Thursday, April 20, 2006
The Enigma of Alan Turing

Right now I'm reading David Leavitt's The Man Who Knew Too Much, a biography of the mathematician Alan Turing. I've always been fascinated by Turing. His work in computer science and cryptography have had an enormous impact on Western civilization,yet very few people, at least in America,have heard of him.

I first heard of Turing in an anthology of great scientific writings edited by Timothy Ferris, which contained Turing's own fascinating article "Can a Machine Think?" In it, Turing lays out his method to determine whether a computer can achieve human intelligence. I was so impressed by it that I read the biographical article on Turing included in the same book. This article was by Andrew Hodges, and it was an excerpt from his book Alan Turing: The Enigma. In the article, Hodges describes how in the last years of his life, Turing was placed under house arrest, subjected to electroshock and hormone treatments, and finally committed suicide to escape persecution. His crime? "An act of gross indecency with another male person."

By the time he was arrested in 1951 under England's antihomosexuality statutes, Turing had already established himself in mathematics. He had virtually invented the science of cryptography, and laid out all the mathematics that underlies computer science. During World War II, the Nazis hadused a machine, called the "Engima machine," to createsecret codesthat were widely thought to be unbreakable... until Alan Turing broke them. Themethod he developed to crack the Nazi codes was essential to the Allied victory.

Turing got his start by solving the decidability problem, one of thefundamental problems in mathematics. Along the way, he came up with a little device called a Turing machine, which could be used to solve an endless number of mathematical computations. Eventually, people gave the Turing machine a name once used to describe a person: a computer.

When he was arrested with a lover of his named Arnold Murray, he cheerfully admitted to being gay. The detectives were struck by his lack of shame, and stated "he really believed he was doing the right thing." Turing cared nothing for the opinion of society, and had no desire to be accepted or respected as someone he wasn't. His psychiatrists tried to "cure" him through psycho-analysis, and failed. One can only imagine Turing's amusement at the efforts of these small-minded men to outwit him.

In the end though, ignorance won out. Turing chose an exit inspired by his favorite film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: he took a bite from an apple dipped in cyanide. Years of persecution had finally worn him down, and for a time it was considered rude to discuss him in polite society. Now Turing's legend is experiencing a comeback, with some new biographies being written and Turing's name cropping up in novels like Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Still,there is always some outraged mathematician going on about how unfair it is to "tarnish" Turing's legacy by bringing up his homosexuality. Which goes to show how farsociety has to goin solving someof its own fundamental problems.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-04-20 01:25:13

Saturday, April 8, 2006
The Bay of Rainbows and the Moon Maiden

Okay, on April 8, which is tomorrow as I write this, something very neat happens on the Moon. On that day the Moon is ten days old.

Not literally ten days old, of course. Saying the Moon is ten days old means it has been ten days since the New Moon, which is the night when the Moon is hidden entirely in the Earth's shadow and is not visible at night.

Anyway, on the night the Moon is ten days old, a range of mountains on the dark side of the Moon passes over into the day side. These mountains are called the Jura Mountains.

The Jura Mountain range runs in a curve across the face of the Moon, and they enclose a region called the Sinus Iridum, or Bay of Rainbows.

Since the Jura Mountains are so much higher than the region that surrounds them, their tops reach sunlight before the surrounding region. Think of a mountain on Earth at sunrise. The top hits the light before the bottom does. So, if you look at the ten-day-old Moon with a telescope, you see a sickle of brightness rising out of the shadows on the dark side of the Moon. The sickle of light is the Jura Mountains.

Now, if you look at just right the time, for a few hours an unusual formation appears. The mountain range takes on the shape of a woman's face in profile, with her hair streaming towards the west. This is a phenomenon Arthur C. Clarke noted in his novel, The Hammer of God, and it's visible with even a small telescope.

It's very beautiful, so if any of you out there with telescopes are able check it out, give it a try. It's worth it. If you miss it this month, you can try again on May 8.

Here is moderately good picture I found online. You can't make out the face, but it will give you an idea of what to look for.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-04-08 00:24:21

Sunday, March 19, 2006
The Geysers of Enceladus

Ah, spring. The leaves are budding are the trees, the birds are singing, and Congress is going through its usual business of the laying out the yearly budget. And as it does every time its budget comes up for review, NASA is announcing AMAZING NEW DISCOVERIES!

It's pretty slim pickings this year. One of its big announcements was that theMars Reconnaissance Orbiter had just been put into orbit around Mars, providing an unprecedented look at the Red Planet. Except that it isn't unprecedented; we have been putting satellites over Mars since the Mariner spacecraft thirty years ago, and we have two or three little robots out wandering around on the Martian surface, so another orbiter isn't really going to capture the public imagination, even if it does has scientific value.

The other bigannouncement is much more exciting, even if it hasn't really captured the public imagination either. This is the discovery of liquidwater on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. Apparently, Enceladus has underground reservoirs ofwaters, which erupt in giant geysers. The Cassini spacecraft caughtan image ofsome of those geysers during the middle of a spectacular eruption. Most people respond to this with, "Oh, that's nice." But this is one big discovery that is actually significant.

For one thing, if you had mentioned a moon of a gas giant with liquid water on it, scientists would have immediately thought of Europa, the moon of Jupiter. Europa is surrounded with ice; it's surface is almost as smooth as a billiard ball, relatively speaking. Underneath the icy surface are volcanoes, driven by the tidal forces of Jupiter and the surrounding moons.

Just like the Moon exerts tidals forces on the oceans of Earth, the gravity of Jupiter and the rest of its moons exerts tidal forces on Europa. The gravity kneads and twists the core of the moon, heating it and building up pressure that is released as a volcano underneath the ice on Europa. The lava that is released melts the ice and makes a layer of liquid water underneath the crust of ice on the surface. And yes, with heat and liquid water there is the potential for life, which takes up a entirely different blog post. There are no geysers on Europa, to my knowledge, but I was wondering if this might be the way that liquid water formed on Enceladus too.

Liquid wateris surprising to find on a moon of Saturn. For one thing, Saturn's gravity is much less powerful than Jupiter's. If say, you had a floating city like the one in The Empire Strikes Back set up in the atmosphere of Jupiter, the gravity there would be three times Earth's gravity. If you weighed 100 pounds on Earth, you would weigh 300 pounds on Jupiter. On Saturn, however, the gravity would be almost the same as it is on Earth, because Saturn is much less dense than Jupiter. On average, in fact, it is less dense than water. So with one-third the gravitational force, and with moons that are on average smaller and lighter than those of Jupiter, does this also mean that the tidal forces on Enceladus are strong enough to cause volcanic activity to melt the ice and make liquid water and geysers? This on a satellite with a radius of only 250 kilometers? Doesn't seem too likely.Keep in mindthat Saturn is almost twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter, so it gets much less heat from the Sun. So what is making the geysers?

I'm sure a lot of science fiction writers are already typing up speculations.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-03-19 21:12:27

Thursday, March 9, 2006
The Day After

As I sit here and write this, an old TV movie is playing on the Sci-fi channel. It's called The Day After. Some of you might remember it. It's about a nuclear war breaking out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. As you can probably guess, it was made back in the 80s, 1983 to be exact. I remember it especially well, since it is set in my hometown, Kansas City. I can still remember watching it for the first time. I would have been seven then, and I'll never forget the impact of watching a nuclear explosion detonating over the familiar Kansas City skyline.The film'sclosing scene as an old man walks through the ruined city is haunting. There is ascene in my own book, The Storms of Eternity, which is inspired by it, and I considerthat scene an homage to Edward Hume's wonderful script.

I also loved it because it accurately portrayed the culture around Kansas City, and mentioned some thesmaller towns around it, like Joplin, Lawrence and Harrisonville.It even mentions Lone Jack, the town next door to the one I grew up in. At the time Lone Jack had a population of about 120, if I remember correctly. All of them are real places... with real missile silos that are still there today.

From the Internet Movie Database: Immediately after the film's original broadcast, it was followed by a special news program, featuring a live discussion between scientist Dr. Carl Sagan (who opposed the use of nuclear weapons) and conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. (who promoted the concept of "nuclear deterrence"). It was during this heated discussion, aired live on network television, where Dr. Sagan introduced the world to the concept of "nuclear winter" and made his famous analogy, equating the nuclear arms race with "two men standing waist deep in gasoline; one with three matches, the other with five".

The great fear of this age is terrorism. In that case you have relatively small fringe groups capable of causing terrible loss of life, but there isn't much fear of them wiping out all life on earth. There is fear of a terrorist group obtaining a nuclear bomb. It's harder to believe the leaders of two nations with about 27,000 bombs between them once stood with their fingers on their respective buttons. Anyone who didn't live through it would naturally have a hard time believing it.

For this reason, I think it would be helpful to show The Day After in schools.Maybeit would help kids understand why we cast a worried eye on North Korea and Iran. I suppose to them itmight seemlike science fiction;it's probably a little difficult to believe that the two great superpowers inthe world were once locked in fifty years of paranoid nuclear insanity.But itis important forkids tounderstand why we were so afraid. We know those 27,000 bombs are still out there.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-03-09 22:35:18

Monday, February 27, 2006
Passing the Torch

I just upgraded my home computer system and went from a dial-up connection to broadband. Let me provide you with a little background so you can understand what a big deal this is for me.

Up until a week ago, I had owned the same computer for six years, a sturdy Compaq Presario upon which I had written two and three-quarters novels and about a dozen short stories, including the one I recently posted on sffworld, "The Great Escape."

WhenI first bought it I thought it was about the slickest machine I had ever laid eyes on. It had a staggering 30 Gb hard drive! 64 Mbs of RAM! A 750 Mhz AMD Duron processor! It was the year2000 when I bought it and the future had arrived.

If I wanted to download an MP3, it took me an hour and a half for a single song, making it actually seem like the terrible, furtive crime the music industrymadeit out to be. Waiting for aphotograph to load was a five minute event as the picture came up a millimeter at a time. "Look everybody, Mom's nose is almost done!" Whenever I tried to dial in, I found I could completely hum the theme song to Jeopardy while modem went through its song and dance. While making my blog entries on sffworld, I had to make sure I didn't go more than five minutes without typing something or I lost my internet connection.

Well, last week after my PC got hung up for third time in one night, I decided the old girl was on her last legs. She just wasn't fast enough or strong enough to handle the new content-heavy internet anymore. SoI went out to Best Buy and got a new Toshiba. It's about a quarter ofthe size of my old Compaq, but it's got512 Mbs of RAM and 160 Gbs of Hard Drive. With my new broadband connection, I can download a song off MSN Music at 99 cents a pop in about half a second and store them all on my hard drive with enough room left over for every picture my digital camera has ever taken, and probably a good portion of my consciousness as well, if I ever figure out how to digitize it and store it on my hard drive in case my brain ever crashes... again.

In the meantime, all that remains for myCompaq is to getmy files transferred over to the new computer. Then I'll load her up in my car, roll down the windows so she can feel the breeze over her monitor one last time, and take her out to a quiet spot in the woods. There, I'll load my shotgun and put the old girl out of her misery like a lame horse. I'm sure she'll go immediately to CompHeaven, where there are no viruses or spyware, disks never need defragmenting, and the dial-up connections are successful every time.

Posted by Robert Williams 2006-02-27 22:16:34