Beyond Creativity

What is it we are actually doing by being creative?  That is, by making up a story such as a novel or a short story, or by producing a scientific paper that adds to the sum of human knowledge about some aspect of humanity, what is it that lies below the surface of this creativity?  As a scientist trained to work with viruses, and later as an aspiring novelist, I’ve taken on and conquered (hopefully) two aspects of creativity: fiction and science.  Both utilize the power of the human brain to come up with new ideas on a regular basis and do something with them.  The question I’m trying to answer here is simply, what is the end result of that creativity?  Where does all that thinking up experiments with viruses and writing fiction go?  What do we get out of it?  (I certainly don’t mean to imply these are the only ways to be creative; they just happen to be the two I’m most familiar with.  You can probably think of others.  But my comments here will apply to all.)

My first answer is two-fold.  First, scientific experiments are done to gather information.  Information that, somewhere down the line, can be used to improve the health of people, animals, the planet, or whatever.  Some scientific papers are so esoteric that their ultimate usefulness to society may be  hard to grasp in the immediate aftermath of their publication, but somewhere, sometime, they should be important.  Creative writing, on the other hand, has as its most immediate goal that of entertainment.  A good story is worth a thousand words.  A story or a movie seeks to take us away from the cares and woes of everyday life and let us lead a different life vicariously in the guise of a fictitious character.  Always fun.

But I maintain there is a higher purpose to creativity, and that is to teach.  Scientific experiments produce good information about a subject, but they are also used to teach students how the scientific process works, and students learn more than what is written in the paper.  They may learn a new technique from a paper, they may learn how a technique is applied to study a given subject, but most importantly, they take that information and merge it with all they’ve learned previously and begin to understand how the scientific process works in the broadest of terms.  Each paper is a brick, and brick by brick, a wall can be built, and eventually an edifice can be constructed in the mind of a student that tells him/her how to proceed with the smallest of experiments he/she may be currently working on.  They learn something, specific and general, at the same time.

Likewise with a novel or a short story.  A reader gains access to the details of the story, the plot, the hero, the villain, the setting, and so forth.  But a student of literature will also read to learn how a story is put together—point of view, description vs. dialogue, telling vs. showing, etc.  Reading is the best way to learn, and ultimately, by reading many stories the student learns how to put his/her own story together.  Creativity, therefore, is ultimately a teaching tool, not merely a device to convey information.  Creativity is death to indifference and boredom, and we need as much of it as we can get.

Big Bang Or Big Bounce?

Back in February, 2017, an interesting article appeared in that month’s issue of Scientific American.  Written by Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Abraham Loeb, the authors presented some evidence for a “big bounce” in the life of our universe, rather than the much better known “big bang.”  The universe as we know it is thought to have started by a rapid inflation of all matter and energy from a point so small it would fit inside an electron with room to spare.  Thus the idea of the “big bang” was born, though it was probably a quiet “bang” since there wouldn’t have been any air around to transmit a sound.  The authors of the article give some evidence (not overwhelming by any stretch of imagination) that the universe has been alternately expanding from a point, then contracting to another point and expanding again.  Ad infinitum.

Well, later several other physicists, thirty-three to be exact, including Stephen Hawking and Alan Guth (who, by the way is the pioneer of the inflation theory) wrote a letter stating their opposition to the evidence in the article, and reaffirming their belief that the universe started with one and only one big bang.  Their evidence is that the universe is not only expanding, but is expanding at an ever increasing rate, and either already has or soon will reach a “point of no return” where it can only continue to expand, and never will contract.  Too much dark energy pushing the matter in the universe apart.  It’ll go on forever.

Two competing theories.  I emphasize that the Scientific American article did not state that the authors thought the Big Bang theory was wrong, just that they thought it did not explain everything, and a rebounding universe was a possibility.  Okay, so much for that.

My interest in this discussion between the “Uni”-verse theory and the “Multi”-verse theory isn’t to try and distinguish between them, or even try to add my name to one or the other.  I’m not a physicist and haven’t got the faintest idea which is correct.  I’ll let those more competent than I figure that out.  But as I began to think about the concept of a rebounding universe, my thoughts took a philosophical turn, and I began to wonder where we all fit in such a scenario.  The universe expands from a point source and grows larger and larger, to eventually result in our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, our cities and towns, and us.  It goes on for billions of more years, and reaches a tipping point.  It begins to contract and drops back to a point, and the cycle starts all over again.  All of that is conceivable by the human mind.  But what isn’t conceivable is the idea that this has been going on forever, and will go on into infinity.  Back in 2010, I wrote a blog called “Wrap Your Mind Around This…” in which I pointed out a few examples of things that are so out of the ordinary in today’s world that they were impossible for the human mind to comprehend.  This rebounding universe is another.  (See the earlier blog at https://rogerfloyd.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/wrap-your-mind-around-this/)  Although I can see a universe that starts with an inflation and continues on only to dissipate into infinity, I can’t begin to envision a universe that bounds and rebounds, like a tennis ball that will not stop bouncing.  Such a universe violates the laws of physics.  The most difficult part to envision is that there has never been a beginning, and there will never be an end.  How does something never have a beginning?

I wonder, does the universe play the same thing over and over with each rebound?  Did we exist in all those past universes?  Or, is each universe different?

The universe in which we currently exist is so large, we are almost infinitely tiny in comparison.  Our galaxy, which is so much larger than us, is itself only one of billions, even, perhaps, trillions.  But to put all that in the context of a universe that rises and falls like a bouncing ball, and has been going on forever—no beginning, no end—just makes the comparison even more difficult to understand.

Any thoughts?

“Viruses” In The Environment

Over the past few weeks or so, I’ve noticed on Facebook several posts about how climate change has caused warming in the northern parts of the Earth, especially in northern Canada and Siberia.  The posts give information about how carcasses of dead animals (and, possibly, humans) are being exposed for the first time in ten, twenty, thirty, or forty thousand years (or even more) because the permafrost in that area is melting.  Potentially, many of those animals or humans died of infectious diseases such as anthrax, plague, or other highly communicable diseases, and the threat to us humans today is that a new outbreak could be started if we exhume the bodies without taking careful precautions to prevent spread.  They even give an example of an anthrax outbreak in Russia when an infected animal carcass was exhumed.  I fully agree.

I have two real comments to make about these stories.  Both points are short and simple, because I don’t have the space here to go into any detail about how to handle the exposed carcasses.  I’m not an expert in that, and there’s a lot of boring detail I’d have to list anyway.  My first point is that these stories are calling the agents that cause the diseases that could be exposed as being caused by “viruses,” even though the all the ones they list are actually caused by bacteria.  Viruses are not “bacteria.”  Viruses are submicroscopic organisms that cause disease, while bacteria are larger, and can be seen in a microscope.  I hope we will begin to use the two terms properly in order to avoid any confusion in the future.

Having said that, there are possible situations where real viruses might be uncovered by permafrost thawing (“permathawing”?)  I can conceive that sometime a carcass of a human who died of a virus disease (such as smallpox, influenza, polio, rabies, ebola, etc.) might be uncovered.  These are real viruses, not the “viruses” listed by the writers of the articles mentioned above.  Some of these might be dangerous.  But there’s a caveat, and this leads to the second point I want to make.

Viruses, on the whole, are easier to kill than bacteria.  It is true that both viruses and bacteria can be preserved for a long time by freezing.  A dead body, whether animal or human, which is frozen soon after death to a temperature well below zero (and it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking Fahrenheit or centigrade here; cold is cold) can preserve any infectious agent reasonably well.  But the agent will begin to die off as time goes by.  Bacteria will generally be preserved longer.  Viruses I suspect would become inactivated more easily.  But there are so many variables—how soon after death the body was frozen, how deep in the frost it was, what the temperature was throughout the frozen state, how long ago it died—that I can’t even begin to make generalizations.  For some viruses, like influenza, for example, I suspect that if a prehistoric human who died of a strain of flu as potent as the 1918 strain were exhumed, it might not be too infectious, since the flu virus can be destroyed relatively easily.  But I can’t be sure.  There is one virus I would be very suspicious of, were a human carcass infected with it were to be uncovered, and that is smallpox.  In lab studies, smallpox is more difficult to kill than most other viruses, and this could raise some serious issues.  The problem is made worse by the fact that we don’t immunize people against smallpox any more, and that means that any researchers under the age of about thirty or forty who might be working with recovered human remains from permathawing could be at risk for the disease.  Perhaps this is a good reason to bring back smallpox immunization, at least for people working in this area, if not the population at large.

In summary, let’s start using the terms “bacteria” and “viruses” correctly to avoid confusion in the future, and let’s be careful exhuming any dead carcass, human or animal.  Diseases have killed animals probably for as long as animals have existed, and those nasty “viruses,” potentially at least, could come back and do it again.  We might even uncover a virus we’ve never seen before.

The High Tension of Life

In this blog post I want to talk a little about putting tension and conflict into story telling.  I’ve just  completed reading two science fiction novels (written by the same author) in which I believe the concept of tension was handled badly.  I’m not identifying the novels or the author for two reasons.  One, this is not a book review, and two, I’m not trying to cut down or disparage the books (you may actually like them); I’m only trying to make a point.  The problem with the books as I see them is that the author placed both protagonists in a state of high tension and internal conflict, and kept the unfortunate person in that state for virtually the entire book.  I found this situation almost unreadable.  Trying to read through this, page after page, chapter after chapter, was emotionally taxing on me as well.  Many times I wanted to toss the books away and not finish them.  (I did finish them, however, because I figured if I wanted to critique them, I’d better read the entire book.)  In short, that’s a terrible thing to do to your protagonist as well as to your reader.

Placing a novel character in such a state is so grossly unrealistic and unbelievable I find myself wondering how it got past the agency and the editor in the first place.  I’m surprised someone didn’t stop it before publication, or at least question it.  I certainly would never put one of my characters in such a desperate situation.  I might put them in that plight for a chapter or two, or three, but not for the whole book.  Tension and conflict are essential in a novel, of that there is no doubt, and it may be true that I don’t have enough of either in my books.  But tension and conflict should rise and fall like the tides.  Keeping a character in eternal tension is unrealistic, and even science fiction has to be “realistic,” at least to a certain degree.  Raise the tension occasionally; keep your characters sane (unless insanity is a part of the story).  If this is what it takes to get published in this day and age, I don’t want to have any part of it.

As a good example of the variation of tension, I offer the Alfred Hitchcock movie “To Catch A Thief.”  Not because it’s such a great example, but merely because I watched portions of it last night.  In the movie, a cat burglar has been retired for fifteen years, but now a copycat has started burglarizing the homes of the wealthy, and the retired burglar has to clear his name and prove to the police the break-ins weren’t his doing, or go to jail.  In his words “they’ll throw away the key.”  (Yes, even Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t above using a cliché.)  High stakes, no doubt.  But Hitchcock intersperses humor and lightheartedness throughout the movie, even though it takes the main character most of the movie to identify the real burglar.  I think that’s one thing that makes Hitchcock such a movie favorite; he knew how to handle tension.

As an unpublished author, perhaps I don’t know what I’m talking about.  Maybe lack of conflict and tension are my problem.  But I do know what I felt when I read the books, and I didn’t like it at all.  And that’s enough for me.

The Final Revision?

I’ve just finished a serious and rather lengthy revision of my first novel, a science fiction work of—in its final form—about 124,000 words.  This revision was prompted by reading about and talking to people about that nemesis of novel writers, the dreaded backstory.  You’ve got too much backstory in your novel, some people will say, many times without even reading your novel.  They may or may not be correct in every case, but I decided to take a long hard look at my first novel and try to do something about the backstory.  Was it too much?  Not enough?  Or just right?  I decided it was too much.  Not just too much, but way too much, and most of it had to go.  I had whole chapters (four of them to be exact) consisting of nothing but backstory.  Those chapters interrupted the flow of the narrative, and while they added some substantial information to the reader’s knowledge of the past history of the two main characters, they were basically wordy descriptions of nothing (or very little) that the reader actually needed to know.  So, out they came, all except one, and that one does reveal some vitally important information about one character’s early life.  Some important details about backstory from the material cut out I did manage to work into the narrative in little spots here and there, and I think the story is much better for it.

In cutting out the backstory so drastically, I reduced the word count from 127,000 to 122,000.  But there was a further change I needed to make.  Several years ago I pitched the novel to a New York literary agent, and she asked to see the whole manuscript.  Even though she eventually decided not to represent the novel, she made one comment that, at the time, left me somewhat confused.  She said she would have liked to know more about what was going on in the main character’s head.  To know what the main character was thinking.  At the time I didn’t know how to take that, because I thought I’d put enough in about what the main character was thinking, and I didn’t want to add more because the novel was too long as it was.  But now that I had removed so much backstory, I decided to revisit the agent’s advice and see what I could do.  So now the novel has grown from 122,000 to around 124,500.  Still leaner than before, although still rather large for a novel.  But I think much better overall.  Is this the final revision I need to make?  Stay tuned.

I will be attending the Pike’s Peak Writers Conference in late April this year, and will be pitching to an editor representing a well-known sci-fi publisher.  Perhaps this year will be the one.  Maybe he’ll like the new version.

Why don’t you check your novel?  You’ve probably got too much backstory in it.

Where Are You?

The title of this post isn’t meant to ask where you are in a spatial location, but in terms of time.  Where are you—where are we all, for that matter—in the life of this universe?  I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.  We all live on a rather attractive blue, white, green and brown planet circling a rather ordinary yellow-white star in a rather ordinary galaxy somewhere in the middle of billions of other galaxies which together constitute what we affectionately refer to as the “universe.”  This universe arose from a massive expansion of all matter and energy some thirteen billion years ago, and is rapidly expanding and expanding, apparently to go on forever, driven apart by wild forces within itself.  It will go on for time immemorial, never to return to its original state.  That’s, at least, the current thinking.

Here we are, sophisticated, sentient human beings, watching this all unfold, trying to make sense of it.  I’ve wondered, ever since I heard of the “big bang” hypothesis, which is the current favorite explanation of how we got here, if there isn’t an alternative explanation, that the universe will eventually run out of steam and collapse back onto itself in a sort of “big crunch,” or “big splat,” from which it would rebound into another expansion and another universe, and so on, ad infinitum.  That seems to me to be a more logical way for the universe to run than just one “bang” which blows up like a balloon and dissipates out in the nether regions, never to be seen again.  The “single bang” theory doesn’t explain what came before the expansion, nor what will come after it.  But that may be the way it really is.  Dark energy seems to be pushing the galaxies apart faster than dark matter can keep them together.

Philosophically, this is mind boggling.  We are the only species on this planet that really understands, to any degree whatsoever, the goings-on out there in space.  We’ve been watching the skies for thousands of years.  We’ve sent satellites into orbit to observe it.  We’ve sent men to the moon.  Do you think that cat or dog or goldfish or parakeet in your house cares much about the big bang?  Do the deer and the wolves in the forest understand that the little red dot in the sky is a cold, solid planet rather than a blazingly hot star?  Or even what a star is in the first place?  No, just us.  Yet we humans make up such a miniscule percentage of the universe, it’s difficult to estimate how many zeros I’d have to put down to the right of a decimal point to give that percentage.  We humans are what I might call “universe sentient.”  We know where we are, though we can’t travel very far in it.  We’ve seen the stars, the Milky Way, and some of the other galaxies that make up our universe.  We have a lot to learn, granted.  But we are capable of learning it.  We have the mathematical skills and computer skills to master the intricacies of the universe.  No dog or cat, or even chimpanzee, has that.  Most likely, other civilizations exist in our galaxy with similar skills, perhaps even more advanced.  (Maybe they can tell us if dark matter and dark energy really exist.)  But philosophically we are alone, and, I suspect, will remain alone for the foreseeable future.

The Caine Mutiny, A Critique

A few days ago I watched the movie “The Caine Mutiny,” for about the fourth or fifth time.  A great movie, and a solid member of my Favorite Movies list.  (You can see the list on this blog site.)  But as I watched the movie, a couple of strange and odd things gnawed at me.  I can remember thinking about this during some of those times I watched the movie before, so I decided to explore these questions in a little detail.

As a movie (released in 1954), it’s one of the all-time greats of World War II naval movies.  It was based on the Pulitzer Prize-(1952)-winning novel of the same name by Herman Wouk.  The Executive Officer of the USS Caine (played by Van Johnson) is moved to relieve his captain, Lt. Commander Philip Francis Queeg, played by Humphrey Bogart, during a storm at sea.  The executive officer is court-martialed (of course), but is acquitted.  Much of the evidence against Cmdr. Queeq is based on the idea that Queeg is “mentally unstable,” to use the words of his most senior crew.  And throughout the first several months that the Caine is commanded by Queeg, they document in detail several incidents they feel establish Queeg’s mental illness.  They say these incidents show he’s “paranoid,” even they don’t really know the meaning of the term.  During the court-martial, testimony reveals that three Navy psychiatrists have examined Queeg and declare him to be free of mental illness, and the conspirators get called on their “armchair psychiatry”.  How could they make such a diagnosis?  They’re not medical doctors.  But my viewing of the movie has consistently led me to wonder if Queeg isn’t really just scared.  That’s what it looked like it during the storm, when Van Johnson took over command of the ship.  The terror in Bogart’s eyes, and the fact that Johnson had to pry the captain’s arm from around some object on the bridge of the ship, perhaps the compass housing, as well as the fact that Queeg issues all sorts of unrealistic orders, orders that could conceivably sink the ship in the storm—all these point more to cowardice than paranoia.  At least, that’s the way Bogart played the character, and Bogart is a fine actor.  I don’t know if it was Bogart’s decision to play Queeg that way, or the director’s, Edward Dmytryk.  This is where the first difficulty comes in.

During the trial, the defense attorney,  played by Jose Ferrer, states quite explicitly that a  Captain in the US Navy could never be guilty of cowardice on duty, because he has to rise through the ranks to command his own ship, and anyone who ever exhibited any evidence of fear or timidity would be cut long before he reached command rank.  Yet that’s the way the captain was played, and it brought a question to my mind just exactly what the movie was trying to say.

The second difficulty I had with the movie was that the “real” reason the Executive Officer took over command of the ship had to do more with the manner in which the captain was handling it, not his paranoia.  All of that didn’t seem to matter at the time, though.  The ship was in imminent danger of capsizing, and only Van Johnson’s orders kept the ship upright and brought it safely into port, especially after it had sustained major damage.  I got the strong feeling from the movie that this was the “real” reason for the mutiny, not the Captain’s mental illness, but it never came up in the trial.  That seems rather odd.