March 2007 Archives

Welcome to the second in an ongoing series of Interviews with authors of Science Fiction. I'm lucky to have had a chance, recently, to review Portland local Thomas A. Day's A Grey Moon Over China, a totally postapocalyptic epic that takes the ongoing cultural fear of an energy crisis to a particularly dark and alienating place in the cosmos. He's an interesting writer for his sense of grand scope -- in the complexity of the narrative and the breadth of time it represents -- but also because of his background: he's worked in the aerospace industry, flown night-cargo planes, and developed Artificial Intelligence software.

Edit: Thanks to the Willamette Week for the nice mention!

Universe: Tell me about your "day job." How does it inform your writing practice?

Thomas A. Day: I serve as an expert witness in high stakes, high tech litigation. I examine patents, source code, trade secrets and computer-based evidence in disputes among the big players, advise their law firms on strategy, and then, if they can’t all just buy each other out or scare one another into settling, I go to court and get disemboweled in public for the cause. It would be imprudent to tell you how much of this process is art more than science or law, or how fleeting the truth tends to be in such matters, because then I would get slapped around with a copy of your blog the next time I testified, but…well.

The experience informs my writing in two ways, I think. First, it reminds me how frail even our strongest institutions remain in the face of concentrated economic power. The Anglo-American system of government and law is probably the best the world has managed to date, but any writer interested in the great struggles of civilization should not forget how desperately difficult it is under the best of circumstances to make a true system from such false creatures.

Second are the personal stories. We start in this litigation business, as in so many aspects of our lives, with convenient narratives about the people caught up in it: the conniving entrepreneur, the sellout, the toady, the noble whistleblower. And then we strip them bare. We read everything they’ve ever written, interview their colleagues, trace for each of them the painfully intimate trail we all leave in the computers we use, and finally fillet them alive on the deposition room table—and what’s left in every case is a deeply compelling, ultimately personal story of an ordinary human being caught up for better or worse in a wholly impersonal affair. And this—exactly this—is also the novelist’s job. So I am reminded with every one of these hundreds of stories I get to watch unfold that the writer should also never believe for a moment the convenient fictions that the careless eye is tempted to draw from the dramas around us.

Here's a beautifully esoteric piece of math news: a team of mathematicians has meticulously explored and completely mapped a hitherto-unknown 248-dimensional structure, called E₈. The E₈ is an example of a Lie Group, which represent the best developed theory of continuous symmetry of mathematical objects and structures. Lie Groups underlie any symmetrical object.

From the Atlas Team's website:

"Lie groups come in families. The classical groups rise like gentle rolling hills towards the horizon. Jutting out of this mathematical landscape are the jagged peaks of the exceptional groups and, towering above them all, E₈. E₈ is an extraordinarily complicated group: it is the symmetries of a particular 57-dimensional object, and E₈ itself is 248-dimensional!"

It took them four years and 77 hours of supercomputer time to unpack the mathematical properties of the entire E₈ structure, and the results comprise 60 gigabytes of data. In a surprising attempt to quantify this amount, the Atlas researchers assure us, if we printed this out, it would cover all of Manhattan!

More importantly, however, this mathematical unpacking will aid us in our hunt for a super-unified theory of gravity: if it exists, its underlying symmetries will have to be about as complicated and unique as a Lie Group structure. Maybe E₈ fits the bill. Maybe the Theory of Everything looks like this.

The image below is supposed to give us an idea of the root structure of a 248-dimensional object, although it's actually a Gosset polytope 4₂₁, only a 2-dimensional projection of an 8-dimensional object. Hare Krishna!

It doesn't matter what you look like, or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it.

Carl Sagan, Contact

Followers of this web-rag know well that Universe was once a bi-weekly print column in the now-defunct LA Alternative. The intertextuality of it all -- blog, paper, and the interactions between the both -- was a lot of fun, brought readers in from all over, and smeared Web 2.0 all over the place. Sadly, the LAA went kaput ("Print is dead," they crooned forlornly from their last cover) and print-Universe was homeless.

Thankfully, the wonderful people over at Portland's Willamette Week -- an alternative newsweekly with a whopping 100,000 circulation -- have taken me under their wing, and I'm now gleefully penning Science Fiction book reviews for the second-largest newspaper in Oregon. My first piece, a review of Thomas A. Day's Grey Moon Over China went "live" today. Read it here, and let's get this hypermedia exchange going again!

Did you know that the geodesic dome is the only man-made structure (apart from, maybe, a "spirit vibe") that gets proportionally stronger as it increases in size? Truth: of all known structures made out of linear elements, a geodesic dome has the highest enclosed volume to weight ratio. It is no secret to my intimates that if I ever earn enough money to own anything, I will have a home with a room-sized dome inside of it, and inside of this dome I will hang a globe of Earth, and there will be a crystal bowl of fruits in the center.

Buckminster Fuller, incidentally, didn't invent the geodesic dome. That privilege is reserved for a certain Walter Bauersfeld, who built a like-structured planetarium right after World War One. Bucky, to be fair, may have absorbed the idea from cultural osmosis independently of Bauersfeld, and he did the rest. It is to him that we owe the word "geodesic," in any case. To think of young Buck and his friends at Black Mountain College, hanging like children from the early dome's struts, euphoric in the face of tensegrity, is heartwarming.

Wanting to experience a shadow of this joy, I set out to build my own dome, albeit on a smaller scale. I gathered an armful of the Pacific Northwest's twigs from Portland's Forest Park -- taking care to gather slender, sturdy branches -- and brought them home, where they were each whittled and sanded to the appropriate density.

Following the invaluable guidelines of Desert Domes, which, despite its deeper Burning Man aesthetic, provides a simple strut-length calculator and ample mathematical formulae, I decided on a relatively simple 2V structure (the "V" represents the structure's chord factor). This meant that I needed only two strut sizes, and hence I cut my twigs accordingly, into 3" and 3.5" lengths. After that, I followed a diagram and carefully pieced it together. The glue was tricky: my original call of using polyurethane was a disaster, since it dries to rigid immovability. I disassembled and started again with rubber cement, which provided the necessary flexibility. The whole project took me weeks, which is probably about as long as it would take to construct a human-sized geodesic home.

The structure surprised me on many occasions; despite my shoddy craftsmanship, it held itself up without support very early in the construction. A moment of revelation, too, occurred midway through the process. Now building the dome firsthand, I suddenly understood that the edges of all the small triangles make up larger, remarkable circles -- "great circles," they're called -- that distribute stress across the sphere. These circles are the geodesics, and where they intersect, triangles are born. The beauty of this interconnectedness, once I saw it, was striking.

The French have a Internet neologism that I particularly like, "Internautes," which of course is a sort of digital traveler, an Astronaut of the web. If any word is more fitting for this blog's readership, I don't what it is.

Welcome, Internauts, to this new version of Universe. We were long overdue for a design overhaul -- cutesy deep-sea creatures are a thing of the past, as is darkness -- and this one, appropriately, is a wonderful collaboration between myself and the Team Yacht one-man band. Influences: Charles and Ray Eames, 60's IBM advertisements (often one and the same), the wormhole to Vega that so brilliantly concludes the 1997 film, Contact. With this redesign, 'nauts, we will plunge headlong into another year's worth of great changes. What will be addressed?

Among many other things: messages pointing upwards from Earth and into interstellar space, Arecibo, Carl Sagan's weed-smoking treatises, sounds made by the human body and the shuttering beat of pulsars, more Interviews, SETI, new Science Fiction, tensegrity, money, writing, the patterns inside of envelopes, "the thing's hollow -- it goes on forever -- and -- oh my God! -- it's full of stars!" Starting from Planet Earth and panning out, out, we'll pass by the planets one by one (the radio signals aging, growing fainter as we go), then the whole galaxy, and then our galaxy will dwindle to a pinprick among the other galaxies, and so forth, forever.