Hard Science, Soft Brain

Zukav

yanallefish said:

SmilingTed, I have to disagree with you about Zukav's writings. He does talk a fair amount about some of the reasoning behind physicists' and mathematicians' thoughts. For instance, he goes through why Einstein and Planck thought differently, discusses a bit of Young and Slater and so on. He also gives a lot of references in case someone wants to delve further into the concepts noted in his book.

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Unless I'm mistaken, (it's been more than a decade) Zukav doesn't explain why the wave/particle duality exists, or why quantum mechanics predicts that observation alters phenomena. Without explaining how physicists came to these conclusions, the book is at best incomplete.

NicoleMD said:

My crowning achievement in science is an "A" in college Physics, and that's pretty much it. I love science fiction, watching it and reading it and writing it. Up until now, most of my writing has been of a comedic sci fi nature, where I put more effort into mocking realistic science than portraying it.

But now I want some of the real stuff in my work. Not a tremendous amount, just enough to be passable to more critical readers, and to give my character driven stories a little more interest.

I was just wondering where you go to get your scientific inspiration. Any tips? I've just been linking around on wikipedia until I find something that suits me.

Just wondering...

Nicole

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Check out Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb - not just a monumental work of history, but also a good description of the scientific process and the reasoning behind particle physics in the early 20th Century.

I read a pretty neat book called Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship.

http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805059857

Basically, it was about how in the early 60s we came up with a way to make an actual interstellar starship. The ship worked on the principle of nuclear pulse propulsion. In other words it dropped nukes out back and rode explosions. Amazingly this ship actually gets MORE efficient the bigger you go, in fact it's theorized that they could have launched ships with masses exceeding 2 or 3 millions tons(which was the theorized design for an interstellar colony ship).

The ship had a top speed of somewhere between 10-25% the speed of light depending on equipment used. Because of the insane amount of thrust produced by nukes, the ship wouldn't be like a beer can, but could be armored like a battleship so that it could shrug off micrometeor impacts even at it's low relativistic speeds.

Alas, the whole thing was torpedoed by the atmospheric test ban treaty we signed in the mid 60s. I still think it'd be a great way to put our warheads to use. Heck, using this tech, we could actually do some amazing things in space, and actually have a true space ship instead of a "spaceraft" that can't even leave orbit. I think in the book it said that due to how much atmospheric testing was going on at the time with nuclear weapons, that launching an orion would only have relatively small impact on the environment, and they figured perhaps 1 or 2 people would die do to fallout from the launch.

It's one of those things that makes me wonder, because in my mind it's the only practical way to do any true heavy lifting that would be required to actually expand into space(short of space elevators, but who knows when that'll happen). *sigh* I guess we'll have to be satisfied with sending just a few people to the moon or mars instead of thousands

PS: Here's a pretty cool presentation on the Orion system. Even now it's considered the "doomsday" choice if an asteroid is headed our way on short notice, as we could launch a ship that would be big enough to deflect even a dinosaur killer with an orion ship.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/12618

PSS: Here's a BBC documentary on the subject. http://youtube.com/watch?v=QToTwX2ZZEI&feature=related

Dommo said:

I read a pretty neat book called Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship.
...

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I haven't read the book, but I've heard about Project Orion from other sources. It makes an appearance in the Niven-Pournelle SF novel "Footfall" in which the human race is desperate to get into Earth orbit.

Regrettably due to the potential confusion it could cause, one of the current/future NASA space vehicles is also called Orion, and it has nothing to do with nuclear power. Official and semi-official announcements:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/orion_announcement.html
http://www.space.com/news/cs_060823_orion.html
Neither article mentions the earlier Orion Project, but they really didn't have to recycle that name. The automobile industry doesn't do it (or at best very rarely does it), and they go through lots more names than do NASA and all the other space agencies.

Well, if NASA had the balls that I wish they did, then they'd use this wussified Orion project as a cover for the real thing .

I've wanted to read that footfall book since it seemed pretty interesting. I'll have to track it down.

Sarpedon said:

Yeah, I didn't like that about the dancing wu li masters. The book on particle physics I'm reading now does much better, by describing the advances in the apparatuses that allowed the scientists to discover new particles. It makes it much more intuitive.

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Peter Galison takes this route too....

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13281.ctl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Galison

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/bios/galison.html

http://physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/galison.html