It Was a Dark and Stormy Experiment

Mr. Faraday’s (most excellent) experimental researches in electricity (1831)

I started to investigate Faraday’s writings while working on a post about Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race, which quotes Faraday to justify B-L’s fictional source of energy, vril. This led me back through Faraday’s monumental collection of researches on electricity, a collection of over 25 articles published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society under the blanket title, “Experimental researches in electricity.”

Faraday is also appearing at Cocktail Party Physics

I’ve always had a soft spot for Michael Faraday, for any number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that he was a brilliant experimentalist with world-class instincts for investigating the behavior of this strange new phenomenon, and yet he possessed only rudimentary mathematical skills — something that hampered the broad acceptance of his concept of how electromagnetism worked.

Can You Say 'Antikythera' Three Times, Fast?

Archimedes and the 2000-year-old computer

[I]n 212 BC, the Syracusans neglected their defences during a festival to the goddess Artemis, and the Romans finally breached the city walls. Marcellus wanted Archimedes alive, but it wasn’t to be. According to ancient historians, Archimedes was killed in the chaos; by one account a soldier ran him through with a sword as he was in the middle of a mathematical proof.

One of Archimedes’s creations was saved, though. The general took back to Rome a mechanical bronze sphere that showed the motions of the sun, moon and planets as seen from Earth.

Disney Goes to War

Disney goes to war

“Nose art” and the equivalent of heraldic icons, courtesy of Walt Disney.

According to the late WW II aviation enthusiast and author Jeffrey Ethell, “the Disney industry was pervasive in American culture and it influenced nose art in a number of different ways. Combat crews copied Disney cartoon characters because they were suitable subjects for humorous and patriotic themes. Disney’s influence also included studio artists, who joined the military and then contributed their talents to the creation of nose art. Disney Studios and the U.S. government had a history of cooperation. At the beginning of the war in 1939, Walt Disney and his artists designed and painted squadron and unit insignia. Disney raised the spirit of the troops when he transformed the ‘once staid military heraldry format created during World War I’ into inspired designs. By the end of World War II, Disney’s five-man staff assigned to insignia completed over 1,200 unit insignias, never charging a fee to the military.”

Idea Mine

Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has post discussing some Star Trek: TNG history, in which I happen to have some involvement.

Reverse the Baryon Flux Polarity!

The details involve the episode Starship Mine

In the annals of nitpickery, “Starship Mine” has a certain infamy. The “baryon sweep” which causes the evacuation of the ship is, we are told, a periodic maintenance procedure which must be performed in order to clear away “baryon particles” which build up when a starship travels using its warp drive. Any stickler for jargon accuracy will happily tell you that baryons are a class of subatomic particles which includes protons and neutrons, so that sweeping away the baryons would rip apart every atom in the Enterprise.

Here’s the backstory: I went to high school with one of the members of the Star Trek staff, Naren Shankar, and we kept in much better touch in those days — we still went home for the holidays and got together. He was the science consultant at the time this episode was written (he later joined the writing staff), and was looking for an excuse for the Enterprise to be in spacedock, devoid of personnel — he had in mind some kind of procedure analogous to degaussing a submarine, and bounced the idea off of me. Rather than suggest some new, made-up particle, I suggested a more generic “exotic-antibaryon sweep;” the idea being that there were some long-lived particles, unknown to us in the 20th century, that could be picked up by the spaceship. However, that was shortened to “Baryon sweep” at some point in the script-polishing process.

Blake considers this as a possibility.

However! We are told that the “baryons” which must be removed build up when a starship is travelling at warp speed. When you move through warp space, you travel at the speed of plot: the laws of physics are those which make for convenient storytelling. Who’s to say that quark combinations which fall apart in ordinary space can’t endure in warp or subspace? As it happens, in the sixth-season episode “Schisms”, a substance called “sonalagen” is trotted out which is said to be stable only in subspace, so within the framework of the show there’s precedent for this kind of dodge. The name of the “baryon sweep” would then be understood as a shortened form of, say, “residual exotic baryon sweep”, said elliptically for convenience’s sake even though the short version carries an unfortunate connotation if read naïvely. Inconvenient notations and awkward jargon held onto for “historical reasons” are common enough that this could well count as unexpected realism!

And what Blake figured out, a lot of Trek fans didn’t. As I recall, the discussion following the show on the USENET Star Trek board was pretty damning, along the lines of OMG, they’d destroy all the neutrons and protons! What idiots!, except that while all neutrons and protons are Baryons, not all Baryons are protons or neutrons, so even in the abbreviated form, the phrase isn’t wrong from a physics point of view, just easily misinterpreted. Of course, had I or someone else suggested a yet another new particle, there would have been fans that complained about that.

Starship Mine isn’t the only episode on which I had some influence. I tried to kill Wesley Crusher once (unsuccessfully, obviously), and there are a lot of names in shows that are references to people I know or have met. In fact, in the third-season episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” the Klingon outpost planet’s name, “Narendra III,” is a reference to Naren, from someone he knew on the staff.