Via Brian at Liftport, a link to this site hosting the entire series of James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed. As Brian said in an email:
Jim,
You’re written before that you admire James Burke’s work on television.
While I don’t condone piracy, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out
that a blog is hosting a download of the ‘Day the Universe Changed’.
One episode per day, file will be up for a week and then it’s gone.I put the first episode on my laptop, let it play and .. my kids liked
it. Which is what I expected but .. you never know.I might be kidding myself by I think it was firing off neurons in my
13-year old son’s brain. I have no idea what my eight year old really
thought (he said he liked it) but he’s not the type to just watch
anything on TV; if it’s boring he’ll wander away and play with legos
or his dinosaur collection or go fool around in the backyard.
Yes, I have written about the series, and Burke previously. It really is excellent – and you should either add the thing to your NetFlix queue, buy it outright, or at the very least avail yourself of the chance to see it online.
Thanks, Brian!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, DARPA, Expert systems, General Musings, James Burke, Music, Predictions, Science, Society, Survival, Writing stuff, YouTube, tech
I’ve mentioned previously the work of science historian James Burke. This past weekend I finished watching the last couple of episodes of his ground-breaking series Connections. Overall, you would probably enjoy watching the series, and will find a lot of chuckles over what was “high tech” in 1978 versus the reality of what we have today. But the closing bit was just stunning – it was a prediction of the need for and use of the Internet before DARPA had even begun to let the cat out of the bag. Here’s the last ten minutes:
In particular the bit that starts out at about 5:00 is the culmination of his entire thesis about change – that understanding how things change is the key to understanding everything. At about 6:45 is this remarkable passage (transcribed myself, since I couldn’t readily find it online – how’s that for irony?):
Scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion and ideology. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches is because thanks to science and technology, they have begun to know that they don’t know so much, and if they are to have more say in what happens in their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge they know exists and that they don’t possess.
And by ‘helped towards that knowledge’, I don’t mean give everybody a computer and say “help yourself.” Where would you even start? No, I mean, trying to find ways to translate the knowledge, to teach us to ask the right questions. See, we’re on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before. Or, if that’s not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don’t have access to it as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb, and blind.
Digital divide, anyone? Anyway, I find it just fascinating that Burke was so dead-on in his prediction of the Internet, even if he didn’t have the term for it, and yet even he failed to understand how phenomenally all-encompassing it would be. Whereas he thought that it would be impossible to just give people access to the information and say “go to it”, that is exactly what we’ve got – and self-organization of information and resources like Wikis make that information understandable, not just accessible.
When, as often happens, I feel somewhat pessimistic, that our greed or violent tendencies will outstrip our maturing as a culture/species, it is helpful to come across something like this. And I think that is why I read SF, and have written Communion of Dreams: because there, with all the ugliness and human folly, there is nonetheless room for hope. Look at what we’ve done in just the last thirty years – what more can we accomplish in the next forty, if we don’t destroy ourselves?
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Al Gore, Carl Sagan, Climate Change, Global Warming, Government, James Burke, NASA, NPR, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin was interviewed yesterday morning by Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition. During that interview the following exchange took place, on the topic of global warming:
(Inskeep): Do you have any doubt that this is a problem that mankind has to wrestle with?
(Griffin): I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change. First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.
This morning’s program had a follow-up segment about how this conflicts with the general consensus in the scientific community, and other reports in the media point out that it is at odds with NASA’s own scientists. Even President Bush just came out with a plan to address climate change concerns in advance of a big global warming symposium being held in Germany next week.
The callousness of Griffin’s remarks is what has most people upset, I think. Because under most scenarios studied, significant global warming is going to lead to the death of millions of people. James Burke did a good series on how this will likely play out called After the Warming, and then of course there’s Al Gore’s book and movie An Inconvenient Truth. To have the NASA chief say that it would be arrogant of us to presume that this is “the best climate for all other human beings” seems assinine, at best.
I believe in global warming. I believe that it is likely a huge problem facing us. For the world of Communion of Dreams, set about 50 years hence, I had to deal with what I expect will be the reality of global warming. Since I wanted to deal with other issues, I decided that I needed a way to explain why the effects of global warming hadn’t yet created additional huge problems for humankind. My initial choice was to have an asteroid impact kick up a lot of dust into the stratosphere, and thereby slightly alter the albedo of Earth. When that additional disaster seemed to be too much for my initial readers, I changed it to having a man-made source: limited nuclear exchanges in Asia, creating a mild “nuclear winter” effect. Given that this term was partly a product of Carl Sagan’s scientific research, it seemed a fitting solution. (As I’ve mentioned previously, Sagan was part of my inspiration for Communion.)
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see whether Griffin survives this little climate change in his job situation, created by his own hot air.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, James Burke, Predictions, Saturn, Science Fiction, Space, Titan, Writing stuff, tech
In my previous post, I commented that the universe had just changed with the discovery of 581 c. A friend who saw this responded that no, the uninverse didn’t change – our perception of it did.
Well, yes, and that was exactly what I meant. I was referring to the wonderful series The Day the Universe Changed by science historian James Burke. If you are unfamiliar with it, by all means track down the series and enjoy. It is primarily about Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift, leavened with a nice helping of applied philosophy. If you’ve seen any of the Connections series that Burke has done, you’ve probably got an idea how he would approach this issue.
The idea that our perception of the universe fundamentally determines our actions is one that I use explicitly in Communion of Dreams. [Spoiler alert.] In the book, the entirety of the scientific community believes that ours is the only civilization still active in at least our little corner of the universe. That belief is challenged by the discovery of an alien artifact on Titan, the moon of Saturn. From then on the story line spins out exploring the very nature of perception and knowledge in the very midst of a paradigm shift – all tightly controlled (at least at first) within the small community of people involved. At each stage of revelation, the characters have to confront and integrate new knowledge, and how they cope with that radical shift is at the very heart of the story that I tell.
This is why after posting my brief “welcome” last night, I kicked back and had a wee dram of my favorite scotch. Because whether or not most people realize it, this event was a turning point in our history. Yes, we all expected that sooner or later such a planet would be found – but now it has happened, and the universe around us is now viewed differently. Sure, the universe itself hasn’t changed – but how we understand it has undergone a shift. Just a small one, but an important one nonetheless.
And just think what will happen when we discover life elsewhere. Particularly intelligent, technological life. And after you start to understand the impact that will have, sit back and once again consider what it is my characters in Communion are going through.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Heinlein, James Burke, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Got an email from someone last evening about the book (he had just finished chapter one), and he made the following observation:
One page 1, you speak of “he – he – he,” but don’t initially give us Jon Thompson’s name or description. I can live with learning his name on page 2, but I wonder if you might consider sliding in some sort of physical description of him in this chapter?
My reply was this:
Um, that was a very conscious decision. Nowhere in the book will you find any real description of him. Tied with a fairly “close” perspective with him, it makes it easier for the reader to subconsciously identify with the character, thereby becoming engaged with what happens that much quicker. And congrats – of all the people who have read it and commented to me so far, you are the first to notice this application of my literary theory. If an editor convinces me otherwise somewhere down the road, I might change it.
And I thought I would elaborate somewhat on this.
There has been a lot of scholarship into how a reader interacts with a text. 20 years ago I studied that as part of my graduate work at the University of Iowa. And while I can no longer cite authors off the top of my head, I do know that I drew several practical conclusions from those studies. This was one of them – that allowing the reader the ability to imagine themselves as a character (in this case, the main character) will help transition the “suspension of disbelief” necessary for a work of fiction, particularly Science Fiction.
Different authors do this in different ways. But for me, the most powerful books were always the ones which allowed me to step into the role of the main character – to imagine myself as Muad’dib or Valentine Michael Smith, learning about a strange world and my place in it. With Jon Thompson in Communion of Dreams, I wanted the reader to do the same thing: speculate upon their own understanding of themselves in a world that is changing around them, not through technology, but through revelation. It is James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed applied to fiction, and hints somewhat at some of the deeper layers of what the novel is really all about.
Jim Downey
