Isaac Asimov on Science Fiction: the Reaction, not the Action

In “Future? Tense!” in his essay collection From Earth to Heaven (1965), Isaac Asimov wrote about the nature of science fiction. He noted that science-fictioneers are stereotyped either as indulgers in weird fantasies or as farsighted predictors of the future. After discussing some SFers’ successful, if limited, predictions, he notes:

Do you see, then, that the important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap-opera; not the income tax but the expense account; not the Bomb but the nuclear stalemate? Not the action, in short, but the reaction?

Not the technological advance, but what would happen if it became common.

He himself had proposed that his robots would have “positronic brains”, from having recently learned about the positron, a sort of mirror-image of the electron. However, when a positron runs into an electron, the two particles disappear into two or three very energetic gamma rays, with the combined energy the an electron would get from a million-volt battery. A positronic brain would quickly fry itself.

But that was not the point — the point is what would happen if artificial-intelligent systems became common. IA had became annoyed at all the SF stories about robots destroying their creators, with the implication that we were not meant to create such entities. He knew that many tools have various safety them, and wouldn’t AI systems also need them? Thus, his Three Laws of Robotics, which I rephrase as follows:

1. An AI system may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. An AI system must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. An AI system must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Likewise, if automatic-driving cars became feasible, what would become of manual driving? IA once wrote a story, “Sally”, in which manual driving had been outlawed as needlessly dangerous.

IA imagined what SFers might have written about cars back in 1880.

There could be the excitement of a last-minute failure in the framistan and the hero can be described as ingeniously designing a liebestraum out of an old baby carriage at the last minute and cleverly hooking it up to the bispallator in such a way as to mutonate the karrogel.

IA didn’t name names of SF stories like that, but that reminds me of the “treknobabble” in some Star Trek episodes.

Or,

“The automobile came thundering down the stretch, its mighty tires pounding, and its tail assembly switching furiously from side to side, while its flaring foam-flecked air intake seemed rimmed with oil.” Then, when the car has finally performed its task of rescuing the girl and confounding the bad guys, it sticks its fuel intake hose into a can of gasoline and quietly fuels itself.

Lots of visual-media SF is similarly absurd about its spaceships, making them seem too much like Earthbound vehicles.

He also considered what social changes cars would make possible if they could be mass-produced in the millions, and at prices low enough for just about anyone to buy them. Wouldn’t people move outward and create suburbs? Etc. H.G. Wells predicted several such things in his 1901 book Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress: Upon Human Life and Thought, and IA thought of something that even HGW didn’t think of. When people commute to cities, they will have to have some place to leave their cars, and he imagines:

A delightful satire about our hero spending all day looking for a parking spot, and in the process, meeting traffic jams, taxi drivers, traffic cops, trucks, parking meters, filled garages, fire hydrants, etc., etc.

The title: “Crunch!”

That seems like painful reality today, but maybe not in 1880, when he thought that that could have alerted at least some policymakers about the problems of a superabundance of cars.

IA also noted a prediction of the Cold-War nuclear stalemate. Robert A. Heinlein wrote “Solution Unsatisfactory” under the name Anson MacDonald back in 1941. Although he imagined radioactive dust rather than nuclear bombs, the essential outcome was the same. He imagined his hero asking if the US could continue to have a monopoly on radioactive-dust making, because someone elsewhere will sooner or later reinvent it. This would result in an all-offense-no-defense stalemate, with every dust-possessing nation dependent on the goodwill of every other one.

Atheism Plus

A new movement has emerged in atheist activism: Atheism Plus. Its advocates describe themselves as

Atheists plus we care about social justice.
Atheists plus we support women’s rights.
Atheists plus we protest racism.
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia.
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

In my opinion, it is an entirely legitimate movement. Different activists specialize in different things, and some people may want to specialize in social-justice issues without compromising their atheism. However, it has provoked some people to call it divisive and to claim that it associates a lot of issues with atheism that do not have any real connection with atheism.

What started it?

North Korea: a monarchy, by any other name, …

The Mad Monarchist: Classifying North Korea The Mad Monarchist attempts to argue that North Korea is not really a monarchy, despite its first two leaders ruling for life and being succeeded by their sons. It seems to me that a monarchy, by any other name, is still a monarchy, and that this is an exercise in the No True Scotsman fallacy.

He makes a comparison to Vatican City, stating that the Pope being elected does not make it a republic. But it seems to me that calling it a monarchy misclassifies it – it is an oligarchic republic, much like the former Republic of Venice. The Pope is not succeeded by some family member, and neither he nor his family chooses his successor.

The Twilight of the Monarchies

I recently thought of that evocative phase to describe the decline of monarchy over the last few centuries, something that I’d blogged on here previously. It was inspired by Norse Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, where they would fight a final battle with their enemies. Also known as Götterdämmerung in German.

But among monarchist blogs and sites, I found something curious. The Mad Monarchist: A Monarchy for America? The Mad Monarchist glumly concludes that monarchist activism in the US will get nowhere. US monarchist groups never get very many followers, and they don’t get along very well with each other. Importing a monarch? Who might want the job? Electing a monarch? Will we get “Queen Oprah I”? The Mad Monarchist suspects that the most likely US path to monarchy would be Caesarism – the US gets into such bad shape that some authoritarian leader takes over and creates a monarchy while carefully letting the US continue to appear to be a republic. That said, he wishes monarchist groups all the best.

My previous entries on monarchy:

• Monarchy: A Long History
• Monarchy: Early Rejection
• Monarchy: Modern European Rejection
• Monarchy: Modern Rejection Elsewhere
• Monarchy: A Few Revivals
• Monarchy: Some Arguments
• Monarchy: Who Wants Them Back?
• Monarchy: Who’s Next to Fall?
• Communist Monarch Kim Jong Il now Dead
• Monarchy: How Did It Emerge?

Higgs particle discovered

Finally! At long last! This long-sought particle has been discovered, or at least some approximation of it. It’s the last remaining particle of the Standard Model, and it makes all the other ones massive except for the photon and the gluon.

Higgs Boson Discovery announcement by Peter Higgs – YouTube
Higgs boson update at CERN: July 4, 2012, press conference – YouTube
CERN Higgs Boson Discovery Seminar – YouTube
Latest update in the search for the Higgs boson (04 July 2012) – the slides

It was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider, currently the world’s biggest particle accelerator or atom smasher. It sends protons around and around at close to the speed of light in a vacuum and collides them with each other. Their kinetic energies are about 4000 times their masses, meaning a lot of energy that can go into making new particles, courtesy of E = mc^2.

The Higgs particles quickly decay into other particles, and it’s these particles that the CMS and ATLAS detector teams observe. The detector teams then reconstruct the masses of the the particles that produced the observed ones and look for mass values that they are likely to have. There are processes that can produce imitations of Higgs-particle decays, but they produce a continuous spectrum of masses. So the detector teams looked for bumps in graphs of reconstructed masses.

They found those bumps, at about 5 standard deviations above the background, and at the same mass, about 125 – 126 GeV, about 134 times more massive than a proton.

What’s next? Collecting more data, and trying to find out how closely this particle fits the expected properties of the Standard Model Higgs particle.

Finally, I agree with all those physicists who hate the label “God particle”.

Rejected for a long time before being accepted

Some notable scientific hypotheses had been rejected for a long time before being accepted.

• Heliocentrism
• Atomism
• Meteorites as Extraterrestrial Rocks
• Geological Catastrophes
• Continental Drift
• Genes
• Lichens as Alga-Fungus Symbioses
• Endosymbiosis
• Transposons: “Jumping Genes”
• Chemiosmotic Biological Energy Metabolism
• Dorsoventral Inversion of Chordates

Their later acceptance was usually the result of later discoveries, sometimes decades or centuries later.

These later discoveries often included resolutions of the difficulties that many of the theories’ critics had pointed out, though not always. Critics of heliocentrism pointed out that stars ought to have parallaxes, and heliocentrists responded by proposing that the stars are very far away, which seemed rather implausible. At least since the late 17th century, heliocentrism was widely accepted, but parallaxes of stars were not successfully measured until 1838, when three astronomers published parallax measurements of three stars. The nearest one of these was nearly 300,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is, thus vindicating the great-distance hypothesis.

The acceptance of some of the theories involved conceptual reorganizations, like with continental drift. Instead of continents plowing through oceanic crust, continents drift along with nearby oceanic crust, which gets created and destroyed. Chemiosmotic energy metabolism was another: instead of some chemical intermediate, it is a physical intermediate: hydrogen ions being pumped across a membrane and then returning.

There are sometimes weird ones. In the late 19th cy., the particle theory of light seemed conclusively refuted with the success of the wave theory. But around the turn of the 20th cy., physicists discovered some effects that implied that light also has particle properties, like the photoelectric effect. This was part of the discovery of quantum mechanics, and that discovery also involved discovering that matter particles, like electrons, have wave properties. Wave-particle duality has been well-established for some decades, though with macroscopic entities being mostly particlelike or mostly wavelike.

Finally, in no case was a theory ever accepted by its advocates whining about how closed-minded the mainstream scientific community is. Pseudoscientists and crackpots never tire of whining about that, almost as if that somehow proves the truth of their theories. But as Bertrand Russell had noted, “There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths.”

How good is your theory?

Ethan Siegel in How Good is Your Theory? Open Thread I : Starts With A Bang : Starts With A Bang, describes these levels of support, which I have numbered:

• 3: Scientific Law. Very well-supported theories that have successfully passed numerous tests.
• 2: Validated. Well-supported but with some problems, like unconfirmed or untested parts.
• 1: Speculative. May or may not be testable. Often gets a lot of publicity, however.
• 0: Ruled Out. The opposite of the first category.

Ethan Siegel’s spectrum is, I think, a good way of comparing the level of support for various theories, and it is a good antidote for “scientists always change their theories!” arguments. Many theories come and go, but they are usually on the speculative side, around 1. Those that get promoted to 2 or 3 usually last. Some of them may get their domains of validity restricted, as with Newtonian mechanics after the rise of relativity and quantum mechanics, but they still remain very successful theories within those domains.