***It should be stated the author is not a fan of science fiction in general. But there is nothing inherently wrong with the genre until scientists begin to use fiction to address scientific problems***
Is it fiction, science, or an unholy amalgam of both? That is the question this blogger tried to address when reading “Gravity’s whispers”. Gregory Benford is both an astrophysicist and a writer of hard science fiction. Hard science fiction attempts to lead the reader to a fictitious world with an emphasis on scientific accuracy. On his Amazon page, it states:
Often called hard science fiction, Benford’s stories take physics into inspired realms. What would happen if cryonics worked and people, frozen, were awoken 50 years in the future? What might we encounter in other dimensions? How about sending messages across time? And finding aliens in our midst? The questions that physics and scientists ask, Benford’s imagination explores. With the re-release of some of his earlier works and the new release of current stories and novels, Benford takes the lead in creating science fiction that intrigues and amuses us while also pushing us to think.
This piece hardly makes one think about the science and more about the literary elements forgotten in science fiction. The story begins with a date and a quote popularized by Voltaire: perfection is the enemy of good. It should be noted this piece is neither. An unnamed scientist (this is left unclear, for all we know it could be part of the janitorial staff at the VLA) has tried to decipher a signal received from their date, Sam the Slow. The mysterious protagonist purportedly spent a day trying to decipher a noisy pattern. Their work paid off and revealed “a string of numbers, […] the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function”. Some exposition later, the reader learns Sam is a scientist working on LIGO and this first gravitational wave detection, thought to be a neutron star crust vibration, actual contains a message. Real talk follows:
‘What? A tunable gravitational wave with a signal? That’s im—’ ‘—possible, I know. Unless you can sling around neutron stars and make them sing in code’
The progenitors of the signal even provide a proof for one of the unsolved problems in mathematics. There is talk of a Nobel prize and relief in that humanity cannot answer the SETI signal.
There were various moments of drivel, notably in the discussion of romance between both parties. It neither adds to the plot nor to the purported science. What should have been discussed more was the signal processing. To this blogger, the mysterious protagonists might as well be ETI. They were somehow able to decipher a gravitational wave chirp to reveal a solution to a Millennium Prize Problem. These individuals will apparently win a Nobel for the detection of SETI and a Millennium Prize. Sam notes “the rest of them”, presumably scientists, would laugh at this assertion and this serves to emphasize the delicate nature of the topic.
The actual content of the message should not be too important as it could have been random prime numbers, albeit the discussion of the Riemann hypothesis gives ETI high intelligence. Greater scientific accuracy could have been invoked by using eLISA instead of LIGO and positioning the scientsits somewhere other than the VLA. This particular piece was neither amusing nor particularly thought provoking. The only moment of connection between the reader and scientists would have been at the end (not because the story completed…) with the relief that humanity cannot contact this extremely intelligent form of life. This blogger thinks writings such as this are dubious at best. It is the height of folly to presume scientific accuracy on completely fictitious topics, and melding the two somehow gives disappointment a tangible form.