Remembering Robert Winglee

The new year begins with some sad news. I’ve just learned that Professor Robert Winglee died suddenly over the holidays. He was a scientist I interviewed for Discover Magazine in 2001.

He was a professor at the University of Washington, but also worked with younger kids who were interested in science.

Those kids dubbed him “the Rocket Man.” His area of expertise was developing new propulsion systems to power humanity into a new era of space travel. If we’re ever going to get to Mars and beyond, we will need new ways to power our rockets. Winglee was just one of the many scientists devoting their lives to solving this fascinating challenge.

I really enjoyed meeting Dr. Winglee, and I’m saddened to hear of his passing. My condolences go out to his family and colleagues.

The short piece I wrote about Winglee is archived at Discover’s website. You can read it for free there. I am also reposting it here.

Rooting around in the detritus on his desk, Robert Winglee finds a quarter-sized magnet and waves it inches from his computer monitor, sending ripples of color scattering as light particles are deflected back toward the screen. He slowly brings together two magnets until they repel each other. Even at age 43, the Australian geophysicist never tires of performing tricks with magnetic fields.

Now Winglee has the go-ahead from NASA to perfect what could be his most promising trick yet: using an 8-inch magnet to propel spacecraft at speeds of up to 180,000 miles per hour—10 times as fast as the space shuttle. Winglee believes that if a satellite or spacecraft could inflate around itself a bubble-shaped magnetic shield as big as 25 miles in diameter, it could zip through space. The bubble in question is actually a field of magnetic plasma, and the bigger this field gets, the faster it will travel, powered by solar winds made of particles hurtling from the sun at a million miles per hour. The sun's cast-off electrons and ions move so fast they can easily be deflected by electric and magnetic fields to create what Winglee terms a mini-magnetosphere—with a greater surface area than that of projected solar sails. The mini-magnetosphere would also have greater thrust and travel much faster than a solar sail. To steer or brake, the craft would simply shift its magnet (and its field) like a rudder. With this system, spaceships could journey past Pluto in 10 years on as little as a pound of propellant a day, an amount that the shuttle wolfs down in 10 milliseconds.

Winglee and his colleagues at NASA and the Southwest Research Institute are currently bringing their idea to life in a lab chamber. There they inject a small amount of gas propellant into the center of a magnet that looks like a soup can open at both ends and measures 8 inches in diameter. As electrons are stripped off each gas particle by powerful radio waves emitted by an antenna inside the magnet, the mix grows into a very hot plasma. This gas expands and makes a brilliant white-blue light display as it pulls the magnetic field out, much like the inflation of a hot-air balloon. Of course this device, bolted to the chamber, is not about to fly anywhere, but the experiment proves that a relatively small magnet can be turned into a potent plasma power source.

His colleagues and former students have posted memories of Winglee various websites:

In Memory of Dr. Robert Winglee

NASA Watch’s tribute is here.

Washington Space Grant’s tribute is here.

The hashtag #WingItLikeWinglee is being used throughout the Twitter-verse. One such tribute is here.

Space image by Greg Rakozy via Unsplash.

Hacker News readers weigh in on my 2000 Discover article

Back in January I told you how an article I wrote for Discover magazine in the year 2000 was suddenly back in the news, garnering, among other things, a mention in a CNN piece. That same Discover story was recently re-discovered by a slew of readers at the computer science news site, Hacker News, sparking a thread of nearly 150 comments.

The thread is here, if you want to check it out.

A reminder: The 20-year-old Discover story asked scientists, physicians, and other experts to predict what life would be like in 2020. “What You’ll Need to Know in 2020 That You Don’t Know Now,” appeared in the September 2000 issue of the science magazine. Among other things, we reported that in 2020 we’d need to know how to talk to our homes, that we’d fret a lot about our online reputations, and we’d need to have our irises scanned to board aircraft. All sorta, kinda true, as the folks discussing it on this thread point out.

There are certainly some quibbles among the comments, which is what makes these kind of things interesting.

Does that mean I’m an “old” writer?

“Prepare Yourself for 2020”

If you’re interested, my original story lives on the Discover magazine website.

The CNN article is here. (My article is mentioned late in the piece.)

If you’re into science, my Discover story also appears in my nonfiction book, The Scientist and the Sociopath, which is a collection of my best science writing.

---

I hope you liked this post. If you want to stay better in touch, please consider signing up for my newsletter. I use that platform to talk about various writing projects, and upcoming books. As a thank you for subscribing, you’ll get a handful of ebooks, including one that you can’t get anywhere else.

Credit: Crystal ball image by Sasha • Stories on Unsplash

That Time I Predicted the Future–and CNN noticed…

Before January 2020 slips away, I should probably talk about how I ended up mentioned in a CNN article five days into this New Year. Before the old year ended, I started getting emails from various people–reporters, educators, others–asking me to comment on an article I wrote for Discover twenty freaking years ago.

In the year 2000, I wrote an article that predicted what life would be like in 2020. “What You’ll Need to Know in 2020 That You Don’t Know Now,” appeared in the September 2000 issue of the science magazine. Among other things, I wrote that in 2020 we’d need to know how to talk to our homes, that we’d fret a lot about our online reputations, and we’d need to have our irises scanned to board aircraft.

Am I a genius prognosticator and futurist? Hardly. I was just a reporter who interviewed a bunch of really smart people. As I recall, when the editors of the magazine hired me to write the story, they already had the title in mind but weren’t 100 percent sure that it would bear fruit. My editor and I drew up a list of scientists the magazine had worked with or had interviewed in the recent past, and set me free to contact as many as I could and ask them how they saw the future shaping up.

“Prepare Yourself for 2020”

At the time I thought some of the predictions were off the wall. The one about cleaning up our digital reputations, for example, seemed nutty to me. But in the year 2000, I had been surfing the web for all of three years. Social media as we knew it didn’t exist. Facebook wasn’t created until four years after my article, but geniuses like virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, quoted in my story, were already thinking about how such platforms would alter the way we interact with others and how we think of ourselves.

When I look at the article today, it feels like a lot of predictive literature—it’s only accurate if you look at it a certain way. Yes, some of us are talking to our homes, but does Alexa count? Some of us are having our irises scanned to get preferential TSA treatment, but most of us are shlepping our way through security the old-school way.

Actually, strike that. Not a single one of the scientists and thinkers I interviewed predicted 9/11—an event that occurred eleven months from the publication of that magazine issue. Indeed, none of the articles written by my fellow reporters in that futures issue predicted that a single act of terrorism would forever alter American life, security, and so on.

So I can completely understand the tone of the CNN article that gently mocks the predictions of futurists.

Anyway, if you’re interested, my original story lives on the Discover magazine website.

The CNN article is here. (My article is mentioned late in the piece.)

And here’s just a random article about how science fiction writers imagined the 2020s.

If you’re into science, my Discover story also appears in my nonfiction book, The Scientist and the Sociopath, which is a collection of my best science writing.

Here’s to a wonderful 2020 for all of us, and to a future most of us have barely imagined.

---

I hope you liked this post. If you want to stay better in touch, please consider signing up for my newsletter. I use that platform to talk about various writing projects, and upcoming books. As a thank you for subscribing, you’ll get a handful of ebooks, including one that you can’t get anywhere else.

Credit: Crystal ball image by Sasha • Stories on Unsplash

My Unpublished Interview with Astronomer Vera Rubin

In 1999, I wrote an article for Discover magazine about Ralph Alpher, one of a trio of scientists responsible for conceiving the Big Bang Theory. During the course of reporting that article,* I had occasion to interview Vera Rubin, the celebrated dark matter astronomer who died at the age of 88 on December 25, 2016. Articles (like these here and here and here) covering her passing noted that she ought to have received the Nobel Prize but never did, no doubt because she was a woman working in a field at a time when men dominated.

As it happens, my interview with Dr. Rubin touched on the painful topic of those who deserve but do not win Nobels. We were talking not about her work per se, but about Alpher and other male colleagues of hers. Her comments were insightful but I didn’t have room in the final story to share everything she told me. I’m releasing the brief transcript now because I think they shed light on Rubin's thinking on the matter, and because she and the three cosmologists at the center of the Big Bang story are no longer with us. (Gamow died in 1968, Herman in 1997, and Alpher in 2007.)

Back in the 1940s, along with his thesis advisor, George Gamow, Ralph Alpher wrote the first paper on the origin of elements in the universe. Later, he wrote a second paper with his colleague Robert Herman that theorized that the radiation of that first bang should still be bathing the universe. The men actually predicted how that 14 billion-year-old relic—called cosmic background radiation—could be found. At the time, radio astronomy was in its infancy and Alpher and Herman could not find scientists willing to gamble on their idea. But in the 1960s, they were proved right when a team at Princeton found proof of the Big Bang in exactly the way Apher and Herman had predicted.

The Princeton team received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for their work, yet the work of the earlier scientists was seemingly ignored. To make matters worse, later books and academic journal articles perpetuated the error by either incorrectly attributing Gamow, Alpher and Herman’s work, or ignoring it entirely. By then Gamow had died, but Alpher and Herman, who had left academic for industry during much of the ensuing years, devoted nearly 30 years of their lives trying to set the record straight.

Here’s what Dr. Rubin told me about how that miscarriage of scientific justice impacted the lives of the two men she called friends.

---

How were they affected by the whole thing?

I don’t think either of them put it behind them. It was a major factor in their lives. I think they both felt that they had been unfairly treated by the entire field. [My husband mathematician-physicist] Bob [Rubin] and I used to tell Bob Herman that we really thought they should just forget about it.

The fact that neither one of them were doing a lot of cosmology or astronomy really meant that their work just wasn’t in the forefront of astronomy. One way people learn about what you’re doing is by your continuing to do it. Your current work is always kind of a reference to your past work. But in their case, they both went off and did something very different, so there was no one to bring their early work to the attention of the community except them themselves. It was just an unfortunate circumstance, I guess.

But I think it bothered [and] continues to bother Ralph. I think it bothered Bob [Herman] too. There were constantly books written about the history that they didn’t think was correct, and they continued to write authors to make corrections. That’s probably what they should have done, but it meant it wouldn’t be something they could really put behind them. So I think these things were always continually being in the forefront. It’s been 33, 34 years.

Dr. Alpher says he’s writing a book to set the record straight once and for all.

I suspect that it will be a very bitter book. He and Bob Herman are very, very dear to us and it was a horrible injustice, but I don’t know what you do in such a circumstance. It would have been nice if he had had a happier life. They could have known that they did something very, very valuable and they could have been happy with this. I think perhaps injustices are in the eye of the beholder, unfortunately. But they were still the first people to do it and they did get a wide variety of enormously prestigious awards. Perhaps they could have asked themselves the alternative. It could have not been discovered during their lifetime. Wouldn’t that have maybe been worse? There’s no doubt that they could have been and should have been treated nicer by the community. They really do have a legitimate complaint. But they could have responded a little differently.

I think the truth is that in science, when I was very young a very wise man said to me, “In science most of your satisfactions have to be internal ones.” I think that that in a sense is correct; you have to be happy. They should have been exuberant with the work that they did. It was rediscovered. It was great. They had not gotten the recognition they deserved, but if their personalities had been different they could have been happy with the knowledge of this great thing they had figured out. And they perhaps could have even been treated better by the community if they had not just been so obviously angry.

I think they are remarkable, wonderful people, and they did something that was wonderful. It would have been very nice if that could have been such a joy that they could have embraced the community and which in turn might have embraced them. But none of that happened. 

They never forgot it, in ways that I can’t even repeat. But they could tell you who said something a little bit better and who said something a little bit worse. Sentences were examined in a way that I think the poor authors never intended them to be.

Bob [Herman] and Ralph have been very dear friends for a long time. With Bob [Herman] I or my husband have actually said, “Why don’t you, you know, talk him out of going on with this?” It never worked. It really affected them.

I don’t know if the Nobel Prize complicated things. If Penzias and Wilson had not gotten the Nobel Prize… But there too, and now I will say some things that are truly awful but this is how the establishment behaves. Someone has to nominate you for the Nobel Prize.

I didn’t know that.

Yes, yes, yes. [Nobel Prize-winning chemist] Harold Urey used to brag—I knew him and he used to brag that that 11 of the people he’d nominated had gotten Nobel Prizes. If you’re outside the establishment, you stand a much poorer chance of having these good things happen to you. If they really had not left the academic world, things may have been different. I really think there lies the explanation. Their lives might have been very different if they had remained in the academic world.

---

* The article is collected in my book, The Scientist and the Sociopath.

---

Yes, I am trying to post here more often. Thank you for noticing. If you want to sign up for my newsletter and claim your free ebook, go here.