Skip to main content

Speculation and science

My latest book, Interstellar Tours, is set on a tour starship of the twenty-second century. Clearly the context is fictional, to give what can sometimes seem the rather remote sciences of astrophysics and cosmology a more hands-on feel. But the science itself is based on our best current knowledge. This does, however, raise a wider question - how to deal with the relationship between speculation and science.

Given that the book is set in the future, I have to occasionally speculate about how our scientific knowledge will progress. As much as possible, I describe phenomena as we believe them to be now, but inevitably there are some circumstances where things are currently uncertain and I need to come down on one side or another. So, for example, despite visiting many planets, in my future life has yet to be discovered for certain beyond our solar system. To make sure readers don't confuse my speculation with 'real science' I have a number of speculation alerts - boxes that highlight what was not known in the 2020s.

If I'm honest, as I wrote about recently, I am not usually a great fan of speculative science. Infamously, speculation used to be at the heart of cosmology, to the extent there was a saying (with many variants) doing the rounds): 'There's speculation, then there's wild speculation, then there's cosmology.' It's fair to say that cosmology has settled down a bit, but there is still a lot of effort being put into various topics where there is little or no real evidence to date.

Speculative science is not, of course, limited to cosmology. In quantum physics, for example, while the outcomes are described and predicted with stunning accuracy, the many interpretations that attempt to show what is going on 'underneath' are currently pure speculation. Some people love this kind of thing - I find it, dare I say it, boring. Until there's some evidence to make one interpretation stand out, I really don't care. I'm not saying people shouldn't work on this kind of science. It's only by doing so that we can move our understanding beyond speculation, at least with speculation where there is some chance of ever realistically getting proper data to identify what is correct. But in some circumstances we probably never will - and even if there may eventually be evidence, while it remains speculative, I find it a bit of a yawn.

Out in space, without the benefit of experiment (yet), speculation will always rear its head. Whether it's black hole firewalls or the book by Rovelli I have sitting on the shelf yet to read on white holes, speculation is going to be rampant. And science writers need to write about it. But, for me, it dominates coverage too much in physics, cosmology and related fields. New Scientist, for example, hardly ever seems to have a lead physics story that isn't highly speculative.

It might seem hypocritical, then, to put my own speculation into Interstellar Tours - but it was necessary for the format of the book. And it is a very minor part. One aspect of speculation where I do enjoy stirring things a bit is over dark matter, where I am reasonably convinced that something based on modified Newtonian gravity (MOND) will partly or wholly supplant the existence of dark matter as a new kind of particle. I was delighted when esteemed science writer John Gribbin read the book that he commented 'The conclusions re. dark matter vs MOND are very bold and will intrigue people!' - my answer was 'I know!' 

So it's not that I don't appreciate the importance of speculation (especially when I think it's right) - but at least this speculation is based on a lot of evidence (see the excellent blog Triton Station for details). It doesn't stop me feeling, though, that speculation in science needs very careful management in the way that it is communicated. And that often isn't the case.

Image by Adrien Converse from Unsplash

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more