Physics: nothing to sneeze at

For me, the early spring is definitely something to sneeze at. Pollen count is through the roof. (It must be, because it's getting to me indoors.)

Pollen. I'm not a fan.

But today's musings are neither a paean to pollen (say that quickly five times) nor a jeremiad. It's a collection of physics news -- all Really Neat Things -- well within the ambit of this blog. While my head does its best to explode (my free advice: don't watch ... especially if you've ever seen Scanners), here's some fare of likely interest:

Beginning with a second result from CERN -- independent of last September's startling report -- measuring neutrino speed. This time the elusive neutrinos were clocked at light speed (as expected), not a hair above. See "The Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Debate Rages On" and "Adagio, OPERA."

Grand opening!

It turns out out that my authorial website (as opposed to this blog) dates back to 2001. Very Arthur C. Clarkeian, to be sure, but in Internet years that's very old. I recently decided it was time -- okay, well past time -- for a change.

Beginning with a new domain name: edwardmlerner.com. Catchy, if I do say so myself. And certainly easy for me to remember :-)

This first phase of the project mostly involved transferring old content into new software, shifting to a new hosting service, and updating page layouts to a more modern look. But that new software (and me owning the domain) will make it easier -- for some purposes, make it possible for the first time -- to add new sorts of content. There will be more phases.

Space-y program

Post-shuttle, the US manned space program requires NASA to buy seats on Russian flights to the International Space Station (ISS), until crew-rated US commercial launchers and capsules come along. (I carefully don't call this NASA's manned spaceflight program, because I doubt anyone in NASA truly wants things to be this way. Congress and two successive administrations have been mucking up the works.)

The ISS

Let's see how that plan is going ...

Ice, water, and fire

Google searches on "Gw'oth" are among the top referral sources to this blog. Reader emails and (at cons and signings) in-person questions that I'm asked also often relate to the Gw'oth.

Europa: ice, cracks, and all

(The Gw'oth, if the word doesn't ring a bell, are aliens who feature prominently in the Fleet of Worlds series of space operas that I write with Larry Niven. The Gw'oth evolved on a world somewhat  like Jupiter's moon Europa, in an ocean beneath the ice. Above the ice lies deadly vacuum. A Gw'o (that's the singular) is an aquatic creature who looks something like a starfish crossed with an octopus. I gave a more detailed physical description in the post Gw'oth revealed! And other fun stuff).

And the question that I am most often asked about the Gw'oth is: living underwater, how did they ever develop technology? Doesn't it take fire to develop technology? As regards non-biological technology, my guess -- like many readers' suspicions -- is: yes.

Wildfires were a part of our forbears' natural environment. Fire was possible in our forbears' natural environment. How the Gw'oth would master (or encounter) fire underwater is less than intuitive ....

One such reader question came up several weeks ago, far down in a thread of comments about a merely semi-related post. I answered with another comment in that same thread, but on reflection, I decided to address the topic in a post of its own. A post that people Googling "Gw'oth" will more readily find. This post.

There aren't major plot spoilers in my answer; I'm dealing primarily with back story before the opening of the series. Before humans and other species of Known Space ever met the Gw'oth. But if you continue, know you will encounter snippets of plot and text from a couple of the books.

Continue as you think best ...

Of wrong turns great and small

No mere fashion statement

As though legions of people walking around apparently talking to themselves -- immersed in remote conversation via their Bluetooth headsets -- isn't off-putting enough, Google plans to bring us voice-recognition computer-interface eyeglasses ... hideous prototype in the nearby picture. See "Head-Mounted Android: Google Reportedly Preps Connected Glasses."

In Small Miracles, I put computer-interface eyeglasses on the main character. Those glasses tracked where Brent was looking -- within the software-displayed image projected by the lenses -- by monitoring IR beams reflecting off the back of the eye. Input was entered via (trained) blinks made looking at menu items and virtual-keyboard keys. All any friend, relative, or colleague saw was his mirrored lenses. Eerily silent and quite antisocial -- but that was the point. Brent was no longer himself, exactly, and I wanted to show him losing touch with humanity.

That people may really go around online like this? I find that scary! And that Android will be the underlying software is all too ironic.

Alien aliens (more or less)

For no obvious reason, I got to thinking about my long-concluded "Alien aliens" series of posts. And decided that it wasn't -- concluded, that is. I'd omitted a key category: human-derived aliens. Hybrids, in a word. Some prefer the term transhumans.

For example: uploads. That's what you get by transferring a brain's content into a computer. Why would anyone, assuming they could? To cheat  death, perhaps -- at least till medical science can achieve immortality or transfer minds from failing bodies into new ones.

Imagine: all one's thought patterns, learned behaviors, and memories transcribed into a new form and format. However human that mind began, it has taken residence in an environment utterly alien to us Mark I humans.

The implications go far beyond the speed difference between synapses and transistors. Imagine speed-of-thought access to vast libraries. Imagine adding radar views of the world while losing some of the more familiar senses (say, smell). Imagine real-time access -- sometimes authorized, sometimes hacked -- to the net's many peripherals, from Earth remote-sensing satellites to power meters (to weaponized aerial drones?).

Surely the uploaded mind's temperament, attitudes, and interests will diverge from those of meat minds. And so: surely also its behavior.

Intrigued? Wikipedia offers s a very long list of uploads in fiction.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a ... butterfly?

A metaphorical butterfly, that is.

In Ray Bradbury's classic (1954) "A Sound of Thunder," time traveling big-game hunters shoot dinosaurs that -- as known from previous viewing of the past -- are within moments of their deaths. The hunters must stay on and shoot from levitating metal walkways, lest their footsteps do anything to alter the past. Of course, one hunter does stray from the path (speaking of metaphors). The hunting party returns to its  own time to find the outcome of a presidential election changed and a fascist coming to power.

A crushed prehistoric butterfly is found in the mud beneath the straying hunter's boot ...

Never a dull moment

Eclectic tech-related articles are once again overflowing my virtual file cabinet. You can't say I don't share ...

While the world waits to see if conventional war breaks out in the Mideast to keep Iran from going nuclear, the amateurs are having at it over the net.  See "Latest Arab-Israeli Conflict Is Growing Cyberwar."

States of the hydrogen atom

Electrons don't orbit nuclei like little planets, the Bohr model having been only an early step toward quantum mechanics. Unless it's a really big atom.  Imagine pumping up an atom (using a laser) to the size of a bacterium. At that size, it turns out, electrons do orbit like planets.  And this may offer just the trick to create a new digital storage mechanism. See "Jupiter’s orbital mechanics inspires mesoscopic physicists."