Simple Elementary

By Tee Shern Ren

Given that humanity is at least 6,000 years old (or older, depending on your Scripture-interpretive leanings), it comes as a surprise to learn that up to 600 years ago — more than 90% of our history as an intellectual, self-aware species — mankind knew at most 11 elements.

Over the 15th to 17th century, we discovered three more, and then humanity went chemically berserk and discovered the next few 70-plus naturally occurring ones, going on to make some more of his own. The story of chemistry is a long one, a historic path through many millennia before arriving at the neat Periodic Table at the last page of our SPM Kimia papers.

The story really began when man started playing around with metal. By a kink in their chemistry, gold and silver are both rare and unreactive, hard to find but always found in their elemental form. All man had to do was to dig (in the right spots) and voila! nuggets of shiny yellow and white. (The lustrous glow of gold and other metals has much to do with the peculiar quantum properties of their electronic arrangements: whenever you admire the glitter of jewellery, you're really watching the unceasing dance of the very building blocks of matter.)

Learning to extract metal from ore, however, was a far bigger technological step forward for man. The first copper, the first iron, the first steel — watersheds in man's march towards modernity. It must have seemed like magic to them, how you could burn some drab mineral with black coal and get shining metal, bright and hard. And chemistry was fanned into flame as people looked on the miraculous transformations you could work, all for the cost of a little energy and the memorisation of the right formula. Dissolve this, burn that, add such a powder into that particular mixture — alchemy promised the world and nearly delivered it, too. Sure, nobody really discovered how to turn mercury into gold (which “would” come, much later) but along the way we learned a lot of other things.

For example, in an effort to distil whatever salts there were in urine (which held promise for alchemists, I suppose, being roughly the same colour as gold if the urinater drinks a suitably small volume of water), Hennig Brand obtained a white chemical that glowed in the dark and burned brilliantly. We call it phosphorus, and we call its glow-in-the-dark phosphorescense. It's the red stuff on the tip of the match, but, more importantly, it's the energy currency in your cells:
every little metabolic action that needs energy input normally gets it by breaking a jittery phosphate ion off an ATP molecule.

Alchemy also discovered nitrogen as the boring stuff in the air which doesn't burn (oxygen is the stuff that does, but we didn't know that either until 1774 — a mere 232 years ago), but it had been working with nitrogen long before that as nitric acid, which, although it doesn't burn, is perfectly capable of corroding nearly any metal known to man. And when you do that, you can isolate the gas hydrogen, which burns brilliantly as the Hindenburg eloquently demonstrated, to give plain
old water. How people discovered that water wasn't one of the indivisible elements of the universe (alongside air, fire, and earth) but was itself "molecules" made by combining smaller things is another story.

Of course, when alchemy graduated into chemistry, the rate of discovery increased by leaps and bounds. Chemistry had an affair with physics, and Sir Humphrey Davy's passing of current through a solution uncovered potassium and sodium. The success of industrial electrolysis also turned aluminium from a semi-precious metal (one ounce of which once cost twice a common worker's daily wages) to something we can afford to throw in the bin. The more energy we put into separating elements, the less able the atoms are able to hold on to their partners in the compounds, and the more of them we are able to isolate — which is partly why the 19th and 20th centuries were a feast of elemental discoveries. We began to master energy, poured it into chemicals, and simply had to see if anything new turned up. (The scientific process here has, of course, been simplified greatly.)

I shouldn't neglect the non-metals: silicon was mistakenly labelled a compound by that same Sir Humphrey Davy, only identified as an element in its own right by Berzelius later on, and now found everywhere you can find an electronic microchip. Fluorine, a (literally) murderously
reactive gas, took 74 years of good chemistry to pin down as an element, and the man who finally did it — Henri Moissan — got the Nobel Prize for his effort. It would go on to form the better half of uranium hexafluoride, notorius for its use in purifying uranium for nuclear power and nuclear bombs.

But surprisingly (or not, depending on your viewpoint) the hardest elements to pin down were the ones that didn't react at all. Remember nitrogen, the gas that wouldn't burn? In distilling it from the air, Lord Rayleigh (he of Rayleigh scattering, the reason the skies are blue) and William Ramsay realized that the "nitrogen" they were getting wasn't completely pure. Sure enough, there was another gas tagging along, one they named "argon", or Greek for "inactive" (a polite synonym for "lazy"). The names of the other noble gases are pretty interesting too — neon is "new", krypton is "hidden", and xenon is "stranger". Aliens who just wouldn't react (not without a large amount of coaxing) had invaded the rightmost strip of the periodic table.

But the discovery that really takes the cake, for me, is helium, which scientists detected and recognised from all of 150 million kilometers away — by radiation from the surface (technically the chromosphere) of the sun. The brave scientists who looked into its light (very carefully), identified a new spectral line, and boldly called it the signature of a new element, were rewarded with the distinction of detecting an element in space before it was found on earth. And its discovery isn't the only thing that is "out of this world". Cool it enough and it transforms into something so weird scientists can only call "helium II", which can creep along walls like
the eerie liquid metal from Terminator and conducts heat (ironically, for something so cold) faster than anything else in the universe.

And finally man got bored with what nature had to offer him and started making up his own elements. It started with radioactivity and the elucidation of the structure of the nucleus: bombard a big atom with enough nucleons and voila! a new element. The first one to be discovered was neptunium, which came after uranium in the same way that Neptune comes after Uranus. Famous plutonium came next in the same vein, followed by more, to make 19 "trans-uranium" elements named so far, plus another five that have not yet been given proper names. The ones waiting for names have appallingly un-pronounce-able nicknames right now — which should I pass you, a few atoms of "Element 116" or "ununhexium"?

But interestingly there was a naming controversy over some of the other trans-uranium elements, started when the Americans wanted to name Element 106 "seaborgium" — despite the fact that Glenn T. Seaborg (who actually “did” transmute lead into gold by stripping protons and neutrons from the atoms, in a process that costs far more than the gold itself is worth at the end) was still alive and kicking when this was suggested, in 1992. In a compromise worked out in 1997,
Element 106 indeed got its name — as part of a "chemistry hall of fame" of sorts, comprising rutherfordium (104), dubnium (105), seaborgium (106), bohrium (107), and hassium (108). One gets the feeling that had this happened a decade later, some American television company would have made a telephone-voting reality show out of the decision.

So we started out intending to do magic, broke the entire universe down to its unique building blocks in the process, and then finished off realising that magic could indeed be done, but at the cost of energy. In Eliot's famous words, we arrived back at the place where we had begun and knew it for the first time: we discovered that God in His wisdom had chosen to make this tremendous universe out of dust, out of atoms: infinitely humble and small, ever reacting and sharing, each wildly unique yet ultimately (at deeper exploration) made of the same things. If we were to listen to the story behind each box in the Periodic Table, then, we could churn out books upon books — and that's not counting the story of the Periodic Table itself ...

Looking at Faces

By Hwa Shi-Hsia

"I need one of these," a friend half-joked, e-mailing me a link to the New Scientist's story about an MIT invention called the Emotional Social Intelligence Prosthetic (ESP; scientists love cute acronyms as much as anyone else).

It's a wearable image-processing system consisting of a camera with a computer that analyses people's facial expressions and prompts the wearer about the mental state of a conversation partner. The idea is that people with autism (a disorder that includes problems understanding others' emotions) could wear this and have the software give them hints if they were boring or
upsetting someone. (This friend is an engineer, a profession whose members are notorious for being socially clumsy anyway, so maybe it's not surprising that a bunch of engineers came up with the idea.)

The face is a window into the mind. Often people try to do a little wayang kulit show, hiding their emotions and putting on false ones, but experienced interrogators can detect this. With tools to dissect an expression like the Facial Action Coding System, even software can tell how a subject is feeling, making things like the ESP possible.

Sometimes, the window is broken ...

In his Saving Faces project, UK artist Mark Gilbert depicts people with disorders affecting the face. Having to sit for a painting, to let someone look at them when instinct said to hide, helped Gilbert's models deal with their conditions and to understand what was happening as they underwent surgery. The images present a contradiction at first, because ordinarily, art is thought of as presenting beauty, yet these people are what we would think of as ugly. The project offers
a service to the rest of us "normal" people as well, by making us look at the pictures and acknowledge that yes, these are our fellow humans, not creatures.

"Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would kill HIM if he was here; but not her. When you want to get revenge on a woman you don't kill her — bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils —you notch her ears like a sow!"
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Why do people find facial abnormalities to be more repulsive than other types of visible conditions? This doesn't make sense from a physical standpoint — a person missing a leg would be much worse off than, say, the SPM student with a growth covering the left side of her face who was profiled in the newspapers last month. Yet if it came to asking how many people would choose to sit next to in a crowded bus, the one-legged fellow would probably win. Since a person's face is normally an indicator of their internal state, our first assumption is that such a person must be equally horrible inside and shrink away.

"Shapes are only dresses, Curdie, and dresses are only names. That which is inside is the same all the time." — George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie

One's face is one's identity. Sure, your IC has thumbprints on it too, but if you're trying to get into a club with an age limit, try showing the bouncer your thumbs. On television, characters who are are alien in some way or another are often marked on their faces. Of course, this is partly because small bits of makeup are easier to do than making prostheses for, say, tentacles, but also because the face is the part of the person we examine first. There are Spock's eyebrows and the Klingons' corrugated foreheads in Star Trek, the gold seal on Teal'c's forehead in Stargate — and all of us who grew up watching the Alam Ria Cuti Sekolah special can't forget the Girl From Tomorrow's three little dots.

When the idea of mobile, independent machines really started to percolate through our collective consciousness, the robots that first emerged from fiction were mostly android. Never mind that in reality it's much more practical to make robots in completely inhuman shapes to fit their function. For instance, the disc-shaped Roomba that vacuums floors is quite unlike Rosie the robotic maid from the Jetsons cartoon. In novels and movies, we were making robots in our own image — assuming that something that has information-processing capabilities like a “mind” must also have a similar physical shape as the conventional package that minds come in.

An unexpected problem with making humanoid robots is that some are too human — or not quite human enough. There is an "Uncanny Valley" between a stylized machine/cartoon face and a true human face, where robots or indeed computer-animated characters that are made to look as
human as possible don't quite make it. Test subjects find the looks of a very refined android to be creepy, because the thing looks like a person — but something's not right. The eyes have nothing behind them. The mouth and the cheeks don't move properly, or twitch in a rictus. Help, it's a zombie, run away! This has been a bete noire for some robotics engineers and animators (like the people who made the Final Fantasy movie).

The face is a window into the mind. To have one is a great gift, and to look at another's face is both the most basic contact with another being, acknowledging that they exist, and an enormous presumption — to try to see into their heart.

"Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face." — Paul of Tarsus

Christianity and Science Fiction

By Tee Shern Ren

Science fiction has treated religion, in general, and Christianity, in particular, far more harshly than it merits. Everywhere I go in the SF world, it seems that Christianity is portrayed almost universally as something the human race will outgrow, like toys suitable for toddlers that are cast away when they grow into adults.

Either religion has evaporated completely by the time humans reach the stars, or it has evolved into some strange myth based on peculiarities of the cosmos, or it has culminated in humanity being enslaved in actuality by the aliens who first inspired the god-myths, or it has become a web of lies by which oppressive regimes constrict and bind their ignorant citizens.

Often it seems that religion isn't even necessary: it is just a part of the social milieu that needs to be recorded for formality's sake before going on. When religion is brought to center-stage, it is often the villain, a sort of dogma or doctrine that is used to hyper-regulate people. Often the hero has to break out of the dogma or doctrine and reach the apex of true, unstifled intellectual freedom.

And where is God? He is most often absent, either outgrown by humanity or cast down actively as humanity reaches to the stars and finds no God waiting. Or it is revealed that the "gods" we worshiped were in fact some higher life-form, far more powerful, but still very much physical and material (and frequently themselves, the product of evolution, which is of course mindless and godless within that poor scheme of knowing things).

It is a bleak picture. Science fiction (and fantasy in general) is a vast vista of fictive speculation from which Christianity seems to have retreated. I have not heard of much Christian science fiction besides C.S. Lewis' Perelandra trilogy (which I haven't had the chance to own or to read yet – shame on me!) or the Left Behind series, which qualifies as science fiction in my books (surprisingly to some) due to the sheer pervasiveness and importance of technology in the culture of the series. (Rayford may have been the leader of the Trib Force, but it was really Hassid, Chang (the two geeks), and God who made many of his escapades possible.) Besides that, I have seen nothing. No space operas, no speculative future histories, nothing to rival the great atheistic edifices that the past 50 years of science fiction have erected. This is relinquishment, right?

To some degree Christianity seems to have some disagreements with science. It seems that science must by necessity discount the resurrection, and disturb the Bible's historical record by claiming immense age for the earth and the universe, and upset man's place in the grand scheme of life, by relegating him to a minute twig on the vivid tree of evolution, a tree which has grown in a million other directions away from Homo sapiens. But none of these are insurmountable difficulties if one realises that, like everything else, created science is just another servant of God.

There are many ways to reconcile science to the Bible, out of which a good proportion leave the great Christian kerygma of Christ's life, death, and resurrection untouched. Let us assume that any Christian science fiction must start there. It must start believing that science is written into the very fabric of the cosmos by nobody less than God, and therefore is innately good and valuable and beautiful (instead of being a man-made diversion from God, as some would see it). Only then can Christian science fiction truly be written.

There is of course some creative value from brushes between Christianity and the classic scenarios of science fiction, mostly humorous (does Easter come once every Earth year for the Martian colony, or once every Martian year? And is wine made from Martian grapes valid Eucharist material?). But for fundamentally Christian science fiction, there needs to be a transformation inside-out.

Christianity needs to subvert the three principal elements of science fiction – cosmos, culture, creature – and transform them into obedience to God's revealed theology.

What does the Christian see in the cosmos? Science fiction has seen a bleakly desolate vacuum, or a battlefield teeming with hostile aliens. But why not a template for the exercising of God's will? The Christian has the right to find God where everybody else sees only the void. All this is His glorious creation; all this lives and exists to glorify Him and to display His invisible attributes so that man (and what other sentient species on distant planets ordained by God's grand mind) has no excuse to deny the revelation of God's righteousness (Romans 1).

And who is to say that God cannot work miracles in outer space? Christians tell stories all the time of divine providence in their lives; is it so far a stretch to imagine that these tales of providence will cease when man has achieved enough to reach for the stars? A Christian astronaut embarking on his maiden voyage to Alpha Centauri needs prayer as much as any other Christian endeavouring to do any other good thing.

Before all this, though, one issue that must be addressed is how to conceptualise humanity surviving to the point of being able to reach for the stars. I am referring to the doctrine of Christ's imminent return, and how it implies (as it always has to Christians of every age) that God is returning soon and therefore humanity will not havetime to waste on going to the stars.

Well, firstly, there is nothing that will prevent Jesus returning after humanity has reached beyond the solar system, no? Jesus is omnipotent and omniscient, and His return is going to be a miraculous event by any reckoning: when He wishes to return and make Himself known again to all humanity I don't think mere space-time will be able to get in His way, will it?

Secondly, if you believe that after Jesus returns He will establish a millennial Kingdom on earth, I don't see why any necessary space travel can't be done during that time. There is nothing essentially harmful about going to the stars so that Jesus would forbid it, in my humble opinion.

Thirdly, not all science fiction has to be set in the far future and light-years away from the earth. There is science fiction to be written even now, stories about time travel and secret government experiments and genetic oddities and things of the sort, and within all those there is room to make the cosmos the servant of God.

On to culture then. My biggest gripe with conventional science fiction is that it portrays religion as being a “product” of culture instead of the “root” of culture. Religion is apparently a product of human flawed analysis of the world and creation – creating a god out of what are simply natural phenomena. Is this a fair view?

Rather, consider culture as being something “given” by God. Consider it a divinely sanctioned and constructed institution for the benefit of its members, and trust that whomever God puts in power God puts for His own purposes. Or it is possible to subvert the science fiction idea of the repressive religion: false religion and religion against Christianity is always repressive and oppressive, but true Christianity sets people free and gives them hope and a cleansed life.

Let the hero go up against a wicked state and a dirtied man-made religion: armed not just with pure intellectuality, and certainly not with atheistic sophistication, but holding the word of God in hand and knowing that he is good and the enemy evil.

Society does not need to outgrow Christianity: society can grow more and more into the image of God which He intended humanity to fill, so that over the ages, the family is upheld instead of degraded and marriage made more sacred instead of more disposable. Christianity needs an optimistic view of the future with God-flavoured speculative hope to counter the pessimistic images that science fiction gives of humanity becoming less and less fulfilled as more and more time passes.

Finally, what of the creature? Let us abandon the evolutionary myth that tells us that man is no more than an inconsequential side-effect of the grand process of evolution: even if that explains our physique, it cannot explain our psyche. Make no mistake about it, we hold the image of God, and man will always hold that image no matter how many millennia in the future the SF is written.

And I would guess (in speculative respect for God's mysteries) that any aliens worth writing about are also made "in God's image" (which has different facets, and cannot be exhausted in making any one species?). Man will never be just another pile of matter which happens to be able to reproduce and make noise; man is significant in God's sight, no matter if he is stranded between the stars studded in the vast void of space. And every human life has this incredible sanctity and worth invested in it by the pure virtue of being human.

In conclusion, I would say that modern Christianity, so fertile in so many areas, is impoverished in the area of fictive writing, in general, and science fiction, in particular. Why is that so?

Perhaps the church needs to defend against the perpetual Da Vinci Codes not just by explaining where they go wrong but by writing better bestsellers to wipe falsehood off the top ten list. The beauty of writing is surely a beauty given by God, and the church loses immensely by losing that beauty. So writers, go forth!

Mind and Matter

By Hwa Shi-Hsia

A close friend of mine is fond of a song by Rush called "Freewill". Since I'm a Christian and he's an atheist, arguing back and forth about religion and metaphysics has become one of the running themes in our relationship.
Part of the song goes:
You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice

You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will

What is this "will" anyway? Note, free will doesn't simply mean not doing what other people tell you. Assuming that you have free will, you can choose to follow or not to follow instructions from outside yourself, but take responsibility for the choice. Like this:
Stick out your tongue.
Did you stick out your tongue? Wah, so obedient. Did you choose to do that freely, or just because you had to follow along with the story?
You didn't stick out your tongue? How do you know you weren't just compelled to rebel against authority? Okay, I give you another chance.
Don't stick out your tongue.
Oh goodie. Now roll your eyes at my awful lameness.

Concepts like "will" and "mind" may be hard to define precisely, yet we know they're real, or feel like they're real. Except when we're sleeping or unconscious, we know something's there behind the eyes. So we'll look behind the eyes first, into the brain.
People use the phrase "gray matter" to mean smartness or intelligence, referring crudely to the parts of the brain that appear gray because of the cell bodies of the neurons clustered there ("white matter" is where the axons are. If you imagine neurons as electronic components, axons are the wires connecting them). People who study the brain are discovering more and more that this wrinkly lump of gray tissue is in fact an incredibly complex organic computer.

We've accepted for a long time that the parts of a person that interact directly with the rest of the world — that is, sensation and action — are controlled by parts of the brain. Have a stroke, half the face goes slack. Kena whacked on the back of the skull, go blind.

However, things that we normally think of as abstract, like memory, reason, and emotion, also have physical bases. For instance, a chunk labelled the hypothalamus controls what my psychopharmacology professor calls "the four Fs of behaviour": feeding, fighting, fleeing, and, er ... f***king.

Another little chunk called the septal area, if damaged, causes uncontrollable rage, e.g. the story of a maddened rat that chased a researcher up a chair. People who fall in love have a decrease in the neurotransmitter serotonin that resembles people with obsessive-compulsive disorder — speaking from past experience, it's a really weird feeling. Even religious experience — the meditations of Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks — has been shown to involve changes in brain activity as displayed by MRI and EEG, respectively (WIRED magazine, February 2006).

Knowing these things about the workings of the brain, we find ways to manipulate it. Large sections of the pharmaceutical industry (and the alcoholic beverage industry and organised crime groups) are based on the fact that emotions, sensations, and behaviours can be adjusted by increasing or decreasing communications between certain brain cells by application of certain chemicals.

In animal studies, rats, cats and monkeys have been made to act like remote-controlled robots. In one particularly famous experiment, a charging bull was stopped in its tracks with a radio transmitter (Jose Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind, 1969). Some types of epilepsy can be controlled by implanting electrodes into the patients' brains, which is a good application of the technology, but in theory, an evil mad scientist with enough money could raise an army of mind-controlled slaves.

Hence my friend's argument: that "neurology disproves the existence of the soul". Since everything we experience has its roots in the movement of ions across membranes and neurotransmitters across synapses, that's all there is to a person.
A popular Christian writer has called this perspective "nothing-buttery" (C.S. Lewis). "It's nothing but a lump of cells...", true. My answer was that neuroscience simply shows the physical basis for the soul. What a thing is made of on the physical level says nothing about its metaphysical existence.

A book may be nothing but paper and ink, but I would be much less upset if you threw my bottle of Quink and ream of printer paper into the toilet than if you did that with my copy of The Name of the Rose. And even if you hunted down and burned every single copy of it in the world, the book could still exist in electronic copy, or perhaps even in the memory of an Umberto Eco fan. For us who are written in flesh and blood, perhaps this would be immortality – being remembered in the mind of God.

What I find baffling about a lot of people who insist that there is no god, no supernatural, nothing but the physical world, is that they also insist that the human mind is free. For the reasons outlined above, this can't be the case. If consciousness has a purely material basis, we are reacting to our environment as fixedly as the stupidest ant, or a chunk of gravel rolling down a hillside for that matter, bound by the laws of physics.

It would seem that we're trapped, either way — slaves to sin or slaves to God, as Paul of Tarsus wrote (Romans 6). If we are only chemical robots, all our arguments and thoughts are pointless. If we are only divine puppets, then the incarnation and the sacrifice were pointless, because we are offered a choice in that sacrifice, and choice isn't meaningful unless it's free.

My contention that soul = brain does put me in a sticky spot. What about people who have suffered brain damage or a mental disorder? The law acknowledges that they have physical conditions that make them not fully responsible for their actions. Does the soul of a human fetus grow along with its nervous system from a primitive neural tube to a fully developed infant brain, or is "soulness" a property that emerges abruptly at some point? (I don't subscribe to the idea of there being a crèche of baby souls up in heaven waiting to be born.) Do animals intelligent enough to have "personality" such as some of the larger mammals, birds, and octopuses have half-souls? I don't know the answers and would doubt anyone who claimed to know with absolute certainty.

The point at which the practical questions of everyday life lay a tripwire across the path of all this neuroscience and philosophising is this: Subjectivity matters. There are more than six billion people on Earth, out of whom I am neither the smartest nor the strongest nor the prettiest nor the fastest or the toughest. The Earth itself is a speck of sand whirling through a void, and some time from now — much longer than the lifespan of the species Homo sapiens — will be melted by the ballooning sun, which itself is only a little bubble of gas among millions upon millions.

On an objective scale I matter nothing to the universe, but the small world of my senses and thoughts matters very much because it is the only world accessible to me — I can't have other people's experiences, and I certainly don't have a mind big enough to contain the whole of the "real world".

The issue that is important to the things I do and the decisions I make isn't whether or not I am totally free to think and act in any way possible, or whether there are such things as absolute right and wrong. The question is whether or not I choose to think about and act on what I believe to be right — whether morality is logical, intuitive or conditioned, even if choice itself is a hallucination. Because I feel it's real, that choice and its moral consequences are real to me. Human society revolves around the idea of personal responsibility, whether for praise or blame.

The old Methodists used to have a greeting: "Is it well with your soul?" The soul may be a metaphysical object that inhabits the body as a shell, or it may be simply the workings of the mushy, wet, biological brain. Regardless, you know that when I say "your soul" I mean the you to whom I am writing — a being that feels, thinks, and acts. Is it well?

The Three C's of Science Fiction

By Tee Shern Ren

I don't claim to be a talented sci-fi writer, as is painfully obvious ;), but I do claim to be an avid sci-fi reader. Science fiction, as it is read, is extremely difficult to pin down. There is science-fantasy, space opera, surrealism, Golden-Era alien encounter, alternate history even ... but there are three unifying factors that pervade all of science fiction: Cosmos, Culture, and Creature.

The first element is obvious. The first real science-fiction most of us encounter are the space adventure TV series — Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica. We connect with them the same way a child connects with the stars in the sky — reaching up and out, looking with wonder at the infinity of darkness. Space, the final frontier.

And often space isn't just an empty, barren backdrop. Sometimes space itself becomes a character, an important and crucial player in the game that is science-fiction. Sometimes space is the enemy, killing people who wander unprotected into the vacuum (being "spaced" from the airlock is the space pirates' equivalent of walking the plank), wrecking people's plans by forbidding matter travelling past the speed of light. At other times space is the saviour, for example offering rebels a large infinity in which to hide from the Empire.

Space effectively makes science fiction large and wonderful, flinging our mundane adventures beyond the sky and thus amplifying their innate connection with our humanness. But space itself is often a player, and not only on the cosmic scale. Space, at the tiniest, plays a role too — the various balances of gravity and electromagnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces dictating the wide range of sciences that make ray guns and time machines and antimatter bombs and space-traversing engines possible. Cosmos at its smallest, the weird world of quantum mechanics where nothing is certain (besides the fact that everything is weird), becomes a tool in the hands of science-fiction authors to invoke any and every imaginable plot device. And the vast stretch of time afforded by the cosmos makes any scale of human expansion imaginable, from a vast galaxy-spanning civilization to the "sublimed" races who have written themselves into the very fabric of space in Iain M Banks' culture novels.

Culture is no less important for science-fiction. The whole point is to explore other worlds, other lives, hence other cultures. I sometimes imagine that "contact" science-fiction (among other forms), the stories of what happens when the different first meet, is an attempt at simulating the "clash of civilizations", a sort of trial run at making us humans meet "the others" and seeing what happens so that we don't make the mistake in real life. We look at the Human-Minbari war in Babylon 5, started when a Minbari act of diplomacy — opening gun turrets — was interpreted as a statement of hostility, and hope that such a thing never happens in the real world. Perhaps we can learn from mistakes we have never made anywhere outside science-fiction novels.

And yet, the cultures we see on foreign worlds resemble our own. Is that any wonder? Science-fiction writers are still just humans writing for fellow humans. It has been remarked, only half in jest, that "on Star Trek every alien species in the universe speaks English!" It is inevitable that the forms used will be familiar, describable, identifiable with. We see aliens and posthumans adopting caste systems, totalitarian oppression, democracy, male dominance hierarchies, matriarchies. And for good reason — when we see these institutions dressed in alien garb, maybe we will get to know them just a little bit better for what they really are.

And of course, the creature is the most important part of science-fiction — the character, the protagonists and antagonists and supporting casts. Here again we meet old friends in new clothes — dictators threatened by revolutionaries, sages stifled by bureaucracy, visionaries held back by traditionalists, lovers separated, prophets ignored, the comical and the grave. The whole fun of it is partly to see old scenes reenacted in new surroundings.

One of my personal favourites is a scene from one of Stephen Baxter's short stories when a maligned nerd cripples the ship jock by tricking him onto a device that, unknown to anybody else, doubles the force of gravity and brings him down. The bright underdog and the brawny bully could've stepped out of any hackneyed Disney movie but the difference and hence the fun came from watching that same tired story play itself out with alien devices on an alien world.

Cosmos, Culture, Creature. The most important question for me, though, is: Where among these does Christianity fit? I will look at this in my next column.

Standard Operating Procedures

By Hwa Shi-Hsia

One Sunday a few months ago, the church sermon was about the rituals of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur in Hebrew).

At that time, still flushed with the thrill of having entered a Biosafety Level Three lab for the first time — if you were ever a Robin Cook or Michael Crichton fan, you'll know what I mean — I was struck by how much the description of the high-priestly duties resembled the standard operating procedure sheets I had had to read so many times in the preceding weeks. They are similar even in their superficial forms, being step-by-step outlines of a process of going in and going out of a special place, sacred or profane, laid out and enforced by a higher authority. Failure to follow the steps meticulously could have (had) potentially lethal consequences.

And they both involve animal sacrifices. One of the verbs used for killing animals used in experiments (other than the "euthanised" also familiar to pet owners) is "sacrificed." It implies that the blood of the animal is used in exchange for ... something higher, that although we value life, there's something we're seeking — whether mercy, or knowledge or healing — that is worth even that blood on our hands.

The resonance of these passages tells me something almost stunning in its unfamiliarity to my modern mind: God is to be approached with as much awe and trepidation as the bubonic plague and avian influenza. Certainly the mediaeval Europeans being consumed by the Black Death thought they were suffering the wrath of God. (If you want a bit of historical background to this, the First Pandemic of plague was during the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian; the Second was the Black Death; and the Third Pandemic, although not so big of a deal thanks to sanitation and antibiotics, is ongoing.)

The situations are parallel but opposite. Animal rooms are considered "dirty," and, therefore, workers must strip off their regular clothes before entering and wash their bodies on exiting to prevent the contamination from infecting them. Whereas humans have to clean and cover up our filthy selves before going in to protect us from being decontaminated out of existence by the furnace-bright presence of God.

However, if we read further into the story of atonement, according the book of Hebrews in the New Testament, this ritual is no longer necessary. Not that the essence of the ritual or the reasons behind it have changed, but that the need for repeated painstaking decontamination has been removed, because for those who want it, someOne has come to do the ritual to decontaminate us forever (which would be a really neat trick for infectious disease researchers if we could wrangle that in a non-metaphorical sense.)

We no longer have to strip, shower and change into scrubs to enter the isolation rooms, so to speak. And I think — if you think of what a pain in the neck it is to have to do that every single time, and what a pain to the soul it is to have to go through a process of fasting and weeping and confessing every single time — the ability to come to God freely, in our plain clothes, is an amazing gift.

These procedures are general guidelines for the performance of specific tasks within the animal isolation wing (AIW). They are meant to guide, but not preclude, your own good judgment in preventing hazardous situations on a day-to-day basis.
The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming — not the realities themselves.
References: The standard operating procedure quoted is from an animal research facility involved with wildlife health. The Biblical quotations are from Exodus 29 (consecration of the priests), Leviticus 16 (Day of Atonement), and Hebrews 9-10 in the New International Version of the Bible.

Pick up clothing (scrubs and socks), as needed, from the storage area just to the left of the UV box. Additional apparel needed to enter an animal room, the service corridor and necropsy room is available in the anterooms once inside the AIW.

This is how Aaron is to enter the sanctuary area: with a young bull for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. He is to put on the sacred linen tunic, with linen undergarments next to his body; he is to tie the linen sash around him and put on the linen turban.

Enter your initials, date, and time on the sign-in sheet posted on the door into the locker room.

Tell your brother Aaron not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die.

Remove shoes, clothes, undergarments, and jewellery and place them in lockers provided in the outer change area. Put on clean scrubs if they were obtained from storage area that day.

These are sacred garments; so he must bathe himself with water before he puts them on.

Put on minimum required clothing (safety glasses, gloves, waterproof boots, and coveralls). Follow all additional instructions concerning biosafety equipment or personal protective equipment that are posted on the door into the anteroom.

Take the other ram, and Aaron and his sons shall lay their hands on its head. Slaughter it, take some of its blood and put it on the lobes of the right ears of Aaron and his sons, on the thumbs of their right hands, and on the big toes of their right feet.

Open the inside door leading to the animal room. As you enter, be alert for any unusual conditions (e.g. loose animals). Make sure door closes behind you.

He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites — all their sins — and put them on the goat's head. ... The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place; and the man shall release it in the desert.

Exiting animal rooms: Decontaminate the surface of all containers that you are removing from the animal room before entering the anteroom. Use 10% bleach solution in spray bottles or bleach baths.

It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.

Enter the inner change area and remove all clothing and store in locker provided. When items become dirty or are no longer needed, place them in the hamper provided so they can be autoclaved and laundered.

Then Aaron is to go into the Tent of Meeting and take off the linen garments he put on before he entered the Most Holy Place, and he is to leave them there.

Enter the exit corridor and shower. Wash all exterior body surfaces, especially the hair, face, and nostrils with soap before entering the outer change area. After drying off, put on your street clothes.

He shall bathe himself with water in a holy place and put on his regular garments.

Sign out on the sheet posted on the locker room door and pick up your transport container from the UV box.

Then he shall come out and sacrifice the burnt offering for himself and the burnt offering for the people.

When exiting the TIB after hours and weekends, record the time you departed in the after-hours log book at the main entrance of the TIB.

Day after day, every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again, he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.

The Christian and Science

By Tee Shern Ren

Some Christians just don't know what to do with science. "Science is a man-made thing," their argument goes, "and all science does is to try and take credit for how the universe works away from God."

And it is easy to identify with their fears. After all, with modern technology we don't really need to invoke God for anything, do we? We don't have to call on Him for rain when we can seed clouds, or admire the way a flower buds when it really is all about gene expression and variable hormonal concentrations. And of course the big bogey, evolution, is “badbadbadbadbad” because it is an atheistic way to explain how life came about without God in the picture. These are known as "god-of-the-gaps" arguments, because God can only be seen in the gaps where science can't explain stuff. Up and against these arguments, what is needed is a good Christian understanding of what science really is.

What, then, is science? Science is basically the study of the natural world. However, it is an interesting form of study: It seeks to know the relationships between observed quantities in the natural world. At the heart of science is the hypothesis, a statement about how variables are related:

The more I eat, the fatter I grow.

The harder I throw a rock, the farther it goes.

The faster I run, the more I sweat.

The heavier a piece of wood, the longer it takes to burn up completely.

In all these hypotheses, I take one quantity and change it, and then see what happens to the other. That is all there is to science, really. The formulae, the apparatus, the research labs, even the science education system — all these are just props and packaging. The gut of it is in the question “How does this affect that?”

I would say that many people, including the majority of science students in Malaysia and probably in the rest of the world, miss this completely. They already have a fixed mental picture about what science is: People in white lab coats standing with shiny expensive instruments, swishing funny-coloured liquids about in funny-shaped glass tubes and containers, or looking down a microscope at strange bacteria. They don't really know how to mix with people, they speak either in Greek or mathematic-ese, and they come up with inventions with which they threaten to destroy or take over the world or both (at least in movies).

To a student in particular, science is really nothing more than the contents of the science textbook for that year. Science is answering all the questions with all the correct points in the correct format (that has to be there — when you answer the question wrong, that's not science; that's stupidity); science is doing the experiment and making sure that the dichromate really turns green or the force really is the product of the mass and the acceleration (otherwise that's not science; that's carelessness). And when it is all over science is just “another few subjects I got an A for.” But that is merely judging a book by its cover. This is just what science looks like on the outside; it isn’t what science is.

Science is more than a morass of knowledge. Science is a fundamental philosophy of curiosity about the universe. The Christian has nothing to fear from it. In fact, the Christian position is the only position from which science makes sense — for science, to the Christian, reflects God's joyful order, which is so deeply a part of Him, poured into creation. I say this because really, there is no other position from which science has much meaning or significance.

The Eastern mystical religions will tell us that all is maya and the ultimate aim is to break through the illusion into the higher reality. But if the world around us is maya, an illusion, what is the point of studying it? On the other hand, materialistic atheism tells us that this world came about by mere chance and is decaying away towards meaningless entropy. Why study a universe that just happened to be? If it is just a matter of chance and probability, then is there any significance in knowing how it works?

The Christian, on the other hand, knows that a good God created the universe and He created it “very good.” And the reason the universe runs so well is because God is a wonderfully wise and orderly God.

From one perspective it might seem that the orderly universe does not need God. After all, God is not needed any more to explain disease or weather or sunrise or other phenomena we once attributed to the supernatural. Does that mean that God isn't in charge of them anymore? Ah, but we can never draw such a conclusion, because there is no way you can exclude God's presence from the universe. You cannot draw a line around some physical process and say “Hah! This still runs even when God isn't involved in it!” How do you know that God really has His hands off when the world is running as it should be?

I believe that really, it is precisely because God is orderly that the universe is orderly. God who is ever dependable decided to set certain things about the universe that are so dependable, like the sun's daily rising and setting, that they seem to operate independently of Him: when in fact they are dependable only because He desires them to be dependable. And the fact that we perceive science as usurping God's place in the universe might just be a sign that we have not yet learned the proper Christian response to it:

"God, thank You for science."