The physics of futility

Open mic: Should science theorize about the unverifiable?

The cover of Shel Silverstein’s famous Book of Futilities depicts two men in an obviously hopeless predicament. Thoroughly chained to both the floor and ceiling in an inescapable room, one prisoner exclaims to the other “now, here’s my plan.” I was reminded of the old cartoon the other week when the front page of the New York Times science section had an article (albeit very well written and worth reading) on a physicist who claimed gravity didn’t exist. Of course he had zero experimental evidence and few in his field even understood his theory, but it got me thinking: Has physics reached the point of futility?

The greatest problem facing generations of physicists has been the inability to unite gravity - as described in Einstein’s general relativity - with quantum mechanics. Both theories work very well on their own in making predictions, but the common ground between them may lead to a description of our origins, allowing us to peer into the very first instants of the universe. String theory, quantum loop theory, M-Theory and a sleuth of other approaches have hacked away at finding a theory of quantum gravity that will make our understanding of the universe more complete.

And much like the search for the mythical El Dorado, the quest for a theory of everything has proven too much for many physicists to resist. While few would argue such a pursuit to be futile, the hunt has consumed the lives of many great minds while bearing very little fruit.

What's more, many of these approaches have attacked the problem from directions that can hardly be described as scientific. The first principle of cosmology Lee Smolin lays out in his book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity is that there is nothing outside of our universe (this is not to discount religion). If the universe is a closed system, then the answer to any question in the universe must come from the universe. String theorists throw such cautions to the wind; the theory predicts wide-ranging things like multiple other universes (can we please use universi?) and dimensions, as well as gravitational effects from outside our own universe. In fact, one of the few methods offered to move string theory from the "not even wrong" category relies on the remote chance of detecting gravitational effects from other universes using the LHC.

For decades the frontiers of physics has been occupied by such theories with profound promise, but little observational support. But can we really question their worthiness? Science rarely plays out the way we expect it to, and quite often the popularly dismissed route ends up being the correct one.

This is not an editorial meant to take a stand one way or the other because, honestly, I’m not sure how I feel. I’ve often taken Brian Greene to task for The Elegant Universe, which made millions of Americans cognizant of string theory and led many of them to believe it was more than just a mathematical framework. But I don't believe string theory is futile (though my friends' frequent questions about it may be), I just think it lacks context in the public eye. I’m very curious what other people think.

Is there such a thing as futility in science?

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Automotive X-Prize reaches final stages

Last week Indy Car racing legend Al Unser Jr. rounded the corners at the Michigan International Speedway in a car with a top speed of 75 MPH, and still managed to make it into the finals. This time the car wasn't an opened-wheeled, gas chugging race car speeding its way to a CART victory - Unser gave that up years ago. No, this was a battery electric car called the ZAP Alias competing for the Progressive Insurance Automotive X-Prize.

While the more famous X-Prize from a few years ago awarded $10 million for the first private craft to take people into space and return them safely, the automotive X-Prize is a series of awards for achievements in extreme automobile efficiency.

The 111 entrants were announced in April of last year, but by October the entrants had been narrowed to 49 before any on-track competition had begun. Every car in each of the three categories must achieve 100 MPG efficiency over a 200 mile range, the winners from each split a $10 million prize. The first group is the mainstream category which consists of commercially viable, moderate-mass market vehicles competing for a $5 million prize. The second and third are alternate classes that each carry a prize of $2.5 million, one for a side-by-side seating car and the other for a tandem seat car.

ZAP (for Zero Air Pollution), which is in the lead in on-line voting as the Fan Favorite for Most Practical (you can vote online through mid-august), is based out of Santa Rosa and is already taking pre-orders for its Alias. The company has supposedly sold over a hundred thousand of its other cars since its inception in 1994 (though most of ZAP's media coverage has been about its executives issuing themselves stock while failing to give their dealers cars). For perspective, Tesla Motors has only sold 1200 Roadsters as of mid-July.


On track competition concluded last week and the field has now been narrowed to nine vehicles from seven teams, with final announcements on winners coming in September. Other teams still left in comp include the heavily favored Virginia based Edison 2 car.

It should be interesting to follow the finalists and see if the cars ever make it to market. MSNBC.com has had great coverage of the competition and you can view some of it here.

Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log

Paul Eisenstein from Driver's Seat

Photo Gallery
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37153229/

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Cylons riding an escalator

I think I can speak for the entire APS Comic-Con crew when I say that one of the best parts of the whole convention was seeing people do ordinary things in elaborate costumes. The Stormtrooper holding hands with his ballerina daughter, Flash Gordon bumming a light from Superman out back, anyone at all trying to drink from the water fountain; it was all hilarious. Of course, I was usually too distracted by the absurdity of seeing superheros have everyday experiences to come to my journalistic senses and capture it for all of you to enjoy too.


Fortunately, fellow blogger Uncountable was once again in rare form and captured perhaps the funniest moment of all: Cylons riding an escalator. I hope you all appreciate it as much as we do.



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The most powerful idea in the world

On Monday's Daily Show with John Stewart, author William Rosen stopped by to discuss his new book The Most Powerful Idea in the World. What is this most powerful idea according to Rosen? The steam engine.

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The Most Powerful Idea in the World begins with how the engine came to be and then traces it through powering industry and factories, as well as fueling transport and other new inventions.

As he tells it, the engine was not only responsible for the start of the industrial revolution, but it also brought about the concept of owning an idea. Before then, it had never been accepted that an inventor should own their idea. Rosen says it's the not only the story of the birth of the steam engine, but also the birth of invention itself. While the engines had existed since the first century in Egypt, the act of ownership and commercializing an idea took it from Britain to the world.

Plus, he's quite a humorous fellow for being the author of a book on steam engines.

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Who is Iron Man?

The modern envisioning of Tony Stark is based on a real life physicist and entrepreneur

Several days ago I reported from Comic-Con 2010 on a panel about whether Stark Industries was a good model for the blossoming new-space industry. Admittedly, the panel was more of an excuse to talk about the future of private space flight than an actual analysis of the Stark model. Then on Saturday Samuel L. Jackson surprised thousands of attendees when he marched out on stage at the end of a Marvel panel and announced the new Avengers characters Black Widow, Agent Ghoulson, Thor and Captain America; Robert Downey Jr. followed by announcing Hawkeye and Bruce Banner. Which still left me wondering: who would the real Tony Stark be?

It turns out John Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. are way ahead of me. In their search for character inspiration in their re-imagining of Tony Stark, they turned to none other than modern tech privateer Elon Musk. He is the CEO and Founder of PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors (a pre-release Tesla Roadster has a cameo in the first film).

In 2009, the company he started with $100-million dollars of his own cash, SpaceX, sent the first privately funded satellite into space with a liquid-rocket. Musk's vision is give humanity the capability of getting off of earth. In a 2008 Esquire peice he wrote that "sooner or later, we must expand life beyond this green and blue ball - or go extinct." It's that visionary sentiment, coupled with his ability to pick which limb to go way far out on, that has enabled his enormous success.

At age 10, he was already programing computers. By age 12, he was already selling his first software. He left his birth nation of South Africa without his parents support at age 17 to avoid compulsory service in an apartheid military and settled in Canada. After working as a manual laborer at a Canadian wheat farm and as a log cutter at a mill, he was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he would eventually receive dual bachelors in economics and physics.

After two days at Stanford as a physics graduate student in 1995, Musk dropped out to found Zip2 with his brother, the payment services company was acquired by Compaq a few years later for $300-million. The same year Compaq acquired Zip2, Musk started the whole thing over again with PayPal, which he also sold a few years later. This time the asking price was 1.5 billion, and Musk was holding 12-percent of the stock.

In an interview he once said there were three important problems he wanted to work on when he left Stanford: the internet, space and clean energy. As John Favreau put it in his description of him for Time's 100 people who will affect the world this year, Musk is "a renaissance man in an era that needs them." No he didn't have an uber rich father to hand him a company, but selling two companies for nearly $2-billion by age 30 is hardly humble beginnings.

And he followed those successes with even greater far-sightedness by starting SpaceX. Small start up space companies are notorious for chewing up and spitting out rich young (and old) playboys. Starting your own space company is a great way to lose a few hundred million dollars. But Musk is not your average daydreamer.

He wasn't exactly tinkering with rockets in his basement laboratory like Tony Stark, but SpaceX is the polar opposite of your average Lockheed Martin (though SpaceX's HQ is used as Ivan Vanko's lab in Iron Man 2). They find innovative ways to build rockets and fuel them with an eye to providing the cheapest space transport possible. In June, when he posed for pictures with the President next to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Musk was being used as a symbol of the president's new vision of spaceflight, one where American ingenuity and a willingness to fail miserably can bring outstanding success.

In the coming years, SpaceX rockets will carry supplies to the ISS with multi-billion of dollars in contracts and it's likely that after the shuttle retires next year, they will also carry American astronauts. Such a move will drastically reduce the cost of trips to space and quickly shift the U.S. off what will soon be our Russian dependence on space transport. All this from a guy who has yet to reach 40.

Most of us struggle with one job and our personal lives, but while Musk was preparing to launch the first Falcon 9 rocket in June he was also preparing to launch the first auto company IPO since Ford Motors a few weeks later. Of course, both were incredible success stories that were widely reported on. But that isn't even all of Musk's commitments. While many know the recent successes of Tesla Motors, few are likely aware of Musk's other clean energy bet, Solar City. The real-life Tony Stark is chairman of the company and put $10M of his own cash in the California start up in 2006. Within a year it was already the number one residential supplier of solar electricity in the state. It now holds the title of number one residential supplier in the nation.

Musk can't fly (though he does have his own Iron Man suit), and he doesn't have a secret identity (that he's revealed yet anyway), but the rocket scientist brings reality into the world of the superhero. He's already forced GM to make the Volt, enabled a new-vision of space policy and brought clean energy to many parts of the country - and if all that doesn't come with tights and a cape I don't know what should.

Watch out for the Musk cameo in Iron Man 2 (sorry, it's in Spanish).



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It all started with the Big Bang!

They're cool, they're hip, and they're loved by 14 million for their quirky wit and intelligence. The cast of CBS's The Big Bang Theory has been everywhere at ComicCon this week, from signing autographs to doing interviews and panels, these guys are kings among nerds here (the title of queen surely goes to Olivia Mund). In fact I was inspired to post this video after the 4-millionth person asked me if I was a fan of The Big Bang Theory show and then told me how much they loved it. I've only seen select episodes, as I have no TV, but I can tell you that I love the Barenaked Ladies' theme song for the show, and they were on hand to play it for one of the panels.


It's curious what a hit TV show can do for the reputation of any particular group in this country. Based on my experience it's not at all true that physicists have less social skills than anyone else and it's also not the case that they're all geniuses either. But theatre is theatre and I'm willing to let those inaccuracies go for a television show that depicts physicists in a human light and shows them as sexy in their own weird way.

For three seasons, that's just what The Big Bang Theory has done. And they do so with an eye to accurate science. The show's science adviser is David Saltzberg, himself a professor of Physics and Astronomy from the University of California Los Angeles, who has received academic and career awards for his work in physics. His strange job at the show is to create props. That's right, in addition to reviewing the scripts for errors and helping with dialog, Salzburg puts fancy (though accurate) equations up for the show.

So, the creators and producers are at least making an effort towards real science and in Hollywood that means a lot. I say we cut them a break, if for no other reason than people seem open to the idea of physics as a result.

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CostumeCon putting on a show

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Comic-Con is nothing if not the biggest costume party on earth. The convention center is huge and the entire place is filled with people. Well over a hundred thousand of them. The building is large enough that if you lost your keys, it would take months to find them (it also looks much more airport-like than the actual airport for some reason). From steampunk to nearly-naked Princess Leia, all costumes are welcome so long as you check your toy weapons with security first. And with tens of thousands of people in such elaborate disguise, it's hard to assume ours are worthy of the masquerade.

However, my dad has requested some pictures of our costumes and fellow Buzz blogger Uncountable has put together a fantastic photo collection for you to sample the madness in addition to Ms. Alignment's Extreme Science Squad (AKA yours truly), so without further adieu...
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Nikola Tesla-The people's superhero

Few people pass up swag at a convention based around all the free stuff you can carry and most snatch up our "free physics comic books" as they walk past the booth. But we get the rest with our calls of "read about Tesla vs. the nefarious Thomas Edison!" Who's going to defend a man that electrecuted elephants as propaganda science demos?

Maybe it's the steampunk craze sweeping the geekdom, but people love Nikola Tesla. He's a nerd pop-culture icon around these parts. Tesla costumes, Tesla Shirts, Tesla the dog, Tesla theories about Tunguska; we've seen it all. One gentleman even came by the booth in a steampunk Tesla costume with his girlfriend dressed as a pigeon. Another's reponse to our accurate physics comic book on the history of Tesla and his battle vs. Thomas Edison for electric world domination was "awesome, everyone's doing that now!"





APS comics haven't gone "mainstream," but Tesla cartoonists really are more common than I could have ever guessed. Jeff Smith, the very famous cartoonist and creator of Bone, is our booth neighbor and he has a deep love for Tesla an upcoming Smith comic features the original mad scientist. Three or four other cartoonists have also stopped by the booth and told us about comics they'd done that involve Tesla.



I doubt APS is in danger of selling out, but it's nice to be appreciated. And sometimes it's even nice to ride the bandwagon, especially if it gets people excited about physics.




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Lessons from ComicCon: Is Stark Industries a good model for the new-space movement?

One of the more interesting panels from ComicCon has been a discussion among figures in the so called "new-space" community about whether or not Stark Industries from the Iron Man movies would pose as a good model for the private space movement.

One of the panelists was XCOR engineer Mark Street who talked about how after the first movie came out all the company's engineers went to see the movie together. Street said they all laughed hysterically when Tony Stark nearly kills himself in his basement labratory after he sets Iron Man's thrusters at 10-percent and sends himself flying. That's the way things are at XCOR he said, which is much different from the way Lockheed Martin or NASA operates.

"It never works exactly the way you think it's going to the first time," said Street. "The large companies use well established procedures and rules, and they develop the 787 and it flies the first time, but that's not the approach that will bring prices down."

While the group expressed varying levels of dis-sapointment in NASA's post-Apollo human space exploration, most agreed that it was lack of competition that was to blame. Because the current industries don't have any incentive to bring the prices of roackets down, they won't.

"The problem we have is that there's only one NASA, as long as it's like that we'll never have competition," said John Hunter of Quicklaunch.

The most striking thing I heard from the panel was about the freedom from regulation the FAA has given to new-space companies. As Street put it, it's not that they're blind to what's going on at these companies, it's that the FAA has built in a wide berth until the industry gets off the ground. That means that Burt Rutan's SpaceShip One and SpaceX's Falcon won't have to prove they are safe for their passengers if/when they try to take them into space, they simply have to demonstrate that they're not a "reasonable threat" to the public at large.

The Mars Society's Dave Rankin says that the competition from these scrappy companies experimenting with new and innovative methods of building things for cheap, is starting to pay off. NASA had a competition for its commercial orbtial transport system contract to determine what companies would be able to deliver things to the ISS and new-space won hands down.

"Lockheed did compete for the contract," said Rankin, "but they got beat out because they just couldn't do the job for cheap enough."

The panel was also in agreement that manned space exploration was inevitable and that being able to book a ticket and go into space was an unavoidable eventuality. Rankin described a wall at Meteor Crater in Arizona where the names of every astronaut to cross the threshold into space are inscribed. "I think people have dreams of going up there," said Rankin. "They don't build walls with lists of all the robots that have gone into space."

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