Human beings are wonderfully complex, so it’s interesting that sci-fi writers love to write about computers developing near-human characteristics (I’m guilty too—see The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan—FYI: this is a free download on Amazon starting tomorrow, June 28, through July 2; also, Odri’s starship in Sing a Samba Galactica is just another member of the crew).  But, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine an AI computer program capable of modeling the emotional ingredients that influence human decision making.  (I suppose you could argue that you don’t want emotions influencing the computer’s thinking because they so often get humans in trouble, but that’s another issue.)

Last week I was struck by the stock market’s reaction to Bernanke’s announcement that the Fed was going to halt their stimulus policies and, in particular, let interest rates rise to a self-sustaining  and steady-state level.  The best way to describe it is that it was an “oh-my-God” reaction of Wall Street and the rest of the financial world to an abrupt change in the rules of the game.  Ignoring the fact that we can’t model these emotional responses (part of the problem), we still should wonder why.  Why is it that human beings have knee-jerk emotional reactions to outside stimuli that can send their world into a vortex of disaster?

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Scott, a frequent commenter to my blog posts, stated in one of his comments, the following:  “It almost seems like you have to be a scientist or almost one to write good SF today!”  At the risk of taking him out of context, this is the theme of today’s post.  To paraphrase Scott, how do we reconcile a scientist’s no-nonsense focused pursuit of good data and elegant theories with the creativity and imagination of a master storyteller?  Is there cause and effect here?  Or, do we just have the synergistic nexus of two different personality traits.

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Einstein’s special theory of relativity differs from ordinary Galilean relativity in that the scientist who ended up looking like a beat poet made the assumption that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames.  That and the key word “inertial” makes the theory “special,” as opposed to “general.”  (This is an over-simplification—the general theory is really a non-quantum theory of gravity, generalizing Newtonian gravity).  Back in September, physicists associated with the Italian Opera experiment shook the world in announcing that Einstein’s assumption was incorrect.  A sensor detected CERN-emitted neutrinos 453 miles away—the distance divided by the time lag gives a velocity.

Scientists hit the hooch, refusing to believe the results.  As an ex-scientist, I did too.  Over a century of experiments had confirmed Einstein’s assumption (it’s still true in the general theory, by the way).  I had a number of people ask me about the experiment.  Some even said, “Wow, Einstein was wrong!”  My response was, “Let’s wait and see.”  One experiment doesn’t overturn a theory—repeated experimental confirmation is required.  The lesson learned here is that, whether he was right or wrong, Eisnstein was just a very able theoretician.  Experiments determine the physics and the scientific method always prevails—theories have to be tested.  In this case, the disbelief spurred experimentalists to check the Opera results.

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Like many children, I admired various sports figures.  Roy Campanella, Brooklyn Dodgers’ catcher, was a role model.  I played that position and later admired the man for his tenacity and courage in facing his paralysis after an auto accident.  I also became a Dodgers fan and was overjoyed when they moved to L.A.   K. C. Jones and Bill Russell were favorites at the University of San Francisco and I followed their careers to the Boston Celtics where I became a fan, even though I was on the West Coast.  The historic confrontations between Russell and Chamberlain were more exciting than the gunfight between the Earps and the Clantons.

I can’t remember seeing any of these three athletes drink or smoke, or reading about their philandering ways in the national media.  A simpler, more innocent time?  Perhaps.  Steroids in baseball were far in the future.  Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant were too.  Nevertheless, I can imagine how devastating it might be for a young boy or girl to see and hear about the decline of one of their sports heroes.  It must be at least as stressful as that first kiss or that first dance.

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Writing about the children’s book Valiant, Dog of the Timberline in a recent post about Westerns, reminded me that, even in a story not about animals, critters can play an important role.  Mice to mongooses (mongeese?), swans to elephants, pigs, cats, and dogs—literary animals have filled the pages of world literature.  Whether anthropomorphized or not, animals can actually become main characters that bring life to a story.  Here’s a quiz.  Match up the following names with the animals I just listed:  Leda, Napoleon, Horton, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Argos, Stuart Little, Mrs. Norris.  Then find the famous authors that wrote about that named animal.

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