HOW FAR CAN YOU? (DAVID LODGE) AND THE SILENCE OF INFINITE SPACE ( OR THE BIG BANG WASN´T REALLY A BANG)

“The silence of infinite space terrifies me,” he murmured, squinting one night through Martin’s telescope at a faint smear of light that the boy assured him was a galaxy several times bigger than the Milky Way.

“Why?”

Austin straightened up and rubbed the small of his back. “I was quoting Pascal, a famous French philosopher of the seventeenth century.”

“Interesting he knew that space was silent,” Martin remarked, “that long ago.”

“You mean, there’s no noise at all up there? All those stars exploding and collapsing without making a sound?”

“You can’t have sound without resistance, without an atmosphere.”

“So the Big Bang wasn’t really a bang at all?”

“’Sright.”

“Doesn’t it frighten you, though, Martin, the sheer size of the Universe?”

“Nope.”

This is the most common way to find science mistakes in films. Sound is a mechanical wave, so it needs a medium to propagate. In contrast, electromagnetic waves, like light, can travel through vacuum.

I think that 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first film to show outer space as silent. “No one can hear you scream in space”, according to the advertising of the film Alien. I am not fussy about this, a film with noises in outer space doesn´t bother me, I understand it´s a poetic license. Indeed, if we want to be very strict, the concept of vacuum is also very controversial

HERE COMES THE MAPLE (JOHN UPDIKE) AND THE FOUR KINDS OF FORCE OF NATURE

... he read every scrap he was sent, and even stooped in the alleys to pick up a muddy fragment of newspaper and scan it for a message. Thus, he read, it was already known in 1935 that the natural world was governed by four kinds of force: in order of increasing strength, they are the gravitational, the weak, the electromagnetic, and the strong. Reading, he found himself rooting for the weak forces; he identified with them. Gravitation, though negligible at the microcosmic level, begins to predominate with objects on the order of magnitude of a hundred kilometers, like large asteroids; it holds together the moon, the earth, the solar system, the stars, clusters of stars within galaxies, and the galaxies themselves. To Richard it was as if a faint-hearted team overpowered at the start of the game was surging to triumph in the last, macrocosmic quarter; he inwardly cheered.

I don´t have much to add, since John Updike himself comments on the original text, which we are told is from ´The Forces of Nature,´ a conference by Steven Weinberg. Physicist dream of being able to reduce all these forces to one, precisely the goal of the big unification theory, as has already been accomplished with electricity and magnetism being unified as electromagnetism

I think that, when I was a student, the interaction electroweak, unifying the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force, has almost been completed. I don´t know how things stand now.

How can one not like and identify with gravitation, which among the four forces, is the only one we are familiar with?

THE ESSEX SERPENT (SARAH PERRY) AND THE PALEONTOLOGIST MARY ANNING

What’s more, he blamed himself for Cora’s adoration for the geologist Mary Anning: she’d never shown the least interest in grubbing about among rocks and mud until finding herself at an Ambrose dinner party seated beside an elderly man who’d spoken with Anning once and been in love with her memory ever since. By the time Cora had heard his tales of the carpenter’s daughter who grew strong after a lightning strike, and of her first fossil find at twelve, and her poverty, and her martyrdom to cancer, she too was in love and for months afterwards talked of nothing but blue lias and bezoar stones.

This blog wants to join the trend of recognizing female scientists. We want to add the paleontologist Mary Anning (although the text calls her a geologist) to the list headed by Marie Curie.

Paleontology and Geology don’t have a good reputation among scientists. So, the unfortunate Mary Anning suffered a double discrimination: one related to her gender at the time, and the other by ‘authentic,’ hard scientists.

I have a soft spot for the clever English women of the nineteenth century, how they had to deal with overbearing men, boring clergymen...
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-essex-serpent/sarah-perry/9781781255452