I have a pet theory about good science fiction stories (and maybe fantasy ones). A good story needs to have both a wonder and a conflict element. A lot of classic SF only have the wonder one. Many of Arthur C. Clarke's stories fit in this category. Consider 2001: A Space odyssey. Remove the wonder elements and there's little left.

Seems like I've been writing a lot about quantum mechanics lately. Apparently so have a lot of other people. One thing that keeps coming up is the reality or non-reality of the quantum wave function. Raoni Arroyo and Jonas R. Becker Arenhart argue for non-reality: Quantum mechanics works, but it doesn't describe reality: Predictive power is not a guide to reality…

The dollar-store version of Sean Carroll

A new paper is been getting some attention. It makes the case for biological computation. (This is a link to a summary, but there’s a link to the actual paper at the bottom of that article.) …

The SEP article on scientific reductionism notes that the etymology of the word "reduction" is "to bring back" something to something else. So in a methodological sense, reduction is bringing one theory or ontology back to a simpler or more fundamental theory or ontology. The Wikipedia entry on reductionism identifies different kinds: ontological, methodological, and theory reductionism. I think the ontological one is the most interesting here, the proposition that all of reality consists of a small number of building blocks.

Happy Winter Solstice Season! The celebrations around the time that the sun's path in the sky starts getting higher again, and the days longer, seems to stretch back into prehistory. It's no accident that we observe many of our most cherished religious holidays and celebrate a new year around this time. It's kind of a corrective. Have a season of good will and fellowship in the darkest time of winter.

In the last post, I discussed Amanda Gefter critique of Vlatko Vedral's view that observers have no special role in reality. Conveniently, Vedral published an article at IAI discussing his view: Everything in the universe is a quantum wave. (Warning: possible paywall.) Vedral puts his view forward as a radical new interpretation of quantum mechanics. As a quick reminder, the central mystery of quantum mechanics is that quantum particles seem to act like waves, including portions of the wave interfering with itself, but when measured, behave like tiny localized balls.

Amanda Gefter has an article at Nautilus a couple of you have asked me about: Reality Exists Without Observers? Boooo! The title is an accurate summary of her thesis. Gefter is responding to a book…

YouTube video by Lance Independent

Since I've been reviewing a lot of horror lately, I could see you being skeptical about my constant disclaimers that I'm not much of a horror fan. But the truth is some horror is so good in its non-horror elements that it's compelling even for people not into horror. That's the case with Sinners, which I'm late to the party on.

I recently discovered the new TV show Pluribus, about a scenario where the whole world gets turned into a hive mind, an annoyingly nice one, at least in the initial episodes, but where a few humans turn out to be immune to the virus that converts everyone else, including the cantankerous protagonist, Carol Sturka. The hive mind in the show appears to work via telepathy, enabled by alien sequences of DNA.

After watching the new Frankenstein movie this weekend, I decided to correct something. I'd never read the original novel by Mary Shelley. I was familiar with the overall story, but I think it came from reading a comic book adaptation at some point decades ago, one I knew was heavily abridged. A key question upfront was which version to read: the…

Last night I watched Guillermo del Toro's new version of Frankenstein. As I frequently point out on this blog, I'm not a big horror fan, but I've frequently been impressed with del Toro's work, and Frankenstein is a classic. And it strikes me as more of an existential exploration than one invoking horror just for horror's sake. We all know the story.

Nature has an article noting that language models have killed "the Turing test" and asking if we even need a replacement. I think the article makes some good points. But a lot of the people quoted seem to take the opportunity to dismiss Turing's whole idea. I think this is a mistake. First, we need to remember how Turing came up with his test.

I've done a couple of posts on Robert Reed's Greatship series, about a giant spherical Uranus-sized megastructure moving through space at a third the speed of light. It's discovered in intergalactic space and claimed by humans, who then invite anyone who can pay in some manner (resources, technology, science, or even just interesting stories) to join on a cruise around the Milky Way.

Ned Block has a new paper out, for which he shared a time limited link on Bluesky. He argues in the paper that the “meat neutral” computational functionalism inherent in many theories o…

I've noted on this blog many times that I'm not much of a horror fan. But the Alien franchise has always been kind of an exception. Space horror might be a little better than the garden variety, just because it's space. But mostly I just enjoy the sci-fi worldbuilding, usually in the early stages of each movie. I'm less enthusiastic about the parts where we watch people die one by one, although the…

A few weeks ago, I talked about Robert Reed's story collection, The Greatship. It's about a spherical Uranus-sized megastructure moving through space at a third the speed of light. Humans manage to reach it first and claim it, and then decide to take it on a tour of the galaxy, offering passage to anyone who can rendezvous and offer payment of some kind.

For people looking to dip their toe in the sci-fi literary genre, John Scalzi is often a good place to start. A lot of sci-fi literature assumes certain knowledge from the reader (such as what "burning at two gees" means). Scalzi's fiction tends to only assume what you might pick up watching sci-fi TV shows or movies. And his introduction of concepts is usually fairly approachable.

I recently finished reading Peter F. Hamilton's book: Exodus: The Archimedes Engine. It takes place in a far future where humanity has fled the solar system in relativistic ark ships, looking for new homes. One group of arks discover a bounty of habitable worlds in the Centauri Cluster about 16,000 light years from Earth. Someone named Asteria sends out a "Green Worlds" signal to all the other arks out there.

I've described Neal Asher's Polity universe many times. It's a future interstellar civilization ruled by AIs, who took over in a basically bloodless "Quiet War", but who seem to rule humanity more or less benignly, providing a society where everyone is immortal, if they choose to be. Although as anyone who's read the books knows, the "more or less" here is doing a lot of work.

There's been some attention lately to a contest on designing an interstellar generation ship, a large scale ship that humans live in for generations while it crosses interstellar space to another solar system. As Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams notes, generation ships are a long time staple in science fiction, albeit with the common trope of the crew forgetting that they're on a ship, or other things going horribly wrong.