One of my favorite science fiction authors is Iain Banks. Most of his science fiction (he writes literary, Earthbound fiction, too) involves the Culture, a civilization of spacefairing humanoids and artificial intelligences who cohabit a technically advanced utopia. Conflict typically arises when the Culture meddles, albeit with good intentions, in lower civilizations.
Bank's most recent novel, Surface Detail (2010), concerns the political, diplomatic, and moral ramifications of virtual hells, to which the disembodied personalities of criminals and other miscreants are sentenced to endure perpetual, gruesome torment.
Unlike some of his fellow science fiction writers, Banks does not have much of a background in science. He studied English, philosophy, and psychology at the University of Stirling in his native Scotland. To keep up with developments in science and, one presumes, to gain inspiration for the technology in his novels, he reads New Scientist.
As someone already immersed in the world of science and news about science, I don't normally read New Scientist, but my wife has a subscription. Taking a look at a recent issue yesterday evening, I noticed a news story by Amanda Gefter entitled "Time need not end in the multiverse."
Gefter's story describes a problem in the theory of multiple universes or multiverses:
In any infinite multiverse, everything that can happen, will happen—an infinite number of times. That has created a major headache for cosmologists, who want to use probabilities to make predictions, such as the strength of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our own universe. How can we say that anything is more or less probable than anything else?
One solution, proposed last year by Raphael Bousso, Ben Freivogel, Stefan Leichenauer, and Vladimir Rosenhaus, evokes the end of time—literally. The abstract of their paper reads:
Present treatments of eternal inflation regulate infinities by imposing a geometric cutoff. We point out that some matter systems reach the cutoff in finite time. This implies a nonzero probability for a novel type of catastrophe. According to the most successful measure proposals, our galaxy is likely to encounter the cutoff within the next 5 billion years.
Although 5 billion years is a long way off, the catastrophic demise of our home galaxy is alarming. Fortunately, as Gefter reports, a paper posted earlier this month by Alan Guth and Vitaly Vanchurin preserves predictions in the mutliverse without killing off time.
Guth and Vanchurin's paper resolves a speculative paradox in a speculative (and controversial) theory. The same issue includes a feature article, "Catching the Sun," which describes startup companies that "aim to harness the power of nuclear fusion more quickly and cheaply than anyone imagined."
Covering speculative—even sensational—ideas is typical of New Scientist. Recent cover stories have included "How animals shaped our minds," "Life on Titan," and "Your seventh sense." Such an emphasis risks misrepresenting the scientific enterprise, given that most scientific results are humdrum, incremental advances.
But New Scientist is magazine, not a journal. Its goal is to entertain as well as to inform. And if you feel tempted to disdain the magazine's breathless coverage of the next far-fetched line of research, keep in mind the speculative ideas—such as antimatter, optical lasers, prions, and cloaking devices—that turned out to be correct.
What's more, I suspect New Scientist inspires not only one established science fiction writer, but also many young students who dream about revolutionizing science.
