Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about the creative science in the short stories of Vandana Singh's collection "Ambiguity Machines"
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Podcasts, presented by State Farm like a good neighbor. State Farm is there? Hey, Orky, if we're living in a simulation?
Whoa whoa whoa wait if what do you mean? Is it a foregone conclusion that we are in a simulation?
Just hear me out. If we're living in a simulation, do you ever wonder.
Why why you're so paranoid?
No? Why are the masters of the simulation doing this to us? Are we part of some crazy experiment?
Oh man, I hope we're not like an experiment in a middle school science project, because I know how those go.
Given how this year is gone, I'm thinking it's probably some bitter grad students somewhere.
Oh man, I knew it it's all to follow some professor out there right ignoring their grad students blame the professor.
It's so easy.
I am more handmad cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm always kind to anything in my simulated.
Universes, in case, in case there's a point system, you mean, like a score.
In case they're experiencing it. Right, when you build artificial intelligence in your simulated universe, you don't know. Maybe they really are are alive, and when you pull the plug, maybe they really do die.
H I thought maybe you were worried that somebody's watching the simulation and judging you.
Well, if I'm in a simulation, the yeah, maybe somebody will punish me for treating my simulations badly.
Right karma. Maybe the universe does work on karma, on some kind of point system.
I should teach the folks in my simulation to treat their simulations well.
Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of Iheartradia.
In which we talk about all the amazing things in our universe, the way it works, the way it doesn't work. The things that we understand about it and the things that we don't understand about it, and all the hidden mysteries, all the things that we're hoping to understand, the future revolutions in knowledge that will change the very nature of the universe as we know it.
Yeah, we like to talk about all the amazing things to discover out there, and we like to talk about the things that are especially real and sometimes not so real.
That's right. And in the group of folks trying to figure out the universe is of course you. Your curiosity helps power the human experiment that is science pushing forward on the boundary of knowledge and science fiction authors who are thinking about the ways that the universe might be. Could it be this way, could be that way? What kind of incredible technology or science discoveries are waiting around the corner.
Yeah, because I think, you know, somebody needs license to do that. You know, just come up with random things and see how it looks on the page without having to worry about pesky things like the laws of physics.
You think there should be a license for that, Like you got to take a test see if you can come up with good ideas. Otherwise you're not allowed to write science fiction.
And do you make complete stop at the end of paragraphs or do you signal plot points? That's important.
If you can't parallel park the ending, you shouldn't even get in the car. Yeah.
Yeah, but we like to talk about not just the big ideas that scientists start thinking about, but even maybe the ideas that science fiction authors are thinking about, way way in the future and way way out in the creative spaces that exists in between science theories.
That's right, because there's a lot in between science and science fiction. In science, we are playing detectives. We are trying to figure out what are the rules of the universe? Are they this? Are they that? Could they be this other thing? Does the evidence line up with one theory or the other? And science fiction authors are doing the same thing. They're wondering what would the universe be like if it worked this way or that way? What would the human experience be if we could do this thing or had this technology. It's really very similar and they build off of each other.
Yeah. Do they ever talk, Daniel, Do you ever have like science science fiction conferences or do you just do that in chat rooms online?
That's what novels are for, right, they write their ideas down, we read them and we go ooh, I like it. I'm gonna go see if that's real, or I'm going to go make that technology happen. I see, But there is a small overlap. There are practicing scientists who are also published science fiction authors, and there are successful science fiction authors who have a real training in science, a history a career of doing science. And that's especially amazing and impressive to me.
Do you think they need to put an asterisk maybe next to their fictional work, you know, just to be clear because it could be a little confusing. It's kind of like when you know, like a CNN anchor will be pitching their you know, government political thriller.
I'm always like, hm, well, you know, most of the stuff put out by theoretical physicists is fiction anyway. I mean, very little of it corresponds to reality.
So I see it just lacks a plot and characters and dramatic retention.
Yeah, but you know, they don't know if it's real. They're just like they're trying to build a hypothetical universe. They're trying to see could this be reality? Could it work? And in the same way, at least good science fiction tries to build a self consistent, hypothetical reality and asks what would it be like to live in that reality? And also could it be ours?
Interesting? All right, well, today we'll be continuing our series of episodes in which Daniel talks to well known science fiction authors about their work, about their process, about the science in their work, and we like to talk about the science of those stories here on the podcast.
That's right, because we are curious about how the universe works, and we wonder why does it work this way not the other way? And so for the masters of these universes, the authors of these crazy ideas, we like to hear, why did you build your universe this way? Or does this really work with that? Or where do these ideas come from?
So to be on the podcast, we'll be talking about the science fiction universe of Vandana Singh.
That's right. And I really enjoyed reading her stories. She's a bit of an unusual entry in our series because she doesn't write novels. She's mostly an author of short fiction, novellas and short stories. Interesting, but her stories are really deeply scientific, like each one is actually science fiction, not technology fiction. It's like imagine if the science of the universe were this way, not what if we invented this gizmo or had this technology.
Oh wow, So do you think that's like a step further than most science fiction. Like most science fiction, you're saying, just kind of makes technology up. But she's here like changing the laws of physics.
Yeah, most science fiction really is engineering fiction. It's you know, could we build this thing, could we figure out how to make this kind of ship or that kind of laser or whatever. But I think the most interesting and fascinating kind of idea is, yeah, let's change the laws of physics, or what if the laws of physics were different from what we imagined. There's another author we've talked about on the podcast before, Greg Egan, who writes really deep, fascinating ideas like that, and I think that Van Donna Sing is in that same category interesting.
You know, normally I would argue for a name change to give engineering it's due, but I don't think I want the word engineering associated with fiction. You know, maybe let's just keep it at science fiction.
That's right. I don't want my bridge designed by somebody who also writes fiction.
And doesn't right, or like you don't want your doctor, your medical doctor to also be you know, a fantasy author.
Right, here's your prescription and here's my latest fiction. Oopswaight, I switched them up. Which is which again.
It's about really handsome and beautiful magical healer that uses quantum stones to cure your diseases. But trust me, this medicine will Ward three.
Oh boy, quantum stones.
But anyway, she is an interesting author of science fiction because she is also a scientist. She's a professor of physics.
That's right. I know her because I found her stories and I read and then I enjoyed them, and then I went to track her down to see if she'd be willing to appear on the podcast, and I discovered not only does she have a PhD in theoretical particle physics, so wow, she knows her stuff. She's a professor of physics, like right now. When I spoke to her, she had just finished teaching a class, So she's a practicing physicist today as well as a practicing science fiction author.
Wow, you have now two members in your club, Daniel of pysics professors. Way, no, don't you have several? Aren't there several of you?
There are several? Yeah, we have Greg Benford here at UCI. He's a pretty well known science fiction author and until recently an active member of our department. There was Alistair Reynolds. He worked at ESA doing astrophysics before leaving that actually to pursue science fiction writing and becoming massively successful. So yeah, there's a good number of folks who have done this crossover.
Cool. And so we'll get into her stories. And as you said, she's a little bit different that she writes short stories. So today we'll be talking about two of her stories in this episode, and they are titled Sailing the Antarsa and Perry Peteria. Now, Daniel, how can we read our work?
Well, she's got collections of short stories out. These two stories appear in a collection called Ambiguity Machines. She also has another collection which is really wonderful, which even the title is fantastic. It's called The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet.
Wow, that is pretty intriguing just from the title, I know.
Yeah, And it's not like somebody went to the buffet in over eight and then felt like a planet. It's a much deeper, interesting dive into what aliens could be like. So I totally recommend both collections. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them.
Oh interesting, all right, so let's talk about the first of these stories. But you said that there's a general theme about these stories that she writes.
Yeah. The general theme in all of her stories is that the universe contains mysteries, that what we see is not everything that is, and that scientists can crack this open and reveal deep new truths about the universe. And this is definitely a concept that resonates with me. I mean, you just look back into the history of science and you see, like the revolution of quantum mechanics, where we revealed that the universe works completely differently from the way our intuition works, or relativity. That tells us that nonsensical things like different people can have different accountings of events and both be correct. You know, these moments where we shake the foundations of our understanding and our intuition and realize that the way we're looking at the universe is more a product of how our brains work and how we've developed than the fundamental truth. Those are exciting moments and science, and I think that those lie ahead, and it's really fun in her stories to see her speculate about potential future revolutions or how we might reveal new truths about the universe.
Hmm.
Interesting. Now, are her stories and kind of about those moments of discovery or do they sort of assume those moments and then you know, figures out how the world would be like if we made those discoveries.
Yeah.
Both. She explores both kinds of things and other kinds of relationships with it. Sometimes they're about the scientists who are making those discoveries, and sometimes it's about how the world is different deep into the future after you've made that discovery and you have to sort of unpack it for yourself to realize, Wow, my universe is different from the one in this story. What is the difference? What is the thing that they figured out that makes their world different? So she's explored from a lot of different angles.
Wow.
Cool. All right. So the first story is called Sailing the Darsa, and it's kind of about an interesting concept that I've never heard about. It's called invisible particles.
Yeah, it's about invisible particles. So in this story, we live in the universe far in the future, where science has discovered something fascinating that the universe is filled with invisible particles we hadn't been aware of previously, and more than just that, these invisible particles have currents, so they are flying through the universe, carrying with them vast amounts of energy. Because they're flowing through the universe.
Whoa, now are they invisible? And also like they can't interact with electromagnetic energy or you just can't see them, but you can interact with them.
You can't see them, and we can't use current ideas about physics or our technology to interact with them, which is why they went undiscovered for so long. And you know, this is really reminiscent of where we are today in science, though we'll dig into that more in a moment. You know, you can imagine, for example, before we knew about neutrinos, our universe is filled with neutrinos passing through us. Like you hold your hand out and there are billions of neutrinos passing through your fingernail at every moment, carrying vast amounts of energy. But because we can't interact with them very much, we hardly notice. They don't bounce off our thumbs, they don't push us, they don't give us cancer. And so in this story, the scientists have found some new kind of particle previously unknown to humanity or to science that's flying through the universe, and they can't really interact with it. But you know, to discover this kind of particle, you have to be able to interact with it, otherwise it might just exist and you don't even know about it. So in this story, they have figured out some way to interact with this invisible particle, some way to discover it and then take advantage of it to harness it. How do they take an energy Well, she doesn't get into the gory details of that, but they build something which in the story is called alt matter, some new kind of matter which can interact both with us and with these invisible particles. And if you fashion it into big sheets, for example, then it can capture the momentum of these particles. It's like sailing through the universe on light, but instead it's capturing the energy of these previously invisible particles.
And so they're you saying, there are currents, like over here, it's flowing this way, and over there it's this invisible matter is flowing the other way.
Precisely, It's like you discover that you're on an island and the water around you is flat, but there are currents of air, and if you just build a sail, you can get pushed from one island to the other. But you have to build something which can capture the momentum of the wind. So here the wind are these previously unknown invisible particles, and if you build something which can interact with them, something which captures their momentum, then you can capture that momentum and transfer it to your spaceship.
For example, go with the flow of the universe. Yeah, the invisible flow.
Yeah.
And it's fascinating because you know, we have this eye idea of a solar sale. Like that, you could fly through the universe on light that comes from the sun. You build a big reflective sheet and when photons hit it, they bounce off, and that gives you momentum and you fly forward. We have a whole fun podcast episode about that. But the big problem with that is that you can't really travel between the stars that way very easily, because once you get far from the star, there's not much light anymore.
Right, Dan, you run out of solar wind.
Yeah, you run out of solar wind. But if the universe is filled with these currents of particles, and you know where those currents are, then you can ride those currents between the stars. So in the story, this creates this new opportunity to build small ships that don't have to carry a lot of fuel but can get between stars pretty efficiently.
Right, And so this lets humanity in this story sell between stars because now we have like this kind of like free source of energy almost that we can use to get to other stars because it's hard to like bring all the fuel with you.
Yeah, it's like the development of a sailboat, you know, beats a rowboat every time because you can just chill out and have the wind push you and you can sail across the ocean without having to bring folks that are going to row you across the ocean. So it suddenly makes your ships have a much much greater range.
Yeah. Cool. All right. So then in the story, I mean, they discover this technology and these invisible particles, but it's not the first time that they send people on into space.
Yeah, so this is like the core nuggative of the idea. Right, she's really thought deeply about how to build an alternative universe, and then she's thought about what would that be? Like, what story can you tell in that universe? And the story takes place at a time just after this discovery, and so previously humanity has sent some big slow ship an ARC to some other star beforeward they had this technology, and they haven't heard back from it, and they wonder like, is it alive, did it crash, did it survive? Are they there building things happily, or is it totally dead. So they send a pilot in the ship equipped with these matter sales to catch up to it and to figure out what's going on. And so most of the story is her journey and wondering what happened to this art.
I see.
It's like they send up a huge rowboat out first, and then they're like, wait, we discovered sailboats. Let's go tell them, or let's catch up to them, or what's the purpose. Can't they just talk to them on the radio?
Well, you know, light speed is very slow, but this is just to send somebody out to investigate, to say what happened to make a connection.
Can't they radio back?
They haven't heard anything back, So.
I see they're not picking up the phone.
Yeah, nobody's responding. And so the next step investigation is, you know, send somebody out there, see what happens. Maybe their transmitter broke or maybe they're all dead.
Okay, so it's about the cable guys. What you're saying, and he's going out there.
The Internet is down on Alpha Centauri. Somebody go fix it.
Somebody's got to do it, all right, let's get into the signs of sailing the atarsa and then these invisible particles. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about this science fiction universe of Vandana Singh, and we're talking about a couple of her stories. In this first one, it's called Sailing Dantarsa and Daniel, you were saying that they discovered invisible particles that have been there in the universe that we had no idea about it. It sounds really familiar.
It does sounds familiar. It sounds a lot like dark matter.
Right.
We know that the universe is filled with all sorts of stuff we don't understand, and we know that there are kinds of matter that we are not familiar with. We know that dark matter is out there from how its gravity affects the rotation of galaxies and the structure of the universe and the shape of things very very early on, and all sorts of other evidence. So we know it's there, but we don't know what it is. So there really are currents of invisible particles out there.
Now. This idea of current is interesting to me because I remember that you told me dark matter is cold, meaning it's not moving very much.
That's right. Dark matter is pretty slow moving and heavy in order to be consistent with how the universe forms. But it doesn't have to be totally stationary. Most likely it's sort of like floating in diffuse clouds and not really going very far. But there might still be dark streams, There might be still be motion of the dark matter, and you know, those speeds could be significant on cosmological scales. You know, you can be moving pretty fast compared to the Earth.
I think that's the title of your next novel, Daniel, dark Winds.
And even if dark matter is totally stationary, we actually do expect to feel a dark matter wind because the Earth is moving right, oh right, dark matter is stationary with respect to the galaxy. We're moving around the center of the galaxy and we're moving around the Sun. Even if dark matter is rotating the same speed around the center of the galaxy as we are, then you would expect to be going sort of headways into the dark matter as you go around the Sun, and then the other direction through the dark matter, and so you would feel a differential dark matter wind at different parts of the year.
So it'd be sort of like popping a parachute when you're in the middle of a speedboat or something.
Yeah, exactly, it could be. And so if we discover dark matter and we find some way to interact with it, and that's key, it might be possible to take advantage of it because it's very massive, it has an enormous amount of energy just in being, we might find some way to take advantage of it to propel ourselves. But the key question.
There is like to catch it?
How to catch it? Yeah, because we don't know how to interact with dark matter. All we know is that dark matter feels gravity, and we have no other way to see it. We have all these experiments that are trying to interact with dark matter in some other way. Maybe there's a new force, maybe they use the weak force. So far none of those have been successful. So even if dark matter is real, even if dark matter is out there, even if dark matter is in a wind, the only way to make this story real would be to be able to build these alt matter sales, these things which somehow can interact with our matter and the dark matter. And that's a huge question mark.
I guess maybe how would you see it even plausible? Like would you have to like what do you think it could be? Like you discover a new kind of element maybe that interacts with it somehow, or or a new kind of particle that interacts with both us and dark matter. Is that any way possible?
Absolutely, we think that there might be some particle like a dark photon, which could interact with dark matter and our kind of matter. But the problem is that we've been looking for that for a long time and we haven't seen it, which means that if it does exist, it's pretty weak. And so this whole concept of sailing on dark matter requires dark matter to push our matter, because we want to push ourselves and our ships which are made of our kind of matter, and so we don't want that to be too weak. But it could be. It could be that it's very weak, but it happens, and then you just need to build like incredibly vast sales in order to capture it. The way you could try to capture neutrino energy, because neutrinos interact with us, but they're also again very very weak. So even though there's a lot of energy pumped out by the Sun in terms of neutrinos, we can't really capture it because we have no way to interact with those neutrinos at a high level.
And yeah, we know neutrinos are going by really fast, right, those we do know for sure. They have a lot of energy.
That's right, They do have a lot of energy. Mostly they're fast because they have very low mass, like neutrinos are almost massless, so it doesn't take a lot of energy to make them go really really fast. And that's actually how we know the neutrinos are not the dark matter, because we think the dark matter is heavy and slow moving, and neutrinos are not that. But the underlying concept here that the universe could be filled with invisible stuff, and if we crack those mysteries, then we might potentially give ourselves incredible new powers. That is totally true that I think is our situation. I think people will look back in one hundred years or five hundred years and say, wow, look how clueless those folks were. They had no idea everything that was around them and all the things they could do with it.
Right. It has happened in the past a lot too. Right, Like you know, before physics in the last century, we didn't know there was so much energy in the nuclei of atom, for example, or we didn't know that you can use quantum tunneling to take photographs of atoms in small things.
Absolutely, nuclear energy is the perfect example because as you say, it's a vast source of energy. Turns out all the matter around us is very dense with energy, and it's not that hard to crack it open, and so yeah, absolutely, we had no idea. Right, we had no idea. You understand the way matter works and the way the universe works, then you can bend it to your will. So yeah, there's a payoff for basic science research.
And science fiction writing.
Science fiction writing and both.
All right, let's talk about her second story that you picked for this episode. It's called Perry Peteia Dame Am I pronouncing that right?
Yes? I think so, Para Peta. It's a crazy story, and as you'll hear in my interview.
With her, it's crazy name for a story.
She even admits that this story is a little bit nutty, but I loved it because it had an idea in it I had never heard before.
I'm intrigued. What's the idea?
So the idea starts with one that's fairly familiar, which is what if our universe is a simulation? So instead of being real, instead of everything we're discovering and learning and seeing and experiencing being the product of, like actual physical things bouncing into each other, it's just a simulation fed to us by some computer somewhere.
Meaning that if we don't actually interact with things, it's just something that is made up by another set of actual physical things in somewhere else.
Yeah, exactly. And there's lots of variations of this. There's you know, from the matrix where you're a brain and a vat plugged into a computer simulation, or a deeper idea where your brain itself is part of the simulation, and all sorts of variations on that. But she came up with what I thought was a really clever innovation on this idea, and that's that the aliens are a little bit lazy. What do you mean, I mean that they haven't quite finished the job. And so in her version, we are scientists in this simulation. We're trying to uncover the rules of the universe, which turn out to be just you know, the source code of the simulation. But they didn't quite finish the job. They haven't quite figured out how does this universe work? You know, they have like a few functions that they didn't quite write or are a little bit sloppy what And they pay attention as we the scientists in the simulation try to figure it out. And when a scientist in the simulation has a good idea thinks, hmm, maybe the universe works this way and comes up with some clever mathematical formulation. If the aliens like it, they make it real.
What and to the plot is like we are in the simulation figuring out what's happening, and the universe is changing around us, like there's an update and then suddenly everything's different.
Yes, there's an update. And so if you have a good idea, not only could you discover that it's real, you could have been responsible for making it real.
Oh weird.
Oh it's pretty weird and nutty, and you know, it gets into all sorts of hilarious stuff. Like she talks about these anecdotes about people predicting particles and then they're observed and sometimes that just takes a few years, and sometimes it takes like fifty years, Like there's fifty years between predicting the has boson and discovering it. And she's like, well, maybe it took the aliens a little while to write that code. You know, it could have been hard.
And it's like for sure that it wasn't there before, like somehow our scientists know for sure that this feature wasn't in the software before, but now it is.
Yeah, but now it is And it's pretty fun. And it takes place from the point of view of one of these scientists, and she's thinking about the way the world works, and she starts to suspect that maybe this is the way the world works. And then it goes into all these deep layers because if she has come up with this idea that this is how the universe works and it's true, then has she is she responsible for making this be the way the world works? Has she invented the aliens by thinking of them? And so there's all sorts of like fascinating philosophical layers there.
What do you mean she can invent the aliens like she thought aliens simulating this was a good idea, and so somehow the aliens made the aliens.
Yeah, exactly. And then at the end, maybe she goes a little crazy. I don't want to spoil it, but she wonders if she is actually one of the aliens creating this universe. And so anyway, it goes into fascinating little wrinkles of ideas. But it's definitely a bit nutty.
Aus Nea would say, whoa, whoa.
But it's not something I'd heard of before, you know, I think of theoretical physicists as just proposing ideas and experimentalists figuring out if they're true or not not, like theorists are responsible for their ideas becoming true.
I see, Well, so I guess what you're saying. It's that our universe is kind of like the beta version. Is that possible? Like can you make a universe that's not self consistent? Like that's prone to bugs.
It's a fascinating idea. There are some issues with it, right as you say, don't you need to work out all the details before you turn the thing on? Well, you know, sometimes you turn something on and you leave things fuzzy, right, You're like, I'll figure that part out later, and then you flesh it out when you get there. You could imagine doing a simulation as sort of like different levels of reality, different greeniness, Like maybe the universe five thousand years ago, before we were better at looking and stuff was a little fuzzier, you know. And as our technology developed, the a like added more pixels to the universe, And as we develop space telescopes, they're like, oops, we better put something in those other galaxies round than just having smudges.
You know, let's brainstorm quick is the universe finite?
I don't know what are the humans thinking. Whatever they do, you know, we'll follow that.
Like, let's invent the speed limit to the speed of lights, therefore they can't look out that far. All right?
That sounds good, exactly exactly. It's awfully realistic, because you know, maybe these folks are just a bunch of bitter, procrastinating grad students and they just haven't worked out the details yet, I see.
Or they're like, what if we make it free to play? But then you have to pay to get extra stuff in it?
Oh? Man, I hate in universe purchases. That's a bummer. Another fascinating angle is what if this is true? But what if there are multiple intelligent species out there? What if some other race of aliens are trying to figure out the universe and they're coming up with different ideas, So like their galaxy is now following a different set of laws of physics than our galaxy. What happens if we ever meet them?
You know?
It's confused?
Oh wow, so that happens. Do we meet other aliens in the simulation?
We do not not in this story, but she speculates about what that would mean. Does this mean, we're the only intelligent people in this simulation. Does it mean that the universe would break or would I crash if we ever met other intelligent aliens and talk physics with them. It's a pretty fun investigation of this idea.
Are we like the customers or are we just like the fish bowl?
I don't know, that's a deep question. Are we the customers or the captives?
Right?
Since we can't leave the simulation, I would say we're more like captives than customers.
Right, But then again, we wouldn't exist without the simulation, so you know we kind of benefit from it in an existential way. Hmm.
Yeah, that's a dangerous argument. I think historically that's the pretty slippery slope.
All right, Well, let's talk about the science of it. And you said, Daniel, this is like a quantum simulation. What does that mean? How is that different than a regular simulation.
Well, I think she's latching onto the sort of the uncertainty and the fuzziness of quantum mechanics. She's focusing on this side idea that if you haven't looked at something, maybe it's left undetermined, and you know, we're familiar with that, where like an electron could go left or could go right based on some fixed laws of physics we just haven't looked yet, and so the universe hasn't decided if it's gone left or right. She's taking that one step deeper and saying, well, what if the laws themselves are not fixed until we think about them clearly? Right? What if the quantum mechanical nature of the universe extends to the definition of the laws.
Oh.
Interesting, Well, I have a lot of questions for her. I'm sure you had a lot of questions for her, Daniels, So you talked to her on the phone.
I did. I called her up when we chatted about this. We had a great time, and we talked a lot about whether we can understand the universe and what it would be like to talk to aliens. And you know, I really enjoyed her writing. Not only is it really clever and full of new ideas I hadn't seen before, which is something I'm always looking for in science fiction, but it's also just beautifully written. It's like lyrical in this way. And what was really fun is that speaking to her, she's also very lyrical, just you know, extemporaneously. Everything she says is sort of poetic, so it was really a pleasure to talk about.
And so again you can find our work in collected editions of her short stories. The one collection is called Ambiguity Machine.
That's right, and the other one is called The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet.
Wow, that is a great title. All right. Well, here is Daniel's interview with science fiction author Vandana Singh.
So it's my great pleasure to introduce to our podcast professor Vandana Singh. Please say hello to our audience.
Hi everyone, it's a pleasure and an honor to be here.
Well, thanks very much for joining us and for talking to us about how you build the science of your universes. But before we dig into the stories that we're talking about today, we want to get to know you a little bit better as a science fiction author. So first tell us a little bit about your background. How you got into science fiction writing.
Well, I've always been really fascinated by the physical universe and by the non human and you know, I was raised in a sort of what you might call a Renaissance like atmosphere in India where I grew up, So you know, we read literature, We appreciated poetry, you know, science. Learning of all kinds was encouraged, including science, and particularly my brother and I were really interested in the sciences, and there was no literature that seemed to speak to all of these things at once except for science fiction, and so I got interested in it at an early age because it seemed to have an unbroken kind of gaze in terms of not worrying about disciplinary boundaries. And also the other thing is that it evoked for me a sense of wonder, which science also does, which physics also does, and in fact, that was my primary reason for going into the sciences because of that sense of wonder. So science fiction allowed me to play with ideas in a way that no other literature can. I guess that's how I ended up writing it.
But first, you took a detour to doing actual hard science, didn't you.
Yeah, yeah, I did. My background is in theoretical particle physics. I studied the mysteries of quarks and why nature seems to forbid quarks from being lonely, which is otherwise known as quark confinement. And you know, I'm not in particle physics anymore, but I do teach physics, and I think about physics all the time. So that definitely informs my stories, as does my more recent academic work on climate science and metagogy.
Wonderful. All right, See, you have a real hardcore science background, but a long love for science fiction. So let me ask you some questions about sort of the science fiction universe. You're familiar, of course, with transporters in Star Trek. My question for you is, do you think that transporters in Star Trek actually move you to another location? Or that they kill you, this assemble you and recreate you, effectively cloning you somewhere else.
You know, that's a lovely question. I love that question. I think it points to, you know, the kinds of answers we might give to that question points to how we think about mind and matter, and whether mind is an emergent phenomenon due to the interactions of matter, due to the complexity of those interactions, or whether the two are separate. And I tend not to be a mind matter dualist, but I have thought actually about and I'm a fan of Star Trek, especially the Next Generation and Deep Space nine, so I have thought about that question. I think that they both possibilities, and since one of the things we learned from physics is that anything that is possible will happen. If not in our universe, then in another. Then I think I think that probably both things happen. Perhaps one thing happens in this universe and another happens in another universe.
Well, that's a fascinating idea I never even thought of before. All Right, but then philosophy aside. Somebody builds one. They invite you to take a trip to the Moon or to Mars by stepping in this transporter. Are you willing to do it? Would you actually step into such a transporter?
No, I don't think I would, because i'man in part because whenever possible for me, the journey is just as important. So the fun of actually going in a spaceship would outweigh the rapidity of arrival the other way.
All right, Well, while we're talking about future technology, what technology that you see in science fiction would you most like to see actually become reality?
That's another great question, and it's a deep question which I know I won't be able to do justice too, but I'll try. I think that we cannot look at technology as being good or bad without looking at the social context of technology, like who benefits, where does it arise from what needs does it satisfy? Who gets their pockets fattened by it, and so on and so forth. So it's a complex question. And in fact, I think if I may posit a technology that doesn't exist today, which is a technology that helps us appreciate interconnections between human and human and between human and nature in a way that is actually better than social media, because social media does some extremely harmful things. But something that can get give us a sense of, even imperfectly, what it's like to be, say, an orangutan in a Southeast Asian forest, or what it's like to be a forest, you know. So if there was something like that, I think I would really really enjoy seeing that in the near future.
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Yeah.
All right, this is Daniel and we are interviewing Professor Singh all the fascinating short stories. So my next question for you is what's your personal answer to the Fermi paradox? Like, if the universe is so vast and filled with livable planets, why haven't aliens contacted us yet?
How do we know they haven't? Right? And the other is that they probably have better things to do.
Well.
As we know, our broadcasts have been going out into space, probably mostly since I don't know, end of the Second World War or something like that, and they haven't maybe they haven't had enough time to get far enough away that people are listening. Or and maybe on the basis of listening to the broadcast, the alien and don't think that we're worth contacting. Maybe we need to improve our TV and radio programming.
Can you imagine hearing some alien messages and the decoding them and beginning they seem boring. I don't want to reach out to them. I mean, I'd like to talk to aliens, no matter what their terrible TV programming choices are.
Right, And I agree with you there, because you know that's why we have things like SETTI, for instance, or METI, which is messaging extra terrestrial intelligence. I think that it may have something to do with culture in one sense that not all cultures, even on Earth, are necessarily interested in reaching out to see who's out there. Maybe it's a cultural thing. Maybe it's a question of technology as well, because as you said, the gulfs of space are indeed very vast. And then it could be that the messages they are sending. They are sending messages are just so in you know, so convoluted and so different that we can't even tell their messages. I mean, you know, I remember my dog giving me a look several times to indicate as far as I could tell that, don't you get what I'm what I'm trying to say here, I mean, like, why are you humans so stupid?
You know?
So, I don't know if all we know, perhaps the messages are all around us and we just don't know how to pick them up.
Maybe the aliens are after all, very alien. But well, yeah, wonderful. Then I'd like to turn to the topic of today's podcast, which is a couple of the stories that you wrote. Specifically, we really enjoyed the two stories, Sailing the Antarsa and Parapatea, and I noticed something of a theme between these, And tell me if I'm misreading this, but I have the sense that both these stories have something to do with an invisible universe around us, That there are things about the universe that we have not yet discovered, or that we grand realizations we could make about the nature of the universe that challenge our assumptions and our sort of parochial experience for one hundreds or thousands of years as humans.
You said it beautifully, and I think that's exactly what motivated me to write those two stories, and in fact, that comes from what motivates me to be in the field of the sciences, which is this unending sense of wonder, because there really is no end to what we discover and what we learn. I think that's very true. I agree with you there.
And so do you think that there are still I mean, in our universe and our reality, huge mysteries, remaining things that science will crack open that will change our entire relationship with the universe.
I think they are out there, and I think that that's what makes science so exciting as a process of discovery, but also as a way of being with the universe and seeing the universe. I'm reminded of a series of long conversations I once had with the George Suthershan of weak interactions, fame particle physicist and also did a lot of work in quantum optics, came up with the idea of tacions, and for him too, inhabiting the universe was simultaneously a process of discovering things that were otherwise or earlier invisible to us. And also a way of being where you simply enjoyed being part of such a fascinating universe. It gave you a sense of kind of belonging to something as vast and wonderful as the universe we inhabit. So I feel like there's so much out there that we don't know, and that are schemes as they are at present, cannot embrace because always the model is a model, after all, it's not as substitute for the phenomen and that we are studying. And so you know, we go in with certain conceptual structures, and if you think of those conceptual structures as fishing nets in the vast sea of the unknown, then you know we're going to catch some things with them, but we're not going to catch everything with them. And so you know, that's why I think that philosophy is also important to science, because if we change our conceptual structures, which the history of science tells us has always been done, then we may catch other things. So to me, this is endlessly fascinating because what we discover about the universe seems to be an interplay between our conceptual structures which come from our human and cultural backgrounds in part and between the stuff of the universe. So I think there's a lot out there, probably right around us, is stuff that we simply don't even can't even detect or let alone imagine.
I'm sure that future scientists will look back at our ignorance and they'll laugh at us. You know how clueless we were, how much information, how many clues there were swimming around us that we couldn't even imagine understanding. You know, the way cavemen and cave women looked up at the stars and had no idea how much information about the universe was being literally beamed at them. But this is a fascinating concept in your story, Perapetea, where the characters are discovering that the universe is perhaps a fascinating quantum simulation by aliens. But then you flip it at the end you think, well, actually, maybe it's all just in my head. Tell me about your thought process there.
Well, that story is such a nutty story.
I love it.
But I'm so glad that you did, you know, especially coming from a fellow physicist, because I wanted to have some fun with these concepts, and you can't do that in an academic paper, right, you have to behave when you're writing an academic paper. But the cool thing about science fiction is that you don't have to behave, Right. So so I imagined, and you know, I Rube Goldberg machines. I love the notion of having a complicated way to do something simple, and so I imagined a universe that, you know, where there were these aliens that are somewhat clueless, that rely on the intelligence and the imagination of various species to help finish the construction work of the universe, because much of it is an illusion, illusion cast by these aliens. And then at the end, you know, not to give away too much of it, but at the end, the notion is, the possibility is that we are among those aliens, and that while we are trying to understand the universe, we're also co constructing it. And so, you know, I just I just wanted to have some fun with this notion. You know, also because if we look at the history of particle physics in particular, they are all these fun predictions that occur as people build their conceptual structures, right, like the omega particle and things like that. So I want to think about it as you know, aliens waiting to see Okay, so this scheme works. Oh so they've come up with that particle, Well let's bring it into being, you know. And you know, so I just it's just so fun in one way, but cons also serious business, so it's both.
Well.
One thing I really enjoyed about the stories is that they had ideas in them I had never seen before, and that's to me, what's fascinating about the universe is that potentially nature has in it ideas we haven't yet considered. And so you described earlier this process of discovering nature by building up our conceptual fishing nets and then using them to trawl, and you know, you can imagine that's an iterative process. As our ideas shift, we discover new things. But my question to you is do you think it's possible for humans to understand the universe? Like first positive that there is a theory of everything, an explanation for the universe that is simple and compact. Is it possible that we are capable of understanding at its deepest level? What do you think it's more likely that it's beyond our capability.
That's a great question. I love your questions. They are so thoughtful and so deep. Well, I think we have to look at what we mean by understanding before we can jump into the question. And often what we mean by understanding is can we find an analogy that works for us, that allows us some predictive power and some explanatory power. And if we can find those analogies, then we say we have understood that phenomenon. But I think that the analogies that we usually look for are things that we are familiar with at our microscopic scales, as we know, and also they come also from a sociocultural impulse, which I know as scientists is hard for us to admit to. But I mean, I think that it's true. Because when we even conceptualize the notion of one grand theory that explains everything, you know, the idea of the I'm mover, you know, the origins of that, other cultures might think instead of a grand unified theory. Instead of that, they might think of an unfolding tapestry or a weaving. So, you know, our metaphors would be different, Our analogies may be different, coming from different backgrounds, and whether nature respects those analogies or those particular fishing nets. We don't know until we throw that net out into the ocean of nature, right, So I think, because what we find and how we conceptualize them relate to what our conceptual nets look like, the process of understanding is unending, you know. I mean, just think about the difference between Newtonian gravity and Einstein's conception of gravity, which are so drastically different describing the same phenomenon, and of course one has a wider domain of validity than the other. But nevertheless, the things that we might mind casting one net versus another would be different things, and we would conceptualize them in different ways. So I really think that firstly, there is no theory of everything. There may instead be a tapestry in which we weave in different threads, and that threads keep changing as we angle and look at them in different ways, and so moving dynamic tapestry, which I think would be more useful as a fishing net than a theory of everything, because we know, for instance, that a theory of everything at the at least how I've seen back when I was a grad student and we talked about grand unified theories, is that we know already that they don't explain, and they cannot predict what happens on our scale in the sense of you know, what exactly is this snowflake going to look like? We know that, And that's because the universe is complex, right, And complexity as a science is a relatively new phenomenon, even though it has its roots in Pontcare in the eighteen hundreds, and yet much of the development has happened in the twentieth century, which is one reason why we don't understand climate change as a phenomenon as well as we could have, because it does not subject itself to reductionism as well as you know, other more idealizable systems and physics do. So I think that, you know, just as science has moved through the ages and emerges with certain notions, think about the ancient Greeks and geocentrism and heliocentrism, and then you know Newtonian physics, and then the incomplete revolutions of quantum physics and relativity, and then complexity science. I think that already the theory of everything is not the theory of everything, so so I don't really believe that there is one. I think there's something much more profound than that that hopefully we'll find our way towards.
Wow, that's a very poetic and also imagine that we stumble our way towards that deeper understanding. If we ever do meet a race of intelligent alien physicists, they'll naturally have different ways of approaching this problem and building up their own tapestry. Do you imagine that it would be possible to relate our thoughts and our ideas to alien theories of everything? Do you think there is one universal concept we all sort of fall towards, or that we could have equivalently effective but totally conceptionally different frameworks.
I think that's a lovely thought experiment, because I think it would be extremely difficult, if the aliens were really very different from us, to understand their conception of the universe, and I think it would be very interesting to find out. I don't know if you saw the movie Arrival Course, which is based on Ted Chiang's amazing story story of your Life, and which I think helps us to see how difficult it would be to communicate with aliens in general, let alone about science, and it would be it would be interesting to look for things that may be universal, but again, even things that among human cultures that we thought were universal turn out not to be so universal. So I think it would be very interesting, and I think it would be a long process of building a hybrid world where the aliens and us could understand each other, you know, because we have our kind of bubble world of conceptual frameworks and they have their world of conceptual frameworks. And for the two to intersect, we would have to work at it, and we'd have to kind of deliberately try to come up with commonalities, ask the other for interpretation, try to interpret the interpretations because the same thing. You know, I wonder, you know, whether there's a universal interpretation for the Pythegorean theorem. Maybe not. You know, triangles could mean something totally different and to some other, you know, alien culture.
And I can't tell if I'm hoping to discover that our understanding is universal or that it's totally parochial and there's a completely different way of looking at the universe. I don't know which would be more fun.
Yeah, I know, well, I think I'd be a little disappointed if our understanding was really universal, because that means that, you know, there's less for us to learn, and so it's it's always it's always good to be surprised, I think so. I think it'd be fun to discover new horizons through trying to look, however, imperfectly at the universe from an alien lens.
Wonderful.
Well.
One of the things I really enjoyed about your stories, other than the incredible creativity, was your portrayal of physicists in action. You know, way too often in science fiction the scientist is just there to motivate the sort of mindless pursuit of knowledge at the expense of everything else, you know, the Jurassic Park sort of thing. And I really appreciate your portrayal of scientists as curious, intellectual explorers, you know, pushing forwards and the boundary of knowledge because of their own personal desires to understand the universe. What do you think about the portrayal of scientists in science fiction, and since you sit in both communities, what do you think about the interplay between these two groups, the science fiction authors coming up with crazy ideas not having to behave well in papers, and then the actual scientists trying to push forward the boundary of knowledge.
It's a very interesting interplay. I think that the portrayal of scientists in popular fiction has gotten better. Is definitely better in science fiction than it is in popular fiction in general, where we still have this ridiculous notion of the scientist as this white male guy with crazy white hair. You know, poor Einstein would probably be spinning in his grave, because we know that scientists are humans, and scientists are more complicated than that, and that they come from all kinds of backgrounds, and also science these we know, especially in our era, is done in teams rather than the loan scientists trying to break the boundaries of the unknown. Although in many of my portrayals I do portray scientists on their own thinking about things, partly because theoretical physicists still kind of work that way and that's my background. But I think that in science fiction, at least that interplay, that portrayal is getting better. It's getting more diverse, partly because the field is getting more diverse. We have a lot more African American writers. We have writers from all over the world whose works are being translated or who are writing in English and getting heard by people around the world. So the conception of a scientist is becoming more complex, as it should be. I think that also reflects real science. We know that in the physical sciences there's still a massive amount of gender imbalance in many countries, actually in India and some other countries in India and Iran. When I looked up the figures last some years ago, the numbers were much better with regard to undergraduate degrees in physics than they were in the United States. So, but you know, it's still not reflect the demographic of the population. And that's also true for people who are underrepresented minorities in the sciences. Physical sciences are the worst in that respect. So the more portrayals we have of actual scientists working and you know, living complex human lives and working on complex scientific questions from different backgrounds, bringing their different lenses to the problem, the better it is for all of us, because the field will inevitably be enriched by that diversity.
I totally agree. And how do you feel about the diversity in science fiction?
You know, I'm very thankful that it's growing. I live in Massachusetts and and I go regularly to a science fiction convention, or at least semi regularly, which is focused on the literary aspect of science fiction, called Readercon and it's really wonderful. Many years ago. When I first started going there, and that was in the early two thousands, I was one of the few brown faces out there, you know, and I was one of the few women writing hard science fiction. And at that time and even now, to some extent, my work is not recognized as hard science fiction because my style is different and I bring in the poetic and philosophical and wondrous aspects of it. But at that time, it was a lonely experience going to a science fiction convention, and now it's very different. And I'm very grateful, in particular to African American writers for just really helping change science fiction from the inside, as well as to writers from multiple countries. Recently, there was an international online science fiction convention called future Con where you got to hear from science fiction writers from all over the world. So people are writing in Argentina, they're writing and they've been writing in China for a very long time. They have the largest circulation science fiction magazine anywhere in the world in China. And then you know people writing from Eastern Europe, from Brazil, and it was really really exciting to see that diversity happening and to be able to be influenced by their stories as well as the stories of the canonical science fiction writers. So I think it can only be to the good to have so many different voices coming in, and particularly afro futurism and indigenous futurisms and indigenous people's conceptualizations of their universe, which increasingly is contributing to our scientific understanding, which I think is very exciting. So it's a very exciting time to be a science fiction writer, for sure.
Wonderful. I totally agree, and I really enjoy reading stories from all over the world in different voices, and just the way we talked about aliens might have different ideas about physics, different humans have different ideas about what we might explore in the universe. So it's been a lot of fun for me as well. So thanks very much for joining us today. Before we let you go, do you have projects coming out soon that our readers can look forward to?
I wish I had a positive answer to that. Right now, I'm figuring out how to teach online labs, so immediately I don't have anything major brewing, but I always have stories kind of simmering on the back burner. Hopefully I will have some new novellas this year. I have a story coming out in the South Asian Book of Science Fiction that's coming out from Golang's Hatchet India, and so that is something to look forward to.
Well. Congratulations on balancing academia and science fiction and your success in both worlds. And thanks again very much for joining us on the work today.
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
All right. Pretty cool. She had a lot to say, and you're right, she does sound really lyrical.
Yeah, she is really well spoken, and as a person of color and a woman in a mostly male and white field, both physics and science fiction, I thought she had a lot of interesting things to say about increasing diversity in those communities.
I didn't think I heard you talk about actual physics, like, did you guys also nerd out and talk about the actual particle theories not just science fiction stories.
No, not so much. She has a PhD in theoretical physics, so that's her background. But recently she's actually shifted more to working on climate change because she thought that's actually more relevant for humanity, which you know, my grant is probably true.
Yeah, I guess if you're writing science fiction, you kind of want your audience to be there in the future.
That's right, it's purely selfish and cynical. I'm sure.
All right, Well, what do you make of this idea of you know, sciences writing science fiction, Like, do you feel like it's another part of your brain or do you feel like it's the same brain that's coming up with these ideas? What do you think is happening inside?
I think it's a harmonious combination. I think science takes creativity. To solve a problem, you have to think about a new direction, and when things aren't making sense, you're like, all right, well, I have to go back to the basic building blocks and think about what am I misunderstanding, What idea am I missing? What new perspective would let all this evidence fit together in a way that makes sense. And that's a lot of the creativity behind in my opinion, good science fiction, science fiction that has like a clever new idea in it, something we hadn't considered before, a new way of looking at the universe, or a new way the universe might actually be. So to me, that's probably why I enjoyed both science and science fiction, because they have this element of like creatively exploring the universe.
Right right, desperately trying to get out of this one or to make it, to understand it more.
Can I speak to the manager please?
Can I speak to the lazy aliens who are told really closing this and making it up as we go. I have a few ideas, that's right, I got some notes. I got some ideas. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that interview, and we hope you check out her work, Vandana Singh's science fiction stories collected in the Ambiguity Machine and also.
The Woman who Thought she was a Planet.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dare industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as Dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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