Fan of sci-fi? Psychologists have you in their sights

Liu zishan via Shutterstock

Gavin Miller, University of Glasgow

Science fiction has struggled to achieve the same credibility as highbrow literature. In 2019, the celebrated author Ian McEwan dismissed science fiction as the stuff of “anti-gravity boots” rather than “human dilemmas”. According to McEwan, his own book about intelligent robots, Machines Like Me, provided the latter by examining the ethics of artificial life – as if this were not a staple of science fiction from Isaac Asimov’s robot stories of the 1940s and 1950s to TV series such as Humans (2015-2018).

Psychology has often supported this dismissal of the genre. The most recent psychological accusation against science fiction is the “great fantasy migration hypothesis”. This supposes that the real world of unemployment and debt is too disappointing for a generation of entitled narcissists. They consequently migrate to a land of make-believe where they can live out their grandiose fantasies.

The authors of a 2015 study stress that, while they have found evidence to confirm this hypothesis, such psychological profiling of “geeks” is not intended to be stigmatising. Fantasy migration is “adaptive” – dressing up as Princess Leia or Darth Vader makes science fiction fans happy and keeps them out of trouble.

But, while psychology may not exactly diagnose fans as mentally ill, the insinuation remains – science fiction evades, rather than confronts, disappointment with the real world.

The case of ‘Kirk Allen’

The psychological accusation that science fiction evades real life goes back to the 1950s. In 1954, the psychoanalyst Robert Lindner published his case study of the pseudonymous “Kirk Allen”, a patient who maintained an extraordinary fantasy life modelled on pulp science fiction.

Case studies from the edge. Schnoodles blog, CC BY

Allen believed he was at once a scientist on Earth – and simultaneously an interplanetary emperor. He believed he could enter his other life by mental time travel into the far-off future, where his destiny awaited in scenes of power, respect, and conquest – both military and sexual.

Lindner explained Allen’s condition as an escape from overwhelming mental anguish rooted in childhood trauma. But Lindner, himself a science fiction fan, remarked also on the seductive attraction of Allen’s second life, which began to offer, as he put it, a “fatal fascination”. The message was clear. Allen’s psychosis was extreme, but it showed in stark clarity what drew readers to science fiction: an imagined life of power and status that compensated for the readers’ own deficiencies and disappointments.

Lindner’s words mattered. He was an influential cultural commentator, who wrote for US magazines such as Time and Harper’s. The story of Kirk Allen was published in the latter, and in Lindner’s book of case studies, The Fifty-Minute Hour, which became a successful popular paperback.

Critical distance

Psychology had very publicly diagnosed science fiction as a literature of evasion – an “escape hatch” for the mentally troubled. Science fiction answered back, decisively changing the genre in the following decades.

What if Hitler had written science fiction? Amazon

To take one example: Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) purports to reprint a prize-winning 1954 science fiction novel. The novel is apparently written, in an alternate history timeline, by Adolf Hitler, who gave up politics, emigrated to the US, and became a successful science fiction author and illustrator. A fictional critical afterword explains that Hitler’s novel, with its “fetishistic military displays and orgiastic bouts of unreal violence”, is just a more extreme version of the “pathological literature” that dominates the genre.

In her review of The Iron Dream, the now-celebrated science fiction author Ursula Le Guin – daughter of the distinguished anthropologist Alfred Kroeber – wrote that the “essential gesture of SF” is “distancing, the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better”, including “our desires to lead, or to be led”, and “our righteous wars”. Le Guin wanted science fiction to make strange the North American society of her time, showing afresh its peculiar psychology, culture, and politics.

In 1972, the US was still fighting the Vietnam War. In the same year, Le Guin offered her own “distanced” version of social reality in The Word for World is Forest, which depicts the attempted colonisation of an inhabited alien planet by a macho, militaristic Earth society intent on conquering and violating the natural world – a semi-allegory for what the USA was doing at the time in south-east Asia.

The Vietnam War reimagined. Wikipedia, CC BY

As well as repudiating the worst parts of the genre, such responses implied a positive model for science fiction. Science fiction wasn’t about evading reality – it was a literary anthropology which made our own society into a foreign culture which we could stand back from, reflect on, and change.

Rather than ask us to pull on our anti-gravity boots, open the escape hatch and leap into fantasy, science fiction typically aspires to be a literature that faces up to social reality. It owes this ambition, in part, to psychology’s repeated accusation that the genre markets escapism to the marginalised and disaffected.

Gavin Miller, Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Curious Kids: why are some planets surrounded by rings?

Saturn is one of a few planets in our solar system surrounded by rings. Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock/Elements of this image furnished by NASA

Dr Rudi Kuhn, South African Astronomical Observatory

Curious Kids is a series for children in which we ask experts to answer questions from kids.

Why do Uranus and other planets have rings around them? (Lesedi, 6, Soweto)

For a very long time, Saturn was thought to be the only planet in our solar system with rings. The rings around Saturn were discovered by an astronomer called Galileo Galilei nearly 400 years ago. He used a very simple telescope that he constructed himself from lenses and pointed it at the planets in the night sky. One of the first objects he looked at was Saturn. At first he thought that Saturn had two large moons on either side of the planet because his telescope wasn’t very good and only produced very blurry images.

Since then, astronomers – who study the universe and everything in it, like planets – have used bigger and better telescopes to find rings around all of the outer gas giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. These planets, unlike others in our system, consist largely of gas.

We’re not sure how the rings work or how they formed, but there are a few theories.

Different theories

The first theory states that the rings formed at the same time as the planet. Some particles of gas and dust that the planets are made of were too far away from the core of the planet and could not be squashed together by gravity. They remained behind to form the ring system.

The second theory, and my personal favourite, is that the rings were formed when two of the moons of the planet, which had formed at the same time as the planet, somehow got disturbed in their orbits and eventually crashed into each other (an orbit is the circular path that the moon travels on around the planet). The stuff that was left behind in this huge smash could not come together again to form a new moon. Instead, it spread out into the ring systems we see today.

Since we don’t have the answers yet, we keep exploring and testing different theories.

What we do know is that the rings around the various planets are all slightly different from one another, but they all share some characteristics too.

First, they are all much wider than they are thick. The rings of Saturn, for example, are about 280,000km wide (stretching away from the planet) but only 200 metres thick. That’s like having a normal pancake on your plate for breakfast that is 14km wide.

The other thing that all rings systems share is that they are all made of small particles of ice and rock. The smallest of these particles are no bigger than dust grains, while the largest of the particles are about 20 metres in diameter – about the size of a school hall. All the rings around the planets also contain gaps that are sometimes many kilometres wide and at first nobody could figure out why. We later learned that the gaps were caused by small moons that had gobbled up all the material in that particular part of the ring system.

The biggest difference between the rings of Saturn and the other gas giant planets is that the particles that make up the rings of Saturn are very good at reflecting the light from the sun back towards the Earth. That means they appear to be very bright, which is why we can see the rings from Earth using a normal telescope. The extremely large number of particles trapped in the rings of Saturn also make the rings much bigger and wider; that’s another reason they’re easier to see than the rings of the other gas giant planets.

The particles that make up the rings of Uranus and Neptune contain elements that were darkened by the sun. These dark particles look very similar to pieces of coal or charcoal like you’d use to make a fire. This makes them much more difficult to see because they don’t reflect as much of the sun’s light back to us.

New discoveries

This is an exciting time for astronomy. More and more satellites and space probes are being launched from all over the world, which allows us to investigate the outer planets of our solar system. That means astronomers will have the chance to study these rings – and one day, hopefully, we’ll be able to answer all of your questions and more.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to africa-curiouskids@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age, and which city you live in. We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Dr Rudi Kuhn, SALT Astronomer, South African Astronomical Observatory

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How did supermassive black holes grow so fast?

This is a problem that has long plagued astronomers. Our current understanding suggests that in this time frame, only so-called intermediate mass black holes up to 100,000 times the mass of our Sun should have been able to grow. And while several theories for this rapid early black hole growth have been proposed, the answer remains elusive.

‘That is still a huge problem in astrophysics,’ said Dr John Regan, an astrophysicist from Dublin City University, Ireland.

Black holes form after a massive star runs out of fuel, sometimes resulting from a supernova and other times without a supernova, which is called the direct collapse scenario. Once a star has no fuel left to burn, it can no longer support its mass and collapses. If the mass of the star was large enough, it will collapse into an object with an immense gravitational pull from which nothing, not even light, can escape – a black hole.

As the black hole gradually draws in more and more nearby dust and gas it can grow in size, eventually reaching the gigantic proportions of a supermassive black hole, such as the first one ever imaged in April 2019. Scientists are now investigating whether supermassive black holes could have formed from supermassive stars which collapsed to form large ‘seed’ black holes, giving them a head start in their growth.  

Dr Regan coordinated a project called SmartStars, which used one of the most powerful supercomputers in Ireland, ICHEC, to model how supergiant stars might provide the seeds for supermassive black holes. The team wanted to see if these stars could account for the rapid growth of supermassive black holes, which we see at the centre of nearly every galaxy today.

250,000

They found such stars could grow up to 250,000 times the mass of the sun within 200 million years of the Big Bang – a tantalising result. However, even supercomputers have their limitations. The researchers were only able to model the future of such stars for a million years, but the modelling needs to cover 800 million years to see if these stars really could be the seeds of supermassive black holes.

‘It’s a really excellent starting point,’ said Dr Regan. ‘Over the next generation of supercomputers we’ll be able to bring those simulations further and further along.’

Other theories for how these black holes grew so quickly are that a tiny fraction of black holes grew at incredible rates, or that smaller black holes merged together to grow into a supermassive black hole.

Dr Muhammad Latif, an astrophysicist at United Arab Emirates University in Abu Dhabi, agrees with Dr Regan that the supermassive star model remains our best theory at the moment. Dr Latif was the principal investigator for the FIRSTBHs project which, like SmartStars, investigated the plausibility of the supermassive star model, using simulations on a supercomputer in France.

'It’s like going to kindergarten and finding a seven-feet tall baby.'

Dr Muhammad Latif, United Arab Emirates University

His project, which was carried out at CNRS in France, showed that supermassive stars could produce seed black holes hundreds of thousands of times the mass of our sun. ‘We found this method is basically feasible,’ said Dr Latif, explaining that these initial seed black holes are large enough to account for the growth of supermassive black holes of a billion solar masses in a small time frame.

However, it requires conditions in the early universe to have been just right for these black holes to form. Large amounts of material made of hydrogen and helium would be needed to form enough massive seed black holes to produce supermassive black holes, which appears to have been possible.

But other unexplained factors mean this is still an open question. The seed black holes would need to draw in matter at a rate of at least 0.1 solar masses per year, for example, and at the moment it is not clear if this is possible.

Observatories

Several observatories are already enabling us to probe black holes in the early universe with great detail. In October 2019, astronomers announced that they had used the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile to find a thick ring of dust and gas around a supermassive black hole inside a distant galaxy. With two gas streams rotating in opposite directions, it’s thought this ring could have fed the supermassive black hole with enough material to cause it to grow rapidly.

Previously, in August 2019, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory managed to spot a so-called ‘cloaked’ black hole growing rapidly when the universe was just 6% of its current age. A thick cloud of gas hides the black hole and its resulting quasar, a bright region of superheated material that surrounds it, but Chandra was able to spot it by seeing X-rays emerge from the cloud.

However, future telescopes will likely be needed to study the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in even more detail. For example, while we can predict the existence of seed black holes, we can’t yet see them. NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due to launch in 2021, may be capable of spotting some of the undiscovered seed black holes.

The European Space Agency’s Advanced Telescope for High Energy Astrophysics (ATHENA), meanwhile, set to launch in 2031, should give us an even better understanding of how supermassive black holes arise.

‘People are quite hopeful that we will get a rather better picture with the ATHENA mission,’ said Dr Latif. And maybe soon, we’ll finally know how these huge objects grew so big in such a short space of time.

‘It’s like going to kindergarten and finding a seven-feet tall baby,’ added Dr Latif.

The research in this article was funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.

This post How did supermassive black holes grow so fast? was originally published on Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine | European Commission.