Evecrumble: teaching physics from a galaxy far, far away

The prompt that got me off the sidelines in order to break a six-month hiatus in blog-posting was a conversation with my thirty-something son. He was telling me that one of the online games he used to play ‘back in the day’ was being re-released in its original form in response to prolonged lobbying by older gamers. Apparently these old-school players wanted to roll back the changes which, they feel, have made the game too easy. Thus, the classic version of ‘World of Warcraft’ is wowing its loyal fans even as I type. However, the current exploits of his balding Guild are not what I want to write about here. How could I, given that I know near-to-nothing about the game. No, what the conversation actually reminded me of was another game he used to play a lot: 'EVE'. EVE is set within a simulated space-based environment that attracted – and presumably still attracts – those who value the potential for internet-based gaming that relies on alliance-building and calculated risk-taking. I can remember listening with admiration outside his door to the disciplined voice traffic of the Corp and corp alliances my son played within as they organised and managed themselves: players from four or more countries and time zones learning the art of cross-border collaborative effort. He was evidently exceptionally good at it if one can take the entry from the Urban Dictionary I show below as any guide. But I digress …

My son chose the name Evecrumble for his online avatar. 

This image is a screen capture from urbandictionary.com

My real reason for drafting this post is that I was reminded once again that physics is everywhere – and that computer games are therefore fair game (sorry!) as sources for teaching material. I’ve already written in general terms about my exploration of university-level teaching using novel approaches (see here) and I’ll not repeat that content other than to mention the use of TV, film, novels and the press. With a great deal of student input to the process, I began compiling and using a library of physics-related snippets from a range of sources familiar to class members. A journalist in the USA heard about it; the story made the front cover of the magazine, which was nice – both for me and for the students who’d had a constructive input.

Science News was, and I believe still is, an American science magazine published by the Society of Science and the Public.

It just so happened that, whilst all this was developing, Evecrumble began to make videos centred on his various multi-national Corps’ activities. What a gift: now I could add online gaming to my portfolio of teaching aids. Armed with a CD copy of one such video I would encourage groups of students to watch, analyse and then voice their appraisal as physicists.

An excerpt from one of the game-play videos created by Evecrumble

This really is rocket science, of a sort. Watch a few minutes and see what you can spot – good, bad or ugly – that might prompt a question or two about the physics of the game. You’ll ideally need a full-sized computer screen since the tactical displays are small, and a darkened room (space is black); sound is optional. The full-length video runs for about 15 minutes; I have extracted about six minutes. Each of the campaigns portrayed will probably have lasted for several hours in ‘reality’.

Between them, and across the several years I used it, my lovely students found much to praise:

• the gas/dust clouds illuminated by stars within – might there be star formation occurring? See my post here for more;
• the fact that spaceship trails appeared curved as they altered course – the exhaust will leave along the axis of the ship from moment to moment; thus, as the ship turns the trail will appear to curve. This is reminiscent of the creation of cometary dust trails: the comet’s path might be an eccentric ellipse around the Sun, but the ‘engine’ propelling the dust is the solar wind and so the direction of the comet’s travel and that of its trail will not coincide.
• The conceptual design of spacecraft and of space stations created much discussion regarding the lack of frictional forces and the effect of reduced/micro-gravity on freeing one up to move beyond streamlined shapes. There have been plenty of images in the press/media of late marking the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on the Moon: immediately obvious is the fact that the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module – the bit that actually landed, part of which later took off again; see NASA library image below) could be light and ‘spindly’. It’s a bit of a tangent, but I wrote about the effect on my interests and passions of things like the Apollo programme in a previous post, here.

There were also areas in which the students discerned more than a little ‘licence’ on display; indeed there are certain aspects that would make most physicists wince:

• A whole swathe of these relate to the confusion between weight and mass: mass is intrinsic to any physical entity but weight arises from the action of gravity on the entity’s mass. For example, like the LEM shown above, whilst a spaceship need not adopt a streamlined (aircraft-like) design, its movement will still be affected by its shape – specifically, the distribution of its mass. The same formulae describe moments of inertia in space as pertain here on Earth: try to rotate the ship/station and those parts furthest from its centre of gravity will exert the most force on the connecting struts or framework. Now that I’ve introduced the ‘g word’ we need also to consider the matter of effective weights: as Einstein pointed out, an object which is being accelerated will, in effect, increase in weight. You can try this yourself the next time you travel in a moderately fast lift, although this is an experiment best tried in the company of understanding friends. You’ll need to fool your legs that there’s nothing unusual about to happen by walking gently around the lift before it takes off – we tend to tense our muscles without thinking and it’s important to avoid that. When the lift starts up, it will accelerate you up to its nominal rate of ascent; in that brief period of acceleration your legs will sense a heavier body above them. Exactly the opposite will happen as the lift begins its descent: the acceleration is now ‘negative’, and it feels like a weight loss. Our bodies are quite sensitive to acceleration. Acceleration is able to induce something akin to the effects of of gravity: it gives the objects an effective weight; they always possessed a mass, but now that mass is being accelerated and the object behaves as though it has weight. Einstein Theory of General Relativity showed us why it is that the forces created by gravity are actually indistinguishable from those generated by acceleration. EVE, and a very large proportion of all space-based science fiction, sets this aside by and large. (It’s the same with ‘super-hero’ stories.) Examine the rates of acceleration in EVE and it becomes apparent that the humans within each ship would not survive: the forces dwarf those experienced by Apollo astronauts.
• Another major issue is the need to slow down in space in order to bring your journey to an end. The fastest way from the proverbial point A to point B is to accelerate constantly for the first half of the journey (during which time the occupants will feel something indistinguishable from gravity remember) and then decelerate equally hard* for the second half. Only then would you come to a standstill at point B. In EVE, as is common elsewhere, the assumption is made that closing an engine down will bring the spacecraft to a halt. The truth of the matter is that the ship would continue onward at whatever velocity had been attained when the engine was turned off since there are no frictional forces – in other words, rocket engines firing in the opposite direction are needed in order to slow down. EVE goes further, as you’ll see in the video, by showing us ships with engines still running but which are nevertheless reducing speed.
• Beyond these topics came discussions on 'jamming' electromagnetic signals, hyperspace/warp drives and technology like the rail-gun. Students also picked up on the choice of units used: AU (an Astronomical Unit is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun) and m/s. Pick a scale folks! (See my earlier post here.) 

Good or bad, the screen footage of game-play served its purpose well by engaging students in reasoned discussions on Physics and for that I was more than satisfied. And when all’s said and done it’s only a game, isn’t it …?

Evecrumble herself, together with a couple of Corp logos from the time.

P.s. I’ll recount one extra interaction with a student, who got very excited when I told the class what was coming as a break from ‘Hollywood’ and the news media. His first contribution when I finished showing an approximately three minute excerpt was to ask whether Evecrumble was me. The look of expectation on his face was very special, but it turned to resigned disappointment when I said that I didn’t even play video games. However, he perked up when I said I knew Evecrumble quite well. He asked me to convey a message: “I was once in that Corp. Please tell Evecrumble that it was an honour to have served with him.” Perhaps it's not 'only a game' after all. I expect my face was a picture at that point; my son’s certainly was when I passed the message on. The choice of pronoun is also interesting. My son had quite purposefully created a female avatar for one good reason or another, evidently to no avail.


Footnote
* I am ignoring the fact that the ship’s mass is changing due to fuel loss. Having said that, if an ion drive is being used (see here) there may well have been refueling events en route – perhaps by collecting H₂O from a passing asteroid/comet. Such thoughts would require another blog post to consider properly …

Only in Moonlight

A major exhibition in The Turner Contemporary Gallery, in which selected works by JMW Turner (about whose theories of colour I wrote, here) are set alongside work by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, runs until May 6th 2019. There is an excellent five-minute video introduction to the exhibition here. I should be honest from the start: it was a bit of a geek-fest for me. I liked some of the individual works simply as pieces of art, don’t misinterpret me, but fathoming out the many links to astronomy, planetary science and so on rapidly took on the nature of a mild obsession. However, I had an unusually specific reason for wanting to spend a few hours taking in this particular exhibition …

One of the first images that caught my eye as I entered the exhibition space was this curiously coloured image towards the centre of the Milky Way. Its title is ‘Colour Field’(Katie Paterson, 2016). The artist had first removed all colour information – which had presumably been derived from combining original astronomical images recorded through specific colour-band filters – and then added back colour derived from a Los Angeles cityscape. In this one image we have a clear statement of the fact that we, and our cities, are all made from the atoms of our host galaxy.

Way back in January 2013 a colleague and I were chatting with the head of Turner Contemporary’s Learning team when the conversation veered off at the sort of angle that sometimes leads to serendipity. We were engaged in an experiment to bring together scientists and artist to discuss an up-coming retrospective exhibition of sculptures by Carl André (here). Although there was a slew of interesting outcomes – including invitations to take part in future interdisciplinary projects with Turner Contemporary – one tangible output from this engaging exercise was the brief animation available here. This ‘side road’ within our conversation concerned a proposal to send a ‘meteorite’ into space. The artist, we were told, was seeking funding and facilities from the European Space Agency in order to send a chunk of re-caste meteoritic material back into space “in a celebration of science, art and human technology”. The artist in question was of course Katie Paterson – and her proposal to ESA resulted in a fist-sized chunk of meteorite being ferried to the International Space Station in May 2014. The ESA web site has a write-up here. I would have loved to have been involved in some way, but a chemical physicist/materials scientist like me could never have provided the sort of expertise she needed. Having now seen the exhibition of her work, including the piece associated with her ‘meteorite’ proposal, I am doubly disappointed because I suspect I’d have learned a lot from collaboration with her. (I was, it must be said, up to my neck in my ‘day job’ as an academic at the time so, in truth, it would have been a difficult project to fit in.) Thus, a fascinating conversation and follow-up email evaporated away … until the doors opened to this exhibition.

The obvious exhibit to focus on in this context is ‘Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky’ since that derives from her work with metallic meteoritic material. My photo of the piece (taken with permission, please note) is shown below. This piece derives, apparently, the largest of a set of five iron-based meteorites; it was the smallest meteorite that was used for the trip back into space aboard an unmanned supply shuttle to the International Space Station. The original meteorites were approximately 4.5 billion years old – as one might expect given that this is the age of the solar system and thus the bodies within it. In passing, the recent missions to comets and asteroids relate to bodies which are of comparable age; unlike the other rocky planetary bodies we’ve explored ‘up close’ – Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus – these smaller wanderers remain largely unchanged since the solar system was formed. Hence the scientific value of missions such as NASA's Stardust (here) and Japan’s Hayabusa (here) which were designed to collect pristine material and return it to Earth, and the expectations associated with the next generation of missions already underway. Katie Paterson’s idea, which is what I heard about way back in 2013, was to take a cast of these iron-based meteorites and then re-melt them into their casts. We therefore have a remnant from the early period of the solar system’s existence which has travelled to Earth and thereafter been transformed by the artist’s conscious intention into a version of itself before being sent back into space, albeit in near-Earth orbit. 

Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky by Katie Paterson (2012-14).

Iron-based meteorites do in fact contain other metals, such as nickel (both metals are amongst my favoured elements – see here) and may well have minerals within them as well. They are mostly the remnants of ancient asteroids, the more volatile parts having melted away to leave only the densest material as a residual core. For an overview of these and other types of meteorites I recommend the Natural History Museum’s website, here. Melting an iron-based material requires a furnace capable to reaching temperatures in excess of 1538ºC; I’ve done it, using a home-made furnace during my PhD in the mid-70s; it’s not easy.

Three other pieces amongst a host of thought-provoking items in the exhibition particularly excited my inner scientist: two by Katie Paterson herself and a cabinet of work by Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschel. The two contemporary pieces used sound and light to encourage a novel look at our relationship to the Sun and to the Moon. ‘Totality’ fills an otherwise gently-lit room with bright reflections from a rather special rotating mirror ball, illuminated by a couple of spotlights. Walking slowly through the moving 3-D pattern of reflections was quite disorienting – a fact which serves merely to pique my interest. Key to the piece is that the ‘mirrors’ on the ball are derived from images of solar eclipses, originally recorded over a span of time from the present day back through early nineteenth century photography to drawings made centuries ago. Using headphones, supplied by the ever-friendly gallery staff, one may augment the experience by listening to one of two audio pieces created by the artist to complement the piece. Then there’s the automated Steinway grand piano which sits – or perhaps that should be plays – at the heart of ‘Earth-Moon-Earth’, which is installed in the same room as the Totality mirror ball. The concept of piece is ostensibly fairly straightforward: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was turned into Morse code (- a process I would have liked to have had more information on) which was transmitted to the Moon. The reflected signal was turned back into a musical score and output via the piano. The surface of the Moon is such that the signal is altered on its return. Whole notes are missing, sometimes several in a row, and this creates an intriguing pseudo-new sonata in which the pause becomes integral to the whole. As a probe of the Moon’s cratered and mountainous surface, this artwork provides one of the most novel methods I’ve come across.

Totality, by Katie Paterson (2016).

Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon),  by Katie Paterson (2007).

Finally, I couldn’t help but mention a cabinet containing a few opened books containing the original notes of observations made by the astronomer Caroline Herschel. These include the page shown below on which she records discovering her first comet (1st August 1786), and a corresponding letter to the secretary of The Royal Society containing the news. Alongside these sat examples of the enormous number of numerical calculations she undertook – published, it is sad to note, in her brother’s name because of The Royal Society’s rules as they were at the time. She was a contemporary of the talented mathematician Mary Somerville, some of whose work is also shown. 

Who says art and science can’t communicate! Personally, much of the creative writing I’ve delved into since ‘retiring’ remains informed by my experiences as a scientist: like so many others, I write out of who I am, often to make sense of my own thoughts. Coincidentally, a longer piece I started a couple of months ago, currently set aside for a season, includes an astronomer looking back to the Earth from the Moon. She stands bathed in Earthshine.

(If you’re interested, there are several posts in this series in which I describe some of the opportunities I’ve had to explore the hinterland between these pursuits, unfortunately treated as disparate in recent decades.)