Original Blog Blurb from 2012
In this episode I praised Looper for the emotional truth of the story, but that doesn’t mean they got the science right. What the hell IS telekinesis, anyway? What forces are supposed to be involved? Electromagnetism, as in Magneto? Gravity, as in Graviton? Marvel Comics went so far as to make up a new fictional particle, the psion, which is a little packet of energy just like a photon, only it’s psychic energy that is generated by the mind.
It may seem a little unfair of me to harsh on comic book writers (English majors, mostly?) when I’ve pointed out multiple times that genes were also theoretical particles at one time. The difference is that there was already existing concrete evidence for genes in the form of specific traits like hair color that were being passed down from parent to child. There are a few people still doing serious research into psychic abilities – I know because I met one from the University of Virginia at the Ligmincha Institute last February -- but he was studying transfers of information, not of a brand-new and made-up form of energy. Still, as Dennis Miller used to say before 9/11 freaked him irretrievably out and his rants were still funny, “Of course, that's just my opinion -- I could be wrong.”
Oh, hey, cool [reading website instead of blindly linking as usual]. The Dalai Lama's there at Ligmincha today. And hmmmm [raising left eyebrow while stroking goatee in sinister fashion] . . . the idea of translating webcasts into other languages is an interesting one. I should steal that. . .
References
io9's extensive commentary/coverage of Looper, including Disneyfied mash-up and spoilerific infographic! Batteries not included.
Updates from 2022
I did in fact steal that idea, by having a student of mine translate the first episode into Arabic.
I just now learned from a recent Wikipedia entry that the psion as a "fictitious ‘unit of mental energy’” was not invented by Stan Lee but borrowed from science fiction author Jack Williamson, who coined it in a 1951 novel called The Greatest Invention, which I have not read.
James Gleick did a book on the concepts and tropes of time travel in 2016, called (appropriately enough) Time Travel. There are excerpts, both written (very short) and audio, at the author’s linked website. HG Wells was more concerned with the future than the past, but otherwise not much has changed since his novel The Time Machine was published in 1895.
Coincidentally, this past weekend was the 5th annual Triad VegFest, a celebration of veganism, a Victorian lifestyle choice that Wells supposedly mocked by having his cutesy future Eloi cannibalized by their underground cousins the Morlocks. This podcast from roughly the same era as VSI goes into some detail on the history of animals in science fiction.
Having grown up on a dairy farm, and having been essentially a slave to cows for fifteen years, I have no moral or emotional problem with the killing and eating of animals, beyond the inherent cruelty of the whole factory farm situation. My gradual reduction in meat consumption over the past decade has been for reasons of health (especially cholesterol) and thermodynamics. It is more efficient to eat lower on the food pyramid. Only about ten percent of the energy captured from the sun is passed up each level; the rest is used by the creature in question to run its body, and is lost to heat before it gets eaten by the next level up. You can feed more people with plants. It’s really that simple. Plant cruelty is a whole other level of hypocrisy I don’t have time or patience to get into right now, but here’s this entry from January.
As an educator and connoisseur of infographics, I really like the step pyramid rather than the smooth one because it’s more intuitively accurate. Whenever I have to teach the concept, as I am this week in my Alien Ecosystems course for Science & Math’s Summer Accelerator program, that’s the one I use.
I tried to come up with my own cool infographic in my last academic paper (Figure 3), but my version may have been too abstract. What do you all think?
VSI Episode 48