Instant Genius - What if the Earth’s magnetic field died? – Jim Al-Khalili

Episode Date: April 17, 2019

Theoretical physicist and science communicator Professor Jim Al-Khalili has taken a break from writing popular science books to write his first novel. Sunfall (£16.99, Bantam Press) is a science fiction thriller set in the year 2041, when the Earth’s magnetic field has started to die, leaving life on Earth vulnerable to threats from space. Scientists and engineers are thrown into a race against time to protect the Earth. All the science in the novel, from the futuristic technology to the apocalyptic event, are based on real science, as we understand it now. In this episode, Jim explains how the Earth’s magnetic field protects us, how being a scientist helped inform his writing, and why fiction can be a frontier for science communication. If you like what you hear, then please rate, review, and share with anybody you think might enjoy our podcast. You can also subscribe and leave us a review on your favourite podcast apps. Also, if there is anybody you’d like us to speak to, or a topic you want us to cover, then let us know on Twitter at @sciencefocus. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: How can we save our planet? - Sir David Attenborough Why is the magnetic north pole moving? - Ciaran Beggan There is no Plan B for planet Earth – Lord Martin Rees Why AI is not the enemy – Jim Al-Khalili Is there anybody out there? – Mike Garrett Building a base on the Moon, and crafting believable sci-fi – Andy Weir Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I mean, I think, you know, in a sense, this novel, a near future sci-fi thriller is very similar to the sort of books that Michael Crichton used to write. But Michael Crichton very often had science as the bad guy, science destroying the world, whereas for me it's science saves the world. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world.

Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Theoretical physicist and science communicator, Professor Jim Al-Khali, has taken a break from writing popular science books to write his first novel. Sunfall is a science fiction thriller set in the year 24.

when the Earth's magnetic field has started to die, leaving life on Earth vulnerable to threats from space. Scientists and engineers are thrown into a race against time to protect the Earth. All the science in the novel, from the futuristic technology, to the apocalyptic event, are based on real science, as we understand it now. In this episode, Jimmy explains how the Earth's magnetic field protects us, how being a scientist helped him inform his writing, and why fiction can be a frontier for science communication.

Here he is talking to BBC Science Focus online assistant Sarah Rigby. First of all, can you please tell us a bit about what your book is about? It's a sci-fi thriller. So I think it seems that a lot of science fiction around now, whether in books or TV or cinema, tends to be sort of fantasy sci-fi. So, you know, whether it's superpowers or sort of post-apocalyptic world, of zombies or vampires or some world far far away. This is very much in the vein of the sort of Philip K. Dick, you know,

sort of near future, techno thrillers, hard sci-fi. The sort of stuff that Hollywood does very well, but which really haven't seen so much in books, not since the likes of Michael Crichton. So it's meant to be a page turner, which I hope people will find, you know, the thrill of the storytelling, but also painting a picture of a world set in the near future, 20 odd years from now.

Okay, so the idea of your book is an apocalyptic type event. So could you just explain the event, please? Yes, I mean, it's in a sense of all this, the possible scenarios for potential apocalypse and end of the world has been done. I wanted to find a new angle. So the basic premise is based on something which, to some extent, we know it's happening. You know, the Earth has a magnetic field, and that magnetic field flips over a few times every million years. And we're overdue a flip.

So the magnetic north becomes a magnetic south. Compasses will point to the opposite direction when that flip happens. And we know it happens throughout the geological records. We know it's happened over history. The sun has a magnetic field, but that flips much more frequently, just every decade or so. So the basic idea is that the Earth's magnetic field is getting weaker, and people think it's because it's getting ready for a flip. But, you know, what I don't think, this is a particular spoiler to say that, in fact,

what's happening, which the authorities are trying to hide from the world, is that the magnetic field is dying. And the apocalyptic scenario here is not just that compasses won't work. Earth could then, if that happens, Earth would very well go the way that Mars went. We believe that Mars had a magnetic field and an atmosphere billions of years ago. But for reasons no one understands, Mars magnetic field died. And when that happens, it's open to space, the cosmic rays, rays and radiation from the sun would strip away the atmosphere. And that's why Mars is now a dead planet. So the horror here is that Earth is going in the same way.

Without a magnetic field to provide the shielding, the bubble wrap around the earth, there's nothing to stop the solar wind, solar radiation from bombarding the atmosphere and destroying it and of course then destroying all life. So the race is to try and do something about kick-starting the Earth's magnetic field again. What is it exactly that the Earth's magnetic field protects us from? Well, because it's magnetic field, it deflects charged particles. So we know that streaming through space in every direction are, you know, it's just the sort of the cosmic rays coming from outer space. But more directly, there's what's called the solar wind, radiation from the sun, which is streaming towards the Earth. And that's why we see the auroras, in Aurora Borealis.

that is these charged particles ionizing atoms in the upper atmosphere, and those atoms then when, you know, they're given energy, they release that energy in the form of light, which is the colorful displays we see near the poles, the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis in the Southern Hemisphere. So that's evidence that these energetic charged particles, electrons, protons, are constantly bombarding our atmosphere, but thanks to the magnetic field, they are deflected away. And even more dramatically, when the sun burps out a bubble of plasma, what's called a coronal mass ejection, chances are that's going to head off somewhere not towards the earth. but every now and again, it can head towards the Earth. And again, thanks to our magnetic field, we are able to protect ourselves from it. The Earth's magnetic field will create what's called geostorms, charged particles moving around the atmosphere.

The magnetic field changes its shape. But on the whole, it keeps us protected. Without it, these charged particles from the sun would fly in and directly hit the Earth. they will, it's dangerous radiation, it can destroy life and change the climate and of course just, you know, strip away the earth's atmosphere. What exactly causes a coronal mass ejection from the sun? The sun is a very, like all stars, it's very active. It's, has lots of, because of its magnetic field and charged part of it.

there's a constant turmoil of processes going on in the sun. And every now and again, it's just, it's bubbling. You know, the gas that the sun is made of is bubbling away. And every now and again, there'll be a release of energy. The physics involved is complicated and is being modeled. So people like Lucy Green at UCL is an expert on current mass ejection. and she talks about how the magnetic field locally in different regions of the sun can sort of change shape and throw these bubbles of plasma out into space.

And in fact, one of the characters in the book, Sarah, is very much based on Lucy Green. And every time I'm going to Lucy and she's seen the book, I tell her, look, if Sarah does anything in the book, don't, that's not you. The character is based on you. The expertise she has is based on you, but not any other personality traits. So, yes, the coronal mass ejections is a very important field of study. Why and how the sun throws these out, but it's a very complex process. And, you know, we can't predict, for example, when the next one's coming or in what direction the next one will come.

That's what, you know, we have satellites going around the sun trying to sort of study its weather. solar weather to try and predict when these things might happen. So do you think there will ever come a point when we can predict these events, or is it just that we'll simply never be able to know? It's very, I mean, space weather is very similar to Earth weather, that we can get better. We can develop more and more sophisticated computer models that have more and more detail, finer and finer graining, you know,

to include more and more data. So we can get more reliable. How far in the future we can predict certain things will happen just depends on the power of our models. You know, we can now save for Earth weather with some confidence if it's going to rain tomorrow in one part of the world. But we're never realistically going to be able to say, sure whether it's going to rain on this date next year.

You know, so going into the future, it's based on, of course, what's called the butterfly effect, you know, chaos theory, that you would have to know the conditions to infinite accuracy now in order to reliably predict into, indefinitely into the future. And solar weather, space weather is no difference. You know, we can have observation satellites. We can develop more, more sophisticated models. We can learn about the physical processes. But there's a limit to how much we can actually know for sure

and make reliable predictions. We'll get better. That's all I can say. So if one of these did hit Earth and we weren't protected by our magnetic field, as you said, it could destroy life. But how would it do that? Would it be like an instant wipeout? or would it be just slowly over time dying out?

Well, if there was no magnetic field, the charged particles from the sun and the current amount of my rejection have so much energy that they would create very, very severe radiation damage. There's the long-term effect of mutations that they would cause, you know, so high levels of cancer. But in the path of this radiation, without protection, you will be fatally exposed to very, very high levels of radiation that would cause damage that would, you know, you'd, I mean, it depends on the level of radiation, but it would kill you not instantly, but pretty quickly, you know, radiation sickness, you know, probably within hours or days you'd be dead.

So it really is quite serious that without our magnetic field protecting us, there's no way life could evolve on Earth. Even with all of our technology now, is there no way we could protect the Earth without our magnetic field? Well, that's what I speculate in the book, you know, that whether, you know, one of the scenarios is that world governments are thinking about creating, an artificial magnetic field, sending out magnetic pulses that are so powerful that they can meet an incoming coronal mass ejection and deflect it, enough so that it avoids the earth. But, you know, as the character in the book, Sarah says, it's a bit like holding a cocktail stick umbrella over your head to try and protect yourself from a storm. It would require such a powerful magnetic field that I don't think that would be particularly useful. We are just grateful that we have a magnetosphere that protects us. Could you please just explain what dark matter is?

Dark matter was postulated many decades ago because it was discovered that the way clusters of galaxies move together, the way stars move around within galaxies couldn't be explained just by the gravitational forces of the normal visible matter we see. It was realized that there must be something else with a gravitational effect that's causing the matter that we do see behave in the strange way. So it was called dark matter for want of another name simply because it was made of stuff, but that was invisible to us. And the reason it's invisible is because it doesn't interact via the electromagnetic force,

which is the force that holds atoms together, for example. And electromagnism is carried by light. So anything that interacts with the electromagnetic force, we will see it because light is entering our eyes, light that has been emitted by it, for example. But dark matter doesn't interact with light, with electromagnetism. And so we don't see it, but we know it's there indirectly through its gravitational pull. And of course, since those early suggestions, there's been more and more evidence that dark matter really has to exist in order to describe our universe.

For example, it's now pretty much established that without dark matter, galaxies couldn't have formed in the first place in the early universe just after the Big Bang. we needed dark matter of which there is much more of the normal matter five times as much we need a dark matter to clump together gravitationally and when enough dark matter had clumped together it could then draw in the normal matter the gas hydrogen and helium gas and once normal matter clumps together it can condense into stars and galaxies are born and stars can then have planets and so on so without dark matter we can't explain the universe as it is. And there isn't another way of explaining as it is. Could people say, oh, well, maybe you're just not being imaginative enough. Maybe there's no such thing as dark matter.

We'll find a simpler explanation. Well, possibly, but I'm not aware of any other explanation that can fit with all the observations we see that does a better job than dark matter. If only we knew what it was made of, because it's not made of any of the particles

we know of today. that has been discovered thus far. It must be made of some exotic new type of particle that only interacts by the gravitational force. So in the book, they tackle this issue by using dark matter, but obviously we don't currently know what dark matter is, and this book has only set 25 years in the future. So do you think it's likely that we will know about dark matter by then?

Yes, I think it is. I think despite not being able to find out yet what dark matter is made of, we're trying lots of different ways of probing its properties. You know, we're either looking out into space and seeing how dark matter behaves. We're building detectors on Earth and protected underground to capture particles of dark matter. Or we're making new particles in places like Large Hadron Collider in the hope that we will discover, you know, just with the energy from a particle collision in the LHC, we will create new particles, one of which, one or more of which might be

what makes up dark matter. But so far we've come up empty-handed. But I think we're so confident that dark matter is real and exists and is out there that we feel we will at some point find out for sure what it's made of. So I've speculated that it is made up of, that it is made up of one of the possible, potential candidates that dark matter could be, these particles called super symmetric particles, neutralinos. They are theoretically possible.

They are postulated as one of the candidate particles. And maybe in reality, 10 years from now, they will be ruled out or maybe even discovered to be correct. I was quite keen for this book to come out either before neutraleinos get ruled out, or, interesting enough, whether they're actually confirmed as the dark matter particles, because then I wouldn't seem so prescient and clever. But in writing the book over the last three years that I've been working on it,

I've been constantly checking with colleagues who work in dark matter physics to make sure that all the information I talk about in the book about dark matter is in fact feasible. Probably the only thing that I have over exact, is the dark matter self-interacting. You know, the idea if we do know what dark matter is made of, potentially we could make beams of dark matter, you know, by the, you know, two decades from now in accelerators. But when you get two beams of dark matter hitting each other,

you know, they don't interact with normal matter. We know that. And dark matter does interact weakly with itself, probably not to the extent to create so much energy. as I describe in the book, but we don't know. You know, we don't know what dark matter's made of. We don't know how intense these beams might be if we were ever able to make them.

So it is possible that dark matter could self-annihilate and create all this energy that we need to fit in the story. Did you find that there were any times when you were having to prioritise scientific accuracy when you would have preferred, for example, to change the narrative? take the narrative in a different direction? Actually, no.

I mean, because my, you know, I have a lot of experience of writing nonfiction and popularizing science, you know, my whole career has been about making sure the science that I explain is correct. And so that was probably the most, one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing this novel, the challenge of getting the science right. If I wanted to explain a particular narrative or a particular scene or a piece of the plot, I would work hard to find the science, the science that I trust that would make that possible. One or two places I had to sort of slightly stretch things a bit, but all the while I haven't broken any laws of physics. I mean, I think that's, that was the challenge.

That's what I enjoyed the most. I often think of the film interstellar, which many people might say, well, it's just a load of nonsense science fiction that's made up. But of course, one of the screenwriters was Kip Thorne, who's the Nobel Prize winner in physics. And he has assured me that everything in that book, in that film, rather, is accurate scientifically. It is possible. It may be speculative, but it's possible. So that was the aim with this book. there's none of

none of the science here could be ruled out and people say well that's just silly that can't happen because such and such some of it may not end up being the way things are but it's based on the science we know today and a lot of the technology that I describe

painting the picture of the world in 2041 is based on science that is known today and therefore it's technology that could be possible in the future and that was a challenge for me. Then I think I can hold my head up high and say I don't feel embarrassed about any other science in the story. So why did you choose to write a fiction book? And do you think that it opens up any possibilities for

science communication that traditional nonfiction formats don't? I think it does. I mean, there aren't many crossovers that are science fiction. based on science fact. There are a few now authors who are trying to write historical fiction or speculative, fiction based on speculative science

and trying to work hard to make sure that it's correct. I mean, everyone I think feels that they have a story, a novel in them. Oh, you know, one day I'll write my novel. But normally it's meant as a joke. You know, I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I have a public profile.

I've written nonfiction books. And so this really came about by accident. You know, one of my books, Life on the Edge on Quantum Biology, which I co-wrote with a colleague here at Surrey, John Joe McFadden. When that came out in 2015, the launch party for that book was attended by various people from our public. And one of them said to me, so what's your next book? You know, we're quite keen to keep you on as one of our authors. What are you going to produce for us next? And I said, I don't know. I've sort of got everything off my chest that I wanted to talk about. You know, I've talked about quantum mechanics and relativity theory and cosmology and black holes and so on. I don't know, maybe I'll write a novel. Half joking, in fact. And but they picked up on that. Oh, really? Oh, right. Well, maybe you should think about this. You know, we'll get you in touch with our science fiction. And said, what would it, what would it? be. I said, well, I guess science fiction. One writes about what one knows. And so they put me in touch touch with the science fiction commissioning editor. And from there on, I thought, yeah, this is my next challenge. Of course, I knew I could write, and they knew I could write, but none of us knew

whether I could write fiction, which turned out to be quite a different skill and a deep learning curve for me. So what's different about writing fiction from nonfiction? well firstly it's it's a you know as with all fiction it's an imaginary world is the world that i of my creation and so when i in an early draft i had one of my characters i was very pleased with this and it was a twist in the plot one of the characters gets killed off and uh my editor said no don't kill off that character. That's one of the most powerful characters. You should leave them to live. I said, yeah, but the storyline is that they're killed. And my editor said, no, Jim, you are, this is your world. You are God here. You can do what you want. You can give people, you know, life or death. It's entirely up to you.

So there's that freedom to explore that, of course, one doesn't have when writing non-fiction that I found very refreshing but it was a very different way of thinking you know i couldn't you know finish a meeting or a lecture or do some research and say oh i've got a couple of hours free now i'll get back to my novel now i i had to sort of block off weeks in advance you know so okay Thursday after next Thursday and friday i've got nothing in the diary block them off writing days and i would shut myself away and i would have to flick a switch in my head and and and think in a different way in order to get into this different kind of creativity. You know, we scientists, we often say, you know, scientific research is creative, and that is very true.

But this is a different sort of creativity. Painting a picture of an imagined world in my head and sharing that world with a reader is rather different from trying to explain the real world as it is. And I found that challenge difficult but very enjoyable to the extent. that writing this novel hasn't put me off the possibility of writing another, but I want to see how this one goes down. Well, I'm sure it'll go down great. So how did you go about creating a realistic future? Well, one of the things I have in my armory to my advantage is that I have over the years

spoken to so many scientists from so many areas. Of course, in my eighth year of presenting the life scientific on Radio 4, I've now interviewed nearly 200 of the world's greatest scientists from all areas, from everything, you know, from cosmology to epidemiology to the volcanology, you know, to the social sciences and psychology and so on. So a lot of the ideas that are at the cutting edge of science today, I've been able to use and extrapolate and say, well, given what we know now, how is this going to manifest itself in the future?

What will the future world look like? So I'm not basing it just on fantastical speculation. I'm actually basing it on what is likely to be the world in 2421. You know, AI, artificial intelligence, for example, I have a good idea of how that will progress. Things like augmented reality, the way various technologies like quantum technologies like quantum, technologies and smart materials and nanotech, all those ideas are fermenting and are part of scientific research today, I'm just suggesting that they will have been quite well established in the future. And I think I'm lucky in that respect. There aren't many probably scientists or

authors who have this sort of access that I've had to the biggest ideas in science today. So do you think that being a scientist helped you with that? It certainly helps me appreciate how, yes, but knowing how science works and knowing how research develops and what can lead to technologies that become part of everyday life. Yes, that's certainly something that being a scientist helps with. But also with the storytelling, you know, as with any author of fiction, you write a... about the world that you know. And so writing a science fiction thriller

in which the main lead protagonists are themselves scientists, I borrowed from my own experience. Many of the characters in the book are based on real people that I've worked with, real scientists. And so their lives, their hopes, their fears, their desires, their motivation for doing certain things comes from

an experience of knowing what it's like to do science, what it's like to be a scientist. So a lot of when I're talking about some of the main characters when they're developing their project with the dark matter and how they persuade other people that this would work, that is as realistic as one gets with research science, research physics in particular, because that's the world I know. One thing I liked about this book was that it felt like a celebration of, scientists, whereas a lot of science fiction would have their lead character as

a sort of action hero. Whereas in this case, you know, we're saving the world, not with, you know, one guy going in there and beating up all the bad guys, but it's how it probably is going to happen in a few decades' time, which is a huge collaboration of scientists and engineers. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know,

In a sense, this novel, a near-future sci-fi thriller is very similar to the books that Michael Crichton used to write. But Michael Crichton very often had science as the bad guy, science destroying the world. Whereas for me, it's science saves the world. Yes, I didn't want it to be sort of a complete sort of out-and-out-action thriller. what I wanted to portray is that the cleverness of the scientists, their ingenuity, was in itself the cool thing. Yes, you know, they show moments of bravery, you know, under adversity. And I'm particularly proud of the female characters in the book, Sarah and Shereen, you know, who really are, you know, they are, the real powerful characters.

But a lot of their power doesn't come from, you know, the action heroics, but rather, you know, a sense of justice, a sense of understanding the laws of nature, but wanting to put it to good use to help humanity. So, yeah, I'd like to think that although these are fictitious characters, they can still be good role models. particularly for younger people thinking about science as a courier. So what is your favourite science fiction that sort of influenced your thinking on this book? Well, I mean, as a teenager, I read a lot of science fiction, the classic sort of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinleyn, Isaac Asimov. And I enjoyed those sort of Arthur C. Clark, in particular,

the 2001 Space Odyssey, books like that. I also enjoyed reading Stephen King, which isn't really science fiction, but it's a thriller. So I've been very much influenced in terms of writing a thriller, a page turner, you know, coming to the end of a chapter and leaving it, as a cliffhanger, that's very much, you know, the influence of writers like Stephen King that I grew up with. But in terms of this near future, hard sci-fi techno-thes,

techno thriller, then I guess it's, it's, it's, it's writers like Philip K. Dick, you know, who wrote Blade Runner. You know, it's, it's that imagining a world not too far in the future and trying to predict what it will look like that actually Hollywood does very well. You know, Hollywood movies, the sorts of things that, you know, like Blade Runner or the sorts of films with Tom Cruise in, you know, or Damon, you know, that there are sets a little bit in the future. And that, that, take a particular bit of science and push it a bit further. But I think in books, in science fiction, there don't seem to be that many that are those sorts of books around now.

So I'm hoping that this is not really going to be competing in a very crowded market. You know, there are no teenagers with superpowers. There are no zombies. There are no vampires. It's just real science that is accurate. but that doesn't mean you can't write a thriller that people want to sort of keep turning the pages. Could you recommend any books or films in particular, sci-fi books or films that you think do the science particularly well?

Well, I mentioned interstellar, which is very good. I mean, of course, interstellar is based, that's rather more fantastical in the sense that, you know, suggest that, you know, wormholes can exist and we're going to be able to travel to massive black hole. Another book in a very similar film, very similar veins, is Contact.

So, Jodie Foster, also and Matthew McConaughey who's in. And the link between contacts and interstellar is interesting because not only is Matthew McConaughey in both films, but both films were very strongly influenced by Kip Thorne. Because Kip Thorne helped Carl Sagan, the famous astrophysics,

write the original novel contacts, you know, a decade before it became a film. So, yes, so I like that for that reason. You know, again, contact is a good. And, of course, a more recent science fiction movie is Arrival, where, you know, again, we make contact with alien civilizations, but they're nothing like the humanoid aliens, that the little green men that Hollywood has been obsessed with.

It's much more realistic a scenario. And then, of course, they're the classic films like 2001 Space Odyssey. I also enjoy films like Gravity was wonderful. Hollywood seems to be working harder at getting the science right now, which is very nice. That's not to say it doesn't make awful science fiction films as well. times. But I'm not one of those people that gets hung up over the bad science and science fiction. You know, it's fiction after all. And that's, you know, I don't, I don't watch the latest Marvel movie,

which I, you know, I enjoy Marvels ever since I was a kid. I grew up with Marvel comics. But I know, you know, Spider-Man and think, hang on a minute, he's just broken the laws of physics. That's impossible. I want more back. You know, it's fiction. But I think there's room for the fantasy fiction, as well as some of them more careful, clever science fiction movies. And I think there have been quite a few in recent years. Okay. And just one last question. What do you hope your readers get out of reading your book?

First and foremost, I want them to say I couldn't put it down. I loved just a thrill of the storytelling and the action because that has been the challenge for me. You know, I know the science, you know, and I can write popular science, but this was a new departure for me, trying to weave a narrative, to tell a story about a world that I created that other people want to, you know, feel excited by. But also, I think, you know, with my science communicators hat on, I'd like to think that I think as you mentioned at the start, it's another potential way of, exciting people about the possibilities of science, that science isn't something and new technologies that are coming are not things that we should be afraid of. You know, when you think about genetic engineering or artificial intelligence and robotics, a lot of people are nervous. You know, what sort of

world is that going to lead to? You know, but it doesn't have to be the Terminator. It doesn't have to be Skynet. So what I'd like readers to come away with is that science is, also be used as a force for good, that it can solve the world's problems rather than creating new ones. So it's painting a positive picture about science as well as being, you know, good fun to read. That was Professor Jim Al-Kalili talking about Sunfall, his new science fiction novel. In the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we ask, what if the Big Bang wasn't really the beginning? Speak to Sir David Attenborough about his new TV show and explore how robots are being used to reveal how ancient animals moved. As always, there is much, much more inside, and please don't

forget to rate and review the show wherever you download your podcasts. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision

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