Book of Lost Nights

So the weekend before last - 17th/18th – was the Sleepwalker novel workshop. It happened in the BFI Southbank’s Benugo bar, which turned out to be a great venue to do it in, being comfy, quiet, and having access to natural daylight. A lot of T Party venues err on the dark and dungeony side, and since we had had an (admittedly great) talk with Mike Carey the week before in the George, it seemed a lot to ask people to spend summer weekends there twice in a row.

I’ve attended a few novel workshops for other people from the T Party, but I’ve never had my own picked to death by them before then. It was, I have to say, terrifying and yet exhilirating. Terrifying because a lot of what you believe to be transparent and indeed on-the-nose in your book is in fact murky and opaque, and exhilirating because so many people get what you’re doing, and some even occasionally approve.

I was absolutely blown away by all the work and thought people put into their crits, especially since Sleepwalker is a fairly chunky girl. I taped the session, being aware that the first time you hear some things about your baby, you resist or reject them – you break out the Ego Fu, if you like - and my feeling was that when calm and alone, I could revisit them with a clearer head. This turned out to be a great idea, and I was able to soak up loads of excellent food for thought. I’m a total evangelist for this method now.

In any case, the past week has been spent collating the notes, annotating the MS, and drawing up plans of what to tackle, whether some things should be tackled at all since that conflicts with other things that need tackling, and what order to tackle it all in.

Shouts are going out to the oldskool Sheherazade alumni Melanie Garrett (who also hosted a beautiful BBQ the night before) and K D Grace, as well as other T Party writers Denni Schnapp, Tom Pollock, Sumit, Rosanne Rabinowitz, Mark McCann, and the awesome staff at BFI Southwark.

Thanks guys. It meant a lot to me.

Currently Reading: Lord Peter Views The Body – Dorothy L. Sayers

No Comments | In: Writing | tags: authors, denni schnapp, k d grace, london, mark mccann, melanie garrett, mike carey, rosanne rabinowitz, sumit says, t party, tom pollock, workshop. | #

So, it’s time to pick Sleepwalker up again.

The workshop is still about ten days away, but already I can see a few things that need more work – the character voices (Astrid’s especially), a couple of missing scenes (particularly John’s first betrayal of the Raven), and cuts, cuts, cuts. I’ve already had some feedback from K D Grace and Melanie Garrett, which while pointing out real areas for improvement, leads me to believe that the project is not entirely doomed. In fact Kathy blogged about it, which just makes me feel all snuggly-happy inside, like a sunbathing meerkat. Melanie, meanwhile, plied me with champagne cocktails on the lawn – we had a fab conversation on the sequel, possibly a conversation where my arms windmilled drunkenly a lot while I shrieked. 

You know, people slag off this writing lark, but I definitely can see an upside.

In the meantime, I saw Eclipse at the weekend, so I’ll probably be reviewing that in the near future. Saturday Mike Carey is coming to speak to us at the T Party, which should be good, and then next Sunday is the Sleepwalker workshop, which now looks like it will be taking place in the BFI bar on the South Bank, subject to final review. The week after that, I’m a signed up guest of K D Grace’s as she reads from her new novel at the grand opening of the Sh! Women’s Erotic Emporium in Portobello Road, so the next month is going to be pretty exciting. 

Exciting, but lots of hard work, as the book rewrites will also have to happen.  All this and a new job too! Still, it will be great to be properly back in London.

Currently Reading: Brethren by Robyn Young

2 Comments | In: Movies, Writing | tags: authors, eclipse, erotica, k d grace, london, melanie garrett, reviews, workshop. | #

Anyway, still trying to come to terms with the writing hiatus. Ideally I should be spending time thinking about the next book, but that’s not where the energy is.

The big news this week was that Marcus Chown, who so heroically guest-blogged on these very pages right here, found his book We Need To Talk About Kelvin has made the longlist for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books on Wednesday. Congratulations, Marcus!

This was great news, but not that surprising – at least to me, who’d read it (my review is here).  

Happily, I’d just finished reading the new edition of his earlier book The Afterglow of Creation, and to celebrate these tumultuous events, I thought I’d talk about that.

The thing about The Afterglow of Creation is that it’s about cosmic background radiation: its discovery, significance, and what it tells us about the early universe, specifically about the Big Bang.

The central principle is this – a long time ago there was a humongous explosion which gave off light and heat – the Big Bang. It happened everywhere at all times. Like everything else that was once really hot but is now cooling down, it gives off a kind of heat – a radiation of just under three degrees above absolute zero – and this is cosmic background radiation. It can be measured and these measurements extrapolated backwards and from this we can learn cool and awesome stuff about the creation of the universe.

Now, if you’re anything like me, this talk of cosmic background radiation is doubtless slightly scary. Maths will be involved, of the most terrifying kind, and feature squiggly symbols and letters sandwiched in between the numbers like scorpions hiding in the crevices between rocks.

You can relax, however, because you are not going to be stung. Chown prefers a high-level discussion of the principles involved, laced with charming anecdotes about how the experimental problems of tracking down signals that are quieter than practically everything else in the universe are tackled by the scientists involved – a kind of litany of wildly creative DIY. People build high altitude balloons, share experimental space with gently rusting canisters of nerve gas, and mistake their Nobel Prize winning scientific discoveries for the interference caused by pigeon droppings on their kit.

It’s fascinating because radiation is a fairly esoteric subject, but nevertheless the enthusiasm with which its tackled both by the principle actors and their biographer is perfectly infectious. By the time the COBE satellite project is moving through the belly of the beast that is NASA you really are on the edge of your seat. A potentially very dry subject is carried off with enormous wit and clarity, with a correspondingly sensitive approach to the human element involved.

If I had a criticism at all, it would be that the book could have used a couple of images, even if only black and white diagrams. It would have been nice to see what a perfect black body curve looks like.

But this is just carping, ultimately. The Afterglow of Creation is a great achievement: a really interesting look at a difficult but vital subject. And I am too intrigued by the reference to this universe showing marks that it might have collided with another universe to think straight. I’m utterly captivated by this idea. The book is full of moments like that.

Finally, I’m linking to this – a rather spooky .WAV file of the sound of the first 760,000 years of the universe, simulated by John G. Cramer, copyright 2003. If you’ve not heard it before, be sure to check it out!

Currently reading: Brethren by Robyn Young

No Comments | In: Books, Technology, Writing | tags: authors, faber and faber, marcus chown, reviews, science, we need to talk about kelvin. | #

Sorry it’s been a while since I updated – lots has been going on here – started a new job, and getting used to paid employment after decadent writerly torpidity has taken some getting used to. I did, however, manage to get a bit of Sleepwalker done, and am now writing another new scene to replace the rather three vague and sprawling ones that I’m sacrificing to Precis, the God of Word Count.

One thing that happened was that I finished reading The First Crusade by Thomas Asbridge which Simon and Schuster very kindly sent on (Rosanne’s copy hardback of The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber, which I’m loving, was simply too precious and huge to cart about on the train). It also had to take precedence over Marcus Chown’s The Afterglow of Creation, because I need the Crusades research stuff this instant – so the Chown will be up next.

Reading The First Crusade is a bit like watching a horror movie – starving Crusaders eat the rotting bodies of their enemies at Marrat al-Nu’man, scheme in Macchiavellian fashion against one another, experience fantastical visions and find +5 Holy Lances buried under church floors, shoot their enemies’ heads into cities by catapult, die of injuries sustained enduring trial by fire. Entire ships of new recruits appear – 1500 Danes, for instance – and within days they have died of plague, to a man. It’s all a lot like the movie version of The Lord of the Rings, except it’s much, much harder to tell the good guys from the orcs.

The book begins with an analysis of why over 100,000 people would, over two years, suddenly drop everything and go haring off across the world to storm a city they had never seen – and even more miraculously, keep at it in spite of disease, starvation, and constant peril of death or enslavement. Lots of work has previously suggested that Crusading fever was little more than a cynical attempt by younger sons and disenfranchised knights to engage in looting and land-grabbing. And of course this is true in part. But Asbridge argues that it is also true that as many entrenched and secure nobles and heads of families also took up the cross.

As to why, he makes a convincing case that “an authentically spiritual age” with its Christian message of pacifism, ascetism, and self-sacrifice was absolutely at odds with the vicious and violent realpolitik of medieval Europe. To survive and thrive, the knightly class could only engage in behaviour calculated to lead to damnation. The extremely controlling behaviour over sex, religious observances, and every single facet of life meant that this fear of Hell was something shared by the whole population, from the kings downwards. By synthesising warfare and religion into the concept of Holy War, the Church offered the spiritually haunted population a means of reconciling the opposing poles of their existence.

Not even the Pope could have foreseen how explosive this formulation would prove to be to people living in the constant shadow of damnation and under threat of an imminent apocalypse. Certainly the Greeks and Muslims didn’t, and a sense of their shock and horror comes vividly alive.

If I had a criticism, it would be that I would have liked to have seen more material from the Muslim side and their strategic decisions – sources something beyond “HOLY CRAP THESE PEOPLE ARE NUTS!” as translated from medieval Arabic. Judging from the extract of his latest which I read late last year, he’s way ahead of me on this score, so looking forward to starting on that soon.

Currently Reading: The Afterglow of Creation by Marcus Chown, The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman and The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (I know, I know…)

No Comments | In: Archaeology, Books, History, Research, Writing | tags: authors, marcus chown, michel faber, philip pullman, reviews, simon and schuster, thomas asbridge. | #

Since I reckon today’s going to be the final day of Sleepwalker (Version 1.0.0) I shall keep this short and sweet.

I saw Alice In Wonderland this week. Some stunning visuals and it was great fun, but weirdly, Johnny Depp’s sensitive Goth manchild supporting character is given screen time way beyond his plot importance – time stolen from Alice, the eponymous heroine. It gives the whole movie this meandering, uneven tone, particularly since it feels the plot has been manipulated to give him a pre-eminence he doesn’t deserve in terms of its mechanics. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the same way. Again, the clue about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ought to have been in its original name. Once you start noticing this stuff, you just can’t stop.

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Despite this, it looked absolutely beautiful, and all of the supporting characters were rendered magnificently, including the Mad Hatter. I think my favourite was probably the March Hare, though they were all gorgeous, and when the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar opened his mouth, I was not expecting him to sound like Alan Rickman. It was an awesome moment. There was also a fabulously dark ending for the bad guys, delivered through passive-aggression, which I must say I liked. I’d definitely see it again.

But if I must rant (and I must, I must) it was because of this arrant piece of silliness. The final monster in the movie is called the Jabberwocky. With a Y. Except that in the Carroll poem, Jabberwocky, the monster is called “the Jabberwock”. Jabberwocky is a poem about a Jabberwock, in the same way that the Iliad is about a place called Ilium that gets trashed by the Greeks and the Nibelungenlied is about the Nibelungs’ treasure.

Every time they said “the Jabberwocky”, nails went down the blackboard of my soul. I should toughen up, I know. I suspect that this is Disney-inserted foolishness.

I’d talk a bit about The Hurt Locker, which I saw on Sunday at Crawley, especially since it went on to win the Oscar, but I had better get in the shower and crack on with my own book. Suffice to say, I’m still thinking about The Hurt Locker, which was a rather devastating piece of cinema. And I was delighted to see Kathryn Bigelow get the love – been a fan of hers since Near Dark. How can you not love the woman that made Point Break or Strange Days? The Ralph Fiennes cameo in The Hurt Locker also took me aback in pleasant surprise.

But enough prattle. I must press on. Onwards and upwards, and all that…

Currently Reading: The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (God, it will be nice to finish Sleepwalker and read a few more books. Think I’ve only read about four since the New Year…)

5 Comments | In: Movies, Writing | tags: alice in wonderland, authors, charlie and the chocolate factory, jabberwocky, johnny depp, kathryn bigelow, lewis carroll, near dark, oscars, point break, ralph fiennes, reviews, the hurt locker, tim burton. | #

I am so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open, but today is a busy day. I’m liking it so far, however, which considering how early in the morning it is, is quite a feat:

Firstly, Violet is returned to me! Rejoice with me, brethren! She is polished and shiny. I have to take the hire car, with its embarassment of electrical embellishments (Electric windows! Central locking! IT IS A WITCH! BURN IT!) back to Waterloo this morning. It’s actually lovely out – pale but sunny – and it will be good to get back to my own car, who I have missed.

Secondly, I left Carthage last night – or rather my heroine did. I went to Avebury yesterday with K D Grace, and I always find it highly inspirational.

Avebury, Wiltshire

It was too cold to walk – there was a bitter wind blowing through the stones, but we settled into the Red Lion and had a deliciously Hobbity lunch composed almost entirely of mushroom courses (breaded garlic mushrooms followed by peppered mushroom suet puddings – nom nom nom). After that we busted out the laptops, worked for a few hours.

I dropped her off after stopping in for a cup of tea and a whinge, and was exhausted once I got back to London. Despite this I had a tinker with what I had, and then ever more clearly I could hear the final conversation between protagonist and pre-antagonist. Before I knew it, Joanna was on her way back home.

This really is us in the middle of the end of Sleepwalker now. I reckon it’s about three more chapters, mostly action, all rather short. Joanna and the Raven have reached the end of negotiations, and it also means I get to spend time with Astrid again, who is always fun in her no-nonsense way.

Also, rather fabulously, Marcus Chown (who rather magnificently guest-blogged here) arranged for me to be sent a copy of his latest, The Afterglow of Creation, so this is also sitting on my desk. Rather looking forward to that!

Currently Reading: The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

4 Comments | In: Archaeology, Food, Travel, Writing | tags: authors, avebury, carthage, faber and faber, london, marcus chown, the afterglow of creation. | #

So, while we all wait to perish in the Snowpocalypse and end up fighting for meat as we cower around burning rubbish bins, I am sat here desperately trying to conjure the spirit of a vanished North African empire for my novel.

The Ruins of Carthage

In a lot of ways Carthage was the obvious choice as the origin for my complicated bad guy. I had never forgotten it. I dug for a season in the city itself, now located on the coast of modern Tunisia. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life. Within days I had succumbed to a devastating food poisoning in a country where the toilets were frequently rare and toilet paper rarer. Additionally, as a young woman as I was exposed to constant and often very physical unwanted male attention, and shopping for groceries, sight-seeing, or even catching the tram to Tunis were all a constant uphill struggle to preserve my sense of personal space and human dignity. We worked backbreaking twelve hour days digging during an African summer, teasing shards of smashed amphorae and burnt wood out of the layered trenches of sand, while watching out for scorpions.

But while there was so much toil and so much pressure, there was, every so often, flashes of extraordinary beauty and true wonder, like lightning strikes through a dark sky. I remember the columned remains of the ancient colonia while the sun set redly over them, the vivid blue-green of the Mediterranean suddenly opening up in a gap in the crumbling sea wall. A kind stranger who smiles brilliantly, wanting nothing from you. Laughter and companionship, gin and tonics on the verandah at the British Embassy, mouth-watering food and juicy wines, redolent of spices and sunlight, in cheerful sunlit terraces or lamplit embroidered nooks.There was a lot to love there, too.

And nobody was stung by a scorpion in the end.

On one day, when most of the others had gone back to the UK, I went with a supervisor to help her check out some sacrificial urns stored at the Museum of Carthage, a splendid building in the heart of the ancient city. For many years debate has raged over whether ancient Carthaginians engaged in the practice of child immolation (the very word is related to Moloch, the Phoenician god and the burnt sacrifices made for him) and while many contest that this is just a blood libel, there’s compelling literary, ancient cultural and physical evidence that this indeed took place, and in large numbers and over a long period of time. Indeed, ancient writers mention the very human variants of animals or slave children being substituted. However, every so often in hard times, the priests would insist upon the real deal, and high-born families would yield up the flower of their youth.

The urns, unprepossessingly grey-brown, were dug up some time in the 1920s and containing no further attribution than tiny hand-pencilled notes with dates and numbers tied around their necks (these were the days when archaeology was a gentleman’s hobby at best). They were piled up in a corner in one of the back rooms when we arrived. They contained a sea of fine grey grit surrounding tiny burnt little human bone pieces. Running it through our fingers, we looked for inclusions, such as amulets of ivory, bronze, and stone. These variously depicted Tanit’s sigil, or the eye of Horus, or ankhs. They had a sad, trinkety look to them, like the geegaws on sale in the souks.

Stelae in the Tophet in Carthage, showing Tanit's Symbol (taken by Michel-georges Bernard (CC))

It was hard to concentrate after a while, and we did not linger long. It has haunted me ever since.

The literature is vast, exhaustive, and polarized, but there is another aspect to sacrificing your children – maybe not just for your own good, but also for theirs. Greek myths feature elements where a baby is passed dangerously through fire or water for immortality – their mortal selves are “burned away”. Achilles is a case in point.

The King and Queen of Doors in Sleepwalker have likewise been sacrificed to immortality, long before they ever come to realise that this is their estate, but as always in such tales, each has a fatal weakness that their rival can exploit. The idea is of long provenance, I have discovered – the terrifying thing is whether I am up to the execution.

Time to get back to it…

Currently Reading: The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

3 Comments | In: Archaeology, History, Research, Travel, Weird, Writing | tags: ali shaw, authors, carthage, human sacrifice, tanit, the girl with glass feet. | #

Merry Christmas to me! I’m celebrating mine by being laid off from work, waxing too footsore to get any walking in, and indulging in seasonally-affected melancholia with only a hamster and a teapot for company. In short, I’m in the best possible psychological place to appreciate The Hell Of It All by Charlie Brooker, which I should have reviewed on Friday but didn’t because I chose to sit around in my dressing gown and snarl bitterly at the computer instead.*

I would have snarled bitterly at the TV, but happily, since I watch Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe on YouTube, I don’t have to. He demonstrates convincingly that it’s every bit as shit as you suspected, so you can move on with your life. He’s been performing this service since the late nineties. His website TV Go Home was a wonderfully surreal mock-up of the Radio Times, featuring shows such as Grief Digestion Theatre (where actors are told that a close relative has died suddenly 18 seconds before they’re due on stage), hallucinogenic synopses of Neighbours where “Toadfish rows a boat made of Disprin across a sea of piss”, and ultimately, and most memorably, Cunt, where Nathan Barley, worthless twenty something trustafarian media wannabee, is described in terms of such toe-curling contempt and spleen it can induce spontaneous eye-bleeding (“Nathan Barley visits an overpriced Soho shitstack to waste £350 on a selection of ironic Christmas gifts…and a Japanese digital camera that prints photographs on marzipan-scented recycled fucking toilet paper“).

The Hell of It All by Charlie Brooker

And Cunt is where we get off, because the rage engine that powered such eviscerating loathing for the smug meedja luvvie is the same one powering his column. Media itself is not so much reviewed as the series of lazy assumptions behind it (Heat magazine is described as the “tittering idiot’s lunchbreak reading of choice” while it invites readers to make fun of Jordan’s disabled son, the convenient appearance of sob story backgrounds from unlikeable Apprentice candidates is critiqued, the double barrelled titillation/empowerment nonsense of shows like “Credit Crunch Monty” where ordinary members of the public are stripped and reduced to tears to give them “confidence” is heaped with scorn).

Underneath it all though, there is a sense of unpleasant realisation. Someone, somewhere, is making this stuff and putting it out, and thinks that this is interesting to you. That they’re taking you in. That they know who you are, that they’ve got your number. And the reflections are all distorted and insulting, a kind of Hall of Mirrors of calumny. This is the thing that you suspect makes Charlie Brooker angry, and before very long, you’re pretty fucking angry yourself.

The book itself is a compilation of Brooker’s column in the Guardian, so obviously it has no particular ongoing theme other than the fact that everything in the universe is rubbish, but especially the media, politicians, relationships, and himself. Oh, and spiders. Or so he’d have you believe, except that every so often he will write lyrically about the legacy of Oliver Postgate (voicer and co-creator of Bagpuss and The Clangers), or on the TV dissection of elephants, or Heston Blumenthal’s Feast, and you realise that things aren’t hated on principle, just when they’re shit. Which is, unfortunately, fairly often.

But the best thing about it is the relentlessly sharp and vicious word portraits drawn in a single sentence: Alan Sugar “used to look like a water buffalo straining to shit into a lake”, Richard Dawkins is “god-hating Professor Yaffle impersonator”, William Hague a “cheery dot-eyed cueball”. Every article is a delight, containing some new phrase or surreal idea – something to love even while it spears the thing it describes in a display of audacious cruelty.

And the index is a thing of beauty. Be sure to look up the phrase “might as well…” in it.

It may be Hell. But it is also passionate and enormous fun.

*In the interests of full disclosure, this is in fact a lie employed for dramatic effect. Actually, on Friday I went out to my friend K D Grace’s book signing at Sh! Women’s Erotic Emporium, and had a really fabulous time drinking pink Cava with friends, listening to erotic short stories, and eating dinky little cupcakes while giggling at vibrators. All of which was enormous fun, but not really in keeping with the tone I wanted to set here. These erotic adventures will be described in more detail anon. With pictures, no less. Stay tuned.

Currently Reading: The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

2 Comments | In: Books, Events, Readings, Weird, Writing | tags: ali shaw, authors, charlie brooker, erotica, reviews, television, the girl with glass feet, the hell of it all, tv go home. | #

This week there is a very special treat here at the Book of Lost Nights, in that popular science writer and New Scientist cosmologist Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin (which I reviewed in these pages last Friday) has very kindly agreed to do a guest spot on the blog!

There was some discussion over what would constitute an interesting new angle for this, and in the end we decided that it might be kinda cool to allow SF (and other writers) to submit their own scenarios for their works in progress and ask Marcus what the thought the ramifications would be.

The shoutout for questions went to the T Party, my own writer’s group, my LJ friends, Twitter, Absolute Write, Litopia, and Futurismic, and Marcus very obligingly furrowed his brow over a set of very challenging and interesting conumdrums. At some point he even broke out some mathematical formulae, as you’ll see below, which to me is roughly analoguous to him conjuring demons and having them do a cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. The results, as I’m sure you’ll agree, were fascinating and thought-provoking:

The first question was from me:

1) If the Moon were to have a wobble in its orbit, say from an asteroid strike or some other catastrophic effect, what would the effect be upon the Earth, in terms of tide and weather? Would there be tsunamis, earthquakes? What if we woke up one morning and the Moon was just gone?

Marcus says: A biggish asteroid would be, say, about 300 kilometres across, which means it would have about 1/1000 the mass of the Moon. A bag of sugar is about 1/000^th the mass of a car. Think of how much effect it would have on a car if you threw a bag of sugar at. Not much. So, although the impact of a big asteroid would have a big effect on the Moon’s surface, it wouldn’t effect the Moon’s orbit a lot. In the past – during the Late Heavy Bombardment 3.8 billion years ago – the Moon was hit by bodies this size. They punctured the Moon’s crust and the upwelling of lava from the lunar interior created the lunar seas (Mare basins) we see on its face today.

But such an impact might make the Moon’s orbit a little more elliptical, so it would swing in a little closer on its closest approach to the Earth. Since the height of tides on Earth depends on the inverse-cube of the Moon’s distance, if the Moon swung even a little bit closer it would make the tides noticeably bigger. But it would have no effect on tsunamis because, contrary to what many people think, they are not tidal waves, and have nothing to do with tides. And it would have no effect on the weather.

If the Moon disappeared overnight, the lunar tides would gradually stop (the Sun accounts for about 1/3 of the tides). In the long-term, however, the effect on the Earth would be very significant. A vast amount of habitat would be lost on the shorelines of the oceans and all creatures that are adapted to feeding on the mud exposed twice a day as the sea recedes would have hard time and maybe become extinct. But the biggest effect would be on our climate. The Earth spins on its axis like a top. And, like a top, it wobbles. If it wobbles too much from its axis, the Moon’s gravity pulls it back. Why is this important? Well, big wobbles would be accompanied by huge changes in climate. We see this on Mars, which has no big Moon. Water once ran on its surface but now it is in the deep-freeze. This kind of thing would happen on Earth without the Moon. In fact, we can thank the Moon for the benign climate the Earth has had for billions of years and, without which, we wouldn’t be here.

The next one is from Pelotard:

2) I have it on good authority (NS, and I actually wrote to the scientist in question and asked) that Mercury might be flung out of the solar system in about 10 billion years. Now… if another planet had been flung out of the solar system sort of recently (astronomically speaking), would there be any obvious signs of this today?

Marcus Says: Hi, Pelotard. Yes, although the planets appear to orbit the Sun as regularly as clockwork, physicists have discovered that the Solar System can sometimes go haywire as if someone has thrown a spanner in the works. This is the effect of something called “chaos”. If a planet was ejected during a chaotic episode, it might perturb the orbit of another planet if it passed close by on its way into interstellar space. But, after that, there would be little evidence that it had ever existed.

Interestingly, simulations of the formation of the planets 4.55 billion years ago often show about 10 Earth-mass bodies forming. The majority are catapulted from the Solar System early on by close encounters with forming giant planets. So, it could be that, in addition to the two Earth-mass planets in our Solar System – Earth and Venus – there are another 8 at this moment drifting through the darkness between the stars, having been kicked out of the embryonic Solar System.

Next up is Dave Gullen from the T Party!

3) Hi Helen and Marcus,

Thanks for doing this. As a regular reader of New Scientist I always enjoy Marcus’s articles. My question are about anti-matter:
- how much would you need to make a bomb with a yield of say 100 terrajoules?
- any idea what would happen if you set it off inside a hurricane?

Thanks again.

Dave Gullen

Marcus says: Hi, Dave. The annihilation of matter and antimatter converts 100% of their mass-energy into other forms of energy, ultimately heat (by comparison, a hydrogen bomb – or the Sun – converts less than 1%). The formula which gives the amount of energy, E, that can be liberated by a mass, m, is the most famous in science: E = mc^2, where c is the speed of light (300,000 kilometres per second).

100 terajoules = 10^14 joules

The amount of matter/antimatter required to liberate this is – using Einstein’s formula – therefore 10^14/ (3 X10^8)^2 = roughly 10^-3 kg, or just 1 gram!

The energy of a typical hurricane, I believe, is about 10^18 joules. So a 1g antimatter bomb exploded inside a hurricane would liberate only about 0.1 per cent as much energy as the hurricane itself. So it might not have a lot of effect. A better way to stop a hurricane would be to cool the seawater over which it is travelling since it is heat from the sea that drives a hurricane. How you would do that, though, is anyone’s guess!

Anonymous asks:

4) A popular trope for near-future SF is interplanetary space travel involving flight times stretching into years. How much of a hazard to travellers is exposure to cosmic rays and radiation from solar wind really?

Within the Solar System, cosmic rays from the Sun – mostly high-speed protons (hydrogen nuclei) are a real hazard for long journeys – for instance, the proposed 6-month journey to Mars. Although a modest amount of shielding might be enough to safeguard the astronauts, a big flare on the Sun that ejected material in their direction, could give them a fatal radiation exposure.

A bigger problem is for interstellar travel since, to get anywhere in a reasonable time, requires flying at close to the speed of light. That means the protons (hydrogen nuclei) of interstellar space hit the spacecraft at almost the speed of light, like a deadly sleet. A lot of shielding would be needed to keep humans safe, which would add to the weight of a spacecraft, meaning it would need more fuel, adding to the weight, and requiring more fuel… A way around this might be to build a black hole star ship! (see my article in “New Scientist” the week before last… http://tinyurl.com/y9axw62)

This is from Bob (MagicMan) at Litopia:

5) In my story, I have my main character create a new battery that recharges constantly by tapping into the earth’s magnetic field. First, will this pass the scientific test of plausibility? Second, would mass production of this battery drain the magnetosphere and what might be the negative effect…would the earth’s core stop spinning, would the electromatic shield that syncs with the solar wind vanish, would the massive energy reserves in the magneto tail dissipate?

Secondary question.

Faster than light speed (FLS) is not possible relative to a fixed point. FLS is possible when relativity is removed. Space appears to be a void but in reality it contains enough debris to create friction and limit the maximum FLS attainable. My premise in my novel is this threshold FLS can be increased by using a magnetic shield to repell the material that produces the friction thereby allowing a significantly increased threshold speed. Is this plausible?

Smiles

Bob

Marcus says: Hi, Bob.

1) Yes, you could certainly use the Earth’s magnetic field to generate power. Recall that whenever a conductor cuts through a magnetic field an electrical current is made to flow in the conductor. This is the principle behind the electrical generators that create our domestic electricity. NASA has experimented several times – though I am not sure with success yet – with a space tether. This is a long thin wire, lowered from the Space Shuttle towards the Earth. The idea is that, as the tether cuts through the Earth’s magnetic field, a current is created in the tether. In other words, power is generated.

You would have to drain a lot of energy from the Earth’s magnetic field to affect it! The Earth’s magnetic field is generated by electrical currents circulating in the Earth’s core, which are ultimately caused by the rotation of the core. No one knows the details. However, core has an enormous amount of rotational energy. Although it is possible that draining energy from the Earth’s magnetic field would have a “back reaction” on the core, the effect is likely to be negligible and the core is unlikely to be slowed significantly. Of course, I could be wrong!

2) The mechanism you suggest for faster-than-light travel is, unfortunately, not plausible. It isn’t the presence of “debris” in space that causes there to be a cosmic speed limit – the speed of light. It is a fundamental property of our Universe. However, according to Einstein, it is only the speed of light that cannot be attained. There remains the possibility of “tachyons”, which never have to attain the speed of light because they are born moving faster than light.

And from Dawn at Litopia:

6) Green lightning… what would the earth’s atmosphere have to change to produce green lightning?

Hi, Dawn. This a hard one! As electricity discharges between a cloud and the Earth, the air along the path is heated to about 30,000 degrees – far hotter than the surface temperature of the Sun. The super-fast expansion of that air creates the sound of thunder.

I think – and I could be wrong! – that at a temperature of 30,000 degrees, a lot is going on. An atom of, say, oxygen or nitrogen, has a number of electrons and each occupies a particular energy level. If an electron drops from one particular energy level to another it gives out light of a particular colour. Within an atom – particularly an atom which has been given a huge boost of energy by being heated by lightning – electrons will have been boosted to a large number of high-energy states (and some will have been ejected all together). As all these electrons drop in energy, light of a whole range of colours will be emitted. Mixed together this will make white light. Just as all the colours of the rainbow mixed together make the white light of the sun.

So I think it wouldn’t matter a lot what the atmosphere was made of. Lightning would be white.

This is from Melanie at the T Party:

7) What’s your favourite use of science in a movie? And what’s your least favourite and most unlikely application of science in a movie or book?

Marcus says: Hi, Melanie! Best – That stewardess walking upside down with Velcro slippers in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Worst – Superman turning back time to bring Lois Lane back to life by spinning the Earth backwards in Superman.

And finally, from Denni Schnapp at the T Party:

It gets cold at night in the Australian desert – an argument much favoured by climate change skeptics – but I wonder how cold it would really get there if the Earth had no atmosphere at all, and ditto how hot it would be during the day, say at noon in Wagga Wagga

Thank your very much for taking the time to answer our questions!

Denni

Marcus Says: Hi, Denni. Without the Earth’s atmosphere the Earth would indeed be frozen solid. By far the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapour. Together with carbon dioxide, this traps enough heat in the atmosphere to give the surface an average temperature of about 14 degrees Celsius. Without this cosy atmospheric blanket, the average temperature would be about –18 degrees Celsius and the Earth would be uninhabitable, a global arctic waste. Although it gets a lot of bad Press, we owe everything to the greenhouse effect! Unfortunately, the small additional effect humans are having by burning fossil fuels seems to be having a critical effect on the planet.

And that’s it – I’d just like to thank Marcus ever so much for agreeing to do this, and also to everyone that sent in such great questions. The next stop on Marcus’ Blog Tour is Teen Librarian on the 15th, so be sure to catch him there! And I really do recommend the book – most wonderfully thought-provoking!

This went so well, that I’m considering doing a guest blog for other fields of endeavour – such as answers to medical or historical questions, for instance. Shout out if you think it would be useful.

Next week normal service resumes, including a discourse on the bittersweet pleasures of redundancy, my unrequited love for Charlie Brooker, and mean-spirited movies, most notably “Law Abiding Citizen”…

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The Sun could be made of bananas, and it wouldn’t make a sod of difference to us. Though that said, it would make for tasty but rather scorched banana bread. It’s not that the Sun is on fire because it’s made of flammable stuff. The Sun is on fire because there is such a lot of it. The crushing force of gravity increases pressure and correspondingly heat within its contents, producing the mind-numbingly melty temperatures within.

This is one of the many surprising assertions made in We Need To Talk About Kelvin by Marcus Chown, which I mentioned receiving and enjoying last week, so I was consequently thrilled when I heard he’d be interested in guest blogging here on December 11th! YAY! So, I’ve read the book, and experienced no less than three Eureka moments.

We Need to Talk About Kelvin by Marcus Chown

Such as: Stuff is made up mostly of nothing but energy. According to Chown, if all the space were removed from atoms, the entire human race could be fit into the space of a single sugar cube. It’s actually highly mysterious that I don’t plummet straight through the seat on the Tube and to gory death on the tracks below, book in hand, as tiny electric forces are basically the only things holding me up. For the record, this is not a great thing to think whilst one is sitting on the Tube reading.

Which brings me neatly around to the book, of course. We Need To Talk About Kelvin, jacketed with what seems to be aggressive non-threateningness, is a book about relating everyday phenomena, such as starlight, your reflection in a window, the fact that aliens haven’t enslaved everybody yet – into powerful illustrations of quantum mechanics at work in the world. It’s peppered with fascinating anecdotes about the scientists involved in the work of proving these things, from Galileo to scientists whose work is only just being published now.

Possibly the most impressive thing, to me personally, was the discussion on quantum probability. I’ve read some extremely good books on the subject while doing my Mephistophela (and increasingly Sleepwalker) research – Quantum: A Guide For The Perplexed by Jim Al-Khalili and Brown’s Minds, Machines, and the Multiverse: The Quest For The Quantum Computer, amongst others, but to me personally, Chown’s recounting of the phenomenon was the clearest.

One hesitates to write things like, “We live in an age where…” It’s just so portentous. You could imagine it being said by Mr. Voice in a movie trailer. In fact, it almost certainly has been. But the fact of the matter is that the incessant daily scramble to stay on top of mundane things blinds us to the fact that we are all participants in an ongoing elaborate miracle – that the universe is a juggling trick where all the balls are in the air at exactly the same time, and science is a series of constantly opening doors leading to ever more astonishing worlds where our idea of “true” and “normal” meets the quantum idea of “true” and “normal” and they immediately get into a huge fist fight. As it happens, on a clear day, you really can see forever. And that’s pretty amazing.

Sometimes you just reminding.

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