Phases Online: Beyond Fiction

Simple Elementary

2006-05-01T00:09:00.000+08:00

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

2006-04-25T09:29:00.000+08:00

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

2006-04-16T21:13:00.000+08:00

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

2006-04-09T23:53:00.000+08:00

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

2006-04-02T20:50:00.000+08:00

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

2006-03-26T22:53:00.000+08:00

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

2006-03-19T20:50:00.000+08:00

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."

Geek Chicks & the Ghost of Rosalind Franklin

2006-03-12T19:54:00.000+08:00

By Hwa Shi-Hsia

It's late one night in the middle of the winter holidays, and the science building is nearly deserted. I'm about to head up the stairs for some worm-herding work when I hear a whisper of movement down the corridor.

First thought: Aaargh! It's haunted! Second thought: This is Science Hall, stupid. Who would be haunting it? The ghost of Rosalind Franklin? I enjoy the silly moment before dashing up to the third floor research lab.

Here's another thought: Maybe we are haunted by the ghost of Rosalind Franklin, but in a less supernatural way. Five decades later, the image of this physical chemist, whose work led Watson and Crick to propose what turned out to be the correct structure of DNA, remains the stereotype of the woman scientist in pop culture: plain, cold, snappish, work-obsessed and sexless.

At least, that's what Watson thought of her, writing as much in his book The Double Helix. He did manage to expose scientists as being competitors as human, avid, and sometimes predatory as businessmen and politicians, but the skewedness of the portrait he presented of Franklin wasn't exposed till much later.

Franklin's biographer Brenda Maddox records her as being a lively conversationalist, a lover of the outdoors, a fashionable dresser (colleagues at King's College saw her only in plain work clothes), a Francophile (England bored her), and a warm friend to many, despite her suffer-no-fools attitude.

Hollywood still clings to the caricature. Female scientists in movies tend to be bespectacled and wear lab coats with ponytails or bobs. If they're not middle-aged and wrinkly, then they're school-girlishly naive and boring until the hero comes along and transforms them into princesses, usually to be saved from a metaphorical dragon at some point. (I'm thinking of Seven of Nine in her pre-Chakotay days and the chick who co-starred with Jackie Chan in "The Tuxedo" … my memory for movies is bad.)

All right, you say, movies are silly. We all know that. The problem is that stereotypes perpetuate themselves by influencing our behavior in real life. For young children, the appeal in stories about doing experiments and "discovering" things may be enough in and of itself. As they grow older, girls may be discouraged by thoughts that they'll be too busy to have a social life, while boys will be scared off by their intelligence, and so forth. The simple fact that there are many more males in certain disciplines can be somewhat intimidating, as with many other fields.

Compounding the problem is that the news media and people in general seem to think of "scientists" as being not quite the same species as the rest of homosapiens. One of my friends (a pianist) was making fun of a post-tsunami article reporting that "animals may have other senses that human beings, even scientists, don't have". "As if scientists aren't humans," she laughed. It's all right for some guys to set themselves on a different intellectual plane, but girls? No, you stay down here with the rest of us who don't understand this stuff.

I visited the Science Museum of Minnesota last week. Coming out of its excellent Human Body Gallery, I saw a stall in a corner, the sort usually seen at "expos" where people try to sell you digital cameras from China. I thought it was for some kind of fundraiser, but on closer inspection, found a banner draped across the front asking "Why are Women Important in Science?" A child visitor might wonder why indeed, if the grown-ups relegate the issue of women scientists to a couple of pamphlets and a cheap documentary on a small TV, in a big museum full of fantastic and ingenious exhibits.

Certainly I'd rather live in a world where gender was irrelevant when teaching children about the past and present contributions of women to the body of knowledge, but the idea that science and maths are primarily male disciplines persists, in Malaysia where I come from, in the United States where I now study, and probably in most other parts of the world. This, despite the rapidly growing proportion of females who work in the physical sciences and math world. In my college – probably atypical because it's a small school – there are as many women as men majoring in sciences. In the USA, in some applied sciences like medicine, the number of women is drawing level with the number of men, and in veterinary medicine, has outstripped them.

Computer programming used to be a female-dominated field early in its history, because it was seen as simple, secretarial work. When people realised that it was challenging and involved advanced problem-solving skills (i.e. cool), men jumped in. So now, the local computer science club has about two dozen guys and two girls. It probably is true that men, in general, are better than women, in general, at certain types of abstract processing that are useful in the physical sciences and math, but by no means should generalisations be used to discourage the many girls who are talented at these.

The college I attended in the US has a programme called PRYSM (Partners Reaching Youth in Science and Math) that pairs female college students with interested girls in middle school (5th to 7th grade, the equivalent of Standard 5 to Form 1). In February, the college hosts GEMS Day (Girls Exploring Math and Science), a bigger event where the participants get to play with numbers, ideas, experiments … and make tie-dyed T-shirts. Ooh … tie-dye … pretty. These are 11- to 14-year-olds, and they get to come to a real college campus and take lessons with real professors and tinker around in real laboratories. Aiyo … if only someone had given me a chance to do that.

The importance of putting children in contact with role models is twofold: First, it shows them that there are people in the working world who are doing the things they're thinking of doing, and that those things are as cool as they hope, and not quite as difficult as they fear. Second, allowing kids to talk to adults about their jobs gives them a more concrete picture of what those jobs are, thus equipping them to make better decisions about what to study in school and what careers to investigate. Our education system really doesn't prepare people to deal with anything other than taking exams, let alone the complexities of adult life, yet every year across the country schoolchildren are assigned to write compositions like "Cita-cita Saya" and "My Dream" without any realistic idea of what they're talking about.

Anyway ... how real is the stereotype? I found the first-name-basis egalitarianism of an American liberal arts college a bit odd, but the openness of the small community brought students into closer contact with their professors than would a large public university. The female science and math faculty could be described as:
a marathon runner
mums with kids
a rowing coach who bakes good cookies
a loopy philosopher
an artist turned ecologist
pet lovers who bring baby squirrels and big hairy dogs to work

In short, people who have lives as interesting and multidimensional as anyone else's, or maybe even more so. Career probably is a high priority for them, but so is it for professionals in any field. No one makes a big fuss if a girl says she wants to be a lawyer or an architect — the traditional money-making careers that half the kids in my Standard Five class cited as their "cita-cita." Research scientists (as opposed to people in applied sciences like medicine and engineering) are just people with jobs — a special kind of job, perhaps, but they're still just people.

Why does the idea persist that science is some sort of all-consuming vocation that cuts a woman off from having a real life? Perhaps it's just that we haven't quite assimilated the notion that women can be smart without being freaks. Perhaps it's because the real role models, the women who are working in these fields and having friends and families and hobbies, aren't visible enough for the distorted camera of pop culture to have recorded them yet.

Check out the links below on Rosalind Franklin and PYRMS & GEMS programme:
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
The PRYSM and GEMS website

Witch

2006-03-05T22:06:00.000+08:00

By Tee Shern Ren

A good science fiction story is truly enjoyable because of the"twist". It's enjoyable when the author creates a world, slowly lets you immerse in it, lets you think you're comfortable with it, and wham! He pulls a fast one on you and suddenly everything looks different and you realise that he's been cleverly hiding something from you all along.

Now, there's no point going all theoretical on this if I can't actually do it in practice. Which is what I've decided to try. Mind you, I'm really much more of a sci-fi reader than a sci-fi writer, but let's see what happens when I take a stab at it. This particular story was inspired by a classroom discussion about hydration energy and another story I read (edit-shouldn't give too much away ;) ). Read and enjoy! And critique, too.

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Witch

We were waiting at the old ATM that used to be in front of the college, where an overhanging roof provided just enough shelter for a guy and a girl already used to getting close with each other. The sky was unusually dark and the rain pounded the roofs around us like a million tiny woodpeckers. She seemed to flinch with every little raindrop impact she heard. Well, that was her. A million idiosyncrasies, but none that mattered more than the delight of even a single peck on the cheek.

It was five in the afternoon and we were waiting for the bus back. Class ended at three but we'd stayed back for a bit in the library going over our notes again for tomorrow's Chemistry test. It was on thermodynamics in chemical reactions; a vast and tangly topic and one I was glad to have her company in unraveling.

Somehow she seemed to have a real brain for chemistry, especially the organic variety of it, and she had taught me far more than I could ever have learned in class. Of course, it helped that she had a face you could stare into for hours without feeling in the least bit tired. But she really was a smart cookie. Top of the class, every subject every test. When she enlightened something particularly difficult for me, sometimes I'd ask her how she'd gotten so smart and she'd reply in half-jest "I'm an alien from another planet!" And we'd laugh and get back to whatever it was we were studying.

"This rain. Sometimes I feel as if the rain will never stop." She suddenly turned to me and near-whispered.

"But at least you're here, nice and dry, with me by your side," I idly said.

"And yet ... "

"Something bugging you?"

"I don't know. Just thinking of my parents. The rain always makes me think of them."

"What about?"

"They hated the rain, too. To them the rain always spoke of the violence of the world."

"And you feel the same way?"

"Yeah. You and your screwed-up wet world." She giggled without much conviction. "You and your water. Violent little molecule."

"What do you mean?"

"Come on! You've forgotten?"

"What, you mean energy of hydration? Umm ... "

"And we just went through this a few minutes ago."

"Oh! I remember! That's the energy released when water molecules form ion-dipole bonds with dissolving solutes. Why did you mention that?"

"So violent. So much energy. And did you know that when there are organic molecules in the proper configuration, the huge amount of energy released is enough to shock even those non-polar molecules into undergoing hydration? When that - "

"But I thought that organic - "

"No, it happens. It just - " she sighed, and continued " - isn't in your syllabus. But it happens. Believe me. It isn't pretty. Violent water."

"Is that what your parents have been telling you?"

"Yeah. Isn't it strange the things you hear when your parents are chemists?"

"Hmm. If it helps you ace exams ... " I playfully punched her on the shoulder, but she flinched.

I turned to take a good hard look at her. She looked awfully pale. Granted, she looked really pale all the time, but this time she honestly looked like she could just fade into thin air. It looked like the rain was really doing something to her nerves. She'd started to sway back and forth, closing her eyes, mumbling to herself, the way a mother tried to calm a child - she was trying so hard to calm herself, and not quite succeeding. And her irrational fear seeped into me almost as if it was a scent you could smell in the cold rainy air. It was a scent I could smell on the rare occasions when I entered her house, too; a house with vitamin bottles scattered all over the place, where the taps always ran dry ("waterless soap is cleaner", she said her parents insisted), where there was milk powder and dried soup and instant noodles but not even a glimpse of a kettle or a thermos, where there wasn't a single water bottle to be found.

I felt like I was gagging in the strangeness of it all. "Hey - " I tried to begin. It took a while before the words came out properly.

"Hey, what about tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow?"

"Come on! You've forgotten?"

"But I thought the test was on - "

"What test? Tomorrow's Valentine's Day!"

"Oh."

"We're still going for dinner, right? The Ship?"

"I don't really know if I can make it ... my parents ... "

"But why should you listen to your parents about it? You're eighteen
today! You're an adult! - "

"That's just it. I'm grown up now. My parents ... they sat me down yesterday and we talked. They reminded me of many things. Responsibilities. Risks. Dangers. Death, even. And I'm just not sure if I can be with you tomorrow. If I - if I can be with you at all."

"What - we're breaking up? Because you're 18?"

"Umm ... "

"After three years! After three whole years of us going through ups and downs together! And you're going to call it quits just because your parents were a bit late telling you about the birds and the bees?"

"You ... don't understand. It's different. I'm different."

"What's - "

And that was when four of our classmates, all guys, burst out from behind us laughing. In my memory they circled us like predators, even though the rain was pouring and they must have been drenched in half a second. They were leering at her, the poor girl dressed in a white tee and jeans holding her umbrella out like a wary swordsman surrounded. "It's your birthday, isn't it?" one of them shouted at her. "Well back in school we'd get a large bottle of water and pour it all over the birthday girl. But it looks like the old man up there is helping us out today!"

Her eyes sprung wide, like a deer caught in headlights - and with a sudden shove they pushed her out from under the shelter into the rain.

Within the blink of an eye her tee was soaked through and the guys were ogling the sight underneath. I turned around, trying to land a knuckle sandwich on the nearest oaf I could reach. I was angling back to land my fist when suddenly their eyes widened further, not in lust but in terror. My arm dropped and I turned again to look.

The rainwater running down the road was red. I looked up and she held my gaze in horrified fascination.

The rain never seemed to run down her skin but instead seeped through her scalp and ran out of her sneakers a light crimson. She seemed to swell a little and then shrink, like a snowman in the sun but with a skin that shriveled and puckered. But even the skin itself was thinning, the whole body seeming to dissolve into the air. Suddenly I heard a high, disembodied shriek - "Seen enough?"

And suddenly she was gone.

Like I said, all this happened where the ATM in front of my college used to be. It's gone now, if you're wondering. The bank demolished it since nobody was using it any more. Spirits hanging around, everyone says.

*Editor: Agree? Disagree? Or just have something to say about this article? Leave a comment or write to us at phasesonline@gmail.com

Apostle to the Xenomorphs

2006-03-01T20:19:00.000+08:00

By Hwa Shi-Hsia

If you're familiar with Bible-scholarly jargon, you may have heard Peter referred to as "the apostle to the Jews" and Paul as "the apostle to the Gentiles" because they were the ones Dr. Luke describes as spreading the influence of the early church within these two groups respectively. And later on Gladys Aylward and Hudson Taylor became the missionaries to China, Jim Elliot to Ecuador, and so on. But what if one day there was a call for someone to become the apostle to the xenomorphs?

Okaylah, so right now it sounds like a completely silly question. However, some people have treated it with all due seriousness. We know that we live in a vast universe – probably not an infinite one ('cos the Big Bang happened a finite time ago), but one so large that the human mind has to contain this largeness with numbers like ten to the panjang berjela-jela punya exponent – in which life has arisen on at least one planet, obviously. And for those of a religious or at least theistic mind, we believe that we were created by a God who loves life. So it's not unreasonable that it might exist on others, and not unreasonable that it might, somewhere, have produced other beings that we can speak to.

Aliens in stories are most of the time the bad guys, emerging from our instinctive fear of the unknown, what ethologists call neophobia. The danger they present is virtually always a physical one, descending from the sky to raze our cities – remember that funny Polo Mints ad that came out after the Independence Day movie? – or stuffing their nasty little larvae into our bodies to munch their way out later. But action movies overlook the philosophical - the greatest danger of extraterrestrial contact may not be to our bodies, but to our souls.

An unusual short story (in one of the "Best SF" anthologies edited by Edmund Crispin; sorry I can't remember its title or author) exposes some of the darker possibilities in extraterrestrial encounters, a team of explorers – one of the biologists is also a Jesuit priest – pay a visit to a planet whose natives have a highly developed technological society, albeit one without spaceflight. Even though the planet is peaceful and many hallmarks of what humans consider civilisation, they have no religion – okay, that's not too weird – no law – that's rather odd, since we can't achieve order without rules – and no concept of morality. Horror and enlightenment dawn together. The priest concludes that the entire planet is a trap devised by the devil to convince humans that they can live without any trace of God. The expedition flees the planet, but not before one of the creatures makes a gift to him, which cannot be returned, of its own egg.

However, what if such creatures had no concept of right and wrong simply because they had never eaten that metaphorical fruit from the tree in Eden, if they'd never fallen like humankind has? And we humans, in our greed and corruption and sheer bumbling stupidity, then infected them with the blight of sin? C.S. Lewis at his most jaundiced considers the situation: "Of course after the first debauch of exploitation we shall make some belated attempt to do better. We shall perhaps send missionaries. But can even missionaries be trusted? "Gun and gospel" have been horribly combined in the past. ... But let us thank God that we are still very far from travel to other worlds."

In a dialogue with an extraterrestrial culture, we would also need to be very cautious about biological as well as cultural prejudices. What if they're like rabbits and eat shit for vitamins, or like spiders and murder their husbands to provision for their babies? For being that had evolved such that this was the healthiest, and normal way of life, coprophagy and murder would not be morally bad even though they are for us. (Even in what might seem the foulest and most appalling sacrifices, they might yet have their own "redemptive analogy*" – such as the pequeninos' trees in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead.)

But again, we shouldn't pre-assume that we would have to be torchbearers for other sentients. Would a merciful God necessarily make his other children wait millions of years for sluggish, stupid H. sapiens to claw their way to the stars with the precious message? Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, says: No.

A child?

Born in Andromeda's out-swept mysteries?

Then count its hands, its fingers,

Eyes, and most incredible holy limbs!

The sum of each?

No matter. Cease.
...

He walks upon the molecules of seas

All boiling stews of beast

All maddened broth and brew and rising up of yeast.

There Christ by many names is known.

We call him thus.

They call him otherwise.

His name on any mouth would be a sweet surprise.

He comes with gifts for all,

Here: wine and bread.

There: nameless foods

At breakfasts where the morsels fall from stars

And Last Suppers are doled forth with stuff of dreams.

So sit they there in times before the Man is crucified.

Here He has long been dead.

There He has not yet died.

So Bradbury declares in "Christus Apollo", both an ecstatic poem and an exploration of the physical and spiritual universes. His answer to the frequently-recycled (by people who don't expect to hear a rational answer) question of "Why would an omnipotent, omniscient God concern himself with one lousy little species?" is "Because he concerns himself with all the multitude of species, all life reaching up to him out of the dark and cold of the void." Out of all the science-fictional universes that have been written, Bradbury's is the one that I would wish most to be ours. His poem sings of a world where the celebration of salvation spans galaxies.

Of the gospel, John Stott writes, "We who read it are the children of our cultures. And as we seek to share it with others in their cultures, we mus struggle to do so in categories which neither impose ours nor despise theirs. In this way we shall be imitators of God, seeking to do what he has done." There is no better answer to the question of what Christians should do if we ever come face-to-face with life 'out there'.

We see the light, we know the dark;

And creatures lifted, born, thrust free of so much night

No matter what the world or time or circumstance

Must love the light...

* term borrowed from the afterword to Don Richardson's The Peace Child

*Editor: Agree? Disagree? Or just have something to say about this article? Leave a comment or write to us at phasesonline@gmail.com

The Science of Bouncy Balls

2006-02-19T22:10:00.000+08:00

By Tee Shern Ren

"Hmm, I wonder why this ball bounces."

It was almost dinnertime at Jeff's (name deliberately abbreviated) house. Jeff is a student I'm tutoring who needs remedial help with almost all his science subjects for SPM. But for the moment he's less interested in Physics or Chemistry or Biology than in the little bright yellow rubber ball bouncing across the floor. His little sister, Debra (name deliberately misspelled) ran across the room to retrieve the bouncy ball. Jeff asked again, "I wonder why this ball bounces."

"Because it's a bouncy ball, silly!" Debra replied, her high-pitched 9-year-old voice as authoritative as that of any PhD physicist. "It's a bouncy ball and bouncy balls bounce!"

"But then why is it a bouncy ball?"

"Well ... because it bounces!"

Apparently satisfied with her circular reasoning, she happily threw the ball at the floor and watched the ball bounce across the room again. But her illogical declarations got me thinking. What really makes a bouncy ball bouncy?

Well, it all falls back to the chemical composition and bonding of rubber and other similar elastomers. Rubber molecules are very long and thin polymers consisting of hundreds or thousands of atoms joined in a line. Many of the bonds are single bonds, which are flexible and can rotate. The result is a fine structure of kinks along the length of the molecule. The molecule itself is so long that it tends to bend and coil randomly, like a rope dropped on the ground. A piece of rubber, such as a rubber band, is made of vast numbers of such kinked, twisting, rope-like molecules.

When rubber is pulled, the first thing that happens is that the loops and coils of the "ropes" straighten out. The rubber extends as its molecules are pulled out to their full length. Still more stress causes the kinks to straighten out. Releasing the stress allows the kinks, coils, and loops to form again, and the rubber returns to its original dimensions. Materials made of long, tangled molecules stretch very easily. They are called elastomers because they are very "elastic" polymers.

The long and short of it all is that bouncy balls are bouncy because they're really long molecular ropes. Of course, why elastomers form long molecular ropes instead of brooding vast lattices or clumpy liquid molecules has to do with the complicated theory of molecular orbitals, which comes in turn from quantum mechanics and its assortment of unreal statements like, "Once you show me where an electron is, you won't have a clue how fast it's going." Electron probability clouds, spin states, orbital hybridization and delocalization energies - is all this really necessary to explain why
a bouncy ball bounces?

Oh, it's a lot easier to say "because it's bouncy!". But one loses the wonder of imagining all those crazy isoprene chains doing the twist.

The danger of learning science from public education is that one loses the wonder of science. Often, we learn how or what without learning why. And every time we blindly memorize a concept, we lose the wonder of deriving it. Science is really done by looking around at the world and figuring out why everything is what it is, not by staring into a textbook. "Bouncy" leads to "why bouncy?"; "floating" leads to "why floating?" (Jeff was freaked out once when I stared into a bowl of soup at dinner and ended up asking him about Archimedes' principle.) Of course, freeze-dried science (the kind you get from textbooks) has
its purposes: quick learning, easy application, simple exam questions. But a student fed only on freeze-dried science quickly learns to hate it, and often goes on to hate all science, which is why the doctor or the engineer seem to have more prestige than the scientist, although without the scientist neither doctor nor engineer is any use.

Science has to be learnt first-hand. Ask Nature respectfully, and she answers. But don't expect her to stop at "Because it's bouncy!" God made her a lot more intriguing than that.

*Editor: Agree? Disagree? Or just have something to say about this article? Leave a comment or write to us at phasesonline@gmail.com

Rules of Science Fiction

2006-01-28T16:42:00.000+08:00

By Hwa Shi-Hsia

Rule 4: It doesn’t have to be authentic; it just has to sound authentic

We live in a world governed by rules at various levels – the laws of physics, the principles of chemistry and biology determined by those laws, manners and taboos on the cultural level, and explicit ‘laws’ created by groups of people known as ‘governments’. Our brains are used to functioning in a structured world. Therefore, if you’re going to create a universe that breaks that structure, you have to establish yet another in order for the reader to be able to accept and imagine it.

Some Science Fiction (SF) writers do try to stick as close as possible to known scientific principles, but that’s unnecessary unless you are a really hardcore geek and have lots of textbooks at hand. Even though providing some detail about the imaginary technology helps (it’s like mental special effects), you do not need to be meticulously technical – how many SMS addicts know exactly how a handphone works?

An important corollary is that a story has to be self-consistent. That is, you can’t break your own rules. Writing something like “Ah Beng travelled to Alpha Centauri in 5 minutes by hyperspace bus” on page 1 and then on page 100, “Ah Beng’s journey back to Earth took him 50 years in hibernation because current technology still had not conquered the problem of going faster than light,” even if it’s convenient to the plot, will destroy the reader’s faith in the story. Bluff convincingly.

Rule 3: Virtually all SF texts (shorts, novels, movies, game storylines) are derivative in some way. That’s okay.

This came as a revelation when I was reading Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”. The narrator notes while visiting a huge library, “I had thought each book spoke of the things...that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books...” This may be especially true for science fiction for two reasons: first, it’s awfully hard to build a universe from scratch; and second, people who are drawn to write SF often do so because they enjoyed reading other SF authors’ work.

What was brilliantly original about “The Matrix” wasn’t really any of its concepts – it borrowed ideas from everybody from Buddha to Jesus to Lewis Carroll (you really can’t get more obvious than that white rabbit) to William Gibson (“Neuromancer”) – or Keanu Reeves’ kayu acting, for that matter, but the Wachowski brothers’ storytelling, cinematography, and effects. Borrow ideas, but re-mould the material into your own creation.

Rule 2: “Derivative” does NOT mean you can ciplak someone's plot/universe/characters/concepts bulat-bulat

Self-explanatory. This is something that many new and young writers tend to do when we are caught up in awe at our favourite authors and just in the process of learning to create stories. Then when you are older and wiser (like in university) your mum will pull out some ancient bundle of foolscap or dot-matrix printout and go “Remember that story you wrote in Form One?” and you will read it and bang your head against the wall in embarrassment. (My first fantasy short ever borrowed heavily from both “The Lord of the Rings” and Anne McCaffrey’s "Dragonriders" series. No wonder it didn’t win the contest.)

Writing fanfiction is a legitimate way of trying your hand at dialogue, plot-building, description, and so on, as long as you’re honest with yourself that it’s fanfiction. I liken fanfic-writing to the way art students practise painting techniques by copying old masters.

In the meantime, if you’re still miserable that you can’t come up with anything original, take comfort in reading Ray Bradbury’s “Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine”.

Rule 1: Create a world, not a backdrop

If you are going to write a story about a forbidden affair between a beautiful girl from planet A falling in love with a handsome boy from planet B, forget about the interplanetary bit - that’s simply a remake of “Romeo and Juliet”. The nature of a science fiction story depends on its exploration of concepts. If you focus on some other element of the story to the point of neglecting to develop the ‘universe’ it’s set in properly, sorry-lah.

The story may function all right as whatever other type it is supposed to be, but the SF fans will demand their money back. Remember how annoying it was to waste two hours watching “Species” thinking it was going to be as cool as “Alien” and discovering that the extraterrestrial material was just a lame disguise for a soft-porn flick? (Unless you like soft-porn – in which case I have no comment.)

C.S. Lewis, himself a science fiction enthusiast and author (in his earlier days it was called scientifiction, he was that old), has disparaging words about this sort of story:

“This seems to me tasteless. Whatever in a work of art is not used is doing harm. ...I am, then, condemning not all books which suppose a future widely different from the present, but those which do so without a good reason, which leap a thousand years to find plots and passions which they could have found at home.”
(From “On Science Fiction” which is a valuable essay for anyone interested in SF.)

Notice this is different from saying that romance, politics, war, and others are bad. In fact, the human element in an SF story, as in any other story, is crucial because it is what enables us, the readers, to associate with the characters and to feel that the world is ‘real’ (I was sooo happy when Miles Vorkosigan finally got married...). More on this later.

Rule 0: Science fiction has to be about people, not science

I’ve just read a very obscure novel, which was written in France in 1849 about “The World As It Shall Be” in the year 3000 (by Emile Souvestre) and am still stunned at how much it looks like 2005. The author must have been a sharp observer of the social and political trends of his day, and wondered what would happen if they were taken to their [il]logical conclusion. A lot of SF writers wonder as much, with varying degrees of success. Others imagine a civilisation so far in the future or so distant from Earth that it has almost no connection to ours. It doesn’t matter – near or far, the heart of an SF story is the people in it, not the machines, not the aliens, not the wars, not the worlds.

The ultimate purpose of an SF story is to be what my old genetics professor would call a "Gedankeneksperiment" – a thought experiment. The range of topics, styles, and worldviews covered by SF is extremely broad, but all SF asks the question “What if...?” It tests the consequences of things which we may yet see in our lifetime (like cloning) or, which may never exist (like superluminal travel or alien intelligence) to the human mind and to human society. If an experiment is to give results that are relevant to us, then it has to be set up in a way that makes sense.

Characters and cultures, no matter how far removed from the present reality, still have to be ‘realistic’ in that the reader has to be able to believe that, in their own universe, they could exist. This is why you can’t write effectively about life a thousand years ahead, or life on other planets, without first knowing and appreciating something about life, here and now.

*Editor: Agree? Disagree? Or just have something to say about this article? Leave a comment or write to us at phasesonline@gmail.com