Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

It came to my attention last night that alecaustin had missed timprov's post featuring Tim singing his new song about Sir Humphry Davy. And I wondered how many other people had missed it, and I thought that'd be a darn shame. So here you go, far too early on a Monday morning: better living through songs about chemistry!

I was talking to a friend about the TV show Eureka (which I really like, by the way, especially in the first part of S3), and I was saying that they mostly stayed on the side of "good handwavium" for me rather than "bad fake science." She, quite reasonably, asked how I drew that line. I think one of the main points for me is that if the science fictional element is not particularly plausible with what we currently know, vagueness about the technical details is a feature, not a bug. Writing books and classes on writing often teach us to be more specific in our writing so that it's more vivid, but sometimes you don't want it to be vivid, because you don't want the reader (or viewer) to have a vivid picture of why exactly this will not work and is in fact ridiculous to even contemplate.

There are, of course, things that cannot be vague enough to be anything but bad science. "The electromagnetic force doesn't work any more!" Well, if the electroweak force suddenly stopped working, we would all die more or less immediately. How do you think your neurons work? How do you think ionic bonds work, for heaven's sake? So you need to actually do the research and find out that building a Faraday cage is what you want rather than the destruction of the universe as we know it--simply saying, "I dunno, it just works that way," is not enough there.

Also, if you have something with problems, listing the problems in character conversation can sometimes get you through. "It took us years to figure out how to deal with the momentum problem," a scientist can say casually, shaking her head at the amount of effort required, or, "The toxicity of the byproduct nearly had us beat," and there you go, you have acknowledged that this is a problem, you have not had to become a Nobel-prize-winning scientist to write your story, on you go. (I mean, if you feel like becoming a Nobel-prize-winning scientist, that's totally fine, and don't let me stop you. I just feel that it shouldn't be a requirement.)

Anybody else have some ideas about writing good handwavium vs. bad fake science? Striking examples in either direction?

The state of Minnesota is having another go-round with its high school graduation standards, particularly in the area of math. We set up a math test people would have to pass to graduate high school. Surprise! People didn't pass it. Lots of people didn't pass it. Surprise again! There was a great deal of uproar, because what were we to do with these high school juniors who didn't pass?

High school graduation the supposed skill certification and high school graduation the social ritual have become inextricably intertwined in our culture. So it's no surprise that people are up in arms and saying things like, "These kids ought to be able to graduate." I even agree with them, but not in the way they think: I don't think high school graduation is most useful when it's a certificate of attendance. But I do think that if you don't know enough or can't do enough to meet graduation requirements, you should be getting feedback to that effect. The idea that you would have passed all your classes and yet not know the things they feel you should know at that point seems like something has gone wrong, and I doubt that there would be this much uproar if we were talking about kids who hadn't passed their classes--for whatever reason, we are culturally on board with the idea that if you fail math, you don't graduate. But these kids are failing at learning math, and they're not failing math, and that, to me, is a big problem. Sure, we're not talking about students who are passionately committed to mathematics here; not every student is or should be. But we are talking about students whose best indications on whether they know an acceptable level of math for a high school student is that they do, and those best indications are, apparently, wrong.

I'm sure there are people who are totally okay with a math test but not with this math test. But that's not what we hear every time this issue comes around. It starts to boil down to, "But math is hard! You don't really need math! And it's hard!" And at that point, well, what do you really need from a high school education? What can't you work around? There's not a heck of a lot, on the level they're talking about here. If having to calculate the area of a room from its dimensions is too much to ask of high school graduates, I'm starting to think that the people constructing these arguments are, in fact, arguing for a high school diplomat to be a certificate of attendance, a verification of age.

One of the things we are not willing to say in this discussion is that people who can't do math are missing out. They're missing out on ways of protecting themselves, sure, on a measure of independence that comes from being able to do some rough calculations yourself. But they're also missing out on something wonderful. Something beautiful. I know I'm talking to some of you about yourselves, and yes, I'm sorry: you're missing out. That dimension of understanding is worth cultivating. It is worth having. Some of you can't do math the way a person who is completely tone-deaf from birth can't learn to identify a piece of music upon hearing it, but the vast majority of you who can't do math are more like someone who doesn't know any songs because no one ever taught you any. It doesn't make you a worse person. It doesn't make you an unintelligent person. But it's still a damned shame to induce disabilities in people who don't have them to begin with.

I believe that math-related learning disabilities are real. I absolutely do. I do not believe that irremediable math-related learning disabilities are as prevalent as people who were taught math very, very badly, often by people who did not themselves know how to do math.

I don't really know what to do about that. Saying, "Yes, fine, go on ahead and get out of here; it's not like we have any real preparation to teach you math from here anyway," seems practical in the short-term but distinctly suboptimal in the long-term. It treats the problem as one of what to tell the students--yes, you are a high school graduate, or no, you are not--rather than what to do to fix a system that "should have" done something but did not.

It allows us to keep on with math education the way we have been. And on the one hand, we sort of have to. And on the other hand, we sort of can't.

One of the things you discover when you are a physics student, or even a former physics student, is that a great many people will automatically assume that any objections you have to colloquial misuse of physics terms are 1) abstruse and 2) fundamentally stupid. The assumption here is that in catching the technical detail, the physicist (or ex-physicist!) is missing the larger and possibly more poetic analogy.

This is too bad, because sometimes the actual meaning of the word would be really useful if only we could get at it. No, this is not a rant about "quantum." Alas.* The word I want this time is "inertia."

See, I keep hearing people talking about having a lot of inertia as though it means that a body at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, full stop. But it also means that a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Inertia is not just sitting there like a lump, it's barreling down the tracks full speed ahead. It's a tendency to keep on with what you were doing before, and what you were doing before isn't always nothing.

So when I say I'm having trouble with inertia, it's not getting started that's the problem. It's starting and stopping and changing directions and going in circles. It's the whole thing. And really mostly not the body at rest part. If we were better at the body at rest part, the other stuff might be easier. But not all of it, because sometimes I really don't like the vectors of change here.

*Short version of the rant: "quantum" does not mean "really big." Go ahead and say, "great leap" or "huge leap" or "ginormous leap" when this is what you mean; "ginormous" will make you sound less clueless than misusing quantum here. Mini-rant over; we now return you to your main ramble.

I didn't take the time this weekend to say that on Saturday I watched one of the worst movies I have actually watched from start to finish. Fat Man and Little Boy is a movie set at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, featuring John Cusack and Paul Newman. "John Cusack! Manhattan Project! How could I not know this movie?" says me. Turns out here is how: it had no redeeming features. No, really. None. They cast a languid man as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Languid. I mean it. They didn't give any of the interesting physicists interesting parts, and John Cusack played Buck Weaver again. I'll bet you didn't know Buck Weaver worked on the Manhattan Project! (Note: I recognize that this is possibly only comprehensible to my folks, laurel, and snurri. Still! They gave him a different name but he dressed exactly the same as when he was Buck Weaver! And showed up carrying a bag of baseball bats! And put a baseball through Leslie Groves's window!)

I actually feel happy for Paul Newman's family, because he was trying to summon up the mean to play Groves, and he just couldn't do it. When Robin was doing a Darth Vader voice when he was three, he was more successful at Big Mean Scary Guy than Paul Newman trying to play Leslie Groves. This bodes well for his general lack of meanness, maybe? Later I thought about it and decided that if you absolutely had to cast Paul Newman at that age in a movie relating to the physics of that era, he would do for Bohr. I know Bohr was running around Copenhagen and passing out in planes on the way to England and like that rather than hanging around bugging Oppie. But still, they had scenes set in Washington, DC, and anyway having random scenes in Copenhagen or London could not possibly have made this movie worse. Having random scenes in Argentina or Burkina Faso could not possibly have made this movie worse.

You know what was the really astonishing accomplishment of this movie? They managed to get some facts correct without having the least notion of their context or meaning. So by not getting everything wrong they made some things worse, because it was mostly not the kind of bad that was howlingly funny. It was just sort of limp. It was released in 1989, which puts its creation right smack in that part of the 1980s when nobody had to justify what a movie was about if it featured vague nervousness about nuclear weapons. It was like if someone ever asked the writers or the director why the viewer should care, they repeated slowly, "But they're making a nuclear bomb. One that's nuclear. And a bomb. Which is nuclear."

Seriously. You just don't need to watch this movie.

I try to keep my book notes non-spoilery, especially for brand-new books, but I can't keep this one in any longer:

( badly spoilery for Neal Stephenson's Anathem )

I got my contributor's copy of Nature Physics today. It is so shiny. The paper is so heavy and glossy and filled with graphs and equations and physics. And my words.

Perhaps I am not jaded about this short story thing after all.

And -- oh, I'm not quite sure how to explain this part. I got published in Nature Physics -- me! -- by doing what it is I really do. I didn't have to spend years pretending, miserably and unsuccessfully, to still belong in physics. I could be a different kind of the shiny, the shiny I always wanted, right in there alongside the shiny I sometimes used to want.

See, this one is better than Nature. Because Nature is for people, but Nature Physics is for physicists. Who are very like people, but different. I've written stories for people for years now, and people have read them and loved them and hated them and not cared about them and done with them like people do with stories. But now physicists will be reading and loving and hating and being indifferent and like that. As I say: like people. But different. And I know that physicists read SF mags. But they read them as people. They read this one as physicists. But not my story as physics! That part's important, too.

You see? Maybe not. Maybe I'm not getting it across. Extremely excited. Distracted by the shiny. Your take-home point here is: shiny. Yes.

You remember Nature? Good mag. Happy people. Publishing my story, "Alloy"? Yes. So they have this sister publication, Nature Physics. You remember physics? Good field. Happy people. Giving me a major and stuff. Yes.

Nature Physics will be publishing my short story, "Search Strings."

It turns out the shiny has not worn off yet. I am pretty bouncy over this one.

I haven't read very much of lj this morning; I'm pretty busy with markgritter's grandpa arriving tomorrow. But there's one experience I wanted to mention in light of a suggestion I came across:

I spent two summers doing research in physics as an undergrad, with the NSF's REU programs. For one of them, I was the only woman out of eight students. This is about the national ratio of female physics undergrads to the total population, or was when I was an undergrad, and while I haven't followed Physics Today as obsessively, I believe it's similar now.

In all honesty, I was at least as intelligent and at least as talented and at least as enthusiastic about physics as any of the guys there, and obviously smarter(/etc.) than at least a few. But I spent all summer fighting the assumption that I was not as competent as they were, not just because I was a woman but because we all knew that institutions would go out of their way not to have single-gender programs. The default assumption was not that they took the top eight students who applied, but that they took the top seven students who applied, and then the top female applicant to round things out to fit the statistics. The rest of them could be there as physics students. Knowledge or assumption of a quota system made sure that I had to be there as a woman -- even if I'd been their top applicant of the year.

If speculative fiction magazines announced that they were having set-aside spots for women writers in their issues, I would get myself a genderless pseudonym if I didn't decide to stop submitting to those magazines completely. I will be damned if I'm ever going through that again if I can help it. And I wish it on no one else, either. It was absolutely miserable. A quota system means that your work always has to be twice as good as anybody else's to demonstrate that it was good enough to begin with. Hell with that. Categorically and absolutely: I am not. Going. Back.

First, I'm going to copy a request from a friend who is a librarian. This person has a patron who wants books (preferably good ones) with the following characteristics:

--female main character who is older and single
--absolutely no love interests, romance or sex
--no swearing, graphic violence, etc.

I have very little sympathy with the person making this request -- it seems to bar a great deal of the human condition from art -- but a good deal of sympathy for the person doing a hard job trying to help her. So. Chime in if you have any ideas.

As regards yesterday's poll: eight minutes. Eight. Those few of you who bet on my continuing sanity on this subject: thanks, but, um, that's not something you should rely on particularly much.

And there's a comment I made in the comments section that probably deserves a moment of explication: orbitalmechanic told me I was cute, and I tried my standard, by now thoroughly failed response to that: "I'm not cute, I used to be a physicist." It was, as I noted, much pithier when it was a growled, "I'm not cute, I'm a physicist." It was no more effective but a great deal more important to me.

See..."cute" is not the same as "pretty" or "attractive" or "hot," or, on the other side of the cute spectrum, "charming" or "fun." None of those other words has quite the same ring to it. And when you're a young, female physicist, often "you're so cute," means something friendly and innocuous...but a substantial percentage of the time, it means, "I don't believe you can handle the math and/or the soldering." People who think you're cute aren't always dismissing you and your capacity to do the work -- but sometimes they are. Often enough to be disturbing. So I developed a knee-jerk reaction to "cute" pretty fast -- more or less upon first contact. (Which was college. Nobody in high school thought I was cute anywhere along the pretty-to-charming spectrum. I promise. I was terrifying, not cute. I got used to that.) (Now I can be both! Yay, adult world!) (Ahem. Sorry.)

And I use "cute" myself sometimes, and never to question someone's competence. I use it of big hulking males whose ability to do linear algebra I have never doubted. In fact, in the personality side of things, the "charming" side, the man who taught my Modern, Math Methods, Quantum, and Nuke courses was just so cute. He had these Inspector Gadget arms, and when he demonstrated rotation over 4Pi with his coffee cup, it was just the cutest thing. I still smile at the cute thinking of Tom doing that. This is not the "ooh baby baby" cute, this is the "awwww" cute. But it's "awww, the way he does physics is so cute," not "awww, he thinks he can do physics!"

Tom wasn't a young woman, he was a middle-aged guy. If someone told him he was cute, they were not going to attempt to take lab implements away from him on his own project and smile condescendingly if he explained how they were using them wrong. No one was going to corner him to try to cop a feel when they were supposed to be discussing results of the last data set if he was cute. No one's girlfriend was going to have to hear a careful explanation about how, no, really, she's a valuable lab partner and not just cute lab decor.

And deliberately attempting to be neither pretty nor charming nor any of the other things cute sometimes means did not seem like the way to go either. So: railing against the cute. Even when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt -- as I know with orbitalmechanic -- that there was nothing of the sort in it.

And the thing is, I don't live there any more. I am not Marissa Lingen, Girl Physicist, on a daily basis (though she still pokes her nose out sometimes). Most editors and agents have no idea whether I am cute in any sense of the word, and if they do, it's not a big deal, either way. Either way, they're not going to pick up a story of mine and say, "Oh, she's cute/not cute," and reject the story unread. Whatever gender problems the field may or may not have -- and we can argue about that somewhere else and at another time, please -- cuteness is not at the center of them. If I hear someone calling me cute for a particular comment or behavior, or telling me I look cute in whatever I'm wearing, there is not even the slightest hint of "too bad you can't plot your way out of a paper bag," in it. Nobody even has to fight that implication, because as far as I can tell, it's just not there.

So, the knee: I need to get it to stop jerking. I know that. But that's why it does.