Science Wow

Zero G Lindy Hop will continue. As you have no doubt noticed, the going has been a bit slow. I apologize. It's taking me longer than anticipated to fully plant my head inside this plot, and my attempts to do so have been thwarted by demands from my day job. The good news is they've finally hired me an assistant, and he starts next Monday. With luck, this will serve to mitigate my ball-bustingly insane workload.

In the meantime, I promised to try to keep things entertaining around here when the wait for new chapters is long. That's what this post is all about. If you're in the fiction-only crowd, feel free to skip this one. But if you enjoy the behind-the-scenes stuff (DVD extras, biographies, things written in washroom stalls), stick around for your bonus slice of Brownadelia.

Some of you may recall that I live in an old schoolhouse. Our steeple is the highest point in the village, as a matter of fact, as the church has no bell. And while it isn't uncommon for retired rural schoolhouses to become residences, ours is also a functional school of sorts. My wife -- as charming and sassy a milf as you'll ever meet -- teaches singing classes to local children, and our own two kids are homeschooled here by her, by me, and by their grandfather.

Among my responsibilities is science, primarily because of my personal passion for the subject rather my expertise, per se. My wife is the neurolinguist in the family, after all -- I'm just an art college dropout. But, at least at this point in the children's educations, it is my zeal that's key.

Do you remember the first time science blew your mind, and made the world feel bigger? I sure do.

I'm six years old, at the library with my mommy, and because I get to choose one of the books we borrow I choose I book with stars on the front because I'm sure this means it somehow concerns Star Wars. It doesn't, obviously, but in order to live down the fuss I've made insisting it is a book for kids like me I am determined to read it from stem to stern. I try. I fail. This is not a book for kids. I give up on the body text and focus instead on trying to decipher only the picture captions.

Through this I manage to glean only a single fact. Just one. But it's a doozy.

I grok that the sun is a star, and that all the other stars in the sky are, in a way, distant suns. "Holy smokes!"

Who wouldn't be impressed? I was so impressed that I remember it still, decades later, despite my inability to remember my social insurance number or even where I've parked the car when I go into a shop. I forget like nobody's business, but I'll never lose being six and recognizing that my view of the world had just been irreversibly embiggened by a book.

Anyway, since then I've pretty much felt that science is a gateway drug for mind-expanding wonder. I've always associated books with those epiphanous moments, so I suppose it's natural that I've arrived at science-fiction: stories where some of the plot-wow or character-wow is fuelled directly by science-wow.

At our homeschool, I head up the science-wow effort. With my daughter we've worked up to designing experiments to test our hypotheses (our current research project involves predicting the sequence in which different species of tree gain or lose their leaves) but with my boy we're still just trying to arrange those basic "holy smokes!" moments for him: that matter is composed of atoms, that the Earth has a place in the wider geography of the Milky Way galaxy, that space is stupendously big and time is stupendously long, that the intricacies of living systems are marvellous beyond imagination, et cetera.

Carl Sagan's justly renowned PBS series Cosmos had a profound impact for me as a kid, but my own children are still too young to get much from it. The ultimate damnation came from my daughter who, while watching the first installment, told me I wouldn't need to pause it while she went to the washroom. That's her version of the kiss of death.

In stark contrast is a new album called called Here Comes Science from the always creative American music combo They Might Be Giants. My boy (3) and girl (6) can't get enough of it. Each of the eighteen tracks is accompanied by its own animated video illustrating basic ideas about astronomy, palaeontology, the periodic table, the scientific method, photosynthesis, solar fusion, and so on. I highly recommend this for any parents whose kids think investigating the world is interesting and cool. The video/album set cost me $15 here in Ontario.

Finally, to close out a theme, I'd like to draw your attention to an interesting post on Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology blog. The headline article itself concerns the old scifi idea of dinosaurs evolving into sentient bipedal beings with technology (like Harry Harrison's Yilané) but the subsequent discussion in the comments section ranges more widely to the hypothetical morphologies of extra-terrestrials, a subject close to the heart of many readers here. Myself, I love seeing these kinds of scifi ideas bounced around by actual working scientists (as some of the commenters in this case are). Food for thought, and fodder for future stories.

By the bye: yes, there will be a child-appropriate scifi Christmas story this year, with no hubba-hubba and no dirty swears. I promise to make up the deficit of hubba-hubba and dirty swears elsewhere.