequence of chem-induced sleeplessness"
• "Aconie's Bees" by Jessica Reisman – "Transition"

Perhaps a story or two is High Concept, and the core idea is pretty much all there is. But these writers are creative and sophisticated. They take us places we didn't dream existed.

4 out of 5 ain't bad: the multiverse and all that

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, anthologies, collections, short stories

In the past couple of days I read four more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke, and skipped one.

Going first to the fourth one I read, "Solidity" by Greg Egan, it seems to explore consequences of the Multiverse, should the parallel universes begin to overlap or even trade characters.

Imagine waking up in your room, but it isn't really your room. The poster on the wall is different, the sheet and coverlet have changed, and familiar furniture has a different style. The clothes in the closet fit you, but you remember none of them, and you wonder where your familiar togs are. The phone on the bedside table looks the same but your password doesn't work. Somehow, the key in your pocket still opens the door to your place.

It is a story of the almost-familiar but frequently changing accoutrements of—and persons in—the protagonist's life. People find that as long as they keep someone in sight, that person doesn't get "changed out" for a similar one. It is a deeply unsettling story, and ultimately a touching one, of people learning how to cope with such changes. It ends in hope with no resolution.

I have written elsewhere about how ridiculous I find the notion by some physicists that new entire universes are created by every quantum choice; ultimately, it boils down to an entire new universe, billions of light-years across, created in full (with that solitary quantum difference) every time literally anything happens to any of the trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of electrons, protons, etc., etc. in the universe, a gajillion times per second. And they say that believers in God are crazy somehow…

Let's hope, if the notion is in any way true, that all those extra universes flitting about don't affect one another.

The first two stories ultimately explore different versions of machine recording of human personalities. In "Things to Do in Deimos When You're Dead" by Alistair Reynolds, a man finds himself in an unfamiliar place, and eventually finds that "he" is a recording that was made when he died, a recording that was supposed to be disassembled for salable skills in the AI world, but somehow escaped that fate intact and is running "in the background" on a supercomputer on Mars's moon Deimos. He is found by a couple of other stray personalities, and learns of something useful he can do. It is ultimately a sad story.

I tried to get different image generators to produce something useful from prompts such as "Accidental ensiliconment". This one made by Dall-E3 is quite off the point of the story, but is rather cute.

The second story is "A Dream of Electric Mothers" by Wole Talabi. A system of recorded personalities of the wise female ancestors can be consulted by a tribe's ruling assembly. We are left wondering if such "tribal memory" efforts have more use than more ordinary ways of consulting history, that is, books.

A different kind of recording with a more focused aim is found in "By Those Hands" by Cong Yun 'Mu Ming' Gu. Much of the story is a long tale of skills, having been painfully acquired, going out of use. Think of skilled craftsmen that once made buggy whips, now that there are no buggies outside of Amish country. But the story takes a positive turn when a scientist seeks to record the diligence of such skills and apply them in other areas, such as microsurgery.

This led me to think of how much of our brain power is in our embodiment. Some 75%-80% of the total number of neurons in our brain are found in the smaller "little brain" tucked down and behind, the cerebellum. Although I have a talent for playing guitar and similar instruments (but not violin!), I spent years developing the talent into a cluster of musical skills. The human brain is larger than that of other animals our size. More resources can be devoted to specific skills, compared to our animal cousins.

For example, a chimpanzee will throw dung at you if you anger it (and are outside a cage so you can't be physically attacked). Occasional news accounts may mention the "accuracy" of the animal's throwing. However, the distance is only 10-20 feet. Put the chimp on a pitcher's mound, and the target of its ire 66 feet away at home plate, and there's no way the critter can come close to the strike zone…or you. Almost any pitcher or fielder aged ten or more can bean you with a baseball at that distance. Bigger brain equals more neurons devoted to accurate throwing.

A fifth story was started, and then skipped. Its genre is "mean streets" and I declined.

There are just eight stories remaining. More later!

Culture Clash with a Chess theme

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, novellas

One item in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke is a novella, "Bishop's Opening" by R.S.A. Garcia. It took a couple of days to read.

The action takes place in a space habitat, where the crew of a spaceship have berthed for repairs and some R&R. A people called the Valencians, a human offshoot, are the arrogant Uber-rich. One of the crew interrupts an attempted assassination by snatching a small weapon from the assassin. He receives a dose of poison as a consequence, and the Valencian target of the assassin reciprocates the favor by quickly getting him to a medical facility that has the antidote. This opens an unlikely dialogue, and while nobody undergoes any significant cultural transformation, one could say that it makes a dent in the attitudes of at least some of the people involved.

Some interesting ideas appear. The milieu is that many or most humans live off-planet in habitats that function as mini-planets. Another is that Valencia itself seems to be in another dimension, and humans need some kind of implant to go there, which is nearly instantaneous. The culture of the Valencians is of relentless competition; the assassination attempt is no anomaly.

I mused upon the extremes. I have noted often that the X in X Generation seems to mean "eXtreme". It was they who created the X games, for example. And that the Y Generation has taken many of the extremes a step further. So it makes sense for an X or Y Generation writer to explore a culture of extremes, as profoundly unstable as such a culture would be. I don't know why the author chose chess pieces as the prototypes of the ranks and castes of the Valencians. In a chess game, a Bishop's opening requires a pawn to move first to allow a bishop (which must move on a diagonal) to exit the back row. In the story the failed assassin is a Pawn, and the target is a Bishop. Other than the terms, there is little resemblance to a chess game.

I thought of titling this post "Culture in change, one mind at a time", but that would be going too far.

A space rescue and other great ideas

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories

In the past couple of days I've read five more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke.

The first, and my favorite so far, is "Falling Off the Edge of the World" by Suzanne Palmer. An interstellar spacecraft has been disabled by some sort of collision in whatever subspace the author posits for FTL travel. After about thirty years it is found by a crew searching along the ship's known line of travel. However, the story is revealed little by little, with many flashbacks and flash-forwards that sometimes confused me. The "light javelin" that speared the craft, it turns out, was peopled by enigmatic, benevolent aliens called "The E", and it is apparently their technology that enabled the human craft, and surviving crew, to live thirty years until rescue. They are either invisible in some way or too small to be seen. Rather than reveal (spoil) more, I'll mention a couple of unique ideas. Part of the spacecraft's hull has been re-formed into a kind of cocoon that protects it from random impacts and preserves the atmosphere. From outside it looks like a silkworm cocoon. Something The E put into tea preserves the health of Gabe, the man at one end of the ship, who cannot go to the other end because of the damage. The story is bittersweet, heartwarming and heart-wrenching.

Another story with an extension of current technology, and a political throwback (hardly unlikely, actually) to a more feudal age, is "When the Tide Rises" by Sarah Gailey. The main character (never named, as I recall) works to gather sea urchins in a kelp farm. Sea urchins eat the holdfasts and stalks of kelp, thus ruining the crop. 

Urchin harvesting is being done now, partly by professionals and partly by volunteers, at a number of natural kelp forests, to restore them. The sea urchins are multiplying because the sea otters that prey on them are a threatened species and may go extinct. Hardly anything else preys on the sea urchins. Nothing fast enough to stay ahead of their powers of multiplication, at any rate.

The kelp farm is a "company town," with all the evils that historical reference implies. An old song about mining goes, "Sixteen tons, what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt. / St. Peter, don't call me, 'cause I can't go, / I owe my soul to the company store." The urchin picker of the story is in a similar pickle. The story ends with a possible out, but we don't know if she will take it.

One story is about "past life reconstruction", which is something I can't bring myself to take seriously. No trace of Hinduism in my soul, folks.

The story "A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language" by Nian Yu is a fresh take on alien invasion. Beinakans are tiny aliens from a water world similar to Europa but larger, with an ocean several thousand km deep, with an ice cover. They have a symbiotic relationship with another sentient species, the Ilian, which are a hundred times as large. Together, the two species, after 40,000 years of co-existence, find a way to penetrate the ice cap and discover the rest of the universe. Almost immediately, they find that a not-too-distant star is about to explode as a supernova. The star is called Rigel in the story, but I suspect the author was thinking of Betelgeuse and just doesn't know a lot of astronomy. Spaceships can be produced for the Beinakans to use to flee, but the Ilians can't go.

The story is told as "capsule memories", which refers to a way the Beinakans and Ilians pass on knowledge and history from generation to generation. In their fleeing, a Beinakan ship finds Earth, which has also been devastated by the supernova, but small numbers of humans are found to have survived. Naturally, the Beinakans take over. The result isn't pretty. I'll leave it at that.

Finally, "Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man" by Rich Larson is an ugly but effective story of a manufactured assassin and its target. This "butterfly" has nothing positive about it! The author's expertise is crafting highly convoluted plotlines. That, and being a potty mouth. This story is unusual in that I didn't like it but I was driven to complete reading it. The idea of some kind of crystal mind and memory, such that each successive butterfly man has all the memories of prior ones, is rather unsettling.

We're doing pretty well so far. A good number of stories that I am glad I read, and very few that I either skipped or was chagrined to have read.

SI struggling to get cats right

 kw: generative art, experiments, cats, simulated intelligence

I spent an interesting hour several days ago "persuading" a few generative art programs to make an illustration for a story I planned to review. In the story, a ship cat (on a spaceship) in patrolling, as cats do, and sees someone (a saboteur, but the cat doesn't know that) release many tiny spiderlike robots from a bag. They are intended to disable the ship. The cat hunts them down and destroys every one (there's other things that happen to the saboteur). I tested various prompts, and settled on this one:

A white-and-black cat fiercely pouncing on small mechanical spiders in a spaceship cargo bay

My first tests were with Dall-E3 in Bing ("Bing Image Creator"). This image, the best of twenty or more images, was the closest to what I was looking for, up to this point.

There is just a one significant problem: The cat appears to be allied with the spiderbots, not attacking them.

Other than that, it's a very good image.

I usually find that Dall-E3 adheres most closely to the prompt. I wasn't satisfied, so I went on to Gemini, which uses Imagen 3 when you ask for an image. 

Imagen 3 produces only a single image, and that image is always square. If you ask Gemini how to ask for a wide format image, it gives instructions, but they don't work. If you just ask, "Please create the same image in a wider format," it will respond, "Sure, here you are," but it will produce another square image, usually very similar. Oh, well.

Here is the image Gemini offered. It was square, but with enough freeboard above and below that I could crop it to a 4:3 aspect ratio. It is the one I ended up using. There are a couple of anomalies, however. Take a close look at the paws. The left paw, that is the one raised, has the dewclaw much too far forward, like a thumb, and there is a sixth digit. Also, one of the digits on that paw, and the corresponding digit on the right paw, have double claws.

An image of a barefoot man that Dall-E2 produced for me a couple of years ago has six toes on one foot and seven on the other. These sorts of errors show that the programs aren't just modifying images of real cats or cartoon humans, but doing something deeper. However, they demonstrate that there is no understanding of the actual nature of cats or humans…or anything else, for that matter.

I went on to ImageFX, part of Google Labs, which I understand uses Imagen 3 also, but it seems to have more flexibility, including settings for aspect ratios. A slip of the mouse set the aspect ratio to Portrait for this one. I kind of like the tiny screens on the spiderbots. As with the Dall-E3 image, it isn't clear whose side the cat is on.

I tried again with a wide aspect ratio setting. This one came out 10:7. This is the only image of the entire set that has the cat in mid-pounce. But is it pouncing on the spiders?

If you look carefully you can see a number of flying spiders.

Hoping to get the cat attacking spiders without ambiguity (though the Gemini image is quite good), I turned to Leonardo AI. Bingo!

This image used the Leonardo Phoenix preset and the Moody style. The cat is not exactly pouncing, but at least it is looking at its prey. I almost used this image, but there is distortion in the hip area, and the even moodier tone of the Gemini image led me to choose that one.

In all, I generated about 100 images to get one I could happily use, and these few others that are "almost there," and interesting in their own right.

Post-Apocalypticism prevails

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories

In three days I've read seven more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke. I'll point out the interesting ideas and comment just a bit extra on the stories I liked the best. Among the seven, four are explicitly post-apocalyptic and two are post-modern dystopian.

The most openly post-apocalyptic is "If We Make it Through This Alive" by A.T. Greenblatt. Three women have entered a cross-continent rally contest, from the abandoned King of Prussia Mall near Philadelphia to an unnamed location in Sacramento, 2,800 road miles away. With a dramatically modified, electrified, ruggedized Jeep they expect to make the journey in 10-11 days. I couldn't get ImageFX to add the solar panels and other accoutrements to the Jeep for this image, but the mood is about right.

For reference, on present-day Interstate highways, the driving time estimate is 40 hours. The fact that average speeds are expected to be in the 25-30 mph range indicates that the author posits a not-totally-annihilated road system. The three each have their own hidden traumas to re-overcome, and each her reasons for being in Philadelphia in the first place, when city living has become much more fraught than rural life.

A story that seems post-apocalyptic, but maybe that's because the middle of a forest fire is apocalyptic enough for most of us, is "All The Burns Unseen" by Premee Mohamed. Fire may cleanse a landscape, but the protagonist, on a mission to find and possibly rescue her parents, finds that it reveals her fractured family relationships, healing nothing.

Producing a colony in the atmosphere of Venus was supposed to yield a utopia. In "We Built This City" by Marie Vibbert, the daughter of "the woman who built the city" has a much more lowly job, but one that provides her with a few perquisites in the dystopia that the city has become. Like many post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories, the cynicism of "the elite" and despair of almost everyone else sits right on the surface. Although the protagonist's heroism earns her mother's respect and "saves the day", the story ends without resolution. Presumably the cynics who run things will make at most token concessions.

In "Mender of Sparrows" by Ray Naylor it gradually becomes clear that the protagonist is a sort of Android. That is, his continued existence is because in an emergency his personality was ported into the body of an Android, whereas "ordinary" Androids have a scripted or manufactured persona. A key concept is the Connectome, the totality of connections between the nervous system and the body, whether human or mechanical. A secondary concept is that humans can detect an Android instantly; one presumes that the "uncanny valley" has not been fully crossed. Both these matters emphasize the point that true artificial intelligence requires embodiment, while demonstrating that such embodiment is no easy conundrum to crack.

Other ideas of interest:

• Being in a simulation already, and experiencing meta-simulations ("Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café" by M. Bennardo; otherwise rather boring).
• Reification of an old photo (and presumably a lot of other stuff, hardly mentioned) into a simulation of a deceased person or pet ("The Historiography of Loss" by Julianna Baggott; puzzling and moderately sad without inculcating care for the protagonist or anyone else).
• Those left behind on Earth when all the rich escaped into orbiting habitats, such as "Erewhon", the home of the rich losers the story centers on, have been modified to digest plastic, because there is so much of it left ("The Plastic People" by Tobias S. Buckell; point made, the story goes nowhere and the people learn nothing).

So far, the book is holding up well. The least interesting of the stories I have read so far is better than the best to be found in the volume of mainstream short stories I panned a month ago.

Of dragons and an amazing cat

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, anthologies, collections, short stories

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke, is big, 581 pages. If I wait until I have read it all to produce any reviews, it could be a couple of weeks. Instead, I'll review a few stories every day or two.

In marked contrast to a collection of "mainstream fiction" that I aborted and panned, just in the first five stories there are three that made me think, "I'm glad I read that," one that I give a guarded "+", and the fifth is at least so-so, but too puzzling to be enjoyable. Here I'll focus on two favorites. Remember, I am an idea guy, but I also like deft craftsmanship.

In "The Dragon Project" by Naomi Kritzer, the core idea is 3D printing of living animals, an offshoot of the trade in 3D printed organs for transplanting. It takes three iterations to produce a dragon that a rich customer will accept; shades of Goldilocks! The three are, respectively, akin to a house cat, a dog, and a pony. But they are dragons, and the "satisfactory" one can even spit fire. That's already giving away a bit too much, but this story is tremendous fun to read. We'll move on…

"The Ship Cat of the Suzaku Maru" by S.L. Huang is named Toshi, and of course he saves the day. The story is told almost from Toshi's point of view by a narrator that knows the cat's mind. The picture is a bit of a spoiler, but I couldn't let the climactic image go un-illustrated. I fiddled with four image generators, and this offering from Gemini (Imagen 3) is the best of a hundred or so (there is a fine line between under- and over-prompting such software).

I think it worthwhile to mention something from "Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu" by Grace Chan. An atypical story of corrupt Haves vs downtrodden Have-nots, it culminates in a hacking-as-justice climax. Would that things were so simple, but it's great fun to read anyway. Interesting fight scene also.

Five down, 29 to go. I note that the lengths of the stories ranges from 5 to 49 pages (a novelette). Buckle up!

Peeking under the skin of the Earth

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geology, volcanology, volcanoes, scientists, memoirs

My uncle was a professor of geology, and during the summer season he consulted for mining companies. He had a "volcano fund", and when there was a report of a new eruption, if he could get someone to cover his classes, he would go. I don't know whether he went to study the volcano, or if he just wanted to see it. The new book I have in hand is by and about someone who goes, and goes frequently, to study these volcanoes: Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves, by Tamsin Mather. Dr Mather's particular expertise is geochemistry, and much of what she does involves collecting and studying the gases that emanate from volcanic vents; talk about bearding the dragon in its own den!

Fear not for our intrepid scientist. Gathering volcanic emissions can indeed be hazardous, but it is rare these days to be required to carry fragile glassware up a mountainside to the edge of doom. Many gases can be gathered by fly-through drones, and hand-sampling equipment is now longer-reaching and safer to use. Though losing a drone can be costly, it beats losing life or health. In other cases, such as a survey described in Chapter 6, "All in the Balance", the gases of interest were known to be emitted over a wide area at a volcano in Ethiopia named Aluto; the author and another scientist took hundreds of samples laid out in a grid covering one square kilometer. This provided a measure of the point-to-point variability in that square, and a rough statistical value for total gas emission in the whole caldera.

The book surveys the progressive understanding of volcanoes as it developed over the past two-and-a-half millennia (or longer). Current knowledge has two broad branches: present day volcanism and Earth's volcanic history. The total recorded history seems long to us, being something like 80 generations. But the geologic record—written not in documents but in the layout of rocks and their arrangements—can be read with reasonable clarity back to 100 to 200 million years, and with less and less resolution over the rest of Earth's four-plus billion year history. The author relates a powerful illustration: A lecturer held out his arm and said, "Imagine that all the time that Earth has existed is represented by the length of my arm." He went on to say that multicellular life arose about where his hand meets the wrist, and that the demise of the dinosaurs occurred at the base of a fingernail. And how much of this length would all of humanity's existence take up? Just the shavings from a single, quite light, stroke of a fingernail file! So "current knowledge" and "deep time knowledge" have very different scales.

One thing we learn from the deep history that has been discerned is that the absolute extremes of present-day volcanism are a fraction of what has happened in the past. A tool for scaling the magnitude of an eruption has been developed: VEI, the Volcano Explosivity Index, which ranges from zero to eight. The boundary between 0 and 1 is an erupted volume of 10,000 cubic meters. Each step is ten times the size of the one before, except VEI-1 covers a range of 100:1, from 10,000 cubic meters to one million. A few examples will give the idea:

• Kilauea in Hawaii erupts constantly for weeks or months at a time, but at a low daily volume, so it is the prime example of VEI-0. Few are the days that it rises to VEI-1.
• Mt. Etna in Sicily erupts from time to time, and a recent eruption produced more than a million cubic meters, or something over 0.001 cubic km; it is VEI-2.
• The devastating eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79BC is considered VE-5. It ejected several cubic km of tephra (the general word for volcanic "stuff"), as did Mt. Saint Helens in 1980.
• The largest eruption in recorded history is probably that of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. Estimates of ejecta volume range from 35 cubic km to more than 100, putting it near the VEI-6/VEI-7 boundary. No undisputed VEI-7 or larger eruptions have occurred in recorded history.
• If a "supervolcano" such as that under Yellowstone erupts, it is expected to be VEI-8, yielding more than 1,000 cubic km. There are 20 known supervolcano calderas on Earth, but none has done much more than fuel groups of geysers more recently than a few hundred thousand years ago. Will there be a next time?

There is little element of time in this scale; it refers primarily to single events. If we consider really persistent eruptions that play out over thousands to millions of years, we get a different scale of beast entirely. Total long-term volumes can exceed VEI-8 by a factor of 1,000 or more! Consider this map:

This is a map of the known Large Igneous Provinces on Earth, for the past 330 million years. They number 24. It isn't known where particular eruptive events are on the VEI scale. But they just kept at it for so long that the typical total is between 1 million cubic km and 100 million! So a mid-range one of these could have covered all of the "lower 48" USA to a depth of about a mile, 1.5 km or more.

The "lesser" eruptions of historic times outline an amazing picture. You may have heard of the "ring of fire", that the Pacific Ocean has volcanoes along all its boundaries. There are other chains of volcanism, but this is the largest. This was a mystery before the understanding of Plate Tectonics was developed in the 1960's, just when I began to study geology in college! The knowledge was so new that the only "textbook" was a little (~200pp) paperback titled The New View of the Earth: Moving Continents and Moving Oceans. I don't recall the author.

The crust of the Earth has two varieties: Continental crust is mostly granite and related "light" rocks ranging between 15 and 50 km thick. Oceanic crust is mostly basalt or gabbro and related "dark" rocks ranging between 4 and 10 km thick. Each patch of crust is "riding" on a "lithospheric plate" 100-200 km thick. Beneath that, the hot mantle is in very slow motion, dragging these plates about. Where they collide, one usually slides underneath the other, and the portion going downward gets "cooked", producing upwelling magma, and a line of volcanoes is the result. Where two continental plates collide, they both get squeezed, and one such area is the Himalayas, which are still rising. The Appalachian mountains of North America are the roots of a former Himalaya of 450 million years ago, now worn to just nubbins.

The really big volcanic areas, and the supervolcanoes that they eclipse, come late in the book. The much less powerful volcanoes that abound all over the planet provide plenty of opportunity for scientists to gather data, whether up-close-and-personal (collecting gases or lava samples, etc.) or more remotely, such as by seismic monitoring. There are 38 volcanoes erupting at this moment; this can be monitored here. About 60 others are grumbling and rumbling and "offering to erupt". So, my uncle could actually have found somewhere to go any particular day, if there had been an Internet in the 1950's!

The author has spent half her life visiting volcanoes and studying them, and in particular their chemistry. I think perhaps my uncle longed for such a life, but the life of a college professor was his lot. I also wanted to be a field geologist, but I found that writing software for scientists was more lucrative (and safer! and I didn't have to live in a tent.). I really appreciate a good scientist who is a good writer, who can bring the stories of the Earth to those of us who don't have as much opportunity to "go where nature is". Even more, here and there a youngster could be inspired to embrace a life of natural history.

Collapsing Schwarzschild 's Cat

 kw: article reactions, black holes, primordial black holes, musings

A recent article at Space.com is titled, "Are planet-killing black holes hiding inside your cat?" I suppose the meme behind the title is Schrödinger's dead/not dead cat. The author, Robert Lea, quotes researcher Dejan Stojkovic as saying,

"But don't worry about a primordial black hole shooting through your cat, or you, for that matter. The team behind these findings says such an event would be non-lethal!"

The article includes an illustration of several sizes of black holes, from supermassive (a billion suns) to sub-proton size, which is in the range of theorized primordial black holes. In particular, a black hole with the "mass of an asteroid" is stated to be smaller than a proton. I suppose that depends on the asteroid; the term "asteroid" covers material ranging in size from a sand grain to a few hundred km.

It is stated that primordial black holes, if they exist, would be zipping about at near-light speed (nobody ever says why), so one would pass through you, or your cat, or Earth, very quickly; about a nanosecond, on your case. I thought of two ways a tiny black hole can cause harm. Firstly, the intense gravitational field "nearby" (we'll try to define that soon) could disrupt tissue; and the Hawking radiation that, we have learned, will eventually result in any black hole "evaporating" by emitting radiation and thus losing mass, could cook (or evaporate!) tissue it passes through.

I would expect these two phenomena to be significant in different regimes, viz:

1. A really small black hole, weighing, say less than a million metric tons (tonnes), will have a smaller reach, gravitationally, but its Hawking radiation will be stronger. If you are "near" such an object long enough, you may not suffer damage from the gravity, but you could get cooked.
2. A larger black hole will have much less Hawking radiation, but its gravitation reach will be greater. If you are "near" such an object long enough, its gravity can do great damage, but its radiation could be beneath notice.

Calculation time! I made much use of Victor T. Toth's Hawking Radiation Calculator. Here are relevant parameters for three possible black holes, one the size of a proton, one 100 times larger, and one 100 times smaller (in radius). The proton's radius is about 0.84 fm (femtometers), or 0.84x10^-15 m; we'll call this Rp.

• Radius in Rp:              100   1.0     0.01
• Mass, Million Tonnes:   56,600   566     5.66
• Temperature, Billion K:   2.17   217   21,700
• Heat, Billion Watts:  0.000111  1.11   11,100

Note that these all are really, really hot! To get a feel for their masses: Iron has a density of 7.9 Tonne/cubic m. A cube of iron weighing 5.66 million Tonnes would be 89.5 meters on a side; for 566 Tonnes, the size is 415 m, and for 56,600 million Tonnes, the size is 1,930 m, or more than a mile. That's getting to substantial asteroid size.

To illustrate how small a proton is in relation to a typical atom, atom radii are in the range of a tenth of a nanometer, or 100,000 fm. A black hole with a radius or 100,000 fm (a little smaller than an iron atom, for example) has these parameters:

• Mass, Million Tonnes:   67 million → 67 trillion Tonnes
• Temperature, K:        1.8 million
• Heat, Watts:               0.079

Note that this "bigger" black hole may be super-hot, but its radiation is negligible. Let's first focus on Gravity. For reference, "1 G" is 9.8 Nt/kg (Newtons per kilogram) at the surface of the Earth. The proton-sized black hole, weighing 566 million Tonnes, would exert a force of 378 Nt on a mass of one gram (such as a BB) at a distance of 1 cm. That's 38,600 G. Gravity scales as the square of 1/r, so within 1 mm of the black hole, anything there (cells in your body as it passes through?) would experience a force of 3.86 million G. Here, duration is everything. If the black hole's velocity is, say a third of the speed of light (or roughly 0.1 m per nanosecond), the time it takes to move one millimeter is about 10 picoseconds. That means that a random cell that is 1 mm off the center of the black hole's path will "see" a spike in force that rapidly changes direction through a 180° arc in the space of about 0.1 nanosecond, reaching nearly four billion G's.

I don't know how to describe the effect on the cell. It is unlikely to survive. It probably doesn't have time to be sucked into the black hole, but a cell that is "brushed by" (say, 1/100th mm) most certainly will be. The result will be a thin "soda straw" hole through the body, much less than 1 mm in diameter, but I don't know how much less.

How about the mass with a size of 100 proton radii? At 1 cm distance, the force would be 3.86 million G's. It is very likely that such a mass passing through you (or your cat) will leave a hole a substantial fraction of a cm across. It is similar to being hit by a 30 caliber rifle bullet, just much, much faster. If either of these masses were moving a lot more slowly, such as an orbital speed in the range of 30 km/sec, rather than 100,000 km/sec (1/3 of light speed), the breadth of destroyed tissue would be dozens to hundreds of times greater, and the diameter of the "soda straw" …? It's hard to comprehend. So let's not bother checking the atom-sized black hole, weighing in at 67 trillion Tonnes! If any exist, they could explain rare cases of disappearance, perhaps.

How about temperature? The hottest black hole is the smallest, and has an incredibly tiny surface area to radiate heat, but radiates 10,000 times as much heat as the proton-sized one. It can do so for a quarter of a million years. Its radiation, mostly X- and gamma rays, amounts to 11 trillion watts. If any of these were anywhere within a few light-years, we'd see them. Let's back off to the 100 Rp radius black hole, which radiates (still in X-rays and higher) 111,000 watts. If it is traveling at 1/3 c, it passes through you in 3-4 ns, leaving behind about 4 milliJoules, or some 4,000 ergs. Spread that out along the length of the path through your body, and it isn't much heat.

Now consider the middle mass, the proton-sized one. It radiates 1.11 billion watts. In the time given, it deposits around 4 Joules, or close to one calorie. Again, not much heating. So there is little "cooking" expected from really fast-moving primordial black holes. However, if their speed is closer to orbital speeds, the "dwell time" is several thousand times greater, and 4 joules becomes more than 10,000 joules, equal to a kilowatt for ten seconds. That'll burn a hole through you! It's not quite as powerful as a lightning strike, but it's getting in that range.

I started out thinking I could debunk the idea that primordial black holes aren't much danger. In certain circumstances they aren't, that's true, but what grounds to we have to assume they are going fast enough to pass through you, or me, or the nearest cat, without swallowing up a hurtful amount of stuff, and cooking much of what isn't sucked in?

Whatever speed they are moving, the smaller ones ought to be visible as sky-blue items that emit lots of X- and gamma radiation. With current instrumentation, we'd be hard pressed to determine their actual temperature. "Millions of degrees" just begins to describe it. So, I've actually presented a challenge to the idea that primordial black holes weighing less than about a half billion Tonnes exist at all.

Troglodyte fantasy

 kw: generated images, ai experiments, caves, cave dwellings, underground living

I have been experimenting with image generation "AI" software for just over two years, having first tried out Dall-E2 on November 11, 2022. I frequently use the software to produce various kinds of backgrounds for Zoom meetings, to use with a green screen. Some are forest glades, some are mountain scenes, some are desert scenes, some are views of alien planets, and some that are intended for "business"  sessions are laboratories or offices.

I had the idea to make images of an office in a cave. I love caves. Preferred vacation destinations are places such as Carlsbad Caverns, Mammoth Cave, Luray Caves and the several caves along the Blue Ridge Parkway. I had several art generators produce hundreds of images, and kept about thirty of them. Two are standouts:

This is from Leonardo AI, using the Preset "Illustrative Albedo" and Style "Stylized Illustration", which produced this colorful result. It's a bit fanciful, which appealed to me.

To see an image full size, click on it. Click next to the image to return to this page.

This is from ImageFX (in Google Labs), which does things differently, having an option to choose from numerous adjectives, which then are appended to the prompt. I appended "Cinematic". This looks more like a natural, though dry, cave (I wouldn't want an office in a drippy, living cave!).

A week or two later I decided to generate the rest of the rooms of a cave dwelling, one I might like to live in.

The original prompt for the Cave Office was an extra-long 50-word prompt, about 275 characters. Several of the art generators put the first 32 characters of the prompt in the file name, in addition to the name of the program and, often, the "seed" number (The seed is supposed to allow you to regenerate an image and then modify it in a later session). I keep a text file of long prompts so I can re-use them. This helps with product comparisons. I change the file name to a prompt identifier plus a program ID, the date, and a serial number.

I eventually prepared twelve more "Trog" series prompts, ranging from 17 to 48 words. Note that most of these programs take in no more than 77 "tokens" (an unusual number...), and a "token" can be a word, a syllable, or a punctuation-space combination, so I don't let prompts go much beyond 50 words.

Is Troglodyte a new word to you? It means a person or animal that lives underground. In old literature it was used in a derogatory way to refer to, for example, underground-dwelling "dwarves".

I won't dig deeper into the technicalities. Here I want to showcase the different rooms I dreamed up, and the way each of these two programs responded to the prompt. I present them four rooms at a time, and each "room" is my favorite from 4, or 8, or more images offered up by the art generator. I start with all the Leonardo AI offerings:

Clockwise from upper left: 

• Entryway. An arch has been built into the cave mouth, and case of shelves full of pots stands nearby. I asked for a coat closet; this is the only "closet" I was offered! Note that this combination of product and its presets has every room adjacent to a skylight or a cave exit.
• Living Room. The floor is paved. I'd have asked for Grow Lights for the houseplants if I'd realized the program would create some.
• Kitchen, complete with a window to outside. The prompt included "refrigerator" but none was offered.
• Formal Dining Room with a chandelier. The pool is a bonus.

• Sitting Room and Library. It takes a dry cave to be a safe place to shelve books.
• TV Room. I debated asking for theater-style seating, but opted for this look instead.
• Office. The original cave room, which inspired all the others.
• Game Room. What's a grand home without a billiards table and some board games?

• Hallway to Bedrooms. This was as close as I could come, in the Leonardo offerings. The floor is close to natural. I asked for wall sconces, and got lots of them.
• Master Bedroom. I asked for a canopy bed, but never received one.
• Utility Room and Laundry. The most natural floor of all the rooms. The tool bench is minimal. Though no stairs are evident, this is clearly a "basement" area.
• Walk-in Closet. This is intended to be attached to the Master Bedroom. One presumes the view is from an archway in the bedroom.

OK, let's compare the ImageFX offerings, in the same order:

As before, clockwise from top left:

• Entryway. Here, the entry is apparently around a bend. Coat closets and a chair make it inviting.
• Living Room.
• Kitchen. Complete with refrigerator! IFX is more compliant to details in the prompt.
• Formal Dining Room with chandelier. The buffet off to the side, with warming pans, is a nice touch.

• Sitting Room and Library. I didn't ask for the Oriental rug, but I'm glad it was included.
• TV Room. Here the seating is facing the screen, in an informal arrangement.
• Office. Of all the rooms, this looks the most like the cave is a backdrop rather than integral.
• Game Room.

• Hall to Bedrooms. This is what I had in mind.
• Master Bedroom. With canopy bed! The knitted rug is as I asked for every time; here it is most evident.
• Utility Room and Laundry. A better work bench.
• Walk-in Closet. The central dresser is nice. I had asked for both men's and women's clothing to be shown. IFX did so.
  

The big lesson for me is that tremendous variety is available; it takes lots of experimentation to learn the uses and limitations of each tool. The IFX images tend to be low key. To make a presentable image, I'll raise the lightness with the Gamma tool in IrfanView, which I use to trim an image and add a signature (as any artist would!). I use Upscayl to double the x- and y- pixel count.

If you have a sharp eye, you may note that the aspect ratio of the images differs between the two programs. Both Leonardo AI and ImageFX have various aspect ratios available. I always asked for 16:9, the same as HDTV, which also matches the screens of my computer setup. However, Leonardo AI images, for all its Presets except "Phoenix", yields images that are 1368x768, or 1.78125 or 57:32. ImageFX images are even wider, 1408x768, or 1.8333... or 11:6.

When I make a Zoom background, or a wallpaper for my Screen Saver, I want exactly 16:9, so images must be trimmed. I'll prepare an essay about that later on.

Art generators don't know physics

 kw: generated art, scientific errors, comparisons, stock image websites

Reading a book of science for a popular audience, in a section about the use of spectroscopy to learn the compositions of stars, I encountered this illustration. Can you see what is (dramatically!) wrong with it?

The principle of refraction is this: when light enters a transparent material, such as glass, from the air, at an angle, it is bent closer to a line perpendicular to the material's surface. That means that the beam of white light entering from the left, should be refracted into a narrow spectrum that proceeds down and to the right. Then, when it encounters the other side of the prism, which is at a different angle, it will be bent downward again. 

Here, the first refraction is in the wrong direction. That implies that the glass prism has a refractive index less than 1, which is impossible. But the second refraction has the correct sense, which just adds confusion. This illustration is from Getty Images, a source of much stock artwork and photography. The author of the book in which I saw this image must not have been paying attention.

This is a more accurate illustration; it is from Britannica online. It shows the refraction angles correctly. One small matter is not accurate: Real prisms produce a spectrum with a dispersion angle of less than one degree. This illustration shows the spectrum, at the right, spreading across fifteen degrees. This is OK for the sake of illustration.

I got curious about such illustrations, and investigated a bit. First, I entered the prompt "prism spectrum" in Google Images. I looked through a few hundred images. There were all kinds of results. More than half of them were somewhere between wrong and incredibly wrong!

Not only Getty Images had it wrong; the following sites were consistently wrong or worse:

• Shutterstock
• DepositPhotos
• Pixers
• Freepix
• Pugtree
• Big Stock

The following had it right some of the time:

• Adobe Stock
• iStock
• Vector Stock
• KaiserScience

Finally, these sites had no errors that I found:

• Britannica
• Cyberphysics
• CK12-Foundation
• Dreamstime
• Australia Telescope National Facility
• LabXChange
• Science Photo Gallery
• Hyperphysics
• Urban Pro

Many of the images had the look of generated artwork. So I put various prompts in four image generation products. After much experimentation with the text, the prompt used for these images was

A triangular prism in the center, a narrow light beam from the lower left upwards to halfway up the left side of the prism, continuing as a narrow spectrum across the middle inside the prism, and exiting the prism to descend toward the lower right as a wider spectrum.

Here are the best of each:

Even with very explicit instructions as to the direction of each section of the light beam, these are the best among numerous offerings that were pretty, but nonsensical. None came close.

One would think, among the billions of images used to train these programs, there would be some accurate scientific diagrams. However, spectroscopy is a "small market" in the scientific arena. If an author wants good scientific illustrations, it's still, not just "best", but imperative to use a human graphic artist, and to examine the results with a critical scientific eye.

Stepstones to infinity

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, space science, popular treatments

My favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, published a new book last year in collaboration with Lindsey Nyx Walker, in the Startalk series: To Infinity and Beyond: A Journey of Cosmic Discovery. With apologies to Buzz Lightyear, the title makes it clear this is no scientific treatise.

As one might expect, the book is fun to read, pitched at just the right level for a popular audience, and copiously illustrated. Rather than chapters, the book has four sections, with a subtitle every couple of pages. The sections are titled "Leaving Earth", "Touring the Sun's Backyard", "Into Outer Space", and "To Infinity and Beyond". Broadly speaking, the sections are like layers of an onion, starting at the center.

The second section, on the planets and their satellites and asteroids and other denizens of the solar system, is the longest, as befits the greater knowledge we have "in the Sun's back yard", where at least we have sent instruments to pass by or even orbit the planets and selected objects. The book went to press before the capsule of material returned from Asteroid Bennu was opened, so that's not mentioned. What is mentioned is the quest to colonize Mars, which cannot realistically be done without terraforming it. Engineering solutions, including carpet bombing the polar ice caps with nuclear weapons, have been proposed. Dr. Tyson has this to say:

"In any case, if humanity ever develops enough geoengineering know-how to terraform Mars as our escape plan after we trash Earth, then we should certainly be able to use that intelligence to make Earth livable again and save ourselves from requiring a planet B in the first place." (p. 135)

To which I add a strong, "Amen!"

The fourth section, after treating what we know of the distant cosmos in a general way, gets a bit philosophical. The authors have this to say about "beyond", that is, about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum uncertainty: "The many-worlds solution may not be simple, but it is the simplest explanation for the oddities at quantum scales." I must contend with that:

Consider sunlight shining through an ordinary window. When the light encounters the glass, ~4% is reflected from the outer surface and ~96% passes into the glass. Then about another 4% is reflected from the second surface and the rest, ~92%, continues onward. Interestingly, the light that reflected back into the glass pane is partly reflected and then most passes through. Some smaller and smaller fraction of the original light bounces back and forth inside the glass pane. Glass is not 100% transparent, to soon whatever has not escaped is absorbed. Considering only visible light, sunlight has an intensity of around 500 watts per square meter, or 0.05 watt (50 mw) per square centimeter. Skipping the math, the number of photons of visible light that encounter the glass each second is about 1.4x10¹⁷, or 140 quadrillion (140 million billion). Each photon "decides" whether to reflect or pass through, twice because the glass has two surfaces. According to the many-worlds interpretation, 280 quadrillion entire universes are created every second, because of sunlight shining through one square centimeter of glass. I have a picture window in my family room that has an area of two square meters. On a sunny morning, every second, about 5.6x10²¹ universes spring into existence, along what dimensions we have know way to discern. Five and a half sextillion. Every second.

Folks, that's just silly. Whatever photons and other quanta are, they are doing something we fundamentally don't understand, and interpretations such as many-worlds reveal how immensely far we are from achieving such understanding.

We are like the pilgrim in this famous engraving from an 1888 book by Flammarion, trying to see beyond our own horizon. Our imagination falls short. Newton imagined himself as a beach comber being fascinated by this shell or that pretty pebble, being ignorant of the expanse of the ocean that tossed them up.

All that aside, and aside from a few errata I'll get into shortly, the book is as entertaining as it is comprehensive. I strongly recommend it.

---------------------------

I have to bring out a few matters where the authors, or a copy editor, ought to have known better:

1. On p. 22, about warming by infrared light, "…once they absorb the various wavelengths of radiation, molecules on Earth's surface are transformed into infrared and are reemitted by the ground." This is a rather dramatic blunder. The molecules are not transformed into infrared! The relevant phrase should read, "…molecules on Earth's surface emit infrared radiation." All the wavelengths of sunlight that reach the ground warm its substance, and it then emits some of this energy as infrared.
2. On p. 119, about the slowing of Earth's rotation, mostly by its interaction with the Moon, it is stated, "After two centuries, days are four milliseconds faster." In this context, the word "faster" is misused. The days are "four milliseconds longer." Gah!
3. On p. 131, "Today, Mars is a frigid tundra." The word "tundra" implies a cold landscape with cold-resistant plant cover. There are no plants on Mars. I don't know what word to use, but the word "tundra" is wrong.
4. On p. 206, on relationships between the intrinsic brightness of stars and their apparent brightness because of their varying distances, "Sirius, the brightest star in our night sky, is smaller than Earth and 8.6 light-years away,…" Siriusly?!?!? As it happens, Sirius is 1.7 times the size of the Sun. Its companion, the white dwarf designated Sirius B, which is much too faint to see without a large telescope, is indeed smaller than Earth.
5. Finally, look carefully at this illustration of a prism producing a spectrum:

This is found on p. 212, where spectroscopy is being discussed. The illustration is from Getty Images. The way the beam of light bends upward as it enters the prism implies that the prism has a refractive index less than 1, which is impossible. Such a material would require the light to go "faster than light" within it.

Compare with this illustration:

This is from Britannica online. It is more correct, showing the light entering being refracted toward the perpendicular to the glass surface as it passes into the prism, and then refracted away from the perpendicular of the second glass surface as it exits. P.S. I was a spectroscopist for a few years…

This illustration isn't totally accurate, however. The best spectroscopic glass disperses the spectrum by a little less than one degree. The spectrum at the right is being dispersed about 15°. However, this bit of scientific license is needed to make the principle more clear.

I put the query "prism spectrum" into a Google Images search. I found that a great many repositories of stock photos have it wrong; only about one-third have it right! Don't Getty and all the others have anyone with scientific understanding on their staffs?