Science and fiction
Science and fiction may sound like two opposing concepts. Surely fiction has little place in science. However, there’s plenty of room for science in fiction! The sci-fi genre has been close to my heart since elementary school, so I was happy to hear that there will be a session at ScienceOnline ‘09 in January focusing on science communication through science fiction. It’s being co-moderated by Peggy Kolm (who writes the fantastic Women in Science, as well as Biology in Science Fiction which I just found out about today), and she’s asked science bloggers to answer a few discussion-provoking questions. It’s hard to tell if I’m a “science blogger,” but I’m definitely both a scientist and a blogger, so here are my answers.
What is your relationship to science fiction? Do you read it? Watch it? What/who do you like and why?
I read science fiction often, and watch it sometimes. (Sci-fi movies and TV shows are sometimes a little too overboard/silly with the special effects for my taste, and in my experience tend to butcher the science more often than written sci-fi does.) In general I think sci-fi appeals to me because of its capabilities to challenge our most basic assumptions and to explore human nature in different settings. Sci-fi is not just narrowly about imagining future technology, but rather about imagining future society in the context of human discoveries and how they influence our lifestyles. Also, I’m impressed by the many discoveries and inventions that were foreshadowed in science fiction, and to some extent as a scientist I read sci-fi to find new ways of thinking about research questions.
My favorite book of all time is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, and I love the rest of that series as well. Some other examples of books I like for the above reasons are Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Galapagos, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and pretty much everything ever written by Philip K. Dick.
What do you see as science fiction’s role in promoting science, if any? Can it do more than make people excited about science? Can it harm the cause of science?
I don’t see science fiction so much as a tool for promoting science as such, though I suppose it has that effect on plenty of people. It can harm the cause of science if it’s unnecessarily alarmist. I think science fiction’s role with respect to science is primarily to give it context, to help us hypothesize about science ethics or to help us recognize benefits and drawbacks to thinking scientifically. Occasionally a sci-fi author’s message may be to discourage a certain path of R&D, or to discourage a certain style of scientific inquiry, but if that attempt at supposedly stifling science is based on a belief that such work would be unethical, I think it would be aiding the cause of science rather than harming it.
Have you used science fiction as a starting point to talk about science? Is it easier to talk about people doing it right or getting it wrong?
I haven’t used sci-fi all that much in this way, though it’s a great idea. It’s certainly easier to strike up a conversation with my fellow physics grad students by talking about people doing it wrong; the movie The Core is a classic in this regard. As a starting point for some more educational endeavor, I think the standard wouldn’t be so much whether the science was accurate or inaccurate, but rather whether the underlying science stuck out as strange to a viewer or reader. Often this would be blatantly inaccurate science, but I could easily imagine it being something verifiably true that happens not to match our real-world intuition. In either case, it’s a good hook to get people interested in the lesson to come.
Are there any specific science or science fiction blogs you would recommend to interested readers or writers?
I don’t have any specific blogs to recommend, but I would recommend the general guideline that writers make sure they are well-informed about the science they’re incorporating. There’s nothing that turns me off to a poem faster than an ill-advised metaphor about quantum mechanics. I’ll change the channel on the TV if I hear an astronaut’s dying screams as he drifts off into space. (I could go on, but I’ll spare you.) If you’re looking for blogs by scientists about their areas of expertise, the SEED ScienceBlogs are a good place to start.