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Home , Gregory Benford, Tachyons in fiction

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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief, I’m Eric Molinsky.

I have a soft spot for good technobabble -- not just the technobabble itself, but scenes where the actors really sell the technobabble, and you believe what they’re talking about. And I imagine for actors that must be really hard to pull that off because most of the time that actor has no idea what they’re talking about. I mean not only are they not scientists, but it’s not even real science what they’re saying.

In fact that phenomenon was made fun of in the movie Quest, where Sigourney Weaver’s character keeps repeating all the technobabble that the computer says back to the crew even when they’re in the middle of a crisis.

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The gold standard for good technobabble, I think, is probably this scene from Back to the .

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Now a Giga-watt is a real thing, but apparently nobody in the cast and crew knew it was pronounced GIG-a-watt.

Which made me wonder why does one poorly understood pseudo-scientific term feel right to me and help bolster my suspension of disbelief while I’m watching a movie or TV show, while another technobabble scene does exactly the opposite?

To help me figure this out, I decided to turn an expert. Helen Zaltzman. Her podcast The Allusionist is like mine in that it’s relatively short and comes out every other week. But her focus is on language. Or as she puts it:

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Now Helen is not a sci-fi fan. But she did have a run-in once with a Darlek, the clunky villains from .

HZ: I once was at the BBC and I got to witness someone try to get a Dalek through a revolving door. It was a prop I assume? 2

HZ: Yeah, they keep one in the foyer for people to have pictures taken with but they’re just as ungainly. As you would imagine. HZ: As onscreen, yeah.

But when I asked her if she wanted to do an episode together about Technobabble, she was intrigued.

HZ: What I was particularly piqued by is that a lot of words in real science did originate in , so words like and ST came up with warp speed. Astronauts came from a story from the ‘30s, which was before astronauts were a possibility in real life. I guess someone has to come up with terms anyway to fulfill the need to describe something, particularly something new. It was probably easier to pick something that was already familiar from fiction I understand that you talked to a physicist? HZ: I talk to a physicist very regularly because I’m married to one. But one you’re not married to. HZ: Yeah, he allowed me out to talk to other physicists. I spoke to the astrophysicist Katie Mack.

KM: I study cosmology, you know the early universe dark matter black holes the end of the universe or all of that.

HZ: So we have a spoiler alert from Katie Mack! She’s been studying the end of the world!

KM: I just I really love this topic and I think there's something wrong with me but it's so much fun to think about how the universe might end. HZ: It’s nice to prepared as well KM: Yes! Definitely!

HZ: She feels quite a lot of annoyance about technobabble because she says in reality a lot of the terms we have for space stuff are extremely basic like Big Bang and black hole. They’re elegant or exotic or polysyllabic terms.

KM: Like if you watch something like there's always there's always words like you know the inertial compensators and you get - these really like multi-syllabic construction's. And that's how you know that you're not supposed to understand it. And you're supposed to just file it away as you know that's a complicated thing. You know, there's oh there's this thing about if you have a particle you put the syllable on the end 3 of it. HZ: Like what? KM: I mean so when we started this in right so we had the proton is a word that actually makes sense but then all the others like electron and neutron and and on all of those are kind of compound words of some things to do with the of the particle plus on. So that's something that we started it. But I've definitely seen if they need a new particle you know it might be like the invisiblebon. I don't know something like that. But I've seen when you need a new element you put and in the end like unobtainium.

I remember that from Avatar

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Well one thing that I hate is when there is a logjam of technobabble and then one of the other characters says can you say that in English, please. That’s such a cliché that drives me crazy. HZ: Yeah, and she felt that’s a failure of the imagination.

KM: Yeah. Because it would be like you know walking up to somebody who doesn't speak Italian and speaking Italian to them it would be really rude and it's not because you're smarter it's just because this is a language that you work in all the time and it's not something that other people do. And so you change how you speak when you're talking to different audiences so as not to be a jerk. HZ: Yeah. I'm married to a physicist. And that never happens. You never just spools out jargon. HK: Yeah. I mean I'm a physicist but so I'm not a good audience sort of thing like I'm clearly not objective, But I also feel like sometimes that that kind of thing can kind of scare people away from real science because sometimes we do have to use complicated terms and sometimes we do have to use jargon just so that we know we're all on the same page you know. But when scientific jargon it stands in for you know that's too complicated I can't possibly understand it. I think that kind of makes people think like oh science is too complicated I can't possibly understand it.

When Katie said it looks like scientists are apart from society – aren’t they? How are they not and why is that a negative stereotype? HZ: She doesn’t want people to think they can’t be scientists, if you have a kid thinking I’m not this super intellectual socially inept person which means I’d fail if I wanted to do science, it seems so exclusive and exclusionary. And also there are ways in which science relates to our real lives and yet it gives the opposite impression. 4

Because I remember when the Mars landed a long time ago, the first time it landed the late ‘90s, early 2000s, there was some rock they named Scooby Doo, some rock formation, and I remember thinking that’s funny, that’s not something you would imagine scientists in a movie would ever do. HZ: I think in a movie, the writers wouldn’t want you to think the writers were that playful and they weren’t taking it super seriously because the audience wouldn’t believe that’s how things really were. Well it’s funny because I talked to – I talked to some people as well. HZ: Oh yeah? I talked to Jennifer Ouellette who is a science writer but she’s also director of the science and entertainment exchange in Los Angeles.

JO: Its’ basically the scientific world and the Hollywood world coming together to create what is essentially a cultural exchange program.

They set up scientists to work with Hollywood directors, TV and movies, because obviously they need their technobabble.

JO: Yeah I think audiences are a much better intuitive scientist than we give them credit for seriously. They can tell when something's wrong. They can tell when something doesn't quite work.

HZ: I’m fascinated by those kinds of job where there’s someone with real expertise who is drafted to add this stuff to an elaborate fiction. Her husband is a physicist named Sean Carroll. HZ: Oh! You know him? HZ: No, just physicist husbands. And her husband worked on the movie Thor.

JO: They were trying to figure out how Thor get to Earth, he said a but they said a wormhole

And it’s the kind of thing you were talking about earlier where these are the kinds of words scientists actually use. HZ: And also I’ve seen the Matt Leblanc Lost in Space where were a big plot point there. Oh yeah, and Jodie Foster in Contact. But that was the problem. They said it was too 1990s.

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JO: And so Sean said you could call it Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which is what it was originally call, and so they ended up using that and at one point someone says, so it’s a wormhole but it sounded cooler.

HZ: And yet most people would struggle to identify the Einstein Rosen bridge when that’s a wormhole Yeah, if you told me the Einstein Rosen bridge connects Minneapolis to St. Paul I’d believe you. HZ: The problem with terms like Einstein – Rosen Bridge HZ: You forget the names! Which is ironic because if you ask anyone what the flux capacitor, even non- geeks know it’s that thing in Back to the Future with the three prongs. HZ: Yeah, sonic screwdriver in Doctor Who Because I was asking her what is the point of all this? What does it matter if you have the Einstein Rosen bridge versus wormhole, like why does this thing need to be set up? And she said, it’s all about world building.

JO: Any time you build a fictional world that has to have rules there has to be constraints because that's what drives the drama in the fiction that's what drives the conflict, because any movie is going to have what they call a by, there’s a certain by ends right and you're just not going to try and explain it. Ideally you want to make sure that the rules in your internal world are consistent and that you only have one or two of these by ins and the viewer will go along with it if it's if it's convincing and believable enough.

And I think the point is whether it’s the Einstein-Rosen Bridge or a wormhole, there’s only one big technobabble concept -- the plot hinges on it -- and that’s what makes it work. The other thing I was curious about is what do the scientists get out of it? And she was saying a lot of them were huge geeks themselves, and they got into science by watching science fiction as kids and if anything, she needs to dampen their expectations because many of them think they’re going to be on the set with director, rewriting script and always being listened to.

JO: Understand they need to get from plot point A to plot point B for example, and they’ve come up with what they think is a reasonable thing, they’ve Googled science but it doesn’t quite work. And you can go in there say no ,that doesn't work. That's not helpful to them. They're probably going to do it anyway unless you give them something better. So you say but this would work and it's actually real and it's really cool and it'll be different and unique and it will really make your scene stand out because you're not just 6 relying on this like bad science trope from like the 1960s.

But the thing that fascinated me the most and one of the things I wanted to look into and why I wanted to make this episode was that there’s certain technobabble that takes on a life of its own where it gets picked up by other sci-fi writers and shows and it becomes its own living meme. HZ: That suggests that they are all working in a common universe as well in the fiction, so I think that kind of works. Especially when these words have come out of the real world and back into fiction, it makes it all seem plausible and not that far away from you, the fiction consumer. In the sense that when you hear the technobabble, you’re like of course, I’ve heard that term before you don’t realize you heard it in a completely different sci- fi. HZ: Yes! Exactly. But that’s going to be after my break. (RETAKE)

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So as i was saying before the break one of the reasons why became really interested in this idea of technobabble is because some technobabble takes on a life of its own within science fiction. For example, do you know the term the ? HZ: I have heard the term the Positronic Brain, but if you said what does one of those do I might stumble a bit. No, no, made it up for his robots in his fiction in the future these robots all have positronic brains, and this got picked up by so many different sci- fi writers. So in star trek data has a Positronic brain. The Positronic brain gets mentioned in doctor who, in the new Westworld show on HBO, as if this is the state of the art thing that powers self-aware robots – and it’s all an homage to Isaac Asimov. And so I talked with the novelist and scientist who knew Asimov. Unfortunately it’s not great sound quality because he was in a cabin in the mountains of Northern California. HZ: Aw, what a great life though (Laughs) He was enjoying it quite a bit clearly! HZ: We’ll sacrifice the sound quality for Gregory’s nice time in the mountains. Oh, I’m sure it had a wonderful breeze as opposed to here in August in New York City, but anyway he of course knew Isaac Asimov and he went up to him once and gave him some flack about that term. HZ: (Laughs) Because it means absolutely nothing. 7

GB: I said you know that positrons are completely destructive in ordinary matter right? If they hit an electron they produce gamma rays. He said, yean I know that. But I wanted a word that made the reader think gee whiz and then move on to the next thing I want them to think about. EM: So when you talked to Asimov about Positronic Brain were you sort of teasing me about it. Was this something that actually kind of bugged you a little bit? GB: Uh, no. OK it was teasing right. I mean he was the great man and I you do know this, right? And of course we had a pleasant laugh about it. Because we were both scientists and we knew the constraints. You know way off them in most forms of the arts the interesting thing is the constraint - all and it’s the constraint of writing in a frame that forces a kind of quality of work. And that's true perhaps more in science fiction than anything else.

So the reason I wanted to talk to Gregory Benford is there’s a particular word that he made particularly famous in science fiction, and it’s a word called a tachyon which is based on an actual theoretical scientific particle if that makes any sense. – one that your husband would probably know about. HZ: Yeah, an actual not a made up theoretical particle. Exactly! There’s a very fine line between the two. HZ: There’s a limit to the amount of those he can introduce to me without getting furious, we’ve had so many arguments about what imaginary numbers are. And so the word Tachyon it was coined by a physicist named Gerald Feinberg in the late 1960s. Feinberg had read a short story in 1954 called Beep by . In the story these people start getting messages from the future. And they discover that this was actually a malfunctioning trans galactic communicator that people are using to communicate with each other in the future and accidentally these inter-galactic emails are being sent backwards in time. And so these people in the present have to decide what to do with this weird information. And do they go in the direction they know the future going to go, or do they make decisions to go in the opposite direction? It’s a big moral quandary but Gerry Feinberg was fascinated and it inspired him to theorize that there might be particles in quantum physics that travel backwards in time like these messages from this short story. But there’s a problem in that if a particle has traveled backwards in time, how do you know it came from the future, if it just looks like a particle sitting in front of you? But he played with the math of quantum physics and proposed that this particle might exist – and he decided to call it a tachyon.

GB: Well you know tardy means slow in Greek and tachy means fast. But we've in 8

English put – to turn it into a noun – an on at the end. So we all humans are made of tardeons but never ever uses that word. Tachyon is more exotic because it doesn’t exists. Gerry Feinberg told me that he went looking for a word that that was sophisticated and a little strange and he found Tachy. EM: It’s funny to think that even scientists have that they know they're designing a word and they think about how does it how do I want to communicate this idea through this brand new word I’m coining. GB: Right. And the best way to make up a new word -- a term -- is to take two things and glue them together so neutron star. So when you take neutron, which you got from particle and you attach it to the star and its star made of neutrons, which is literally true. Nonetheless the image is very different because you've taken the terms from two different pieces of science. EM: It's interesting. I mean that's what science fiction does anyway. They often will take that they'll take they'll take an element and an add on to it. GB: Right. That's part of the poetry of science fiction the invention of new terms to excite the imagination through making connections that weren't there before.

HZ: Yeah but it works, it’s quite a short term which I appreciate and it’s relatively easy to pronounce and it sounds like something that’s been around for a couple hundred years or more. So then the weird thing is James Blish, the guy that writes this story in 1954 that inspired the scientist Gerry Feinberg, Blish eventually gets a job writing Star Trek novels after the show was cancelled and in one of the novels called Spock Must Die. HZ: That’s harsh! It’s very harsh, where he started introducing the tachyon as a fictional particle. And then Gregory Benford – the guy I was calling in Northern California – he made the tachyon the centerpiece of his 1980 novel which is about scientists in the future sending messages back in time to prevent an apocalypse. And the funny thing is Gregory Benford is also a scientist and he was part of a study that disproved could exist in the real world, but they captured his imagination to the point where he eventually wrote this novel Timescape where he imagined how they could exist. And he took the science of his novel very seriously so he bent the rules of reality just enough to make tachyons seem real.

GB: It's so useful that once it became known mostly after I published Timescape, people started to use it in stories just as a device. So that all they had to say was well, we got this information on a Tachyon Beam and problem solved. One word and you don't have to explain it anymore. One word will do it for you.

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As you can tell, Gregory Benford is a little annoyed about this because he put a lot of work into imagining how it could work in his novel, and it just gets thrown out there now without any deep connection to the story, and that’s why it’s become technobabble. It’s in .

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It’s on The Flash

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And of course it’s on Doctor Who and Star Trek. In fact, I found a 12-minute montage on YouTube of just characters from Star Trek the Next Generation using tachyons. HZ: (Laughs) Did you watch all 12 minutes? I got bored after six. HZ: Six though. You really hung in there. What were you waiting for?

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And the craziest thing is that in 2001, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN thought they found the tachyon – they found a particle moving backwards in time. But it turned out to be a technical glitch.

GB: It was a bit exciting for a while and I understand the excitement because you see if they do turn up then it means this quantum field theory of calculus is correct. And we're going to have to contend with the fact that the use of tachyons will produce splitting of the universe – how about that? EM: Yeah. Try to do an environmental impact statement on that statement. EM: Well when you heard the news were you surprised excited or skeptical? GB: All three. Because it might be true! But it probably wasn’t!

HZ: I find that incredibly reassuring some how. Really why? HZ: I don’t know, you’ve got these greatest brains in the world, this incredibly complicated thing – this thing that even though it’s been around for a while it’s something we’re still not ready for in the modern world. And yet you still have things like that happening someone dropped a piece of their sandwich in the Large Hadron Collider! 10

(Laughs) HZ: I think I like the mundanity of it creeping in to something that seems so far fetched and incredible. I like that in the tachyons and in fiction that’s what makes it seem real when you have this stuff that’s really quite boring and pathetic. Yeah. The thing that I always find interesting is the idea that it’s kind of a conversation. First you have Gerry Feinberg who is a scientist that reads science fiction and hangs out with writers like Gregory Benford who are scientists themselves. So it’s like I see your tachyon and I raise you a tachyon beam particle. And then you’ve got these scientists who are inspired by sci-fi who are introduced to movie direction through Jennifer Ouellette so they can influence what we see on screen. It’s one long conversation from scientist to scientist, from writer to writer, from generation to generation. To me that’s how you build culture. HZ: And I think fiction is a far more effective way to communicate science to people than the pure science, I don’t think many people would opt into a television program about how space science works and the like but they would watch the fiction and some of that can rub off so if you can get things in there, it can seem quite educational without seeming too worthy.

Well, that’s it for this week, thank you for listening. Special thanks to Katie Mack, Jennifer Oullette, Colin Milburn, Greg Benford and of course, Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist.

HZ: So if there was a Molinsky particle.. If there were a Molinsky particle what would I want it to be? I hope it would be one of those quantum particles that appears and disappears in different places. It slips between universes. That would be my dream the Molinsky particle… HZ: Knows how to make an exit (Laughs) Knows how to make an exit! HZ: Never outstays its welcome!

Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinsky. My website is imaginary worlds podcast dot org.