Dr. Kevin Grazier has made a career of studying intergalactic planetary formation, and, over the last few years, helping Hollywood writers integrate physics smartly into storylines for popular TV shows like Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Defiance and the blockbuster film Gravity. His latest book, Hollyweird Science: From Quantum Quirks to the Multiverse traverses delightfully through the science-entertainment duality as it first breaks down the portrayal of science in movies and television, grounding the audience in screenplay lexicon, then elucidates a panoply of physics and astronomy principles through the lens of storylines, superpowers and sci-fi magic. With the help of notable science journalist Stephen Cass, Hollyweird Science is accessible to the layperson sci-fi fan wishing to learn more about science, a professional scientist wanting to apply their knowledge to higher-order examples from TV and film or Hollywood writers and producers of future science-based materials. From case studies, to in-depth interviews to breaking down the Universe and its phenomena one superhero and far-away galaxy at a time, this first volume of an eventual trilogy is the essential foundation towards understanding how science is integrated into a story and ensuring that future TV shows and movies do so more accurately than ever before. Full ScriptPhD review and podcast with author and science advisor Dr. Grazier below.

Most people who watch movies and TV shows never went to film school. They are not familiar with the intricacies of three-act structure, tropes, conceits and MacGuffins that are the skeletal framework of a standard storytelling toolkit. Yet no genre is more rooted in and dependent on setup and buying into a payoff than sci-fi and films conceptualized in scientific logic. Many, if not most, critiques of science in entertainment don’t fully acknowledge that integrating abstruse science/technology with the complex constraints of time, length, character development and screenplay format is incredibly demanding. Hollyweird Science does point out some egregious examples of “information pollution” and the “Hollywood Curriculum Cycle” – the perpetuation bad, if not fictitious, science. But after grounding the reader in a primer of the fundamental building blocks of movie-making and TV structure, not only is there a more positive, forgiving tone in breaking down the history of the sci-fi canon (some of which predicted many of the technological gadgets we enjoy today), but even a celebration of just how much and how often Hollywood gets the science right.

Conversely, the vast majority of Hollywood writers, producers and directors don’t regularly come across PhD scientists in real life, and have to form impressions of doctors, scientists and engineers based on… other portrayals in entertainment. Scientists, after all, represent only 0.2 percent of the U.S. population as a whole, and less than 700,000 of all jobs belong to doctors and surgeons. And while these professions are amply represented on screen in number, that’s not necessarily been the case in accuracy. The insular self-reliance of screenwriters on their own biases has led to stereotyping and pigeonholing of scientists into a series of familiar archetypes (nerds, aloof omniscient sidekicks), as Grazier and Cass take us through a thorough, labyrinthine archive of TV and movie scientists. But as scientists have become more involved in advising productions, and have become more prominent and visible in today’s innovation-driven society, their on screen counterparts have likewise become a more accurate reflection of these demographics – mainstream hits like The Big Bang Theory, CSI (and its many procedural spinoffs), Breaking Bad and films like Gravity, The Martian, Interstellar and The Imitation Game are just a recent sampling.

If you’re going to teach a diverse group of readers about the principles of physics, astronomy, quantum mechanics and energy forms, it’s best to start with the basics. Even if you’ve never picked up a physics textbook, Hollyweird Science provides a fundamental overview of matter, mass, elements, energy, planet and star formation, time, radiation and the quantum mechanics of universe behavior. More important than what these principles are, Grazier discerns what they are not, with running examples from iconic television series, movies and sci-fi characters. What exactly is the difference between weight and mass and force, per the opening scene of the film Gravity? How are different forms of energy classified? Are the radioactive giants of Godzilla and King Kong realistic? What exactly happens when Scotty is beamed up? Buoying the analytical content are a myriad of interviews with writers and producers, expounding honestly about working with scientists, incorporating science into storytelling and where conflicts arose in the creative process.

People who want to delve into more complex science can do so through “science boxes” embedded throughout the book – sophisticated mathematical and physics analyses of entertainment staples, trivial and significant. Among my favorites: why Alice in Wonderland is a great example of allometric scaling, the thermal radiation of cinematography lighting, hypothesizing Einsteinian relativity for the Back To The Future DeLorean, and just how hot is The Human Torch in the Fantastic Four? (Pretty dang hot.)

The next time readers see an asteroid making a deep impact, characters zipping through interplanetary travel, or an evil plot to harbor a new form of destructive energy, they’ll have a scientific foundation to ask simple, but important, questions. Is this reasonable science, rooted in the principles of physics? Even if embellished for the sake of advancing a story, could it theoretically happen? And for Hollywood writers, how can science advance a plot or help a character solve their connundrum? In our podcast below, Dr. Grazier explains why physics and astronomy were such an important bedrock of the first book – and of science-based entertainment – and previews what other areas of science, technology and medicine future sequels will analyze.

In the long run, Hollyweird Science will serve as far more than just a groundbreaking book, regardless of its rather seamless nexus between fun pop culture break-down and serious scientific didactic tool. It’s a part of a conceptual bridge towards an inevitable intellecutal alignment between Hollywood, science and technology. Over the last 10-15 years, portayal of scientists and ubiquity of science content has increased exponentially on screen – so much so, that what was a fringe niche even 20 years ago is now mainstream and has powerful influence in public perception and support for science. Science and technology will proliferate in importance to society, not just in the form of personal gadgets, but as problem-solving tools for global issues like climate change, water access and advancing health quality. Moreover, at a time when Americans’ grasp of basic science is flimsy, at best, any material that can repurpose the universal love of movies and television to impart knowledge and generate excitement is significant. We are at the precipice of forging a permanent link between Hollywood, science and pop culture. The Hollyweird series is the perfect start.

In an exclusive podcast conversation with ScriptPhD.com, Dr. Grazier discussed the overarching themes and concepts that influenced both “Hollyweird Science” and his ongoing consulting in the entertainment industry. These include:

•How the current Golden Age of sci-fi arose and why there’s more science and technology content in entertainment than ever
•Why scientists and screenwriters are remarkably similar
•Why physics and astronomy are the building blocks of the majority of science fiction
•How the “Hollyweird Science” trilogy can be used as a didactic tool for scientists and entertainment figures
•His favorite moments working both in science and entertainment

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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our podcast on SoundCloud or iTunes.

In the year 2042, time travel has not yet been invented. But by the year 2072, that is no longer the case. Nevertheless, it is outlawed, inaccessible to all but the most powerful and violent gangs in an economically repressed dystopia. Due to scientific advances of that era, it is impossible to dispose of a body without a trace, so the criminal gangs use the time travel to execute their “trash,” sending the bodies back in time to be executed by hit men called Loopers. The body vanishes from the future, but never existed in the present. Unless something goes terribly awry. Such is the setup of Rian Johnson’s bleak, brilliant sci-fi film Looper, a shrewd commentary on how we use technology, the value of a human life and whether a destiny can be changed. It is easily the best sci-fi film since 2010’s Inception, and surely one of the best of this year in any genre. Full ScriptPhD review, below.

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a Looper, a very desirable and profitable position in a time over-run with vagrant raids, poverty, hopelessness and violence. The job has a 30-year finite time span, at which time the Looper is sent back into time to be exterminated, and a younger, genetically identical version of him starts job all over again. This is called “closing the loop.” The consequences, shown early in the film, of not closing the loop are dire, both for the younger Looper and his older counter-part. But Joe, an emotionally detached junkie, treats his executions with a regimented ennui. Until one day, when a loop fails to show up at the expected hour. In a split second, Joe recognizes the man as the older version of himself (Bruce Willis), and the brief hesitation allows Old Joe to escape, unleashing the fury of the warlords on both of them across the boundaries of time.

The future painted by Johnson is noir-lugubrious but stops short of the over-the-top post-apocalyptic dreariness of Blade Runner or Children of Men. Instead, the issues of social equality, money and humanity that we struggle with today are exaggerated under the umbrella of traditional sci-fi existentialism. The Looper future is also one filled with abject unfairness. Hungry vagrants that steal food out of desperation are shot immediately by armed citizens. A mobster (Jeff Daniels) sent from the future to run the loopers quenches his boredom by running the city with tyranny, leaving the dirty work of closing loops to violent thugs. Worst of

all is the news from the future of the appearance of a tyrannical warlord named The Rainmaker, who is closing all the loops one by one.

At first, the relationship between Young Joe and Old Joe is antagonistic. All Old Joe wants to do is survive and warn his younger counterpart not to repeat the mistakes he made, especially trying to avoid the death of his wife. All Young Joe wants to do is close his loop, collect the money and make right with the mob. But they grow to grudgingly protect one another amidst a greater goal—finding and eliminating the younger version of The Rainmaker in the present. A series of mysterious maps and codes lead Young Joe to a farmhouse where a young woman, Sarah (Emily Blunt), and her son Cid (Pierce Ganon) are hiding out. As it dawns on Young Joe that Cid is the Young Rainmaker, he wrestles with whether a deleterious future can truly be avoided either for himself or Cid, all while chasing Old Joe and being chased himself.

From the sci-fi element, Looper craftily wedges evolution of technology in a future world not so unlike our own. There is time travel, a quirky genetic mutation that affects 10% of the population (they can levitate quarters!) and expected audiovisual upgrades to touch-screen technology. But there are also familiar elements—books, records, refrigerators and even cars—that make these developments feel natural and real. Even time travel is treated not as an exotic luxury but a quotidian burden. The one and only scene of time travel in the film shows a rather simple metal tube that transports people to a time point in an empty field.

Whether time travel is actually possible in reality is a point of continuing contention with physicists. First referenced in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, time travel has been a steady staple of the sci-fi canon, but it wasn’t until Albert Einstein unraveled the four dimensions of space with his Theory of Relativity in 1915 that the notion seemed tenable. And of course, in theory, time travel is a very real occurrence, since we know that time passes more slowly the closer you approach the speed of light. Physicists such as Stephen Hawking have grappled with other time-space phenomena such as wormholes and quantum theory that might facilitate time jumping. Most scientists, however, are unified in their belief that if a time machine were ever built, it would be used exclusively for going forward in time, and not backwards, for many of the same quandaries proposed in Looper, particularly whether you can change the course of events that are destined to happen in the future.

But Looper doesn’t contend with any of that. It just assumes physicists have solved these hurdles and focuses on a smart, intricate, well-written story. It’s a film that treats its audience with respect, asking for patience in the more complicated plot points, and rewarding it with a satisfying, shocking crescendo worthy of its metaphysical journey. Indeed, Looper might be the first film of the 21st Century to provide a truly real purview into the ethical quandaries, and frightening realities, that time travel might present to us should it ever come to pass.

Preview trailer here:

Looper goes into release nationwide on September 28, 2012.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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You can always tell you’ve gone too far when you reach the wind farms. They populate the barren wastes of California’s northern interior, rows of them spinning atop camel-haired hills starved of moisture to slake the thirst of the Los Angeles glitterati. These motionless pinwheels are an ironic green afterthought to the ecological disaster that embraces the Interstate-5 freeway: now that we’ve created the dust bowl we may as well use the wind to power our air filters. There’s more than wind and dust out here. This is where they put the kinds of facilities the government doesn’t want people snooping around in. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is one of them—a secretive development center for our nation’s nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. Here in Livermore, the world’s finest physicists are on the verge of a breakthrough that could power entire cities on a bathtub full of water. The National Ignition Facility, also known as the world’s largest laser, is on the cusp of achieving the first break-even nuclear fusion reaction. NIF is the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sagrada Familia. If successful, the four billion dollar facility will be the first ever to demonstrate Ignition: a fusion reaction that releases more energy than was put into it. The energy, national security, economic and environmental ramifications for the United States, if not the world, would be staggering. ScriptPhD.com’s Stephen Compson gained ultra-exclusive access to the normally reclusive facility, including tours, interviews, and a peek at the lasers that could hold the key to the United States’s global rebirth. With nuclear fusion on the brink of break-even, Stephen recounts we tour the world’s next scientific revolution.

The Photon Valley

Livermore is not so much a city as it is a byproduct of the lab at its center. This small suburban community lies halfway between San Francisco’s Bay Area and the Interstate 5 that allows truckers a north-south passage between the “Two Californias.” They call it The Photon Valley, the world capital of laser technology and all things light-related. Moth-like high-tech subcontractors orbit the facility’s perimeter. Charon Sue Wollard is Livermore’s second Poet Laureate. Her poem Steller Gest hints at the secrets locked away in the cathedral of optics:

I check into a room that smells like a Pine-Sol explosion and cruise the two main drags looking for a meal. A pretty girl takes my order at a pizza place, and I realize for the first time what a physics town this truly is. Her eye shadow has been cross-sectioned into bandwidths, showing five different colors on each eyelid. It is a cosmetic display of the visible light spectrum. She smiles and asks if I’d like a beer.

Fusion is the process by which two atomic bodies, driven together by an overwhelming force, merge to become one heavier nucleus. It is the reverse of fission, the splitting process that gave us the atomic bomb and the conventional nuclear reactor. An atomic act of coupling, fusion powers our sun and every other light in the night sky. At the National Ignition Facility here in Livermore, scientists and engineers stand at the threshold of tapping into that process to create a limitless supply of clean energy. When the stars burn out, we’ll make our own.

The Birth of a Star

The car is completely covered in bird crap. This isn’t just one or two droppings caked onto a dirty hood, but a carpet-bombing by a flock of irritably-boweled miscreants. Lynda, the public affairs officer assigned to chaperoning me through the facility, smiles apologetically and gestures toward the culprits in the dense trees that loom over the parking lot.

Like a quiet family home in mid-Los Angeles, the Livermore Lab hides from prying eyes with a protective wall of foliage that makes it look more like a nature preserve than a nuclear weapons facility. But behind the trees they have plenty of barbed wire and guards armed with assault rifles. I finger the clearance pass with my photo on it and thank her for the souvenir. She looks puzzled, “You won’t be allowed to keep it.” Bruno Von Wonterghem is exactly the sort of Germanic super-scientist you’d imagine running operations at the world’s largest laser facility. His accent lends an easy everyday quality to words like laser, optics, and Neodymium. He has the propensity to trail off into a mumble that could fill an entire page, like he’s been talking about the laser’s attributes merely for his own benefit. Bruno has been working on laser systems at the lab for almost two decades. Every time I ask a question this strange light comes into his eyes, as though he’s realizing for the first time that there are people in this world who don’t know about the National Ignition Facility.

From the outside, the building doesn’t quite look real. It’s glossy, like one of those photos a developer might put up in front of a vacant lot to convince people that something could be built there. I’ve been trying to get into this facility for over a year, and to my disappointment it looks exactly like the pictures. Most of the facility’s iconic equipment is on display in the front lobby, and the walls throughout are lined with posters explaining how everything works. The whole thing screams field trip, and I’m starting to wonder if there is actually any science that takes place here. Then they show me the laser bays.

Every article you will ever read about the National Ignition Facility measures the size of its laser bays in terms of football fields (four). It’s difficult to get a feel for the scale from the picture, because this is only one of two laser bays and what you don’t realize looking down on it is that the whole system is suspended a story above the ground, putting us three stories up. They do that because any replacement modules have to be loaded from underneath in pre-assembled clean rooms so that any outside particles will fall out of the system.

After giving me a minute to ogle, Bruno clears his throat. “The Facility is essentially an energy concentrator in time and space. It takes about sixty seconds to charge up the capacitor bank with six megawatts, but the laser releases that energy in a very short amount of time: billionths of a second. Those six megawatts are concentrated by over fifteen orders of magnitude, more power than the entire United States electrical grid.” The cool thing about lasers is that they have an unlimited threshold for delivering power. Photons, the packets that physicists use to quantify light, occupy no space, so you can pack an unlimited number of them into as focused a path as your lenses allow.

The charge process concentrate the lasers through time, and the lenses concentrate them through space. Each of the tubes acts like a telescope, converging NIF’s 192 beams onto a single capsule the size of a vitamin, gaining another nine orders of magnitude in the process to create temperatures hotter than the inside of the sun.

At the molecular level, heat causes vibration. The hydrogen ions in the fuel capsule are both positively charged, so they magnetically repel one another. However, the supercharged laser creates a perfectly symmetrical layer of plasma around the target. There’s nowhere for the ions to run, and as they heat up and accelerate to over a million miles per hour, the two cores inevitably fuse to become a hydrogen atom, releasing some of their mass as energy in the form of neutrons. Each laser bay contains 96 beams, one in each steel tube. Thick black high-voltage cables snake along the outside delivering power to the amplifiers. The tubes are filled with Argon gas because air reacts with lasers and impedes their progress. Aside from the amplifiers, the lasers also pass through pink slabs of neodymium that add juice to the discharge. The shot bounces through the entire array four times before it enters the switchyard into the target bay.

This is the world’s largest optical system. There are over 70,000 large optical controllers and 30,000 smaller optics. As we look over it all from the third floor, Bruno sniffs, “If you could look through all these tubes and strip away all this steel, you would find a sea of optical elements. It would be beautiful. Right now, it just looks like tubes.”

Between the Conception and the Creation

Every shot starts in the Oscillator Room, which is a somewhat disappointing set of server-like cabinets containing the three oscillators that send out the initial pulse to the preamplifiers. This starting pulse is only a billionth of a joule, or 1/160th the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito. A fairly humble beginning for a star’s birth. They use the three oscillators in tandem to fine-tune the timing of the pulse down to a few trillionths of a second. The oscillators run constantly, but only one of these pulses will enter the amplifiers to begin powering up for a shot. A large red counter keeps track of all pulses that pass without notice through the fiber-optics, unable to reach their full potential in the adjacent laser bays.

In 1957, John Nuckolls began investigating peaceful applications of nuclear weapons technology. He proposed a novel scheme: the implosion of a Deuterium-Tritium (hydrogen isotopes) fuel capsule inside a tiny holhraum driven by an external energy source (refer to above graphic). This is the same scheme NIF uses today, but at the time when Nuckolls proposed it the laser had not yet been invented, so he considered other exotic power sources like particle accelerators, plasma guns, and hypervelocity pellet guns, which sound suspiciously like glorified BB guns.

The reaction that takes place at NIF today is almost identical to the one Nuckolls designed in the 60s, but the physicists needed a laser system capable of generating a pulse hotter than the core of our sun to achieve ignition. First they built the SHIVA laser, named for Oppenheimer’s proclamation that he had become the destroyer of worlds after unveiling the atomic bomb. SHIVA was followed by NOVA, NIF’s predecessor and the first laser system Bruno worked on at the facility. In late 2009, almost fifty years after the idea was conceived, NIF successfully demonstrated the temperatures necessary for energy gain ignition. “It was so much bigger than any of us ever imagined,” Bruno reflected. “When we bring in the original scientists to look at the target bay, they sort of look around in awe and say, ‘We can’t believe this is what we asked for.’”

The target chamber is a 10-meter diameter aluminum sphere with laser tubes sprouting from its surface. From the outside, it looks like one of those alien objects from Contact or Sphere. It spans three stories of the facility, so you can only ever look at it from above or below. We stand on the third floor watching a crew of workers install some newly hardened diagnostic equipment. They’ve spent the past six months preparing the target chamber to absorb the massive amount of energy released by the fusion reaction. The entire chamber is now surrounded by a concrete and boron barrier two meters thick. In the LIFE facility, a commercial power plant designed to actually generate electricity, the neutrons will be absorbed by a mantle of liquid salts that transfer their kinetic energy to heat energy which drives a conventional steam generator. However, because NIF is an experimental facility where they actually need to observe the reaction, its physicists were presented with the challenge of preparing cameras that could withstand the bombardment, since neutrons lay waste to electronics.

The density of the imploding target is so high that normal x-rays can’t penetrate the implosion’s surface, so they concentrate four x-ray beams to over a Petawatt, which is a quadrillion watts (yeah, real number). The reaction itself is only a tenth of the size of a human hair, and it boggles even the scientists who work there that they have an x-ray powerful enough to observe it. They call this camera Dante, “because it looks into the mouth of hell.” Despite the incredibly powerful forces at work, Inertial Confined Fusion is safer than any of the power-generating technologies that have preceded it. The key thing to remember is that the reaction is an implosion, not an explosion. If anything goes wrong, the whole thing collapses on itself and nothing happens. The worst thing that can happen is all the fuel gets consumed and we’re out one more capsule. There’s no possibility of a catastrophic meltdown like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. Lynda deals with this line of questioning all the time: “People hear that NIF generates temperatures hotter than the sun and that it creates a miniature star and they wonder how the whole facility doesn’t melt down. But we’re talking about an implosion, with an incredibly small scale, for only a few billionths of a second. It’s no different than a supernova, the physics are all the same, but the scale’s a bit smaller.”

Holhraum is the German word for “hollow room.” It has been mostly analogized to a pill capsule, in reference to its size and shape. Its role is to act as an x-ray oven, containing the plasma generated around the target pellet and acting as a mold for the fusion reaction’s symmetry. The holhraum contains the fuel pellet made up of the hydrogen isotopes Tritium and Deuterium. There’s no danger of scarcity with these two elements: Tritium is derived from the relatively common Lithium and Deuterium comes from plain old water. Another advantage to fusion is that there’s no waste created, at all. Everything is consumed by the reaction, leaving behind no toxic radiation or weaponizable elements. In fact, physicists can use facilities like NIF to dispose of the nuclear waste from the previous generation of fission reactors, rendering the arguments about Yucca mountain or blasting it into space completely moot.

The shot director begins the countdown, and alarms sound throughout the facility. Daylight hours at the facility mostly consist of construction and maintenance work, they fire the lasers at night. There are only twenty people in the facility during a shot, and they’re all here in the control room, but they have the alarms just in case. The countdown is four minutes, which seems like an incredibly long time. Nearly all of the process is controlled by computers, a necessity for the minute level of control required to achieve symmetry. The control room looks a lot like NASA’s Mission Control. They like to hire nuclear submarine captains as shot directors, because of the rigidity in operations requirements. “We can train them with the technical knowledge, but having that operations experience from a submarine where things are going on all around you is essential. There’s a lot of action during a shot, but each one can take up to twelve hours. It’s like loading a new missile every day.”

As we reach the final few seconds of the countdown, I look around nervously. The overhead lights flash, and that’s it. No sound effects, no shaking. I have to ask if it worked. The only noise comes from the physicists next door scrambling to be the first to retrieve the data. Lynda leans over, “When you take the amount of shots fired in an entire year, where each one only takes a fraction of a second, it’s almost like this thing is never really on.”

Countdown to Ignition

The National Ignition Campaign coincides with football season, but the stakes are a little higher. Ignition is the validation of fusion as a viable energy source, the point at which the critics are silenced and the rest of the world scrambles to duplicate the feat. “It’s going to be incredible, standing room only. There’s people lining up around the world that want to be here for that event. Every milestone along the way has been a major event, when we went from two to four lasers it was a major event. Now we have 192. And it’s all leading up to the ignition.” The question they must get tired of hearing is: when? “September, October. There’s a few [target] options we have, a plastic capsule, a beryllium capsule, a diamond capsule.” I ask Bruno which one he thinks will do the trick. It’s important not to underestimate the technological perfection required to achieve the symmetry necessary for the ignition. Every aspect of the shot must be analyzed and optimized to an order of precision never before achieved. With all that said, he doesn’t see any reason why the plastic capsule won’t get the job done.

I have to press: “The plastic capsule, that’s going to be the one?” Bruno replies with a tremor in his voice. Like the girl who’s fallen for too many bad boys, he’s been hurt before, “I believe that will be the one, yes.”

Are you ready for some Physics?

The above title sounds a lot more enticing if you sing it to the Monday Night Football theme song. There’s no good reason why I should be allowed into a nuclear weapons lab. I’m nobody, another starving bookworm with a taste for Faulkner and single barrel scotch. All I can surmise is that so far, no-one’s managed to pull this four billion dollar sword from its stone and shove it somewhere that will make the American public pay attention. I’m living proof that they’re desperate. No one I know has even heard of the National Ignition Facility, which quite sadly included the Editor of ScriptPhD.com who sent me there. I’ve spoken with professional engineers and physicists who don’t recognize the name. There’s certainly been plenty of media coverage: the BBC, the Discovery Channel, Wired, Time. People’s ears tend to perk up when they hear something might kill them, but the general public hasn’t had a survival-based reason to pay attention to physics since the end of the Cold War. We know that unruly nations getting access to nuclear weapons is a bad thing, but as to the current state of the field, a nuclear warhead is implicitly bad enough that there’s been no reason to continue following their progress.

Fusion offers us the solution to a problem most people don’t even know we have. The immediacy of it isn’t so clear, but in his excellent BBC Horizons: Can We Make a Star?, Professor Brian Cox paints a grim picture. It’s not possible to give the rest of the world access to even half the electricity that the average American uses without bankrupting all possible means of generating electricity, and in the process laying waste to the environment.

We have to figure out how to generate electricity for the growing population around the world without, as Bruno likes to say, choking ourselves. The actual numbers are sobering, but it’s a subject people don’t like to read about because in the past there’s been no clear solution. Now here we are, being handed that solution on a silver platter by a group of individuals that no one’s heard of who have been working on that solution for the last fifty years. Which only makes the endeavor that much more noble.

The Holy Grail

When I began this trip, I had no idea that I would be making a pilgrimage. Bruno and his co-workers are like stonemasons laying the foundation for a church they will never live to see. It will be at least twenty years before the first commercial fusion reactors come online (skeptics put the time-frame around 2050). John Nuckolls, the man who came up with Inertial Confinement Fusion, is in his nineties. Five thousand people have spent their lives building this facility up to this point. They are the clergy of the modern era, humanity’s most educated class, working selflessly to create a better world. “People want to be here to work on a mission. The goal is really very abstract to many of them, but they’re all motivated by being able to contribute to an event where they can make history. There’s a grand challenge to it, a vast significance in being a part of that.”

Gone are the days when the average American held down a job for the same company his or her entire working life, but many at the National Ignition Facility join the team when they finish their doctorates from the world’s finest universities and work there until they retire. There are fathers who have spent their entire careers working on fusion only to see their son or daughter take up the cause. Remarked Bruno: “We have to think long term. You need technology that can carry you beyond fifty and a hundred years into the future. When you think about your great grandchildren, this is the only solution, the only way that we can survive with the quality of life that we’ve become accustomed to. It is our holy grail.”

The Neutron Age

The achievement of energy gain fusion is one that should fundamentally alter human existence. As technology advances, our quality of life will remain intimately connected with access to cheap, renewable energy. There are existential stakes as well. Fusion is the engine that drives our universe. By achieving Ignition, we begin our mastery of Mother Nature’s own energy source, a force so fundamental that cultures around the world worshiped its daily appearance at dawn. “Every fifty to a hundred years you reach a point where you make a quantum jump in technology. We went from coal in the industrial age to the atomic age in the fifties and now we will reach the neutron age. We can finally see an opening into the energy problem. Within fifty years you could provide a significant fraction of your basic power production from fusion. You can give this to developing countries and bring them into a new century. Suddenly someone with no refrigerator, no microwave will realize what it means to live in the modern age. We have a quality of life here in America that simply cannot be provided around the world with the resources we have. Fusion will make that possible.”

Clean power is only the beginning. Like the technologies that emerged from the Pandora’s box of quantum mechanics, fusion will undoubtedly open up a whole new wave of technological advancement. Every aspect of the National Ignition Facility, from the optics that carry the lasers to the supercomputers that process the data have pushed the limits in their field. Bruno gives me a sly look. “We probably have no idea yet what applications will come from having a neutron source like this.” And thanks to the NIF’s tireless believers, we enter that neutron age this fall.

Stephen Compson studied English and Physics at Pomona College. He writes fiction and screenplays and is currently working toward a Master of Fine Arts at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television.

~*Stephen Compson*~

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“I think we’re living through the greatest age of discovery our civilization has ever known,” declares British physics superstar Professor Brian Cox as a preamble for each episode of The Science Channel’s BBC import Wonders of the Solar System. Episode by episode, Dr. Cox deconstructs our wondrous Universe one focus at a time—the Sun, the Big Bang, life on other planets. But he does something even more important. He infuses his own obvious enthusiasm and passion for his field in each experiment and factoid. As a viewer, you can’t helped but be absorbed in the intergalactic vortex of knowledge. The timing of this mini-series and emergence of Cox’s exuberant personality could not be better. Funding for NASA missions has been cut dramatically, with an ongoing re-evaluation the role space exploration should play in the national budget and science ambition. American viewers should get used to Cox as a modern-day Carl Sagan, because his star is rising fast. ScriptPhD.com was extraordinarily fortunate to sit down with Dr. Cox in Los Angeles for a one-on-one podcast about the show, the current state of space exploration, and what is possible to achieve experimentally if we only try. My conversation with the inspirational, eloquent and brilliant Brian Cox, along with our review of Wonders of the Universe, under the “continue reading” cut.

Astronomy was never my strongest suit academically. And while I’ve always had a respectful admiration for the solar system and interplanetary sciences, I was never the kind to stargaze or spend hours on the telescope on the off-chance of spotting Mars, Venus or the Saturn rings. It’s a testament, then, to the immensity, ambition and quality of The Science Channel’s latest mini-series project, Wonders of the Solar System for holding me positively captivated while screening the first two episodes. A concept as simple as a solar eclipse is the running theme for the entirety of the first episode, “Empire of the Sun.” By the time the eclipse is recorded, it is the climax to an astounding collection of facts about how rare, precious and ordered the Sun (and its position to the Earth really is). A perfect eclipse is only possible right here on planet Earth—400 times the planetary distance away from the Moon, with the Sun an exact 400 times the diameter of the Moon. No other moon in the vast expanse of the solar system has these properties. Pretty amazing stuff, right? The timing of Wonders of the Solar System could not come at a better time. With our economic and moral spirits at a nadir, it’s time to discuss the importance of space travel and exploration to our scientific, nationalistic and optimistic psyches. President Obama’s 2011 NASA budget, while providing an increase of $6 billion for technology innovation, scrapped manned space flights, including a manned mission to the Moon and any proposals of future Mars exploration. Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, strongly criticized the move as handicapping spaceflight and exploratory ambition. One of the things Wonders of the Universe reminds us, and that Dr. Cox reiterated in our podcast below, is that scientific discoveries come out of limitless ambition, and often from asking completely unrelated questions. Nothing is more ambitious for mankind than exploring the Universe that houses our miraculous existence. Future episodes will examine the Wonders of our atmosphere, the similarity between our planet and Mars, and most excitingly, examining the possibilities of alien life in the solar system.

Part of the appeal of Wonders is that unlike many educational platforms that talk at the viewer in order to inform, Wonders feels like an interactive, experimental experience. When Cox isn’t zipping from one far-fetched corner of the world to another (catching an aurora borealis in the Arctic Circle! a solar eclipse in India! Mars-watching in Tunisia!), he’s pointing out cool, and often eye-catching, experiments that show viewers the science and physics that makes our solar system so fantastically unique. Who would ever know that a tornado in the Midwest is actually a physics parallel to the formation of our very universe. The scientific principle at hand—conservation of angular momentum—stopped the solar system from collapsing under its own gravity during formation, allowing a stable, rotating disc of planets to form. We all know the sun is powerful, shining 1 kW of energy for meter squared of the Earth’s surface, equal to one million times the yearly power consumption of the United States in each second! But it’s a lot more fun to watch Cox show this measurement in Death Valley with a pail of water, a thermometer, and some physics. Likewise the Sun’s sunspots, a still not quite understood phenomenon that has been correlated to the Earth’s seasons and weather, which Cox illustrates with a digital camera. All of this extemporaneous experimentation is reminiscent of the best of Carl Sagan, just with a modern twist.

The Los Angeles Times, in their television review of Wonders called Brian Cox “the nerd that’s cooler than you.” Already a budding superstar in the world of particle physics (check out his TED talk on his work at CERN’s Hadron Supercollider), Cox is that perfect mix of half-scientist, half-TV star. Without him, Wonders would be a completely different endeavor. (Listen to our podcast below as an example of his charismatic eloquence.) To boot, BBC and The Science Channel spared no expenses when it came to production values. In our one on one meeting, Cox let us in on the secret that the whole of Wonders was filmed with an old-fashioned 1970s cinematic lens, lending a decidedly movie feel to the show, particularly the graphics and digital sequences. While some imagery is real, such as amazing Martian sunsets captured by the Mars rover, other digital effects (notably in the “Empire of the Sun” episode) are stunning enough to make you feel like your television is the portal window of a spacecraft in intergalactic orbit.

Wonders of the Solar System airs on The Science Channel on Thursdays at 9 PM ET.

While in Los Angeles to promote Wonders of the Solar System, Dr. Cox graciously sat down with ScriptPhD.com to discuss the show and his views on space exploration. Among our discussion topics:

•How he is still able to channel a passion for the solar system
•Why he thinks it’s critical for NASA to take risks and go to Mars
•The possibilities of life in the outer solar system and
•Why it’s a huge mistake for NASA to cut their budget for space exploration

Take a listen below:

~*ScriptPhD*~

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Subscribe to free email notifications of new posts on our home page.

What is time? How does it work? Why is it immutably unidirectional (moving from the past and towards the future)? And most importantly, why does time exist at all? These are among the preeminent metaphysical questions to date for scientists and laypeople alike. Using the principles of entropy and universe expansion since the Big Bang, cosmologist Sean Carroll (recently profiled in the New York Times) hypothesizes about the arrow of time in a brilliant new book From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. In addition to reviewing the book, ScriptPhD.com’s in-house physics and astronomy guru, Stephen Compson, had an extraordinary opportunity to sit down with Dr. Carroll in his physics lab at Caltech University. In a stunningly in-depth, rich interview, they explored everything from the creation of our universe, to entropy, the time-space continuum, how physics and film intersect, and why the principles in Dr. Carroll’s book are important and topical for the general public to grasp. It’s rare to see this wide-ranging of a discussion on popular physics from such an authoritative researcher, so sit back, enjoy and click “continue reading” for more.

I first started writing for this site because I was excited about the relationship between fiction and physics, especially what they both can tell us about the nature of time. From The Time Machine to Groundhog Day, many of our movies have posed questions about moving outside the arrow of time. In another way, the recent popularity of movies with out-of-order chronology, like Pulp Fiction or Memento, have served to make the public more comfortable with non-traditional narratives. Since many of our questions about space and time originate with the work of Einstein, it’s worth mentioning that Virginia Woolf was one of Einstein’s early supporters and publishers in America, and that his work on relativity in turn clearly influenced writers like Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner (both also published by Woolf at some point). Here in 2010, as we fire up the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, it seems that physics is due for another upheaval, which will no doubt have an impact on the way we tell stories.

That’s why I was so excited to get my hands on a copy of Dr. Sean Carroll’s latest book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. If you’re a fan of Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, or you find yourself lurking in the physics section of your local book store, or you just want to learn what we know about time, this book is the definitive work of the moment.

Sean Carroll is a respected professor of cosmology at Caltech University, and the recommendation quotes on the back of his book read like a who’s who of popular physics writing. The book is very readable, and anyone who can follow the byzantine plotline of Lost should be able to understand the ideas he presents. His theory has to do with the concept of entropy, the measure of the orderliness of the universe. Our universe went from a low entropy compressed state before the Big Bang to the expanding state of increasing entropy, in which we now live. The metaphor he often uses in the book is that you can make an omelet out of an egg (or you could drop the egg, or freeze it, or do any number of things), but once that omelet’s been cooked you can’t make it back into a raw egg. From Eternity to Here is an examination of why that is so, why time moves from past to future and not backwards (apparently this wasn’t obvious to scientists!).

The book is also a vehicle for Carroll to throw in his hat on cosmology’s Big Questions of how the universe was formed, how many universes there might be, and why the Big Bang could happen. What makes his work accessible to the armchair physicist is that he roots his ideas in examples you can find in your own kitchen and in diverse selections from popular culture, everything from science fiction to Dumb and Dumber.

As you’ll see in my interview with Dr. Carroll below, physicists today are struggling with the same questions about fate and free will that made Spiderman go emo. I tried to pin Carroll down on the answer, but he’s got better moves than Spidey when the conversation starts to turn toward the philosophical. Also, when you’re trying to ask a scientist at the top of his field about his work, chances are you’re going to assert something stupid in your questions at least once. I managed to do that about four times. But he answered the questions without making me feel like a complete idiot, which is, I think, what the book really does well. It’s informative without condescension (as Hawking’s work can sometimes feel). Carroll even manages to be funny (for a scientist). As physics marches forward to the tune of the Large Hadron Collider, we’ll need more books like From Eternity to Here to keep up with the research.

Interview With Sean Carroll:

ScriptPhD.com: How would you define Cosmology?

Sean Carroll: Cosmology is the study of the whole universe all at once. Cosmology looks at the big picture of what the universe is made of, where it came from, and how it’s been evolving.

SPhD: Your book deals a lot with time and with entropy, and dances around the issue of. Where does From Eternity to Here leave us in terms of our free will and what physics can tell us about that?

SC: I’m trying to reconcile the fact that physicists think there are laws of nature which are never broken and we obey those laws, but on the other hand we think that we’re able to make choices. I think both views are compatible with each other. The point is that we don’t know as much about the future as we know about the past. With the past we have a feeling that it’s set in stone, and that has to do with the fact that the entropy was lower, but the future is unknown to us. I think that’s the reason why we can feel and act as if we have free will.

It makes sense to think of ourselves as beings that have choices to make, because, even if all the pieces that we’re made of, all the particles and atoms and so forth, obey the laws of physics, we don’t know the state of all those particles. It makes no difference what those particles are doing because we don’t know, so we can act as if we have free will, and at the same time obey the laws of physics.

SPhD: Your book draws on examples from movies and TV shows. Are there any works in popular culture that come close to conveying our actual understanding of time and the universe?

SC: That’s a hard question. There are plenty of works that play with our understanding. My favorite is probably the movie Memento, by Christopher Nolan, it’s not science fiction but it uses time in a very interesting narrative technique, with flashbacks and reverse chronology. There’s also TV shows like Lost where you have time travel and alternate realities. They’re not trying very hard to stick to the laws of physics, but they’re trying to be logical and consistent. I wouldn’t turn to movies or TV shows to learn about how physicists think of the nature of time, but they’re certainly very useful in prodding us to think about time in imaginative ways.

SPhD: What do you make of the idea that American movies often boil down to a question of fate versus destiny?

SC: I think it’s a classic dilemma, are we fated to do something or do we have choices in the matter? And the laws of physics have the same dilemma built into them, on the one hand, we all obey the laws of physics, on the other hand we think we can make choices. I don’t think that the large-scale choices that we make are in any way fated, I was not destined to become a physicist. But if I knew the velocities and positions of every particle in the universe, I could figure it out. It makes a great dramatic tension to feel that something is inevitable and watch the hero fight against that.

SPhD: Quantum mechanics tells us that there is something to the act of observing the positions and velocities of those particles, would you say that if you had observed all the particles that you might miss your chance to become a physicist?

SC: Quantum mechanics makes things more complicated because it says that when we observe something, we can’t know exactly what it is we’re seeing, we can only observe the probability of something happening. I don’t think that changes the basic story because we don’t know the whole system so it doesn’t really matter anyway. Large scale human activities are impossible to predict in practice even if they could be perfectly predictable in principal.

SPhD: Do you think that our existence as intelligent beings is a cosmic accident? And would you consider that to be a low-entropy result?

SC: That’s a very interesting question, actually. Entropy goes up as the universe evolves, but simplicity and complexity are harder to predict and understand. The universe starts out very simple, and it’s going to end very simple. The complexity happens in between. There are senses in which the existence of complexity in our current universe arises because entropy is increasing. When entropy was very low there was no complexity, once entropy hits its maximum value there will be no complexity, but in between interesting things can happen. So I don’t think it’s crazy to wonder if the existence of life and consciousness arose because entropy is increasing. A lot of details still need to be worked out around that, but something like that might be on the right track.

SPhD: In your LA Times Interview, you talked about how many of your colleagues take the progression of time from past to future for granted because that’s the way it works in our universe. It reminded me of the geocentrist debate, where we want to see ourselves as the center of things because this is the universe we live in, so of course it must be that way. What can we learn from the mistakes scientists have made in the past, and what do we have coming up in terms of experiments that will shed new light on cosmology?

SC: My own personal philosophy about that is that we need to remove ourselves from the universe that we are actually in and ask ourselves what we think the universe should be like if we couldn’t make any direct observations. Let’s say we knew the laws of physics, but we didn’t know the configuration of the universe, there’s no reason from that thought experiment that we would end up with something like the Big Bang, there’s no model that could predict something like that, yet. We’re not on the verge of answering that question, that’s a hard question. We’re still groping our way towards some better ideas, but we’re doing lots of experiments that should help us out. We’re doing cosmology experiments, learning more about the background radiation that’s left over from the Big Bang. We’re doing particle physics experiments, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva hopefully will teach us something about the laws of physics that we don’t know yet. So it’s not a short term project, it’s a long-term project, but the important thing is that we’re absolutely making progress.

SPhD: The LA Times also asked you if God exists in a multiverse and you said we shouldn’t need God to explain physical phenomena. If some being in the multiverse did create our low-entropy universe, could we distinguish that being from what we think of as God?

SC: I’m not sure how you would ever know that that’s what happened. There’s no reason to think that it can’t be explained by purely material things going on. Scientists like to look for the simplest possible theory that fits the data, and we don’t have that theory yet in cosmology, but there’s certainly nothing in the structure of our theory that indicates that we won’t be able to get a purely physical theory of everything.

SPhD: If either a Being or physical phenomena did create our universe in its low-entropy state, what kind of energy would it take to accomplish that task?

SC: The good news is you don’t need that much energy to create the universe. One of the secret lessons of general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, is that if the universe is closed—it sort of curls back on itself—the total energy of the universe is zero. That seems crazy to us because there’s a lot of stuff in the universe, but the positive contributions to energy and the negative contributions to energy exactly cancel, as long as the universe is closed. So to make a new baby universe, to take the old space-time and pinch off an entirely new space-time, costs no energy at all. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to do, it just doesn’t require a lot of resources to do it.

SPhD: If the speed of light remains constant throughout space-time, shouldn’t it be possible for us to map the expansion of the universe with the history of light?

SC: That’s basically what we do. We take light that you can observe today coming from different sources, and those sources are of different ages because they’re at different distances. The far away ones are much older, have emitted their light long ago, and the closer ones have emitted their light more recently. That spectrum of time is actually very useful to us, if we only saw the universe as it exists today, in some sense we would know less. This way we can actually see back into the past.

SPhD: Do you think we’ll eventually have a complete map of our universe?

SC: We won’t ever know everything there is to know about our universe simply because, given that the speed of light is a finite number, there will always be some things that the universe won’t let us see, they’re simply too far away. The best we can hope to do is to put together a schematic picture that makes sense of the part of the universe that we can see. It won’t ever be complete, there will always be more to learn and more to figure out, but we should be able to understand the basic outline of the universe in which we live. We’re not there yet.

SPhD: What do you think of film’s potential as a four-dimensional mapping tool?

SC: In the CGI era, you get to choose every single pixel that appears on your screen. I think visualization of space and time is certainly something we can do, but I don’t know that it’s been exploited anywhere near to what it could be. Flying through galaxies is nice, but it’s very hard to get the evolution of the universe right. We always want to show a picture of the universe from the outside, but we’re stuck inside. I hope that with technology we can put together representations of the universe from the inside, where you can see it expanding and get a more intuitive, hands-on feel for what’s going on.

SPhD: Since you mentioned Memento, how do movies that invert technology lay the groundwork for our understanding of space-time?

SC: There’s something very interesting about how we tell stories. Narrative certainly has the arrow of time, earlier things first, later things later, and that’s not always respected [by the storytellers]. Stories are told through some funny time order, and that’s always done with some purpose, it’s challenging our assumptions for interesting reasons. Because of physics, and because of entropy and the arrow of time, we have this idea that the past moves to the future in a certain way. That the effect comes second and the cause comes first. It goes both ways, you can understand a little bit about how the narrative techniques work by understanding how the physics work, but you can also appreciate going into the physics and where it comes from in some way by really trying to wrap your mind around some of the more interesting narratives out there.

SPhD: It seems that entropy is in some way dependent on decisions made by the observer. As we follow our world lines and make decisions, aren’t we actually decreasing entropy within our light-cones?

SC: That’s not true, actually. There’s a confusing discussion about how dependent on individual observers entropy is, and that’s partially because there’s more than one definition of entropy. One way of defining entropy is by measuring how much you don’t know about a system, but clearly that’s not something we could physically understand. But there’s also a definition of entropy that has nothing to do with our knowledge: that the universe can be in a more likely configuration or a less likely configuration. We human beings are unusual structures in the universe because we attempt to create a little bit of order around us, we attempt to remember things, to organize our local environments. But the way that we do so greatly increases the entropy of the universe as a whole. We spread out a lot of extra entropy into the universe by our activities here on earth. We are not anywhere near equilibrium, a state of very high entropy, but if the environment were anywhere near high entropy we would not be here.

SPhD: Why is that?

SC: What we think of as life, environments and information processing and metabolism, depends on the fact that entropy is low, overall. If entropy were high, nothing would happen, so we would not be able to organize our lives better. We can make our environment orderly by increasing the entropy of the universe, but if the entropy of the universe were already at its maximum we could not create order.

SPhD: Why did you write this book? Why is it important that the public understand cosmology?

SC: Time is something that a lot of people can relate to. We use time every day in our lives, and the amazing thing to me is that the way that time works is really dependent on the universe itself, dependent on the Big Bang. We’re all sort of living in the aftermath of that influential event. It’s a great route to thinking about some big ideas, some big abstract concepts that are still grounded in things that everyone can understand.

SPhD: What would you say is the thinnest part of your argument?

SC: The major point of the book, that the arrow of time ultimately depends on cosmology and conditions near the Big Bang, is ultimately solid. That’s something that, not everyone agrees, but they should agree. The puzzle, then, is why was it like that? Why did the early universe have such a low entropy? I don’t think we know very much about that yet, I have my favorite idea and it’s in the book, but I’m not wedded to that idea, I think we have a long way to go before we can be confident. We have a good handle on the problem, we don’t have a good handle on the solution yet.

SPhD: Experimentally?

SC: It has to be a give and take between experiments and theory. We don’t know what experiments to do until we have a theoretical basis to ask questions, but we don’t know which theories are right until we have experiments to test them.

SPhD: What’s the single project in physics that you’re the most excited about today?

SC: As a theorist, I’m trying to figure out what happened around the time of the Big Bang. I think that’s plausible, we can really talk about it sensibly now whereas fifty years ago we couldn’t ask that question. So I’m hopeful, but it’s a hope based on optimism, not an experimental basis, yet. Experimentally I think it’s all about the Large Hadron Collider, that’s no secret. We don’t know what it’s going to tell us. One of the things about physics experiments is that we don’t know what the answers are ahead of time. But we’re looking into a space which is unknown, which we haven’t looked at before, so the chances are we’re going to find something surprising.

For you physics nerds that just can’t get enough space-time continuum jabber, we recommend Sean’s one-hour TED Talk lecture at the University of Sydney on nature of time, the origin of entropy, and how what happened before the Big Bang might be responsible for the arrow of time we observe today. Part I and Part II.

Stephen Compson studied English and Physics at Pomona College. He writes fiction and screenplays and is currently working toward a Master of Fine Arts at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television.

~*Stephen Compson*~
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The Hubble Space Telescope is the world’s first observatory that actually orbits—you guessed it—through outer space. Over the last decade, Hubble has captured some of the deepest and most detailed images of our universe. All those recent headlines about exoplanets: those discoveries come from Hubble. Scientists viewing pictures of light projected from stars over 13 billion years ago (almost at the origin of the universe): that’s Hubble, too. Hubble 3D documents the 2009 mission by the crew of the Shuttle Atlantis to make vital repairs to one of mankind’s most expensive, and significant, science projects. There would be no second chances. If the mission had failed, Hubble would be just another piece of junk orbiting above the earth, like my Direct TV satellite and Elvis’s body. The tension is real, the suspense extraordinary, and the imagery? Out of this world. And fortunately for terrestrial audiences, the entire mission was captured by the crew and director Toni Myers on some of the most breathtaking, brave film ever recorded. We are proud to make Hubble 3D an official ScriptPhD.com Editor’s Selection.

REVIEW: Hubble 3D
ScriptPhD Grade: A+ (Editor’s Selection)

How’s this for high stakes movie drama: NASA Mission specialist Mike Massimino, who was involved in the two previous missions making repairs and upgrades to the Hubble, a six foot three comedian who somehow conned NASA into putting him into orbit multiple times, squeezes inside the confined space of a delicate and incredibly expensive apparatus that was never intended to be modified once put into orbit. He has to access a circuit board behind 173 screws, which he must attempt to delicately handle in a space suit. If he bumps into something or a screw floats free it will put the whole telescope out of commission. To add extra danger to the mission, he’s handling sharp electronics which could tear his gloves, exposing him to extreme outer space conditions, and kill him.

The astronauts are the highlight of the film, as they provide a human element to this story in the stars. One thing Hubble 3D does very well is give the audience as close to an authentic experience as possible of space travel, which includes watching the astronauts make burritos in zero gravity, or hearing them talk about scratching your face before you put your helmet on because you won’t be able to touch it once you’ve suited up. But where the film really shines is through its spectacular 3D flythroughs of the births and deaths of stars, the super massive black hole at the heart of the Virgo cluster, and a cloud of newly forming galaxies. Take a look at some of the breathtaking cosmos imagery bestowed to scientists by the Hubble telescope:

Director Toni Myers is a titan in the IMAX world. She’s worked in the format since its invention in the 1960s, and if you’ve ever seen an IMAX title having anything to do with nature or science, chances are she directed it. For the incredible flythrough sequences, she worked in collaboration with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore to produce the footage, then compiled them into a narrative with the supercomputer at the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. But let’s be crystal clear: none of the cosmos imagery is second-rate computer simulation; it’s all compiled from real data taken by the Hubble telescope.

There were other unique challenges in the making of this film. Myers couldn’t exactly send Director of Photography James Neihouse into space on the Atlantis, so they had to train the astronauts in the IMAX camera’s use. The Atlantis only had room for eight minutes of film capture, so they couldn’t afford to waste a single shot with bad focus or poor lighting conditions. If you’ve never witnessed a shuttle launch in person, Hubble 3D offers the next best thing with some truly visceral footage. Myers and Niehouse buried their 2 million dollar camera in a bunker of sand bags only 57 meters away from the launch site. The results are, as Massimino puts it, the closest most of us will get (and probably would ever want to get) to the actual feeling of a launch.

Leonardo Dicaprio’s narration is breathy and at times a bit hammy, but it’s hard to imagine a narrator who could do justice to the unbelievable scale of these images. Seeing the stars like this is a sublimely humbling experience. When the final images of the universe faded and the lights came up, many people around me (including ScriptPhD Editor Jovana Grbi?) were crying. If it sounds like I’m describing this movie as some sort of religious experience, well, you should just go see it for yourselves. Hubble 3D provides a captivating look at the fruits of one of mankind’s greatest scientific achievements.

Exclusive ScriptPhD.com Q&A with NASA’s Mike Massimino and Director Toni Myers

Mike Massimino is big for an astronaut, an attribute that made me nervous watching him crawl into the world’s most expensive telescope. But he’s also quite funny. Someone asked if he had any concerns about the film and he quipped: “Having to see my nose in 3-D.” He was also ecstatic about the film’s release because it was a rare opportunity to get his teenage daughters excited about something, not that their dad was an important astronaut on an important mission, or even that he’s in a movie, but that his name would be narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Toni Myers has trained over 120 astronauts and cosmonauts in the art of IMAX photography. She directed the award-winning Space Station 3D along with many other space and nature-related IMAX pictures. After sending one of the most expensive cameras ever made into space, she had to wait an ulcer-inducing four weeks before the footage was rendered to see what the astronauts had actually filmed.

ScriptPhD.com joined a roundtable discussion with this pair to talk about the making of the film, the challenges of shooting in space, and the future of the American manned spaceflight program.

You were talking about how the night cycle offers this incredible view of the stars, and I wondered why we didn’t see more of that footage during the film?

Toni Myers: I can answer that- it has to do with shooting in IMAX–

Mike Massimino: You’d better. I just set the thing on auto and pressed the red button.

TM: -IMAX film is a 65 mm negative, so it just can’t capture stars during the night. If one of your prime shots happens during the dark you really can’t see it in IMAX. It’s

the equivalent of ASA 250 depending on how you rate it, it just won’t capture those wonderful images crews always talk about like lightning storms or aurorae.

Mike, how would you describe seeing the stars during a night pass?

MM: You know, when you first get to space you immediately run to the window and see that view during the day, and I remember my first flight I’d always be at the window during the day cycle and go ‘Ah, it’s dark, I’m gonna go downstairs’ until I decided to hang out at the window for a night pass, and I actually enjoyed the night passes as much or more as the day passes.

During the day it’s bright out, you can see the oceans and the clouds very clearly, when you go at night all of a sudden it’s like this magical time. You can see the line [of the approaching day pass]. And the stars, they don’t twinkle because they’re not coming through the atmosphere. They’re just these perfect points of light. You can see the gas from the milky way, you can see the Magellenic clouds, and all of the constellations like you’ve never seen before. It’s the greatest planetarium in the world. And you can also still make out the earth, sort of. Where the sky meets the earth there’s like this greenish bluish color where the sky meets the earth. And when you come over a city you can see the lights, kind of like when you’re on a plane, you see these clumps of light around cities. There was a lot of storm activity when we were flying over Australia at night time and you could see those thunderstorms light up the clouds from above. And you’re above it, you don’t see anything else, just the gases coming up from the clouds, it’s almost like it’s communicating-

TM: -It’s propagating.

MM: It’s almost like you’re spying on people. You’re flying over Europe or something, and you can see where people are living. You can see their light. You go over Africa and it’s pretty dark, maybe a few places with light. Japan is really cool because it’s all lit up and then you get those rings of light all around it, which I think are the fishing boats offshore. Then you come over the United States and it’s like a Christmas tree. The west coast is really lit up, you’ve got a lot of action up in the Chicago area, and up in the Eastern seaboard, man it’s just unbelievable. The signs of civilization over the US compared to the rest of the world are just incredible. You look down at Miami, and then there’s like a black-out in Cuba. They didn’t pay their electricity bill or something.

I had a question about the take-off. I was blown away, literally. How close are the cameras for that and are they destroyed?

TM: They are not sacrificial cameras, I wouldn’t have a job if I was destroying a couple million dollar cameras. They’re both in blast boxes, which are very protected and the one was actually on the pad looking up, 57 meters from the base of the shuttle. The box is literally drilled into the pad. It’s a hardwire start that NASA activates, and you have to time it before the launch so you have a handle on the shot before you get a bunch of dust in your face. And there are ¾ in. ports that the lenses look through, and we covered the whole thing in sand bags the day before so it looks like some kind of creature there. And we had a second one on top of the rotating structure above the shuttle. We had not actually done that position before and we knew there was gonna be significant motion in waves around it, but both came out really well.

MM: I was watching the movie for the first time with my wife in Washington, and I first thought my wife’s seat was shaking because of the sound from the movie during the launch, and then we realized it was me that was shaking. It really allowed me to relive this whole experience and allows me to share this experience with other people who weren’t there.

TM: I was shooting Space Station 3D and a rock went right through the ¾ in. glass on one of my cameras, and I thought, well, I’m spending the rest of my life in Kazakhstan, I can’t go home. But James [Niehaus] fortunately had put a neutral density filter in front of the lens in the camera and the rock hit the filter and just dropped, didn’t damage the camera, and as a result we had this 3D shot of debris coming towards the camera and shattering the glass, and when people watched that at the IMAX, many of them actually take their 3D glasses off and looked to see if they had shattered.

It’s not looking very good for our manned spaceflight program right now in this country, do you think people will look at this film and think maybe we’re making a mistake?

TM: I’d love to just say I think it’s a mistake and I certainly said so in this film. If we intend to go anywhere we need these skills, and at least a human and robotic partnership just like the space station. I think people need to understand that if you go back to the moon or especially if you go to Mars you’ve got to build some kind of infrastructure there and the things that crews have learned in the process of building a space station on orbit and how to live there on a permanent basis are everything you need for our future off the planet. I think we’ll look back and see this as just a minor little blip, if it is a blip. The Chinese will say they’re going to the moon tomorrow and everything will speed up.

MM: I think the movie does show people what we’ve been able to do with the shuttle here, and Toni mentioned the space station which was built by shuttle crews. I’m optimistic, I don’t think you’re gonna be able to kill the space program. Certainly throughout the world, we have a lot of partnerships with other countries , for example the Russians, who are our partners– we’re going to be using their space ships.

The shuttle program is ending, by the end of the year most likely we’ll be done, so you have to have something else. Going around the country with the support that we have from all the taxpayers who are paying for this thing and from politicians on both sides of the aisle, and from the president as well, I do not think that we’re going to accept not being a part of the international space community, and I mean sending people, not just the probes.

I think in America we see ourselves as explorers and enjoy being right in the heat of it. We’re not going to let other countries beat us, so I think we’re going to continue to send people into space and I think we’re going to want to have our own spaceships here to do that as a back up to the other countries. I think we’re going to have something, whether it’s going to be commercially developed, some kind of joint venture with NASA, will it take astronauts plus tourists, I don’t know how all that’s gonna be worked out, but I am convinced that we’re not gonna stop.

Why do you think it’s so important to send people into space?

MM: I need a job and I got these two kids going to college…No, in some ways it’s hard to justify, although Hubble 3D shows that we can do practical things, when Hubble breaks we can send people up there to fix it. When the bolt was stuck on the handle I was able to rip it off. We’re able to adapt and do things that you wouldn’t be able to do without a person on the spot. We’re all people here on this earth, we want to experience things first hand. Unfortunately not everybody can go there, but I think as a species we like to send at least some representatives out there to explore and see what’s going on so we can experience it as people. There’s no way that that argument can hold in any kind of budget discussion where it’s up against what the taxpayers can afford, but from just a human point of view I think that’s what’s going to keep us going in the end. We don’t want to just send a probe and take pictures, we want to have people see what it’s like to actually see a new world and describe what it’s like.

TM: To add one coda to that, I recently listened to former astronaut Mike Collins speak at the fortieth anniversary of the moon, which was a little more urgent, and what he said was that maybe we’re going to have to expand outward from this planet in the coming century because of a population explosion. There are very practical reasons. Think of how we look back at Galileo 500 years ago, I bet 500 years from now we will look back having established habitats elsewhere.

By the way, you can follow Mike Massimino on Twitter. He sent the historic first tweet from space during the Hubble repair mission.

Hubble IMAX 3D goes into limited IMAX release on March 19, 2010 and is in theaters nationwide in August.

View trailer:

Stephen Compson studied English and Physics at Pomona College. He writes fiction and screenplays and is currently working toward a Master of Fine Arts at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television.

~*Stephen Compson*~
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It’s not often that world-renowned scientists crash in the heart of Hollywood to talk about Nobel Prize-winning physics research. But on a recent summer night, the ScriptPhD, along with a handful of lucky astronomy aficionados, was treated to a light show with a side of general relativity. At LA’s famed Laserium CyberTheatre, Yale physicist Charles Baltay, also known as the man responsible for Pluto’s demise, captivated a delighted audience with about 10 billion years of physics, starting from the Big Bang to Pluto’s demise. Continuing the physics theme was a visually stunning array of laser pyrotechnics set to the thematically appropriate tune of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” For Dr. Baltay’s lecture, entitled “Exploring the Dark Side of the Universe”, and the psychedelic imagery of the world’s most advanced laser light show, please “continue reading” under the jump.

Ivan Dryer, Pioneer of the Modern Laser Light Show

The evening’s festivities were graciously hosted and introduced by Ivan Dryer, founder of the Laserium and a Los Angeles legend in the world of entertainment technology. Mr. Dryer is generally considered to be the father of commercial laser light shows. Starting out as a filmmaker in the 1970s, Dryer transitioned movie lasers used primarily for film effects into a show at the Los Angeles Griffith Observatory under the name “Laserium”. Laserium shows went on to be played in 46 cities worldwide, and were viewed by over 20 million people, eventually gaining recognition as the longest running theatrical attraction in the history of Los Angeles. “I had no idea how popular this would be,” Dryer said. “It was supposed to be temporary and wound up as a career. As many as 20 million people have leaned back and watched the sky light up to music.” What made that experience so popular? Dryer thinks it’s something about the fundamental appeal of light: “The quality of that light triggers something in the brain, I think. It gets into the limbic system” — the central neurological structure where the passions reside — “and stirs things up. The light and the music trigger our deepest emotions.” The light and the music continue at the Laserium’s permanent new cybertheater in Hollywood. Anyone who goes from being an aspiring young astronomer to an aspiring young filmmaker gets the ScriptPhD.com seal of approval!

And speaking of astronomers, the audience was treated to a lecture by world-renowned cosmologist (and the man responsible for the astronomical demotion of Pluto), Dr. Charles Baltay. Dr. Baltay, a Higgins Professor of physics and astronomy at Yale University, was born in Hungary and raised in Bavaria shortly after World War II. After relocating to the States, Dr. Baltay received a physics PhD from Yale and taught at Columbia University. What follows is a rare lecture that makes esoteric physics and astronomy approachable and enjoyable to non-scientists and scientists alike, while deftly explaining the sophisticated cutting-edge frontier of the expanding cosmos.

Lecture: Exploring the Dark Side of the Universe with Dr. Charles Baltay

I’ll be talking about the dark side of the universe, but by this I don’t mean Washington politics or the CIA. I’ll be talking about something called cosmology.

So this is our view of the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe. The first question is the structure. At small scales, the Earth is going around the Sun, the Moon around the Earth, there’s a lot of lumpiness, but when we look at the large scale, it’s very smooth and uniform. The next question is evolution—again, lots of irregular motion at small scales, and at the large scales, it’s pretty much the same as it’s been. Many of you might recognize this picture as The Big Dipper. It’s looked the same to the Greeks, to the Arabs, since recorded history, so our view was that the Universe was really not changing. It’s forever.

The questions we ask in cosmology are: is the Universe really static or is it evolving in some way? What is the age of the Universe? Is it infinite? Is there even a meaning to the age (if it’s forever then there’s no age)? What is the future development of the universe? What is the “stuff” that the Universe is made of?

Let me start by giving you the present view of the Universe. We believe that the Universe is not static but in a state of uniform expansion as an aftermath of the big explosion. This we call the Big Bang model.

We believe that we cannot see most of the “stuff” in the Universe. The picture above of the stars and galaxies is what we call “visible matter”. It turns out that visible matter comprises 1% of the stuff out there. Most of it is dark matter and dark energy, stuff we cannot see and that we don’t know very much about. And we believe that on the largest scales, the universe is very smooth and uniform. We believe that there is such a thing as an age, the time since the Big Bang. And we believe that to be 10-20 billion years. Some people say 13.2 billion [as in photo above], which may or may not be right, but that is a theory.

We don’t know the future of the Universe. It may keep expanding forever, like a big chill, or it may recollapse. Which will happen will depend on the amount and nature of this dark matter and dark energy. Right now we really cannot predict the future until we learn more about these properties. So this is a quick summary and you can now go to sleep for the rest of the lecture. [ScriptPhD note: we highly discourage this. It gets even better!]

To fill in a few details: how do we know all of this stuff? It doesn’t come from religious books, it’s not voodoo science. It started with a guy called Edwin Hubble who invented Hubble’s law. What he noticed is that distant stars and galaxies are moving away from us. The further something is, the faster it’s pushing away. That’s Hubble’s Law in a nutshell: the recession velocity is some constant times the distance. The point here is that the further away things are, the faster they’re rushing away from us.

Now how does he know this? And the key idea here is something called the Doppler Effect. Light is a wave is a wavelength. And the wavelength determines the color. So blue is about 4,000 Angstroms, green is 5,000 and red is about 7,000 [see animated chart above.] The numbers here don’t matter. The longer the wavelengths look like red to your eye, the shorter wavelengths look bluish. We’ve all experienced the Doppler Effect. You’re on one of your beautiful freeways, if a car coming the other way blows their horn, you hear a high pitch and then as they pass it falls to a lower pitch, have you noticed this? [Note: to hear the Doppler Effect, click on the link below.]

Doppler Effect Car Horn

The higher pitch is the shorter wavelength, then they pass you and they’re moving away from you, you get a lower pitch or a longer wavelength. So if the source is approaching the observer, you get shorter wavelengths, meaning towards the blue, so it’s called the Blue Shift. If something is moving away from you, then the pitch drops, you get longer wavelengths, which are redder, so it’s called the Red Shift. This is the whole clue to this [universe moving away faster] business. Measuring the red shift tells you the velocity that’s moving away from you. But how do you measure the red shift?

This picture is called a wavelength spectrum. This is a numerical representation of the wavelength of light coming from a distant star. And you notice certain items give you certain colors, like neon is a bluish color, and sodium lights a yellowish. Each of those colors show up as a line [represented by a specific wavelength]. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this top pattern is the same as that bottom pattern, but it’s displaced in wavelength [because it’s coming from a more distant star]. That’s how we measure the red shift. However much the wavelength is displaced, this tells you the red shift, which tells you the velocity. So what you do is look at a lot of distant stars in the galaxy, which is what Hubble did, measure their red shift from pictures like this, and figure out that the further away something is, the more rapidly it’s moving away.

Why does that mean an expanding universe? Suppose you go to a marathon in your city of choice and as usual you are late to things. So you arrive late and by the time you get there, you see that Sue the leader is 16 miles from the starting line. And she is running at 8 miles per hour. Joe is running at 4 miles per hour, so he only got 8 miles from the starting line. And some loser is only doing 2 miles per hour, so he only got 4 miles away. So if you all start at the same point, the faster you run, the further you get away. And that’s exactly Hubble’s Law [as relates to Universe expansion.] To put it another way: the further something is, the faster it’s running away from us. So that’s all there is to it. Very simple.

Suppose I come late to the marathon and I say to someone, “How long has this race been going on?” [the equivalent being, how old is the universe?] It doesn’t take an astronomer to say, 2 hours. If Sue is running at 8 miles per hour, she’s 16 miles from the beginning, the race has been going on 2 hours. So that’s the age of the Universe. All you have to do is measure how fast the galaxy is running away from us and how far the distance is, and you get the time. So the age of the Universe is the distance to some star divided by its velocity. But we make one big assumption here. That they’re running at a constant velocity. Suppose that Sue was really running faster, but is now getting tired.

So that brings up the next big question: is the expansion velocity of the Universe a constant or not? And you say that the answer is simple, because there is stuff in the Universe, like magnets, people, worms, stuff, gravity is attracted, so if the thing is expanding, gravitational attraction has slowed down the expansion. So we would expect the expansion of the Universe to slow down, to decelerate. And the rate of the deceleration tells you how much stuff there is. The more stuff, the more gravity, the more it slows down. But how do we measure these things? How can you measure what the velocity was in the past, say a billion years ago? If we are looking from Earth at a supernova (that’s an exploding star in the Universe), and let’s say that it was 10²² kilometers away. It takes light 3 billion years to get from the supernova to the Earth. So the light that we see today was really emitted 3 billion years ago. And the properties of that light tell us about the Universe as it was 3 billion years ago, and in particular, the red shift of that light tells you about the extension velocity of the light in the past. By looking at supernovas at different distances, you are indirectly measuring the expansion velocity of the Universe. Distance translates to time in the past, because light travels with finite velocity.

Scientists did this experiment and there was a huge surprise: the expansion velocity was smaller in the past and is bigger now. The Universe is accelerating! It has no business doing that. It cannot possibly do that [based on all the points discussed above]. All the laws of physics, and everything we know say that this cannot be. So this study came from guys at Harvard, so we didn’t believe them, but then people from Berkeley replicated the experiment and we now have to believe it. This is a strange state of affairs. All of the stuff in the Universe attracts gravity, and cannot cause it to accelerate. Scientists are not very smart and savvy, but we’re smart enough not to call the New York Times and say, “We just spent umpteen million dollars and we don’t know what the hell is going on.” So instead, we call the New York Times and say, “We discovered dark energy. What’s dark energy? We have no idea.” But dark energy is something that has to be pausing gravity. So we hypothesized dark energy is pushing the Universe apart and it’s qualitatively different from anything we think about, and it’s dark because we don’t see it. This is kind of where we are currently in this research field.

So we all recognize Albert Einstein, who came up with the Theory of General Relativity. And when you do the calculations and you put everything together, you come to this very startling conclusion: that the visible stuff in the Universe is 1%, and dark matter and dark energy are 99%. So all our physics books, the books in the Library of Congress are, but alas, 1% of the Universe. The rest [of the matter], we know almost nothing about. So the question is, how do we learn more about the age, the history and the future of the Universe? One thing we would like to do is look further back in cosmic time. The experiments we’ve done up until now have only gone back a short time, maybe 1 or 2 billion years. We would like to go back maybe 10 billion years to trace out this expansion velocity. Going back to our earlier example, I see Sue running the Boston Marathon, and I’d like to trace out her velocity from the beginning of the race. If I know that, I can reconstruct the exact age and predict the future. So going back further in time, long ago, means further away, because that is the direction the light is coming. Far away means these supernovas are very faint, so you have to go to space to look for them.

We have proposed a space mission [the SuperNova Acceleration Probe as part of the Joint Dark Energy Mission] to look for these supernovas to take us back further in time. On the other hand, you also need a sample of nearby supernovas to compare [them], and that we have to do from the ground, because they’re relatively bright since they’re close-by, but they are very rare. The ground experiments will give us the baseline supernovas and that is the Palomar Quest Survey which is underway at the Palomar Observatory not far from Los Angeles as a collaboration between our group at Yale and a group at the California Institute of Technology. The SNAP space mission [link above] is a proposal with about ten universities collaborating, and we’ll eventually have to launch one of these Delta-4 rockets in the future [view conceptualized animations of the project and space projections here].

Here is a picture of the Schmidt Telescope that we are using at Palomar and a sample of some of the types of pictures that we are getting, such as the Andromeda Galaxy. But how do we find these supernova explosions? These are exploding stars, they take about two weeks to get to their peak brightness, and they take about six weeks to fade away. So we take one picture and compare it to a picture taken a month before, and then subtract the images to determine the supernova strength [see graphic in supernova picture above]. We have one big nuisance. And that is that in some of the images, you see an object moving over, and circling between the stars. That’s not a supernova explosion, it’s something that’s moving down the solar system. So within the background of the supernova search, are there other planets within our own solar system?

Back in the 1930’s, before computers, this guy named Dr. Clyde Tombaugh looked for 30 years by eye on photographs to find Pluto. And we’ve now started finding more planets, at least six to date, some that are bigger than Pluto:

Because of these discoveries, we now believe that the solar system is probably twice as big as we used to think. So this upset people quite a lot and they said, “Either we call these guys planets, or we demote Pluto.” So that’s what happened. We have blood on our hands. Actually, what really happened is that everybody gets to be called a planet, with five inner planets, two giant planets, and four outer planets. And maybe we will find a few more [during the course of the Palomar survey]!

Question and Answer with Dr. Charles Baltay:

How often do you get lucky enough to witness a world-famous physicist answering questions and explaining high-order physics in every day layman’s terms? Not often. Following is the transcript of Dr. Baltay’s post-lecture question and answer session, during which his natural wit often shined through.

How is your work going to address dark energy and dark matter?

Charles Baltay: The approach we have now is to trace out the history of the expansion. And from that we can deduce how much dark energy there is. Of course, a more complete answer would be: take Einstein’s formulas of general relativity and… it gets complicated. But the basic idea is that the expansion history will tell you about the dark energy.

What got Pluto “declassified” when there are other planets that are much smaller?

CB: Well, declassified may not be the right word. It was reclassified as a minor planet, to make the distinction between the giant planets and the minor planets. So it’s an International Astronomical Union, and they spend their days arguing and this is what they came up with.

How do you determine the distance of the planets and supernovas you study?

CB: With great difficulty. Measuring distance is a big problem; that’s a hard thing to do. The reason I keep emphasizing supernovas—there are certain classes of supernovas that we know how bright they are intrinsically. So from the apparent brightness [of those standards] we can judge the brightness. It’s like a car headlight, if you knew how bright it was up close, then you see it from a distance, you could say the light passed off is 1/r², from the intensity deduce the brightness [and ergo the distance]. And that’s why we pick out supernovas of all the possible things we could look at.

[ScriptPhD note: You must imagine the sassy molassy British girl asking this question—it’s so much more fun!] We know that there’s these lumps of rocks circling the sun. Why does it matter what we call them and is it really a good use of grown men’s time to argue about it?

CB: Well the International Astronomical Union has to have something to argue about. It’s a disappointing thing to argue about. You’re right—there are planets, there are asteroids, there are comets. So they are all things that go around the sun. So people like to classify. Biologists say that there are plants with three leaves on the end, versus five leaves on the end, and they give them names. So that’s what people do.

Sassy Molassy: It’s kind of an old-fashioned way to go about science, isn’t it?

CB: Well, yes. I don’t particularly find it exciting, but that’s my sole resistance to energy balance, whether we have 9 or 10 planets. Who cares?

Are you familiar with Stephen Hawking’s theory that there are singularities that are infinitely large and infinitely small? [Read about the Penrose-Hawking Singularity Theorems here.] And if so, do you believe that that might be an explanation for why there is spin and not just Big Bang thrust?

CB: Well, from what I understand about those theories, none of them encompass repulsive gravity. So dark energy is really different from anything that anyone’s talked about, in that it has repulsive gravity, and that’s what pushes the universe apart. So none of those weird things that people talk about—worm holes and singularities—none of those explain dark energy. We’re looking at something really quite new.

How does dark energy compare with the other forces, like gravity or electromagnetism?

CB: If I knew I’d publish immediately! We just don’t know.

Is there some correlation between the dark energy that you’re talking about and Einstein’s Cosmological Constant which predicts an expansion of the universe based on its properties of space?

CB: Yes. You’ve been reading books, obviously. OK, so let me mention a bit of history. Einstein wrote down his equation [E = mc²] in 1916, without a cosmological constant. He realized that that’s inconsistent with a static universe. In a sense, I can’t take this jacket hanging on this chair and leave it in the air. Gravity will make it fall down. So Einstein, revolutionary as his thinking was, firmly believed that the universe is static. This was before Hubble’s constant. So he said, “How can I fix up my equation?”, he put in this extra term, he called it his cosmological constant, which canceled out the gravitational attraction, and to him it was just an extra term. Then in 1930 Hubble said, “The universe is not static,” and Einstein said, “Oh, the cosmological constant is the biggest blunder of my career.” Now, I don’t know what he meant by that, because it couldn’t be one thing. Maybe what he meant was, “Had I stuck to my guns, and said the Universe cannot be static, I could have become famous!” [laughter] So from 1930 until just a few years ago, everyone used the cosmological constant. It was something that Einstein used to catch up his theory to be consistent with the semi-state universe. But we discovered that the universe is accelerating, maybe the cosmological constant is doing it. So that’s one candidate for dark energy.

Since waves tend to travel through mediums, is dark matter the medium by which light travels through?

CB: No. But how do I know that? I don’t think it is. We don’t know what dark matter and dark energy are. So it’s just the beginning of the story.

Are the experiments you talked about the only experiments happening on dark matter and dark energy?

CB: No. There are at least three or four more experiments being planned by various other techniques. It’s sort of a hot topic. It’s now the holy grail of cosmology. So a lot of people are doing it with different things. Of course we have the best design, but…

Can dark matter exist in a black hole, do you think?

CB: I don’t know. As I said, if I knew I’d publish.

Is there a number associated with Hubble’s Constant, just like pi?

CB: There is a number. It is hotly debated but the general values are described here. It’s not a number like pi, that’s a geometrical number. It’s a number that we have to measure.

What can your space telescope see that the Hubble cannot?

CB: The answer is the following. It’s called field of view. When you pick up a pair of binoculars, sometimes it has a very narrow field of view. And sometimes a big field of view. If you’re trying to find many, many supernovas, you want a wide field of view. The Hubble has a very narrow field of view. So we have to do something better than the Hubble. I’m being very modest today.

Now that we’ve discovered another [planet in the] Zodiac, how does that work with the horoscope? If you were a Leo, are you now a Virgo? [laughter]

CB: That’s beyond my pay scale.

Lights and Lasers and Pink Floyd, Oh My!

The highlight ending of this otherworldly evening was an hour-long bravura of luminescence to the soundtrack of “Dark Side of the Moon” by Pink Floyd. For those that have never experienced a show at this magnificent hidden Hollywood gem, it is, according to People Magazine, “the closest thing to tripping out in inner space.” Check out just a slice of the experience in pictures:

Our complete photographic collection from the show can be found as an extra feature on our Facebook fan page. Please credit all photography to ScriptPhD.com.

It would probably take extraordinary measures to travel far enough to see a distant supernova or nascent planetary body, but if you should find yourself in Los Angeles (or have been living here all your life) and want an exciting, explosive audiovisual scientific excursion, go to the Laserium’s permanent home in the heart of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Great science amidst the global capital of entertainment… it doesn’t get better than that!

~*ScriptPhD*~

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Review:  Star Trek

ScriptPhD Grade:  A

Still sitting atop the box office a couple of weeks after its release, the new addition to the Star Trek franchise is, quite simply, sensational.  J.J. Abrams’s stunning visual pyrotechnics in the first ten minutes are worth the price of admission alone.  The 11th film in the Star Trek movie series, arguably one of its best, goes back to the beginning to recreate the narrative of James Kirk and Spock.  As the film opens, the USS Kelvin is under attack by Captain Nero, of the Romulan mining ship Narada.  Only able to save his pregnant wife, acting Captain George Kirk is able to witness the birth of his son, James T. Kirk, before the Kelvin is destroyed.  The action picks back up as Kirk, having grown up to be the cocky daredevil that we all know and love, is urged by Captain Christopher Pike to channel his recklessness and arrogance towards joining the Starfleet Academy.  On the way to the USS Enterprise, he meets some familiar friends, Commander Spock, whose own childhood is chronicled early in the film, and Leonard McCoy.  During Kirk’s first moments on the Enterprise, an attack similar to the one that killed his father occurs, and in trying to warn Pike and the rest of the crew that it might be a Romulan ambush, he is kicked off the ship to the desolate Siberia-like Delta Vega for mutiny.  There, in the movie’s best moments, he meets an aged Spock Prime (portrayed by Leonard Nimoy), who relays events of the future to him.  In the year 2387, a particularly strong supernova threatens the entire galaxy.  Ambassador Spock is sent aboard the Jellyfish to inject a “red matter” with unstable gravitational properties into the star, thereby creating an artificial black hole to devour the supernova.  But he didn’t do it in time, and the planet Romulus was devoured instead, along with both ships, which travel into the past.  Nero arrives 154 years earlier, when he destroys the Kelvin helmed by Kirk’s father, and Spock arrives 25 years later and is marooned by Nero on the Delta Vega, a witness to the destruction of his own planet with the very same red matter.  Spock Prime convinces Kirk that he must become the Captain of the Enterprise.  They meet Montgomery Scott (always a welcome source of humor relief) at a Starfleet outpost and beam back up to the Enterprise.  Aided by Pavel Checkov, Scotty, Spock, Bones, Mr. Sulu, and Uhura, Kirk sets of on a dangerous and exciting mission to stop Nero, save the captured Captain Pike, and save the entire galaxy.  All in a day’s work!

What worked best about the movie was its updated cast, it’s wink-wink-nudge-nudge nod to little bits of the original series, and the movie’s overall approachability.  Perfectly cast, its two leads, Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, sizzle with chemistry and add a fresh facelift to beloved characters of sci-fi lore.  They channel this chemistry well Of particular note was Quinto’s lone scene with Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock.  When they stood side-by-side, giving each other the Vulcan salute, I’ll admit, my nerdy little sci-fi heart melted.  Also noteworthy were Karl Urban as Bones, a hilarious Simon Pegg as Scotty, and Eric Bana who does what he can with Nero (who is a little too one-dimensionally eeeeeeeeeeevil for my taste). It’s hard for anyone to find disappointment with this movie.  There are so many wonderful “insider” Trekkie moments to the new Star Trek, with references to Treks of the past, that older fans will not feel ignored.  By the same token, by rebooting the story of Kirk and Spock’s original friendship and retelling the story of how Kirk came to be the Captain of the Enterprise, those fans who haven’t necessarily watched the series or the movies (*whistles innocently to deflect attention*) will still be able to follow the action anew.

Thanks to some first-class big-screen magic, a sleek, snazzy tricked out Enterprise set, and all the bells and whistles modern CGI can buy, I’d say the Trek franchise will live long and prosper for quite some time to come!

The Science:
I’m not here to nitpick about every little detail from the movie, like, ohhhhh, DRILLING INTO A PLANET and the considerable power it would take beyond Captain Nero’s big, bad drill.  Or that quantum teleportation, at the very basis of “beam me up Scotty”, has been accomplished only on the modest scale of atoms or light beams.  But I digress.  Instead, here are a couple of Big Items to mull over as you’re watching or re-watching the movie.

Black Hole Sun, Won’t You Come…
Let’s talk about black holes for a moment, since they get a lot of play in the Star Trek movie.  A black hole is a region of space with such a powerful gravitational field that nothing, even light can escape the pull.  That is why it is called black—it absorbs all light but emits none.  At the center of a black hole is a concentrated point called a singularity surrounded by a spherical boundary called an event horizon.  If crossed, this boundary will lead all matter and light inevitably towards the singularity.  How are they created?  Well, there’s three types of black holes.  Black holes at the center of galaxies are called supermassive black holes, because they are just that—supermassive, usually on the order of 10^5 to 10^10 solar masses.  Then you have an intermediate black hole, which is on a smaller scale than supermassive black holes, but whose formation is still a mystery to physicists.  Lastly, and most common, are stellar black holes, created by the gravitational collapse of giant stars (at least 20 times more massive than the Sun) at the end of their lifetimes.  When a star runs out of nuclear fuel—its ability to balance the gravity with pressure—gravity wins out and the star, if its massive enough, explodes as a supernova. That is the core completely collapses under its own weight to a point with zero volume and infinite density (the singularity).  The velocity required to be able to break free from this point would require exceeding the speed of light.

Now having reviewed all of this, you don’t have to be Einstein to know that getting really close to black holes—bad.  Getting trapped inside one—VERY bad.  But they don’t suck things in.  Unless you are closer than twice the diameter of the black hole, the gravitational pull is no different than anywhere else in the Universe.  Each black hole has an event horizon, a mathematical demarcation of the space-time continuum, the region from which no escape is possible.  Cross the horizon, and you are trapped, stay out of the horizon, and you are safe.  In fact, if our own Sun were to theoretically go supernova and collapse into a black hole, the Earth would not suddenly be sucked in like a Hoover, since that black hole would only be about 3 km in diameter, proportional to its mass and the radius of its event horizon.  You would have to have a very massive star or planet—definitely something bigger than Vulcan or Romulus—to create a black hole with a large enough horizon to be able to pose a danger to ships and other planets far away.  And even then, it wouldn’t be able to reach across outer space to go get them.

Escape from a black hole.  It sounds like a bad 1960’s Sci-Fi movie.  And bad science.
In the movie, the black hole that envelops Romulus spits out Spock and Nero’s ships into the past.  This is just not possible.  Assuming that the ships made contact with the supernova’s event horizon, tidal gravitational forces would carry you to the black hole’s singularity in a matter of seconds.  And since the concentration of mass per radius of a black hole is condensed such that the escape velocity—the speed with which you’d need to move to escape the gravitational pull of that object—is greater than the speed of light, nothing gets out.  The ships wouldn’t even escape as minced meat; they just wouldn’t escape.

Later in the movie, as the Enterprise is about to escape to safety from the final black hole battle, the black hole’s event horizon threatens to suck the ship in, Scotty suggests ejecting the warp core and blowing it up near the black hole, thus creating enough momentum to thrust to push the ship away.  Drop a bomb here on Earth, and the force of the explosion creates a shock wave as the exothermic reaction of the explosion travels through a chemically unstable medium, such as air (lots of oxygen, nitrogen, methane, etc.).  We’ve all seen the videos of how far away a nuclear detonation can have this effect.  The problem is, there’s no AIR in space.  The force of the explosion would just create massive amounts of electromagnetic radiation.  And even if we were to swallow this oopsie, once again, the escape velocity of an event horizon is equal to the speed of light, which the Enterprise would have to outgun.  So we would have to make some assumptions, like relativity and quantum theory being wrong, to breathe a sigh of relief at this miraculous escape.  J.J., bubbeleh, you’re killing me!

Red Matter, It Matters!
All things being equal, the scientific low-light of the entire movie had to be the “red matter” resulting in the implosion of the planets Vulcan and Romulus.  The matter was created to possess certain gravitational properties, and was originally used for a good purpose, to stop the supernova threatening the Galaxy.  Without spoiling the movie for those that haven’t seen it, the matter, having reappeared in the hands of the evil Nero, is used to create a black hole that envelops the planet Vulcan.  Now I can predict what you’re thinking I’ll say next… “You can’t create a black hole!!!”  Well, actually, yes, you theoretically can.  And recently, researchers from the University of St. Andrews did… on a tabletop!  The researchers used the refractive index of a fiber optic as an analogue for a gravitational field.  They sent a pulse of light through that fiber optic that changed that refractive index, and then followed that up with a probe beam of light that could travel faster than the pulse, but because of the local altered field, couldn’t move past it.  Boom, theoretical black hole!  This experiment was prototypic at best, though, a model for a black hole using fiberoptic analogy.  But to create something powerful enough to collapse a planet, a galaxy, especially given what we’ve discussed about getting close to a black hole, he fact of the matter is…. you need matter.  And lots of it.  The size and diameter of a black hole is directly proportional to mass of the original collapsing star.  Something the size of a droplet of red matter would create a black hole smaller than the size of a pin, and since the event horizon is twice the diameter away…. OK, you guys are starting to get it.  So the idea that a mere soupcon of mysterious “red stuff” can create a black hole core with that kind of gravitational pull?  Well, that’s Hollywood.  Shiny, dazzling Hollywood, but Hollywood no less.

Interested in reading more about the science behind Star Trek?  Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss has written a fantastic book called “The Physics of Star Trek”.

All other things being equal, however, the movie itself had way too many shiny explosions, neat special effects, a decent script, and likeable, sexy cast portraying familiar characters to divert my attention away from J.J. Abrams’s brilliance or the tight production values.  Bottom line?  Worth seeing, and definitely reinvigorates the franchise.  And hey, it got us talking about physics, right?

But you don’t have to move at warp speed or dream big on a movie screen to see stunning examples of technology and engineering taking off to the cosmos or staying right here on Earth! Click “continue reading” for more details…

JPL Open House

A couple of weeks ago, the friendly NASA scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech University in Pasadena, CA opened their doors to the general public, as they do only once a year to show the behind-the-scenes secrets of their engineering wonders and sneak peeks of upcoming projects. JPL is one of NASA’s largest laboratories, with 21 spacecraft and nine instruments on active mission, all a part of NASA’s plan to explore the Earth, the Moon, Mars and beyond. The ScriptPhD waded knee-deep into Nerdvana to check it all out:

Rovers and Robots and Rockets, oh my!
One of the treats of JPL’s Open House each year is a look at the robotic critters that travel the limits of outer space, exploring planetary terrain, and giving us critical information about the makeup of our solar system.  Much of the groundwork for these prototypes happens at JPL.  A few of my personal favorites:

A full-size, full-scale model of the Phoenix Mars Lander, built at JPL, which fulfilled a five-month mission in the Martian northern plains to answer important questions about Martian life sustainability, the presence of water on Mars and how polar dynamics affects Martian climate.  The Mars Lander had some robotic “firsts” for outer space exploration:  an atomic force microscope for unprecedented views of Martian soil and a chemistry lab-in-a-box for instantaneous analysis of soil and water chemistry.

The Axel rover, a lithe new prototype capable of climbing vertical rocky terrain!

The ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra Terrestrial Explorer), a robust, rugged winnebago-like rover that will be responsible for carrying payload and habitat on top of (food, water, possible lodging) for exploration on the Moon.

High-Tech Gadgets, Low-Tech Assembly
The highlight of the trip was a look inside the belly of JPL’s Spacecraft Fabrication Facility, normally off-limits to the public, where the ittiest, bittiest components of rocket and spacecraft hardware get manufactured. I mean, sure we can all ooh and ahh at the Starship Enterprise, but someone has to put all those nuts and bolts together, right? Take a look…

All of this high-tech wizardry happens in a room that looks like your uncle Sid’s mechanics shop:

But don’t be fooled –the simplicity of this shop belies the complexity of the science involved. Each workstation (such as the one below) is comprised of highly specialized different machinery and computers to service the vast array of parts and components that make up a typical spacecraft or exploratory device.

For example, this little cone-shaped part is actually a part of a rocket’s engine brake propulsion system, and helps lower the rocket as the spool unwinds during landing.

The harmonic drive, a simple input/output gearing mechanism, was manufactured and used in NASA’s OPPORTUNITY and SPIRIT Mars rovers, with 19 harmonic gear units dispersed throughout the robot’s arms, gearing, steering system and drive mechanisms.

After assembly, all parts end up in the back room of the Fabrication Facility, which serves as the quality control and testing site, to make sure that each part is rocket-ready to withstand the temperature, pressure, terrain and other rigors of outer space. From there, they are shipped to various NASA assembly locations and then go boldly where no (hu)man has gone before!

Location, Location, Location!

Most impressive was the application of NASA-derived technology for the betterment and advancement of life right here on Earth.  In conjunction with NASA’s Innovative Partnerships Program, new technologies and capabilities specifically innovated for mission objectives end up with commercial uses in health and medicine, transportation, public safety and national security, environment, agriculture and computer uses.  In fact, quite a bit of technology that looked futuristic and high-tech savvy in early Star Trek episodes is now a quotidian reality (MRI scanners, cell phones, PHASRs used by the military, Bluetooth phone devices, etc.).  A few recent NASA breakthroughs include:

•Robotic joints specifically developed at the Goddard Space Flight Center were altered to support a horse’s weight with a special harness, and will revolutionize treatment for horses with leg injuries that would otherwise kill them.  The human versions of this technology are being applied to US military personnel rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
•The development of space suit technologies for making deep-sea diving suits capable of protecting divers called to work in extreme and dangerous conditions, such as high pressure, toxic chemical spills, and chemical warfare agents.
•Adaptation of the Mars rover Panoramic Mast Assemblies for Gigapan robotic platform for consumer cameras, allowing earthly photographers to take digital panoramas like never before.  As a photography, buff, the ScriptPhD approves!
•Design of a nanomesh by Seldon Technologies, Inc. for filtering impurities from drinking water was able to filter out >99% of viruses, bacteria, chemical contaminants, E. Coli and Salmonella.  And it does all of this at 5 gallons per minute without electricity, heat, chemicals, or environmental impact.  Viva la astronautica!
•As we talked about in our review of Caprica, virtualization technology, a sci-fi staple, is fast becoming a reality.  Technology developed for improving the telepresence of the Johnson Space Center’s Robonaut was used for high-end head-mounted virtual reality applications, including virtual surroundings, and movement sensors.  Somewhere out there, LeVar Burton is smiling!

To see more of these stunning examples of engineering applications, go HERE.

The coolest part of all?  Live-tweeting, of course!  What would 21st Century space travel be like if you couldn’t follow every step on Facebook and Twitter?  To follow the latest and greatest adventures of NASA scientists at JPL, friend them either @NASA or @NASAJPL!

Hubble Telescope Crew—20th Century Launch, 21st Century Fix
All of this Deep Space excitement, of course, culminated in this week’s completion of the last Hubble Telescope Service Mission. What’s all the Hubble hullabaloo about, anyway? 19 years ago, the Hubble was carried into space by the space shuttle Discovery in April of 1990 and positioned on the Earths upper atmosphere, allowing it to take images with little background light. Used by everyone from NASA engineers, academic physicists, mathematicians and astronomers, commercial companies and even amateur users, its gorgeous, iconic images and groundbreaking data have helped to redefine our view of the cosmos and awakened the vast possibilities of our universe. All Hubble data is transmitted to Earth twice daily via satellites in White Sands, New Mexico (is it just me or does everything happen in New Mexico?), eventually ending up at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Looking for archives of past Hubble data? They’re actually available to the public at the Space Telescope Science Institute archives. Four previous service missions have replaced, added and improved optics and camera equipment of the telescope, have allowed it to beam data streams to the Earth as they’re collected, and have performed various mechanical and instrumentation servicing. What will happen to the Hubble? Well, it was never meant to be a permanent fixture. In fact, it’s already outlasted its initial 15-year mission. Eventually, its orbit around the Earth will decay over time due to its position in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and it will likely re-enter the atmosphere. This will either happen via a guided re-entry via another shuttle mission, or as a controlled re-entry by the future addition of an external propulsion module.

The value of the scientific information that has been obtained via the Hubble has been, well, astronomical. In addition to one of its main contributions to the field of astronomy and physics, helping to estimate the rate at which the universe is expanding and the very age of our universe, the Hubble’s sharpness and depth in telescopic photography has provided seminal pictures of distant supernovae, black holes, existing planets and objects of the solar system, including the use of Ultra Deep Field photography to capture galaxies billions of light years away.

Service Mission 4:
Service Mission 4 (SM4) is the last planned shuttle mission for the Hubble space telescope, with improvements, additions, and repairs expected to take the telescope through at least 2014, when space observation is transitioned to its NASA successors, the James Webb Space Telescope and the proposed Advanced Technology Large Aperture Space Telescope. The original servicing mission was supposed to take place in 2004, however, was delayed indefinitely due to the Columbia shuttle tragedy and the human risk involved in launching a shuttle that could not reach the International Space Station if something went wrong. After public outcry, Congressional hearings, and a new NASA chief, the mission got underway May 11, 2009. Unlike previous service missions, this one enjoyed all the perks of 21st Century technology, including a live TV stream of the Hubble Mission, updates on the official Service Mission 4 website and the first ever live tweets from space from Michael Massimino, one of the three astronauts on the Atlantis crew, better known as @astro_mike! Follow all the Hubble updates from his Twitter blog here.

Additions:
The Atlantis crew had a VERY busy 10 workdays up in space, as they performed on-orbit repair of current instruments and addition of new ones. The mission payload included:
•Two new toys: the Cosmic Origins Spectograph and the Wide Field Camera 3. These will allow the Hubble to continue its history of spectacular photography of distant stars, galaxies and universes using UV, infrared and visible light.
•Better, cleaner orbit: a fine guidance sensor for controling the telescope’s directional system, new gyroscopes for orientation and fighting upper atmoshpere drag, new batteries, a new outer blanket for better insulation, and a new lease on life!
•Safer re-entry: a soft-capture mechanism was installed onto the telescope. NASA had previously been weighing either attaching propulsion systems to the Hubble or a guided re-entry via another manned space mission. This soft-capture mechanism will allow another shuttle to grab onto the Hubble as she’s led back down to Earth after her mission is over.
•Best of all? An IMAX 3D camera was carried on the payload of the shuttle Atlantis, subsidized by IMAX and Warner Bros, for production of a new movie that will tell the story of the Hubble Telescope and be released sometime in 2010. ScriptPhD.com will, of course cover it!

To hear a podcast of President Obama’s conversation with the crew of the Atlantis upon completion of their mission, click HERE. The Atlantis was supposed to land yesterday at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL, but was been waived off due to poor visibility. It landed today at Edwards Air Force base in California. God Speed and thanks from a proud country for a job well done, Atlantis!

By the way, while the guys were up in space, what movie do you think got screened for them? Why, Star Trek, of course! (https://news-briefs.ew.com/2009/05/nasa-beams-star.html)

~*ScriptPhD*~