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About Douglas Phillips
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Blog postAs an author of science fiction, I’m fascinated with invisible worlds – places that are very real, but beyond human senses. A particle accelerator (like the one described in Quantum Space) acts like a microscope capable of peering into the subatomic world, but also like a stopwatch able to slow high-speed particle collisions down to an event we can observe. They’re incredible machines.And, while I’m no particle physicist, I pretend to know one. Her name is Nala, and if I’m being completely
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Blog postSay you live in a dense city. Your apartment is on the 14th floor with tall buildings all around. And, for this mental exercise, let’s pretend you’re an avid voyeur. Each evening, you pull out your binoculars and spy on your neighbors. There’s a cute guy cooking dinner just across the street. In the next building over, an old woman reclines in front of the TV. You can even see what show she’s watching. In another apartment, lovers kiss, never realizing they’re being watched.You quickly realize
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Blog postMy first degree was in Physical Geography – the study of the Earth’s surface. Landforms, erosion, water cycles – that kind of thing. Our planet is a gem among millions and an inspiration as I learned its many secrets. Geography also involves lots of maps, something we cartophiles (map lovers) love. I’ve spent hours (or weeks) pouring over a single map. I post maps on my office walls. I even have an accurate map of the Milky Way which marks hundreds of stars, clusters, and nebulae. That map is a
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Blog postYou’re walking down a street. A stranger stops you, claims special powers, and pronounces that you left the bathroom light on in your apartment over on 85th street, forty blocks away. Naturally, you should: a) ignore this nut case and walk on, b) tell David Blaine to pester someone else, or c) ask if this stranger is a scientist. The correct answer is c, but you knew that in advance, right? If you’re like me, you already know and love the astonishing methods of remote sensing. If not, read on!
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Blog postEnglish. This language that many of us speak is quite old, with roots going back to the 6th century when it was brought to Britain by Saxons migrating from northern Europe. Every language evolves, but what I find most interesting about modern English is that it isn’t pure. Not even close. Many of the words we speak every day are borrowed from other languages, sometimes without us even realizing their non-English nature. Go to Starbucks, for example and order a venti cappuccino. Or make
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Blog postA few months ago, I posted a blog about the weak force (read it here), and it got me thinking about each of the processes of radioactive decay. There are three kinds: alpha, beta, and gamma. Alpha decay is when an alpha particle (two protons and two neutrons) is ejected from the nucleus of an atom. Alpha particles are low energy and short-range – they can be stopped by a piece of paper (or your skin) and fizzle out after one or two centimeters.Beta decay causes an atom to miraculously chan
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Blog postI’ve always enjoyed storytelling hiccups that involve the “fourth wall” – you know, that imaginary barrier between fictional characters and the audience. The name, fourth wall, comes from theater where performances have three physical walls, to the left, right and behind the stage. Characters in a stage play aren’t supposed to know that somewhere off in that fourth direction, there are people watching them. Once in a while, those characters figure it out, and that’s when the comedic fun begins.
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Blog postOur universe is quite organized, with physics that follows well-defined rules. For example, the only way bits of mass are pulled together or pushed apart is through a specific force. So far, physicists have discovered four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, gravity, the strong nuclear force that holds protons and neutrons together inside an atom, and the weak force that governs radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus. For years, I never quite understood that last one, the weak force, and whe
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Blog postNinety-one and five sixteenths. It’s an important number in the relationship between Earth and Sol. That’s how many times Earth rotates for each quarter revolution around our star. It’s equivalent to 365.25 rotations for each full trip around the sun, a number more recognizable to most people.But there are four key positions that our planet passes through each trip around the star: two equinoxes and two solstices, and the rotations between each position are almost exactly 91 and 5/16 *. We
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Blog postThanks for all the email. I love it! I thought I’d answer a couple of questions that came up for Quantum Time.Q: One thing I'm curious about is the issue of force (mass times acceleration) in empros time. People are moving so fast relative to forward time, that touching someone might impart a fatal contact.A: Several readers pointed this out! As Mathieu and Zin explain in the book, transitioning to empros time causes forward time to dramatically slow down to just a trickle. One tick of the
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Blog postWhat if this was the argument that we were having... ? A commercial break ends and the television switches to a busy newsroom. The Fair News talk-show host looks up from papers spread across her desk.Host: “Welcome back. In our next segment we focus squarely on the big debate raging across our country. Earthquakes. Are they natural? Or human-caused? Joining me now are representatives from both sides. Lawrence Temblor is a senior geologist with the State of California and is the author of the
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Blog postI’ve always enjoyed time travel stories, primarily because I’m fascinated to see how the author depicts the method of time travel. It might be a powerful machine that uses spinning crystals, a magic telephone booth, or a DeLorean fueled by garbage that accelerates to 88 miles per hour. When I read a story that skips the method (and many do) by suggesting the hero only needs to think about the year or rubs a magic penny to jump to that year, I usually tune out. Those stories tend to become
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Blog postThe aliens are coming and we’re in deep trouble! It’s a common theme in science fiction. Those evil overlords with their powerful weapons are planning to take over Earth and a) subjugate us as slaves, b) stick probes into our bodily orifices, or c) eat us. But why? What is it about Earth that these aliens covet?When writers get stuck, they invent something. One answer is that these slime-dripping arachnids covet our water. You see, their planet is bone dry, or maybe they used to have water,
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Blog postI write on a computer like every other author. But I also have a pile of paper on my desk, my hand-written design notes and sketches. Paper gives me a place to work out the plot, or handle the math, or just think about the geometry of multiple dimensions of space. This blog might be a little goofy, but I thought I’d share a few of the sketches and notes from the first three books.Let’s start with Quantum Incident. Do you recall the story where Daniel is called to Nevada to solve the mystery
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Blog postScience fiction and fantasy books often share shelf space in both physical and electronic book stores. I’ve never quite understood why. Okay, I see that both genres involve places, people and fantastic events that are beyond our current reality. Both genres introduce the reader to creatures that don’t exist in our world or the story dives headfirst into an entirely new world. So yes, there are similarities, mostly in settings and characters.But that’s where the similarity ends. In my opinion,
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Blog postImagine the Big Bang. What would it have “looked like”? A gigantic fireball? The most colossal fireworks explosion you’ve ever seen? A blinding flash of light?None of those comparisons come close, but hey, we’re only human. We have nothing in our world that compares to an event that couldn’t possibly have been “seen”. After all, at the moment of creation, even photons didn’t exist (not to mention eyeballs). Thus, any drawing of a cataclysmic explosion is not even close to what happened in the
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Blog postI’m a scientific tourist. Regardless of where I travel, I add science to the itinerary (often with full support from my wife). We visit observatories, laboratories and other famous places of science, including scientist’s homes. While planning a trip to Ireland, I was surprised to learn I’ll be staying just around the corner from where Erwin Schrödinger lived when he led the department of physics at Trinity College in Dublin. Cool, let’s go!Most people know the name Schrödinger from th
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Blog postCol. Sandurz: Prepare ship for light speed!Dark Helmet: No, no, no, light speed is too slow!Col. Sandurz: Light speed, too slow?Dark Helmet: Yes, we’re gonna have to go right to…ludicrous speed!Luckily, the Space Balls ship has just such a setting on their control panel and off they go to catch up with a flying Winnebago.In Quantum Space, Daniel Rice also suggests that light speed is too slow, but for a slightly more serious reason. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is mind-boggling big, about
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Blog post“I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.”Thus, begins the classic science fiction book, Flatland, written in 1884 by Edwin A. Abbott. Abbott was not a writer or a scientist or a mathematician – he was a school teacher – and while his story never had the impact of his contemporaries, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, it remains today a masterpiece of imagination.The story is told by A
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Blog postThe Infinity Motel. It’s a welcoming place where the vacancy sign is always lit. The room numbers start at 1 and by the time you get to room 24,578,378,833,012 you’re still no closer to the end of the hallway. Dang, should have opted for the suite by the pool.The concept of infinity isn’t easy to fathom. No matter how big a number you can imagine it’s puny by comparison. Here’s a pretty big number: if you could compact quarks literally side-by-side, how many would it take to fill the entire
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