Imaginary Worlds - Technobabble

Episode Date: September 7, 2017

This week, I team up with Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist podcast to help me figure out why one set of poorly understood pseudo-scientific terms can sink a scene, while another set of pseudo-scientific phrases can sell a sci-fi concept. We'll hear from physicist Katie Mack -- who hates technobabble -- and Jennifer Ouellette who plays matchmaker between scientists and Hollywood directors that want to sell their mumbo jumbo with real science. And "Timescape" author Gregory Benford tells the story of tachyons, and how an obscure theoretical particle became a technobabble meme. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. I have a soft spot for really good technobabble. Not just the technobabble itself, but scenes where actors really sell the technobabble,

where you believe what they're talking about. And I imagine for actors, it must be really hard to pull off because, I mean, first of all, they're not scientists. They probably have no idea what they're talking about. And this isn't even real science. It's made-up pseudoscience. In fact, that phenomenon was made fun of in the movie Galaxy Quest, where Sigourney Weaver's character keeps repeating all the technobabble that the computer says back to the crew, even

when they can all hear the computer, and they're in the middle of a crisis. Sphere on board. Computer, is there in the middle of a crisis. On board? Computer, is there a replacement beryllium sphere on board? Negative. No reserve beryllium sphere exists on board. No, we have no extra beryllium sphere on board. You know, that is really getting annoying. Look, I have one job on this lousy ship.

It's stupid, but I'm going to do it, okay? But the gold standard for good technobabble, I think it's probably this scene from Back to the Future. Where Doc Brown realizes what it would take to power the DeLorean to get back to 1985. Now a gigawatt? Now, a gigawatt is a real thing, but apparently nobody in the cast and crew knew it was pronounced gigawatt. But the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity

is a bolt of lightning. Which made me wonder, why does one poorly understood pseudoscientific term feel right to me and help bolster my suspension of disbelief, while another technobabble scene does exactly the opposite? Well, to help me figure this out, I decided to turn to an expert, Helen Zaltzman. Her podcast, The Illusionist, is somewhat like mine in that it's relatively short, comes out every other week.

But her focus is on language. Or as she puts it. This is The Illusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, bury language in sand at the beach. In which I, Helen Zaltzman, feed language after midnight. This is The Illusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, flip the lights on and off to tell language it's time to call it a night. Now, Helen is not a big science fiction fan, but she once had a run-in with a Dalek, the clunky robot villains from Doctor Who. I once was at the BBC and I got to witness someone trying to get a Dalek through a revolving door.

It was a prop, I assume. Yeah, they keep one in the foyer for people to have pictures taken with, but they're just as ungainly as on screen, yeah. But when I asked her if she wanted to collaborate on an episode about Technobabble, she was intrigued. What I was particularly piqued by

was that a lot of words in real science did originate in science fiction. So words like robotics, I think Star Trek came up with warp speed. Astronaut was from a science fiction story of the 30s. So that's quite a while before astronauts were a real possibility in life. I guess someone has to come up with terms. Anyway, all words are made up at some point to fulfill the need to describe something,

particularly something new. It was probably easier to describe something, particularly something new. It was probably easier to pick something that was already familiar from fiction. Yeah. And so I understand that you talked to a physicist. I talk to a physicist very regularly because I'm married to one. But one you're not. You talked to one you're not married to. Yeah, he allowed me out to talk to other physicists. I spoke to the astrophysicist Katie Mack. I study cosmology, the early universe, dark matter, black holes, the end of the universe. And how's the end of the universe looking so far?

It's looking really fun. I really love this topic and I think there's something wrong with me. It's nice to be prepared as well. Yes, yeah, definitely. 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 not really elegant or exotic or polysyllabic terms. Like if you watch something like Star Trek, there's always words like, you know, the inertial compensators and you get these really multi-syllabic constructions 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.

Check the bypass valve on the matter anti matter reaction chamber make sure it's not overheating and mr scott the board show is correct i didn't ask you to check the board lad yes sir you know there's always there's this thing about if you have a particle you put the syllable on at the end of it like what like i mean so this we started this in physics right so we have the the proton is a word that actually makes sense, but then all the others like electron and neutron and tachyon and all of those are kind of compound words of like something to do with the nature 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 Invisibon or something like that.

But I've seen that. I've seen when you need a new element, you put an um at the end, like unobtainium. I remember unobtainium from Avatar. This is why we're here. Unobtainium. Because this little gray rock sells for 20 million a kilo. That's the only reason. Well, it's funny because one thing that I always hate is when there's sort of like a log jam of techno babble. And then one of the other actors or characters says like,

could you say that in English, please? And then they say it very simply like that. That's such a cliche that drives me crazy. Yeah. I think she also felt that there's a bit of failure of imagination. 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. Yeah. I'm married to a physicist and that never happens.

He never just spools out jargon. Yeah. 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, you know, scientific jargon stands in for 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. I mean, when Katie said that she it concerns her that it looks like scientists are apart from society, aren't they? I mean, how are they not and why is that a negative stereotype?

She doesn't want people to think that they couldn't be scientists. So if you've got a kid watching thinking, well, I'm not this super intellectual, socially inept person, which means I would probably fail if I wanted to do science. It seems so exclusive and exclusionary. And also there are lots of ways in which science relates to our real lives, and yet it gives the opposite impression. Because I remember when the Mars rover landed a long time ago, or the first time it landed, I think, late 90s, early 2000s, there was some rock that they named Scooby-Doo, some rock formation.

I remember thinking, though, that was pretty funny. That's not something that you would imagine scientists in a movie would ever do. I think in a movie, the writers wouldn't want you to think that scientists were that playful and they weren't taking it super seriously because maybe the audience wouldn't believe that that's how things really were. I think linguistically, it's somewhat reflected as well because in real life life you're using words that have come into English through many different routes. A lot of them are classical, a lot of them might be slang, a lot of them might be fusions of one word and another. And they might be high social register or low. And we use these quite fluently and without thinking about it. and without thinking about it.

But if you saw that on screen, you might think, well, hang on, why are they talking in pure physics one minute and then just slang the next? So in fiction, you have to choose your track more than you do in real life. That's interesting. Well, it's funny because, you know, I actually talked to some people as well. I talked to Jennifer Ouellette, who was, she's a science writer, but she was also the director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange in Los Angeles. It's basically the scientific world and the Hollywood world coming together to create what is essentially a cultural exchange program.

Basically, they set up scientists to work with Hollywood directors, movies, TV shows, because a lot of them, they obviously, they need their technobabble. Yeah, I think audiences are much better intuitive scientists than we give them credit for, seriously. They can tell when something's wrong. They can tell when something doesn't quite work. I'm fascinated by those kinds of jobs. Yeah.

Where there's someone with a real expertise who's drafted in to add this sort of stuff to an elaborate fiction. Her husband's a physicist named Sean Carroll. Oh. Do you know him? No, it's just physicist husbands. Right.

So, well, so her husband worked on the movie Thor. They were trying to figure out how Thor could get to Earth really, really quickly. And he says, well, you know, just a wormhole. And it's the kind of thing that you were talking about earlier in terms of these are the kinds of words scientists actually use. And also I've seen the Matt LeBlanc Lost in Space space where I think wormholes were quite a big plot point there. Well, Jodie Foster as well in Contact. But that was the problem.

They said it sounded too 1990s. And Sean said, well, you could just call it an Einstein-Rosen bridge was what it originally called. The lensing around these edges is characteristic of an Einstein-Rosen bridge. A what? And so they ended up using that. An Einstein-Rosen bridge is a theoretical connection between two different points of space. It's a wormhole. And, you know, at some point someone says, it's a wormhole.

But it sounded cooler. And yet I'd imagine most people would struggle to identify what that was if you said the Einstein-Rosen bridge, people wouldn't necessarily realize that was a wormhole. Yeah. I mean, if you told me that the Einstein-Rosen bridge actually connects Minneapolis to St. Paul, I'd believe you. The problem with the terms like the Einstein-Rosen bridge is you forget the names. In a weird way, that's funny because the flux capacitor is very memorable. Like geeks all know the flux capacitor. Even non-geeks, I think, if you say what's a flux capacitor, they'd be like, oh yeah,

it's that thing in Back to the Future with the three prongs. Yeah, sonic screwdriver in Doctor Who. Yeah, so like, and I was asking her like, why does this matter? Why does it matter if you have an Einstein-Rosen bridge versus a wormhole? Like, why does this make a difference

in the world that you're setting up? And she said, but that's the whole point. I mean, it's about world building. Anytime you build a fictional world, it 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 buy. There's certain buy-ins, 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 buy-ins and the viewer will go along with it if it's convincing and believable enough. But the other thing too I was asking her is like, what did the scientists get out of it? And she was saying that a lot of them are huge geeks themselves. They got

into science because they watch science fiction as kids. And so it's very exciting for them. And if anything, she needs to dampen their expectations because a lot of them think they're going to be on set with a director or, you know, just simply being taken as seriously as they would in academia. And, you know, you can go in there and 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'll really make your scene stand out because you're not just relying on this like bad science trope from like the 1960s. techno bible that takes on a life of its own where it goes it gets picked up by other sci-fi writers and shows and it becomes it becomes its own living meme that suggests that they are all working in a common universe as well in the fiction so i think that kind of works yeah especially when these

words have come out of fiction into the real world and then back into other fiction, it makes it all seem plausible and not that far away from you, the fiction consumer. And the sense that when you hear the technobabble, you're like, yeah, of course, I've heard that term before. You don't realize you heard it in a completely different sci-fi world. Yes, exactly. But that's just after my break. So, as I was saying before the break, one of the reasons why I really am interested in technobabble is because some technobabble takes on a life of its own in science fiction.

For example, do you know what the term positronic brain means? I have heard the term the positronic brain, but if you said, what does one of those do? I might stumble a bit. Well, positronic brain is nothing. I mean, it's like Isaac Asimov completely made it up. It's the thing in his fiction that allows these robots to be self-aware, to be able to just function as well, if not better than a regular human. And this got picked up by so many different sci-fi writers. I mean, it shows up in Doctor Who. It shows up in Star Trek. Data has a positronic brain. In West World, the new show on HBO, Anthony Hopkins mentions that his androids have positronic brains. And it's all like a big homage to Isaac Asimov. And so I called up the novelist and the scientist Gregory Benford, who knew Isaac Asimov.

And it's not great sound quality because I called him up when he was in a cabin in the mountains of Northern California. Oh, what a great life, though. I know. He was enjoying it quite a bit, clearly. 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, so he

of course knew Isaac Asimov, and he was talking about how he actually went up to him once and gave him some flack about that term, because it means absolutely nothing. And I said, you know that positrons are completely destructive in ordinary matter, right? If they hit an electron, they produce a gamma, right? He said, said, you know that positrons are completely destructive in ordinary matter, right? If they hit an electron, they produce a gamma, right? He said, yeah, I know that.

But I wanted a word that made the reader think, gee whiz, and then move on to the next thing I wanted them to think about. So when you talked to Asimov, though, about the positronic brain, I'm just curious, were you sort of teasing him about it? Was it something that actually kind of bugged you a little bit? No. Okay, it was teasing, right? I mean, he was the great man, and I said, you know, 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, I often think in most forms of the arts, the interesting thing is the constraint.

And that's true perhaps more in science fiction than anything else. So, but the reason I want to say Gregory Benford is because there's a particular word that he made particularly famous in science fiction. And it's a word called tachyon, which is based on an actual theoretical scientific particle, if that makes any sense. One that your husband would probably know about. Yeah, an actual theoretical particle, not a made up theoretical particle. Exactly. There's a very fine line between the two. Yeah. There's a limit to the amount of those that he can introduce to me without me getting furious. We've had so many arguments about what imaginary numbers are.

to me without me getting furious. We've had so many arguments about what imaginary numbers are. So the word tachyon was coined by a physicist named Gerald Feinberg in the late 60s. And he was actually inspired by a short story, a science fiction story from the 50s called Beep by James Blish. And that story is about these people that start getting messages from the future. And they discover this was actually a malfunctioning transgalactic communicator that people were using to communicate with each other in the future. And accidentally, these intergalactic emails were sent backwards in time. And so the people in the present have to decide what to do with all this information. Like, do they go in the direction they know the future is going to go? Or do they make decisions to go in the opposite direction? But Gerald Feinberg was

more fascinated with just the idea of these messages going back in time, and he began to theorize that there might be particles in quantum physics that also travel backwards in time. So he did a lot of mathematical calculations, and he wrote a paper where he proposed that he believed that this particle might exist, and he called it a tachyon. Jerry Feinberg told me that he went looking for a word that was sophisticated but a little strange, and he found tachy. Well, you know, tardy means slow in Greek, and tachy means fast. But we've, in English, put, to turn it into a noun, an on at the end. So you could

have, you know, we all humans are made of tardions, but never ever uses that word. Tachyons is more exotic because it doesn't exist. It's so interesting. I mean, that's what science fiction does anyway. They often will take, they'll take an element and add an on to it. 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. Yeah, but it works. It's quite a short term, which I appreciate. It's relatively easy to pronounce looking at it.

And it sounds like something that's been around for a couple of hundred years or more. Yeah, but then the weird thing is James Blish, the guy that wrote that short story that inspired Gerald Feinberg to imagine the tachyon, that guy eventually gets a job writing Star Trek novels after Star Trek was cancelled. And in one of the novels, it was called Spock Must Die. That's harsh. It is very harsh. But anyway, that novel, Spock Must Die, seems to be the first time that tachyons are being introduced into fiction by the very guy that wrote the short story like 15 years earlier, the one that inspired the scientist Gerald Feinberg to imagine tachyons. And that brings us back to our friend Gregory Benford, who I called in the mountains of

Northern California. So he is a scientist and a novelist. So as a scientist, he knew Gerald Feinberg. He, in fact, took part in a study to figure out whether Gerald Feinberg's tachyons could actually exist. And Gregory Benford came to the conclusion they probably didn't. But, you know, Benford's also a novelist. And so he was so inspired by this whole experience that he ended up making tachyons the centerpiece of his classic 1980 novel Timescape, in which scientists from the future try to send messages back in time to prevent an apocalypse from happening. And because Gregory Benford knew the science so well, this novel goes deep, deep into the physics of how tachyons could work. I mean, it's like he

tweaked reality just enough and laid it out so carefully as to how he was doing it to make tachyons work in his world wow and i i also think that's one of the reasons why it's good technobabble not only is it one thing you remember you know it's all there's one piece of technobabble you have to know tachyons but the story hinges on it there's like narrative and emotional weight to it. 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, right? You don't have to explain it anymore. One word will do it for you. As you can tell, Gregory Benford is a little annoyed that all these other science fiction writers didn't put the work that he did into tachyons.

It just kind of gets thrown out there without much, you know, science behind it. Yeah. But for some reason, it just really catches on. Like, it's in Watchmen. A resulting blast wave would produce a sudden burst of tachyons, particles which travel backward through what you perceive as time. It's in the flash. That is a tachyon device powering up the speed force in your cells like a quick charge battery. It gets picked up by Doctor Who, Babylon 5. I found a 12-minute montage in YouTube of just characters from Star Trek The Next Generation using tachyons.

Did you watch all 12 minutes? I got bored after six. Six, though? You really hung in there. What were you waiting for? We're being hit by a field of energetic tachyons penetrating the hull. Miss LaForge, can you implement your tachyon detection grid with 20 ships? Captain, I'm picking up a tachyon surge.

There's a disruption in the tachyon detectors. There's an increase in tachyon emissions from the Federation fleet. And the craziest thing is, in 2011, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN thought they actually found a tachyon. But it turned out to be a technical glitch. It was a bit exciting for a short while. it turned out to be a technical glitch. It was a bit exciting for a short while. And I understand the excitement because, you see, if they do turn up,

then it means this quantum field theory of tachyons is correct. And we're going to have to contend with the fact that the use of tachyons will produce splittings of universes. How about that? Yeah. Try to do an environmental impact statement on that experiment. Well, when you heard the news, were you surprised, excited, or skeptical? Of all three. Because it might be true, but it probably wasn't. I find that incredibly reassuring somehow.

Why? I don't know. It just feels, you've got these greatest brains in the world, this extremely complicated thing that still, even though it's been around a while, feels like something we're not ready for yet in the modern world because it's too ahead of its time. And yet you still have things like that happening. Someone dropped a piece of their sandwich in the Large Hadron Collider. I think I like the mundanity creeping in to something that seems so far-fetched and incredible. I think I like that in the tag-outs and in fiction. That's what really makes it seem real, doesn't it? When you just get this stuff that is really quite boring and pathetic. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the thing that I think is really interesting about this is just the idea that it's just like a big conversation.

I mean, first you have, you know, James Blish writes this short story about particles moving backwards in time. Jerry Feinberg, the scientist, reads it, is inspired to propose this actual theoretical particle, a tachyon. And then all these other science fiction writers saying, well, I see your tachyon and raise you a tachyon beam particle.

And then you've got these scientists that grew up reading science fiction, working with Jennifer Ouellette so that they can end up on movie sets influencing what we see on screen. And it's just like this one big, long conversation from scientist to writer to scientist to writer, generation to generation. And, you know, that's how you build culture. And I think fiction is probably a far more effective way to communicate science to people than just the pure science. I think a lot probably a far more effective way to communicate science to people than just the pure science. I think a lot of people wouldn't necessarily opt in to that,

to watching a television program about how space science works or such like, but they would watch the fiction and some of that can rub off. So if you can get real things in there, it is quite educational without seeming too worthy. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Katie Mack, Jennifer Ouellette, Colin Milburn, Greg Benford, and of course, Helen Zaltzman. So if there was a Malinsky particle, what would it do? A Malinsky particle? What would I want it to be? I would 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 Molenski particle. Knows how to make an exit. Knows how to make an exit. Never outstays its welcome. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook, a tweet at emilinski. My website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. And if you want to check out Helen's podcast, The Illusionist, that's A-lusionist, not illusionist, it's at theillusionist.org. Panoply