I’m expecting a bloodbath in the EPA, NASA, NOAA and possibly other agencies as Mr. Trump wages war on the environment. Many employees there are civil service, but that might not stop Il Duce AKA Narcissus le Grand—he’ll just close down the agencies if he wants to get rid of them. The EPA, NASA, and NOAA are where many of those “bad scientists” can be found who disagree with the GOP claim that climate control and taking care of the environment have low priority. Narcissus le Grand even believes global warming is a hoax.

What’s driving all this is Trump’s desire to end all environmental regulations so that companies, his included, can pollute and destroy the environment as much as they want, a particularly virulent and dangerous example of capitalism without controls. Even now, they ship high-tech toxic waste and other crap to places like Bangladesh. Il Duce and his minions probably think it would be cheaper just to dump it somewhere in the U.S. How ‘bout not doing it at all?!

Disasters like that BP oil well in the Gulf, destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, poisoning wells and water supplies—those kinds of things are just part of doing business, according to Trump and his cronies. He names Pruitt to head the EPA and one of the gnome’s first public acts is to deny the role of CO2 in global warming. C’mon!

Many scientists are worried. A week before Il Duce’s inauguration, more than 250 volunteers met at UPenn for a two-day binge of downloading climate data and storing it on independent servers. “If you don’t want to do anything about climate change,” said Texas A&M atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler, “you are in a stronger position if you get rid of the data.” Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Center of Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists said, “With a president who doesn’t respect scientific information, one abuse could be data mysteriously disappearing from websites, or government scientific websites may suddenly have misinformation.” Most of the data that was saved was from NOAA, EPA, DoE, and NASA.

One of those infamous executive orders from Narcissus le Grand could restrict data access from outside the U.S. Trump’s evil minions are already talking about clamping down on the internet and allowing service providers to have multi-tier systems—that’s been on the GOP hit list for some time. And shortly after the inauguration, Trump ordered the EPA to delete climate change pages from the EPA’s website, but he then backtracked on that order when the roars of protest became deafening. The order for EPA scientists and other agencies’ scientists not to post on social media or communicate with reporters still stands, though. Inside the agencies that do climate-related research, Goldman says “morale is low. People are scared.” Scared for their jobs, because Il Duce likes to fire people who disagree with him!

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In my forthcoming novel, Gaia and the Goliaths, #7 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” Detective Castilblanco considers some of the pros and cons about nuclear power. The novel’s main theme involves climate and environmental issues, pro-environmental activism, and attacks on the environment waged by corporations and their political sycophants.  Russia, known for its lack of concern about the environment and the Chernobyl disaster, plays an important role too. These issues are current ones now, considering the new U.S. administration that will invade Washington D.C.

Mr. Trump and his cabinet choices will probably set back any progress we’ve made on environmental issues, except for states like California that are far more progressive than Washington, and there are plenty of willing accomplices for Trump’s team in the GOP-dominated Congress. The new president thinks global warming is a hoax and climate control isn’t necessary. But questionable actions have been taken by Dems too. There is a general consensus among politicians that nuclear power is bad, so let’s get rid of it.

For example, Governor Cuomo of New York has championed the closing of the Indian Head power plant on the Hudson, mentioned in my novel, without having any viable alternative for replacing the power the plant generates. Many European countries depend on nuclear power, as does Japan. Is it dirty energy? Are nuclear power plants accidents waiting to happen? Have politicians created a Frankenstein monster in order to win votes from environmental activists?

First, let’s state for the record what affects global warming and is bad for the climate, namely fossil fuels. Presumably Cuomo, who has no technical background and is apparently channeling Van Helsing in his pursuit of nuclear energy as an evil vampire, will replace Indian Head’s power output with coal-burning or natural gas power plants. Those are worse for the environment. We need to reduce the carbon footprint, not augment it. Any environmental campaign must be anti-fossil fuels because there is no way to use them that won’t damage the environment. Period.

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Some excitement was caused recently by the announcement of an E-type exoplanet, Proxima b, a planet orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system (Alpha A is a G-type star like the sun, while B is a K-type star, but both are much brighter than Proxima). That system is about 4.3 light-years from Earth, or 40.14 trillion kilometers. (Conversion lesson: convert to statute miles.) The size of the Milky Way is about 100, 000 light-years, so Proxima is right around the corner. Right? Wrong! Even distances in our galaxy are “huuuuge,” to borrow a word abused by two recent presidential candidates and the SNL comics.

More excitement was caused by the report from scientists at the RATAN-600 radio telescope at Zelenchukskaya in Russia. They detected a strong signal apparently originating in the direction of the G-type star HD 1611595, known to have one warm Neptune-like planet (40-day orbit). This star is 94 light-years away. The Russian report to the SETI committee was made without many details.  The star might have rocky E-type planets too, so many UFO-ET enthusiasts and sci-fi addicts are in a frenzy, spurred on by the meaning of the acronym—“Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.” While some other Russian scientists wrote the whole thing off as terrestrial interference (covering their butts?), the scientific jury is still out (comments updating this are welcome).  95 light-years is many times 4, of course, but still small in comparison relative to galactic distance markers—4 is a walk to your neighborhood convenience store; 95 is a short car ride to the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts.

Let’s counter some knee-jerk reactions to these reports first. Coincidentally, SETI has a new focus on red dwarf stars. They can live billions of years longer than G-type stars, where SETI’s emphasis has traditionally been, because we know at least one G-type star, ours, has an intelligent civilization (although “intelligent” might be a questionable word to use sometimes). That extra stellar lifespan might allow a red dwarf like Proxima Centauri to be home to an ancient civilization far advanced beyond ours (and actually be intelligent?). The hurdles are enormous, though, for any kind of life in such a system, because livable E-type planets would have to orbit the parent star so closely that they would be tidally locked, one face always turned toward the star. That means life as we know it could only exist in that transition zone between eternal day and eternal night.

The second report is a bit more difficult to put down in this way: an E-type planet could exist farther out from HD 1611595 and have life. Without knowing the details of the signal (I only know it’s strong), one can’t use it to mark the source as being intelligent. If it were narrowband, seemingly coded, and beamed directly at us (how could they know to do that when radio had just been invented on Earth 90 years ago?), you might have something. But consider this: one scientist estimates that ten-to-the-thirtieth (one followed by thirty zeroes) watts would be needed to broadcast this signal if omnidirectional (i.e. not specifically aimed at us), and ten-to-the-fifteenth watts if beamed directly. The first corresponds to a Kardashev Type II civilization, one that harnesses all energy emitted by its sun (Dyson sphere?—that’s physicist Freeman Dyson, not my author-friend Scott Dyson); the second to Type I, a civilization that “only” harnesses all the energy falling on its planet.

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Most sci-fi readers and writers are familiar with the Fermi paradox, summarized by the question in the title, and the associated Drake equation that tried to resolve it. For those who are not, let me review that history first before going on to discuss a different take on the Drake equation that I found interesting.

The Fermi paradox first appears in my sci-fi books in the second book of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” In Sing a Samba Galactica, Earth colonists on New Haven, an E-type planet in the 82 Eridani system, have evidence for some local ETs and try to figure out how to communicate with them. Here’s the excerpt:

***

They had an informal meeting in the bachelors’ dining area.  Takahashi watched as Malenkov, ever the showman, pinged his beer mug with a laser pointer and then stood on top of a chair.

“At Los Alamos, in 1950,” he began, in his best orator’s voice, “the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, as well as other physicists working on the atomic bomb project, this provocative question:  If life is so common in the universe, where are they?”

Malenkov waited for some chuckles to subside, gulped some beer, and continued.

“Fermi noted there are plenty of stars older than our sun.  If life were so plentiful, it would have begun on planets around these stars billions of years before it began on Earth.  In that case, shouldn’t Earth have been visited or colonized by a race much older than our own?  Even with slow means of space travel like what we used to come to New Haven, a civilization with a will to homestead could settle a large fraction of the galaxy in a million years or so.”

Malenkov looked out at his audience.  Takahashi, sitting in the cafeteria’s front row, smiled at him.  So which one of us is Holmes and which one Watson?

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As more and more planets are discovered, some in their star’s E-zone (Earth-like conditions stretched a little, but always with liquid water), it becomes almost a certainty that life exists “out there.”  Earth isn’t the center of the Universe, it might not be all that special, and human beings better start giving any gods they’ve created a little more credit, or create new ones with a more universal outlook.  That said, what about intelligent life?

Fermi’s paradox, summarized succinctly by “Where are they?”, isn’t really a paradox.  If you assume the ETs are subject to our same physical laws—in other words, they’re limited by the speed of light and the immense distance even to nearby stars—they can’t visit us anymore than we can visit them.  Many ET civilizations might have come and gone.  Their people might have wondered if there’s someone “out there,” or they didn’t give an ET rat’s ass—maybe they were so xenophobic they didn’t want to meet anyone else, or their planet was shrouded by thick fog and they didn’t even know anything outside the atmosphere existed.  Intelligent life just might not be that intelligent.

Or, it might be a lot more intelligent and technically more advanced than we are, pushing beyond the limitations of physical laws as we currently understand them.  In my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (CCT), I postulate some colonization in near Earth-space via trips lasting hundreds of years, followed by an ET-Human collaboration that figures out to hop around the multiverses, a type of faster-than-light travel that doesn’t make old Einstein turn over in his grave.

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Some theoretical physicists play loose with mathematics.  Feynman, for example, never worried about the convergence of the series needed to calculate things in QED (that’s quantum electrodynamics); in fact, he designed a technique, now called Feynman diagrams, to allow him to throw away infinities easily and just hoped things would work out.  That’s called renormalization.  The renormalization of quantum field theories became a big deal.  The electro-weak theory of Weinberg, Glashow, and Salam, designed to explain and combine the electromagnetic and the weak forces, for example, was never fully accepted until ‘t Hooft proved it could be “renormalized.”

Dirac’s bras and kets were just vectors and linear functionals on a Hilbert space, but I doubt he worried too much about functional analysis, the study of infinite-dimensional vector spaces and their linear operators.  Even Maxwell’s brilliant synthesis of all classical electromagnetic phenomena—gamma rays, x-rays, visible light, electricity, and magnetism—had to wait years until vector calculus was invented by Gibbs before its true beauty could be seen.  A classical vector field is determined by its curl and divergence, and that’s exactly what Maxwell’s equations say about the electric and magnetic fields.

Sometimes physics gets ahead of mathematics.  Sometimes it’s the reverse.  The key to quantum chromodynamics isn’t Gell-Mann’s Eightfold Way.  The representations for the special unitary group SU(3) he used to organize hadrons into composites of quarks already existed.  His contribution was to recognize that the representations could organize the hadronic particle zoo.  Similarly, I always thought that algebraic topology was an esoteric branch of mathematics, and yet it has found multiple uses in particle physics.

On the flip side, Ed Witten’s treatment of string theory (part of quantum field theory) has led into many breakthroughs in the theory of knots, an unusually esoteric mathematical subject, so much so that Witten received the Fields Medal, the prestigious mathematics equivalent of a Nobel prize (the story about why Nobel didn’t want to give a prize to mathematicians seems apocryphal).  Much earlier, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity wouldn’t have gone anywhere without tensor calculus—his friend Grossman, a mathematician, even helped him with the math.

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People are addicted to their smart phones, so much so that they walk into fountains, kill pedestrians and other drivers, and expose themselves to scam artists, muggers, and perverts.  Beyond that, or bloviating about trivial matters, or being a narcissistic showoff on social media, what can a smart phone do for you?  Depends on who you are, of course.  I’ll turn the question around and discuss what your smart phone CANNOT do.

ID a song.  I heard an oldie the other day.  I could hum the melody.  Loved the piano riffs.  But if I hadn’t been able to remember the name of the performer, I could have never answered the question: Who’s that performer and what became of him?  (It was Richard Marx, by the way.  He’s going on tour and has a new album.)  Song recognition isn’t covered by voice recognition.

Make par in golf, or catch a fish.  It might know what those things are, but it can’t do them.  And it can’t help you do them either.  Smart phones are just limited little computers, apps are just limited little programs, and neither of them are really smart.

Write a novel.  Beyond mentioning the obvious that your smart phone can’t create any of the elements necessary to spin a good yarn, try writing a novel with your thumbs!  Voice recognition technology, you say?  Try it.  You’ll be spending so much time editing that you’ll scream for your laptop.  Or join Jack in the Cuckoo’s Nest.  But maybe all those badly edited ebooks are written this way?

Help you find God or inner peace.  It might hook you up with the latest online quack who calls her- or himself a preacher, but God doesn’t answer a smart phone call and the internet offers no inner peace, just a bunch of random stuff that obeys Sturgeon’s Law, not God’s.  You can obtain more peace by putting your phone on a tile floor and stomping it into pieces.

Make popcorn.  Tres important, mes amis!

Offer a substitute for a loved one’s hug or kiss.  You might find a dating site or attract a pervert on Facebook (is that what the new “love” emoticon on FB is for?), but your smart phone is not much of a companion, in spite of your obsession with it.  Moreover, anyone who kisses her or his iPhone or Galaxy screen is just asking for a major bout with the flu, unless s/he puts hand sanitizer on that screen often enough.  That would have the advantage of making it slippery so thieves couldn’t grab it as easily…or make it drop to that tile floor and shatter into pieces!
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Benoit Mandelbrot (11/20/1924—10/14/2010) popularized the description and construction of 2D and 3D sets of fractional (non-integer) dimension.  He called them fractals.  I won’t use the word “invent” because such sets were studied as far back as the 1800s.  Of course, to say fractional (or “fractal” or non-integer) dimension, one has to redefine dimension a wee bit—Haussdorf, a 19^th century mathematician did that.  (The famous Cantor set, always a subset of the real numbers between zero and one, can be constructed to have any Haussdorf dimension between zero and one—no wonder Cantor went crazy.)  Just about everything Mandelbrot described and constructed still must exist in a space of integer (1, 2, 3, …) dimensions.  The construction of a fractal is often based on self-similarity, tacking on more and more similar but smaller pieces, ad infinitum (or taking them out).

Fractals represent ultimate geekiness because they have found many applications in computer graphics, including artsy stuff like landscapes and seascapes.  There was also a time, though, when just about every other paper in solid state physics used fractals, fractional dimensions, and self-similarity to describe complex systems—they’re ubiquitous in nature.  Today that fad has passed, but fractals still remain (sounds like a line in Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence,” doesn’t it?  It appeared 12 years before Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature).

Mandelbrot spoke once at Clark University in Worcester, MA.  There was a cocktail hour before, befitting a famous VIP visiting from IBM, followed by a lecture—Mandelbrot seemed to enjoy himself at both.  He didn’t discuss the history of fractals much—to paraphrase Newton, Mandelbrot had stood on the shoulders of mathematical giants—but Benoit certainly sold his product well.  I’ll have to admit that his book is a work of art and probably helped popularize the subject even more—maybe a large number of applied mathematicians nowadays owe their geekiness to that book and its applications to computer graphics.

Today fractals are just another useful tool in the applied mathematician’s bag of tricks.  I even remember an image compression scheme based on fractals (JPEG is a more popular one).  Applied to sonic data (like MPEG), it could probably find useful applications today in compressing Senate filibusters—it was a lossy compression scheme, but the public wouldn’t care about that when dealing with filibusters.  No problem with candidates on the stump, of course, because they never spout more than fifteen-second soundbites.

And so it goes….

In his op-ed article on creativity in the NY Times, Prof. Adam Grant, management and psych professor at the Wharton School of UPenn, says step one to creativity is to procrastinate.  “Creativity takes time.  So I’m trying not to make progress toward my goal.”  I think that’s BS, and I’m hoping I’m not alone.  The first part depends on your definition of creativity, of course.  Presumably, this prof, who’s trying to sell his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, is using a business definition.  I don’t see much creativity in the business world.  I see it in the author/composer of Hamilton; I’ve seen it in the works of Alejandro Obregon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; and I’ve seen it in scientists and engineers, from researchers to smart phone and car designers.  Grant confuses creativity with business acumen.  Trump has the latter, but he isn’t creative (come to think of it, Trump and his progeny went to Wharton).

So, let’s get past that first statement in the quote and move on to the second.  Procrastination is the opposite of creativity!  If one procrastinates, s/he’s doing absolutely nothing.  Now Alan Watts might say doing nothing is accomplishing something—that’s part of Buddhist teaching (make your mind blank to achieve enlightenment)—but it sure as hell isn’t being creative.  I’d generally call it wasting time!  At a conference once some Austrian physicists told me that they were in the process of thinking about getting some dinner.  Maybe that’s typically Austrian—I seem to remember Vienna as pretty laid back (but probably not during WWII)—but dinner just isn’t that complicated, and time spent in the process of thinking about it would be better spent doing physics in this case, where a physicist can and should be creative.  Leave the dinner creativity to chefs—culinary art is creative, but only when you do it, not in the process of thinking about it.

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[A new feature just for my readers, wee bits of popular science nostalgia.]

John Archibald Wheeler (7/9/1911—4/13/2008) might have received only popular recognition for his students if he hadn’t coined the term “black hole” (Hawking popularly comes to mind first as the scientist most associated with black holes, of course).  His most famous student was Feynman, but Misner and Thorne were two others (the doorstop-sized tome Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, is one classic on the subject of general relativity).  Wheeler was a physicist’s physicist, though, like Feynman, dabbling in anything that interested him.

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (8/8/1902—10/20/1984) was more like physic’s Harper Lee; he did a few things too (the idea of physical “constants” varying on a cosmic scale is intriguing), but he’s most famous for the equation that bears his name and postulating the positron as the electron’s anti-particle to make sense of it (it took physicists awhile to find that pesky particle, though).  He had an early tome on quantum mechanics where he introduced bras and kets—today we know them as vectors in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and complex-valued linear functions on them (Hilbert spaces existed in Dirac’s time, but, like Feynman and many other theoretical physicists, Dirac eschewed rigorous mathematical formalism).

At a conference in the early 1970s held at New Orlean’s Loyola University (next to Tulane), Dirac and Wheeler were guests of honor and sat in the front row competing to see who could doze off first when the geekiness became as stifling as the bad AC.  Dirac was particularly energetic during his talk, though.  Loyola is a Jesuit school, so one smartass grad student decided to embarrass Dirac by asking him if his belief in absolute measurements didn’t imply a belief in God.  Dirac, either agnostic, atheist, or just pissed (those might not be mutually exclusive, from Dirac’s reaction), dashed offstage and returned with a meter stick.  “This is a meter,” he said, “and it will be a meter whether God exists or not” (that’s a paraphrase).  Since Napoleon’s scientists invented the meter, he had a pretty good case.

By shifting several decades, black holes had a history similar to the positron—theory predicted them long before they were discovered.  Many other predictions of general relativity were confirmed experimentally before that happened (I’m discounting extensions to women’s large handbags).  Physicists play with positrons and a whole slew of anti-particles now; no one wants to play with or even come close to a black hole (unless you’re one of Pohl’s HeeChee).  Today astrophysics brings the small (like the positron) and the large (like the black hole) together, at least theoretically.  I’m sure Dirac and Wheeler are smiling about that—if they’re not taking a nap.

And so it goes….