Original Blog Blurb from December 2012
Today’s episode might sound as though I am ragging on the writers of fantasy for varnishing their tales with a thin veneer of scientific lingo. That is not so. My view is, We gotta start somewhere. Human children are not turkeys, or dragons. They don’t hatch knowing the scientific method, and it can’t be imprinted on them, either, as much of our educational system seems to assume. At that stage, especially,
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
-Albert Einstein
There’s actually a really good story where a time traveler tries to speed up scientific progress by teaching the modern scientific method in its full complexity to the Greeks, with sample sizes and statistics and the whole replicability shebang. The example I remember from the story was that Aristotle repeatedly said women have fewer teeth than men, but never bothered to actually open a woman’s mouth and count.
Like most time travel stories, the plan didn’t work. The Greeks rejected the modern scientific method as too much trouble. Little kids are the same way. A little imaginary sugar makes the science go down smoother. I think of it as a developmental stage, but hell, even a professional science geek like Luke Harmon thinks the scientific literature is boring, and he writes the stuff.
Here’s a recent and super-fun example of how the real-life Vikings were better traders than they were scientists. According to this documentary, they never discovered the secret of making crucible steel for themselves; once they lost the trade route, they lost the metal. Though I guess the engineering of the armor-piercing shapes of the blades should count for something.
There is one thing that the dragon movie nails, beautifully. There’s a moment when Hiccup says to Toothless, “Everything we know about you guys is wrong.” That’s the very essence of science, and my intuition is that such moments have become more common in pop culture.
How would we test that?
References from the show:
Dreamworks Dragons: Riders of Berk
Cressida Crowell, author of the How to Train Your Dragon books
Spiderwick Chronicles (the field guide, particularly)
Three Hearts & Three Lions
Glory Road
The Dragon & the George
Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law (scroll way down)
Updates from 2022 (or possibly 2008)
“Many new things form, but most of them don’t persist.”
-Luke Harmon
It is amazing to me how much I’ve forgotten in the past ten years. In some cases, listening to these interviews, I learn almost as much now as I learned then. I hope, probably in vain, to retain more of it this time.
Episode #3 of the Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon, “Natural Selection,” has Dr. Curt Connors injecting lizard DNA into the stump of his amputated arm. Little did he know, it had been accidentally zapped by Electro in the previous episode, so it was all glowy. Never inject the glowy stuff! I yelled, but he’s a fictional character, and I was yelling from fourteen years in the future, so he either didn’t hear, or he ignored me. Typical.
This guy wrote about using electricity to enhance regeneration in salamanders in a whole slew of papers, culminating in a book called The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life in the late 1990s. He lost his scientific audience when he started agitating against power lines and cell towers, but the early work is fascinating.
The regeneration work continues, however, as in these two recent technical publications, which I’m happy to say more about in the comments, if there’s interest,
and is being potentially enhanced by other technologies, like stem cells.
Finally, I had a great moment at last weekend’s ConGregate, where a publisher actually requested some article pitches from me. That’s never happened before.
I’ll have a fuller report of that convention, and of the summer’s teaching, next week. Tune back in. Maybe it’ll even be on time. Sign up and you won’t have to worry about remembering.
VSI Episode 52