The Science of Doctor Who: s01e03, “The Unquiet Dead”
For the first time in the new series, the TARDIS heads into the viewers’ past. Because of this, there are only two science-fiction concepts in the story: a “space-time rift” and energy beings who can inhabit gas clouds and dead human bodies.
The Cardiff Rift has been described as a wormhole, a gateway, a place where disparate parts of space and time meet, allowing beings and objects to travel from one part to another. While wormholes are solid scientific theory and not seriously challenged, they are also transient, unstable, and not big enough to send a water molecule through – much less a complex construct such as a mind or a body. On the other hand, these are certainly staples of science fiction; there would be no DS9 without them, just to name one example. So it’s realistically bad science, but like FTL drives, we can probably wave that issue away.
The energy beings are another common SF trope, but one where I have trouble suspending belief. Setting aside any question of souls, here on Earth, a person’s mind needs a brain and a body to inhabit. Computer software needs hardware on which to run. A radio signal needs a transmitter to generate it, and a receiver to play it back; none of these ‘information patterns’ interface with our world without using something physical. Otherwise, it’s like trying to pull spaghetti out of the pot using the beam of a keychain laser pointer.
And a cloud of gas makes a poor carrier for information. Gas is random, disorganized, subject to disruption by currents and slight temperature variation. Try to use a gas cloud to store your financial spreadsheets, and you probably won’t be happy with the results for long. But the other option in the episode isn’t much better…
At first glimpse, the idea of the loose minds taking over corpses seems an obvious one – the original owner isn’t using it, right? But centuries of embalming technology has blinded modern humans to one fact: bodes decay. Shortly after death, various chemical processes in a body are no longer inhibited or controlled; it doesn’t take long at all before eyes are useless for seeing, internal organs are useless for digesting food, brain tissue cannot carry electrical charges, and muscles will no longer flex and pull. And embalming only disguises these processes, or sometimes makes them worse! A loose mind somehow settling into a corpse’s body would find itself extremely frustrated in short order, unable to use it for any of the most basic functions.
(Yes, this means that all zombie movies are complete BS. But no one watching a zombie flick cares, so we’re good.)
Now, it could be some sort of telekinetic puppetry, such as the Nestene Consciousness used two episodes ago. But specially designed plastic mannequins still seem to make better vehicles than decaying bodies. And again, what are the Gelth aliens using to generate the telekinetic forces? The Nestene at least had a giant organo-plastic brain to work with.
In summary, we’ve got two almost certain impossibilities. Both of them are common in SF, so not many folks are probably going to get hung up on either, but they are bad science nevertheless. And in an unrelated note, why can’t the aliens ever just ask for help? The Doctor would bend time and space to help out if they just asked nicely. Stupid aliens.
The Science of Doctor Who: s01e02, “The End of the World”
Of course, I say “every day or two” and immediately, life keeps me from paying much attention to any writing for a while. That, and I needed to find my archive copy of the episode to check out a few details.
This go-round, the main science-fiction idea is that the Doctor has taken Rose forward five billion years or thereabouts to watch the Sun engulf Earth. (It’s a little morbid, but then the death of homeworlds is weighing on the Doctor’s mind these days.)
The timing’s about right, and Rose shows off some basic science knowledge when she points out that a) this should be a slow event over epochs, not an afternoon’s happening, and b) the Earth’s continents should be wholly unrecognizable now due to plate tectonics. Good for Rose! The Doctor glibly responds that gravity satellites have been holding back the sun today, and –
Wait. Wow. The technological civilizations of five billion years from now have the ability to keep dead stars from expanding. I mean, sure, no problem, five billion years; but an understanding of physics at that level implies they can do almost anything with energy and matter that they want, to the point where the space station and shuttles displayed would have to be utterly rustic and quaint. Maybe the whole ceremony is a bit of a LARP, like visiting Colonial Williamsburg is for today’s Americans.
– and that the “Trust” put the continents back as they were five billion years ago, for some sort of aesthetic reasons. Again, I guess since those are basically the continental shapes upon which Humanity evolved and reached the stars, perhaps it’s some kind of nostalgia thing. On the other hand, Earth’s continents aren’t a sliding tile puzzle. Much of the familiar coastlines, mountain ranges, and other geographic features would have been erased by time, and the Trust would have had to reconstruct them from scratch. (But hey, they can keep dead stars from expanding, they can do that too.)
This is not really a scientific observation, but comments of the Doctor’s and Cassandra’s later imply that the economy of the galaxy is still capitalist. I can hardly say that’s impossible, but with the galaxy’s suns pumping out free energy to anyone with a solar collector, and uncounted myriads of lumps of ice and rock and mineral wealth scattered throughout the arms for the taking, and the aforementioned technology levels: well, their version of capitalism must be fairly interesting.
Back to the science. Lady Cassandra. Yeah.
It’s kind of interesting how Cassandra moves her eyes and lips without any muscle tissue. Also, it’s interesting how her eyes pass information to her brain with no detectable optic nerve. (Our optic nerves are thick, obvious things not unlike organic coaxial cable.) Also, her mouth would be useless as a speaking device, since there is no jaw, tongue or vocal cords for making sounds, and there are no lungs to move air through her mouth so those sounds would be audible. Also… also… also… yeah. Lady Cassandra is, at best, a Disney robot puppet being manipulated by the brain tissue beneath. Too bad no one thought to put an automatic misting system on the frame from which the puppet’s hung. Oh, I guess it’s possible that she has nanotech implants for all this – again, the tech levels of this episode are rightly the tech of miracles – but it wouldn’t do anything for her already shaky claim of being ‘pure human’.
That’s a pretty ridiculous claim, anyway. The episode never says how old Cassandra is and the later “New Earth” doesn’t help, but we know from “The Empty Child” that humans began eagerly copulating with the rest of the galaxy’s sentients at least by the year 5,000. From the genetic viewpoint of the year 5,000,000,000, it’s a moot difference. She’d have be ‘pure human’ by some overly-specific and arbitrary definition she made up for the purpose.
Side note: it’s mentioned in one of her two appearances that she transitioned from male to female. By the year 5,000,000,000, one would expect that procedure to be so effortless and routine that people could change bodies like designer clothes if that was their thing. In fact, you’d really expect Cassandra in this episode to look completely like a prime specimen of 21st-century humanity; such a body could be re-spun from her DNA pattern (with desired tweaks) whenever the old one wore out… or just got boring.
So, the upshot is that I find the artificial compression of a star more convincing than Lady Cassandra. In science fiction and fantasy, sometimes the high concepts work far better than the baser ones.
Next time: an episode with, really, not a lot of science in it.
The Science of Doctor Who: s01e01, “Rose”
In 2005, Russell T. Davies brought Doctor Who back to television screens, and he did a wonderful job. The show’s ratings reached unprecedented heights, and our favorite Time Lord gained fans he’d never have been able to reach in the old days. Whovians never had it so good.
But one thing hadn’t changed in the years since the old show went off the air. Back then, most of the science in this classic work of British science fiction came from the magazine articles and the uncommon TV special on new discoveries in astrophysics. And that was okay, really. But this is the 21st century: there are science cable channels, science blogs, science celebrities, and the fairly accurate and up-to-date Wikipedia. Anyone writing for TV should be able to get at least the freshman science right, if only to give it lip service before violating it.
So here, I’m going to look at the science of individual episodes of the new Doctor Who. I’ll not spend a great deal of time on character or plot concepts in an episode unless, you know, I feel like it. And I may not worry too much about core concepts of the show like the TARDIS: like warp drive in Star Trek, if it’s BS, it’s BS upon which the series is built, so it gets a pass. And just because some science may be dubious doesn’t mean it’s a bad episode… unless the plot depends on the science in question…
So, “Rose”. The main science-fictional concept here is that a giant plastic alien brain is animating shop-window mannequins to terrorize the shopping malls of London. The episode doesn’t make this clear, but the Nestene Intelligence has been to Earth twice before in older episodes. In those attempts, it uses a ‘realistic’ puppet (like Mickey this time) to take over a plastics factory (Auto Plastics the first time), which it uses to make the dummies and ship them around the city; we have no reason to assume the M.O. is different this time.
This explains how a mannequin would have a gun hidden in its hand: the Autons have them built in when they are made in the factory. But the dummies seem to be otherwise just like ones used today, perhaps with different plastics that make them easier to animate. Based on the antics of the loose arm in “Rose”, we gather that the dummies don’t need any other sort of special organs – brain, individual muscles, consumption/storage – to do their jobs.
This suggests that the main Nestene consciousness is doing all the work remotely, controlling them telepathically and physically moving them with transmitted telekinetic force, like a child playing with hundreds of action figures at once. This fits in perfectly with the episode’s plot: the Nestene needed an amplifier array to blanket the city, and once it was defeated, the entire army collapsed like abandoned fashion dolls. Plastic’s a good choice, by the way, for animated puppets. Since plastic is composed of long chains of molecules, called polymers, one can imagine the chains coiling and relaxing like animal muscle to move the puppet around.
Telekinesis is a great science-fiction tool: since we have no evidence of anything like it existing in reality, a writer can have it function however convenient. We can use the laws of physics and biology to say a few things about telekinesis and telepathy: no one has yet suggested a method for such forces to be generated and received that has held up to experiment. Also, animals do not evolve the ability to generate directed radiation in the forms we do understand, since it’s always more energy-efficient to do your work in other ways: for example, communication by sound waves, or by color and motion, takes far far less energy than producing radio waves. There isn’t an organism on Earth that doesn’t have a limited energy budget. On the other hand, an advanced organism may find a way to add those abilities artificially to itself, so we’ll let the Nestenes have that one.
Finally, I do want to touch on a new attribute of the TARDIS: the outside doors. In the past, it was often implied that the TARDIS had inner and outer doors, with a mysterious discontinuity between them – mainly due to limitations on television effects technology. And the interior doors were generally portrayed as comfortingly massive. Now, the TARDIS appears to have a simple set of flimsy wooden doors between the console room and the universe, which would concern me quite a lot as a traveler. I think we must assume, based on the Doctor’s assurance that they’d resist “the hordes of Genghis Khan”, that either those doors are far more solid than they look, or that there’s plenty of super-science reinforcing and protecting them – or both. It’s fun to now be able to look into and out of the TARDIS whenever we want, so that’s good enough.
Next time: blah blah blah… and I feel fine.
We’re leaving Mother Earth…
This is NOT from the upcoming movie, but from a Japanese tie-in game. It rules anyway. If possible, click through and watch the HD version instead of the embedded one!
Starr, who’s currently unfamiliar with the Yamato franchise, said that the ship looked like the ether flyer Thunderchild to her. I took that as quite the compliment 🙂
Costuming at RavenCon
To those who’ve attended RavenCon before:
I’m in the mood to wear the Alice costume again to RavenCon, since the movie’s still out, and hey, it’s comfortable. I’ve never been to RC before, though, and I don’t know the atmosphere there. Am I likely to have staff and attendees dropping apoplectically to the floor at the sight of a boy in a dress, or will it provoke the smiles and chuckles I usually get?
Input would be useful!
Impossible things before breakfast
Oh, and this is the hall costume that went over so well. After what I thought would be my grand exit from TCon costuming last year, I could hardly disappoint my audience this year! The choice seemed appropriate with the Tim Burton movie’s release this season. I got picture requests all day, and some folks actually expressed disappointment that I changed back into street clothes after Keith’s concert!
One thing I learned: college seating is not designed for petticoats. Well, another: some ladies take vengeful glee in seeing a guy rub his sore feet after spending the day in heels. It was fun to wear through the day, though. Only problem is that I just don’t know how I’ll follow this next year.
A Visit to Technicon
Technicon 27 started with our water heater cracking open.
Okay, so the two weren’t causally linked. The situation remained damn frustrating, though: Starr had been scheduled to work her 7am-7pm shift, but we both really wanted her to come to the con, which meant we would probably get there around 2 or 3 Saturday morning. So be it: such is life. Then her work called in the wee hours of Friday to say she’d actually been scheduled 3am-3pm, which wouldn’t be any easier on her, but meant we’d show up in Blacksburg at a decent hour!
Then we both came home to work to find our driveway awash. For once, there was nothing both vital and water-soluble in the garage, and the heater is all we lost. But one of us had to stay to get it fixed, and I was the one with the Guest badge and panel commitment, so off I went.
I have learned to despise that drive. I love the con, and I love seeing friends and family; I’m so glad I didn’t have to miss out on my twenty-fourth straight Technicon. But that drive is beginning to get on my nerves. At least I caught the tail end of the Meet Our Guests social, and enjoyed meeting artist T Campbell (with whom I shared a hotel room).
Technicon was small this year; that’s not a criticism, just an observation. They chose not to run a dealer’s room this year, though they had most of the other trappings: a video room, anime, card and tabletop gaming, and various panels and presentations. I participated in the Amateur Film panel with rubinpdf and other members of Galtham Films, who made up about 90% of the attendance; I had a good time, and hope that impink will post images of his revised TSE Mirage design.
Late in the evening, southernsinger performed what was almost a White Plectrum sing-along rather than a concert: the fraction of new attendees in the audience may well have felt slightly left-out. I helped judge the six-entry Costume Call – though the event was small, the costumes were wonderful, and we had a heck of a time picking the ones we liked best. trenn won “Best in Show” with a great Seventh Doctor, but ypawtows did score a mention for “Best Use of an Undead Smurf in a Short Subject”.
I ran my late-night panels as usual. This year, I just wasn’t in the mood for complex presentations, and aimed more for a “friendly discussion circle” atmosphere. At least a few folks told me they enjoyed them, so it must not have been a terrible idea. After closing out the room, I had just enough battery power left to swing by jlfranklin‘s room party, which was nearly shut down itself. Back up to the room and sweet unconsciousness.
Sunday, it felt surreal to have no closing programming, no chances to say goodbye to folks. I just got on the road as soon as possible, spent a nice lunch in Roanoke with my Mom, and then did that cursed drive again. I was so tired and strung-out when I got to Chesapeake that Starr and her dad managed to get a glass of wine in me at Olive Garden, and now I’m not sure whether my vagueness around the edges today is exhaustion, the effects of drink, early con-crud setting in, or Monday.
Anyway. For me, Technicon 27 was a great success. It’s the only time I get to see lots of people who mean a great deal to me, and I had much fun. My hall costume got remarks such as, “Okay, you are now officially my favorite person ever.” I have another Guest badge for my collection. Furthermore, I got to continue a TCon attendance streak beaten only by an elite few.
Was it a success from the con’s point of view? I don’t know. I heard a rumor of around 150 badges, staff and guests included. The venue wasn’t the best, though I know the staff’s choices were limited this year. I suppose we’ll see – I wouldn’t mind attending a full three-day Technicon 28 if they can pull it off.
Thanks to the con for the invite! While I don’t know at the moment where or when it may happen, I can’t wait to see everyone again…
Why this “Steam on Mac” thing is a big deal to me
Steve Jobs has little use for computer games. Inconveniently, his customers are quite interested, and that’s been a problem since 1984.
I can’t source most of this, so you’ll have to assume that my memory isn’t too fuzzy, and I wouldn’t lie to you. But while plenty of Apple engineers have been happy to help out game developers here and there, Steve’s seen bigger things for his Macintosh; leaps and bounds of creativity, imagination, and the simplification of daily tasks. Not bad, but we want to shoot the undead too, and Mr. Jobs doesn’t really seem to get that.
So thanks to that, and years of management confusion at Apple, Mac gaming has never had the market share of Windows gaming. That didn’t mean no one was playing, though. The company that created Halo made its first fortune off a Mac game. The company behind Doom and Quake always found it worthwhile to publish Mac releases of their titles. But there was one game, a classic among Windows gamers, one that always stood separate. When people tested me for rabid Apple fandom, there was always one fact I’d easily admit to: you couldn’t play Half-Life on the thing.
And there’s some odd history behind that. According to rumor, Half-Life for the Mac was nearly done: in late beta-testing, at worst. Then Gabe Newell of Valve went to Apple and asked Steve Jobs to make some changes to the Mac OS so it would run his games better. (I suspect it was either DRM hooks in the OS, or more likely, licensing DirectX from Microsoft… both of which had a snowflake’s chance in Molten Core of happening.) Steve probably explained in his winning way where he figured Newell’s head was stuck, and Mac HL was immediately cancelled.
But, you know, other guys kept making money, small though they might be. And did I mention “Molten Core”? Yeah, see, that’s a place in a little game called World of Warcraft… a game with around 11 million subscribers, available in parallel for the PC and the Mac. So, maybe Mac gamers are only 1% of the PC gaming market. That meant that Blizzard was collecting subscription money from 100,000 gamers every month. Obviously, that’s the kind of money than any successfully game company can totally ignore…
Oh. Hm. Well. And, you say, Macs all run on Intel motherboards, now? Well. Perhaps we can do this without trying uselessly to twist Steve’s arm after all…
So, now we’ll have Steam on the Mac, and I can play HL and Portal without dual-booting, and not have to roll my eyes when a friend tells me about this awesome little $5 game download they found there the other day. I’m happy. Gabe will get my money. He’s happy. And it only took him over a decade to figure out how to reach into my wallet!* Well, we all just need a little time, sometimes.
*I confess, he already has some of it. I bought HL for the PlayStation 2, and Portal for Windows, playing the latter by dual-booting my Intel Mac. But Valve says that I’ll get a copy of Portal for Mac for free just because I registered the original through Steam… and suddenly, I’m even more well-disposed to the company. (I previously expressed concerns about the Steam service, and they still exist, but the company seems to be going out of their way to make the utility worth more than the hassle. That seems good business.)
