Apr 15, 2016

To celebrate our 250th hour along with our Quillification (that’s a fancy word I made up that means the book is definitely getting published), I promised you guys something special today, and boy are you going to get it:

When one is dealing with "hard science fiction" it’s particularly important to get the facts right. For example, one of the best hard science fiction writers, Larry Niven, got a very important fact wrong in his first story, "The Coldest Place" (1964). In this story, the coldest place concerned was the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun. However, Mercury was found to rotate in a 2:3 resonance with the Sun before the story saw the light of day, meaning it was published with known scientific errata. Oh well. It didn’t seem to hurt his career much.

Since "The Punch Escrow" is set in the 25th century, I expect that I will have gotten a lot of things wrong. I’ve done my best to avoid such missteps, but since I am only a fan of quantum physics and not a quantum physicist myself, I leaned on my highschool friend Joe Santoro, a real life medical physicist, to vet (and sometimes invent) the science necessary to make my world scientifically plausible. Joe is one of the nicest, smartest guys in the world. He’s probably blushing reading this, but without him there probably never would have been a Punch Escrow. To celebrate our publication, I wanted to share a short interview I conducted with Joe. Consider this the first in a series of interviews with people who have been invaluable to me in making Joel Byram’s world credible.

Tal: I guess first question would be your name and what you do for a living?

Joe: My name is Joe Santoro and I am a medical physicist. I work in a radiation oncology clinic at a hospital on Long Island. We’re the guys that make sure the medical linear accelerator is delivering the correct radiation dose to patients undergoing radiation therapy. We also come up with the treatment plans for patients which dictates where the radiation will get delivered. We’re responsible for routine QA of most of the various components that comprise the radiation delivery chain, i.e. the CT scanners, LINAC, on-treatment imaging, etcetera.

Tal: What was the thing that made you want to get into physics?

Joe: Now you’re making me use my way-back machine. I guess I would have to narrow it down to 3 things at a really early age; astronomy (just looking up at the sky), magnets (which are cool at any age), and a fascination with things just crashing into each other. I subsequently became obsessed with meteorology to the point where I was making weather reports daily and posting them on the classroom door. Incidentally I didn’t end up “specializing” in either meteorology or astronomy but these early interests were springboards into studying (particle) physics and mathematics later in life. To this day I still love a great meteor shower, looking up at the moon, or a spending hours a day on Wunderground.com

Tal: In science fiction books, scientists are often presented as characters with no sense of humor. I think that’s why The Martian is so beloved by the scientific community, because it presents hard science side by side with toilet humor. It was something I wanted to capture for the Sylvia character in the book, she’s a quantum physicist, but she’s also happy to drop a dirty joke. As a professional physicist, how much of a role does humor play into your daily work life? Can you give any examples?

Joe: It’s funny you ask that. When I think back on the influences that shaped my personality as a scientist (and just a regular person), I think of Peter Venkman (Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters) and Chris Knight (Val Kilmer’s character in Real Genius). Perhaps it was just a function of watching and re-watching these movies at a really mentally malleable age, but both characters made the prospect of being a scientist seem like something really cool to aspire to.

I think having a good sense of humor allows you to deal with the absurdity, randomness, beauty and cruelty of the universe in way that complements science’s attempt to establish some sort of framework for all that. I think taking oneself too seriously is a hazard in both scientific pursuit and life’s pursuits. After all, what’s the point if you can’t have a good laugh every now and then?

It goes without saying that working in a radiation oncology department can be extremely stressful and tragic on an almost daily basis. I’ve been at places where joking around is discouraged and I can tell you, people don’t last too long at those places. Without being able to joke around with the people I spend the better part of my day with, I think I would want to throw myself in front of train at the end of the day.

Tal: I’ve asked you to help me convert mosquitoes to flying steam reformers, keep self-replicating nanos in check with ecophagy cages, and make human teleportation possible with density functional theory, among other absurd requests. Your one caveat to me was to ’beware of using too deterministic language in the story’ - Can your elaborate on why you said that?

Joe: Did I say that? It sounds quite serious. I guess what I meant is that when talking about things inherently “Quantum”, it requires us to use the language of chance and probability instead of certainty. Quantum physics describes the world of the extremely small and at these scales, familiar quantities like the position, velocity, momentum, and energy of an object become fuzzy and probabilistic. Instead of specifying these quantities as definite values like we’re used to for say a car traveling on a road, we have to instead speak of the expectation value of these quantities for an object like an electron. Quantum physics can say that the most probable location to find an electron orbiting a proton in hydrogen atom is the 1.5 times the Bohr radius but nothing more definite. This is in contrast to saying that saying that our car is at position X,Y,Z, traveling at velocity V. It’s definitely a different way of thinking about reality and I’m not sure anyone really ever gets used to it. 

Tal: Last question before I let you go back to saving the world one patient at a time: What one quantum physics breakthrough would you like to see happen within your lifetime?

Joe: That’s a doozie. If you’re going to make me pick just one I would have to say commercially viable quantum computing coupled with photonic data storage and transfer. The exponential increase in processing capability of a quantum computer will enable humanity to solve all sorts of currently intractable problems across dozens of disciplines. This also has to be accompanied by a completely new ways to move and store such enormously large quantities of data which means moving away from electronic data storage and busses to light speed photonic data storage and bussing. There are even some people using organic compounds like DNA as a means of storing extremely large quantities of data. The coupling of these nascent technologies can potentially change the course of humanity in unimaginably fantastic ways.  

I can’t thank Joe enough for helping me build the world in which The Punch Escrow takes place. And I can’t thank you all enough for helping me bring that world to light. To that end, I’m unveiling the first three chapters of The Punch Escrow. Please note that these are still from the first draft of the manuscript, so there will be errors and the chapters as they appear in your books may be differently worded or organized. I hope you enjoy them.

Lastly, for those of you participating in the t-shirt giveaway, there’s a short survey here about the color/ink options.