On the Fringe at Comic-Con

July 27, 2009

I love Comic-Con. Where else can you wear an embroidered purple steampunk trenchcoat and not have anyone bat an eye? Because that's practically a Brooks Brothers ensemble compared to the guy decked out in a Robin Hood costume. And where else do you overhear people complaining that the hordes of zombies crowding into the streets are really holding things up? (Personally, I think zombie hordes add a certain je ne sais quois to a festive evening on the town.)

We rolled into San Diego Thursday afternoon, so I could be on hand for the science and science fiction panel my organization, The Science & Entertainment Exchange, put together in conjunction with Discover magazine. I had enough time beforehand to wander through the exhibit hall with Bad Astronomer Phil "Death from the Skies" Plait, geeking out over the replica Enterprise captain's chair and latest offerings from film, TV, gaming, and comics. I got to meet one of my favorite Webcomic artists (and fellow physics phreak), Zach Weiner, who draws Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and check out the local coffee shop that transformed itself into the fictional Cafe Diem from Eureka for the weekend. (Eureka creator/showrunner Jaime Paglia stopped in Thursday evening and was instantly mobbed by fans of the show.)

Paglia was just one of the featured speakers on our panel, which also included JPL's Kevin Grazier, the technical consultant for Eureka (he also advised on Battlestar Galactica), and Phil as Moderator with the Most. Also on hand were Rob Chiappetta and Glen Whitman, both staff writers on Fringe, and one of their tech consultants, Ricardo Gil da Costa of the Salk Institute.

And finally, Jane Espenson rounded things out; she's written for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Battelstar Galactica, Dollhouse -- really, the list goes on and on. Espenson is Comic-Con royalty by now. These days she is the showrunner for the forthcoming BSG spinoff, Caprica, which just started shooting a few days before. (Espenson promised lots of "hot robot action coming soon!")

I'll go right ahead and say that these folks are putting out some of the most well-written, thought-provoking and boundary-pushing sci-fi on TV these days. The clips shown from each show ably demonstrated that. And as panelists, they didn't disappoint: it was a lively, substantive, and often funny discourse on the crucial interplay between science and science fiction.

Science, of course, plays a vital role in all of these shows, even though all three are very different in theme and tone. (Eureka is a dramedy, Fringe is partly "a horror show," per Whitman, and Caprica is -- well, I guess we'll see when it premiers this fall, but based on the clip (and BSG), it's definitely slanted toward serious sci-fi drama.)

Robotics, AI, cloning, brain imaging, transgenics, icky viruses run amok, "smart homes," and dimension-hopping to a parallel universe all figure prominently in the various plotlines. And therein lies their appeal to both head and heart. Cutting-edge science -- particularly the game-changing, revolutionary breakthroughs -- invariably comes with troubling implications for society, even morality. "Science fiction is a reflection of our current standing in our moral decisions," Phil observed.

For instance, the panelists mused on the ethics (and philosophical implications) of downloading someone's consciousness into a cloned body, not to mention the legal questions that might be raised. The Caprica clip showed two men debating whether or not such a creature was really one of the men's daughter, or simply a perfect facsimile, prompting questions about the nature of human identity. Espenson acknowledged that the writers had debated fiercely about whether this constitutes some sort of "afterlife," adding, "I think we should all worry about being downloaded and put into robots."

Season 2 of Eureka featured an episode where a man's wife comes back from the dead, only to find her husband is now living with a clone of her, with whom he has had a child. The child is genetically "hers," yet she feels no maternal instincts. Does she have a legal obligation to this child, Pagila wondered? (Grazier pointed out that DNA testing means she couldn't prove the child wasn't "hers.")

What about Fringe's Walter Bishop, who uses some semi-fictional brain-reading technique to extract information from a recently deceased person? It almost seems like torture, Phil observed -- so is it ethical, even though the guy is technically dead?

Gil da Costa, as the representative neuroscientist, assured us that "the neurobiology happening at the Salk Institute is a lot more tame than what what you see on Fringe," but there are existing brain imaging techniques that can extract information from the brain. He cautioned, however, that this data "is very tricky to interpret because we don't understand the brain fully yet. The brain doesn't lie, but what we get is our biased interpretation. You cannot always directly transpose laboratory advances socially and legislatively." (Quipped Whitman: "We need a Law & Order: Fringe to debate the ethical issues.")

Where do they get their ideas? Sometimes the writers draw on breaking headlines in the news as inspiration for their stories; sometimes they come up with a compelling story and then try to find science that makes the scenario semi-plausible. And not all of the ideas end up working their way to the screen: Paglia bemoaned a discarded episode toying with Attack of the Killer Tomatoes on Eureka. (Look for it on Fringe, Season 5, joked Whitman.) Incidentally, Grazier swears he has a plausible scientific explanation for the glowing spines on BSG, but apparently it's not the sort of thing one can share in polite company.

What about maintaining that all-important balance between science and science fiction? Just how far can sci-fi writers push the boundaries of plausibility? "From an audience perspective, you want to start with something that's more grounded, and then take them on that ride," said Chiappetta of the approach on Fringe. "Start with familiarity, easy to understand concepts, because then you get the opportunity to push people's buttons. We want to be 'science next,' 10-15 minutes into the future as opposed to a year in the future." While bemoaning the inherent limitations of the 42-minute format for Fringe, he and Whitman acknowledge that much of the audience doesn't really want in-depth explanations on primetime TV, and will "tune out the science if it starts getting too complicated."

Paglia said that the manifesto for Eureka is that "we don't want to cross over into magic, things that are not yet scientifically possible at all." Espenson also shies away from "the mystical stuff," preferring story lines where "the magic is technology. We are so limited that we grasp for magic when it's physics we don't understand yet." Paglia agreed: "The closer you look, the more magical the science is. Heck, I want to know how my iPhone works because it's magic to me!" And Phil quoted the incomparable Carl Sagan in closing: "It does no harm to a sunset to know a little bit about it."

Ultimately, of course, these shows are fiction; they are not documentaries. Exactly how accurate does the science have to be, when the primary objective is to entertain and tell a good story? I usually tell people that shows like Caprica, Eureka and Fringe serve a broader purpose of inspiring audiences to take a closer look at real-world science. "So many scientists go into science because they want to be Captain Kirk or Spock," Grazier said. (Apparently sci-fi action figures abound in JPL's offices.)

And chatting with Chiappetta after the panel, he mentioned that they had selected the particular Fringe clip shown because it demonstrates Walter Bishop employing the scientific method -- in his own madcap, zany way. That said, it's still fiction. Chiappetta cautions, "The general rule of thumb is that if you see Walter do something on Fringe, don't try it at home!"

Photos: (top) Jane Espenson waxes profound while Jaime Paglia and Kevin Grazier look on. Source: Phil Plait, via Twitter. (bottom) Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Source: Zach Weiner.

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World's First Weightless Wedding

June 22, 2009

Some kind of space history was made over the weekend, as NYC couple Erin Finnegan and Noah Fulmor exchanged wedding vows while in zero gravity aboard G-Force One -- affectionately known as "the vomit comet." The aircraft flew a series of 15 parabolas, resulting in five "weightless" intervals of 30 seconds. The quickie ceremony was performed during those intervals, with some room for second takes just in case, say, the bride or groom threw up.

At heart, the vomit comet is the world's most awesome roller coaster, taking such extreme lifts and dips in its parabolic trajectory that it can achieve a reasonably sustained freefall (about 20-30 seconds of freefall out of every 65 seconds). The ride starts with a steep, 45-degree climb, followed by a dip downward, during which those precious moments of weightlessness can be experienced.

Getting married in zero gravity does present some unique challenges to a wedding planner. Finnegan wore a specially designed gown with a tiered skirt designed to billow out in all directions -- with pants underneath so the bride need not worry about revealing her undergarments as she tumbled about for the full weightless experience. They couldn't get insurance for the wedding, although it will be legal, since the airpace over Cape Canaveral is still within the state of Florida's jurisdiction.

Chief among the obstacles was the exorbitant cost. I know weddings run up ridiculous tabs these days, but the bride and groom and their seven family members/guests forked over $5400 per person. (An anonymous soldier in Iraq paid for half the ticket for Finnegan's mom, who was understandbaly a bit sqeamish at both the price and the zero gravity .) They also had to cover the cost of an onboard photographer and videographer -- becuase this was definitely a wedding that cried out for photographic documentation.

Was it worth it? Probably -- that's certainly a wedding day one is unlikely to forget. And the happy couple have been space enthusiasts since they were kids; among other things, they hope their nuptials can raise awareness for the future of private space exploration. "We're saying, the future is going to be awesome," Fulmor told New Scientist. "The future is here if you want it. We're getting married in zero gravity!"

Mazel tov to Finnegan and Fulmor...

He Watches the Watchmen

February 25, 2009

Science fiction/superhero fans are on tenterhooks waiting for the imminent release (in a couple of weeks) of the long-awaited film adaptation of the Watchmen graphic novel. I've been reading it the last few days, and man, is it an impressive piece of fiction. Dark, disturbing, unrelenting in its depiction of a doomed society, yet with glimmers of hope here and there to ward off any bitter aftertaste.

I won't bore you by rehashing the premise; you can learn all you need to know right here. Suffice to say, it deals with a group of retired (and deeply flawed) superheroes who regroup when their former members start getting picked off one by one, to try and save the world from nuclear Armageddon -- or to save humanity from itself.

The tagline for the movie is catchy: "They watch over us. But who watches them?" When it comes to the science behind the superheroes, the answer is Jim Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota and author of The Physics of Superheroes. When the National Academy of Sciences' Science and Entertainment Exchange -- then still in its pilot phase -- was looking for a good technical consultant for the film, Kakalios was an obvious choice. Who better to consult on a movie about the science of superheroes than someone who literally wrote the book on the subject.

And yes, there is lots of science in Watchmen, most notably Dr. Manhattan, a nuclear physicist who got disintegrated in a nuclear accident (oopsie!) and somehow figured out how to rearrange his atoms into some semblance of a human form. Oh yes, he can teleport, and manipulate atomic structure at will. But that's just one example. There's science in just about everything if you look for it. Check out this YouTube video the university just released, in which Kakalios gives the skinny on the science:

Lessons from an Ancient Art

February 14, 2009

Lots of scientists have favorite hobbies, but it's rare that those hobbies blossom into an exciting new branch of research. But that's just what happened to Robert Lang, a former NASA researcher whose 40-year fascination with the Japanese art of origami led to his pioneering an intriguing cross-disciplinary interweaving of origami with mathematics. He's now recognized as one of the world's leading masters of the art, as well as a leading consultant on various practical applications of origami to common engineering problems: using the underlying algorithms to simulate air bag deployment, for example, or to design a stent graft.

That's right, folding a sheet of paper with no cuts into intricate shapes has more than mere aesthetic appeal. And he told rapt listeners all about his fascinating work this afternoon at the AAAS meeting in Chicago in his talk, "From Flapping Bird to Space Telescopes: The Modern Science of Origami." The fundamental question is this: given a desired subject, how do you fold a square of paper to produce a recognizable representation of the subject? According to Lang, four simple laws can give rise to very rich complexity in origami. They have to do with properties of crease patterns, angles around a vertex, layer orders, and valleys and ridges.

I won't go into all the gory details, but you can find a handy little program called TreeMaker on his website detailing the fold patterns needed to make just about anything, based on whatever little stick figure shape you enter: a bull moose, a tarantula, a common household cockroach, for example. This assumes one has sufficient manual dexterity to follow those instructions, however. Based on my disastrous childhood attempts at knitting, crochet, and most other forms of the crafty arts, my chances of managing anything more advanced than your basis crane -- something Japanese schoolchildren master right out of diapers -- are pretty slim.

It's the real-world applications that caught my interest, most notably the reference to space telescopes. What could origami possibly have to do with that? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Back in 1995, says Lang, we achieved the "first origami in space," in the form of an intricate solar array based on origami designs.

The James Webb Space Telescope currently being built features a multiply segmented mirror that neatly folds into thirds for the telescope's deployment sequence. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory face a major challenge in the design of the 100-meter lens for their "Eyeglass" telescope intended to orbit 25,000 miles above the Earth. The lens -- roughly the size of a football field -- has to fold down to about 3 meters (there's currently a 5-meter prototype that colds to about 1.5 meters), and the mathematical underpinnings of origami could help solve that particular conundrum.

Finally, origami has found its way into the design of solar sails, a space technology that enables space craft to be propelled by the pressure of the sun’s radiation. Solar sails must be packed in such a way as to unfold without requiring gravity to straighten out any creases. In 2005, Japanese scientist Taketoshi Nojima made science headlines when he demonstrated that an origami sail can be compacted into a very small space. It is also more energy efficient than other designs since it uses the least possible surface area and opens in one motion by pulling on opposite sides of the structure (see photo).

All in all, it was quite the fascinating talk. Fortunately, just because you're not at the AAAS meeting doesn't mean you have to miss out entirely. Last year Lang gave a TED talk along similar lines, which is easily downloaded from the Intertubes:

Photo: A compressed paper model of the solar sails from a space satellite, unfolded into a lovely origami spiral. Source: Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Iron-Clad Science

December 06, 2008

Nothing draws a crowd like an alien visitor, particularly if said alien arrives in a nifty, planet-like spaceship and takes the form of Keanu Reeves. Last night, Caltech students -- and lucky members of the public who were able to snag one of the few remaining tickets -- packed a campus auditorium to capacity to view a clip from the remake of the 1950s classic sci-fi movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, followed by a panel discussion featuring Reeves, director Scott Derrickson, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll (a.k.a., my Spousal Unit), and Caltech robotics specialist Joel Burdick.

Moderator Maria Spiropulu, a high energy physicist at CERN and new faculty member at Caltech, fielded questions from the audience on everything from the likelihood of life on other planets, whether Cylons will ever be a reality (and whether Burdick secretly had some stashed away in his lab), and what sci-fi classic they'd most like to see made into a movie -- a question that stumped everyone except Derrickson, a hard-core sci-fi buff. He said he thought science fiction novels were way ahead of movies in terms of development, citing Dan Simmons' epic Hyperion series as one example of something he'd like to bring to the big screen. Apparently Derrickson likes a challenge. There was even one smart-alecky, jargon-heavy technical question for Carroll about a physics paper he'd submitted the day before. ("These are the strangest questions we've ever gotten," Derrickson ruefully observed at one point.)

But let's face it: Reeves was the biggest draw, and he gamely played along, responding with admirable good humor to the constant jokes about his uncanny ability to portray an alien, non-human being named Klaatu. Asked how he'd prepared for the role, he dead-panned, "I read the script." And in response to a question about why he plays so many Messianic-type roles, he simply said that he was drawn to characters who were "searchers."

The Day the Earth Stood Still hits theaters next week, but I had the chance to attend a screening of the film the night before, and can report that there are some truly fine touches to the remake. First, the cheesy UFO-style spaceship in the original has been replaced by a giant sphere whose surface has swirling atmosphere-like gases, and even the occasional bolt of lighting. The press release describes the concept as a "temporal space translator -- a movable portal that Klaatu and his people use to maneuver from one world to another."

Klaatu's robot protector, Gort -- originally played by a 7-foot tall man in a silvery suit -- is now entirely CGI-generated, and pretty darned chilling in its sentient-yet-machine-like efficiency in responding to violent actions. And some very real near-term technology also makes an appearance as the film's scientists explain the genetic coding of Klaatu's human body: Microsoft's prototype Surface Table, an interactive tabletop that looks like a flat-panel computer screen, which responds to hand movement and any objects set upon the table. Think the iPod Touch in table form. Apparently Microsoft has plans to use the Surface Table commercially in bars and restaurants, "where customers will be advised how much their drinks cost and be given recommendations for other beverages when they set their drinks on the table."

The filmmakers took a cutting-edge approach to the depiction of the alien life form, too, which traditionally have been portrayed as humanoid, carbon-based life forms quite similar to life on Earth. "A progressive alien civilization might be based on advanced biology and ecology and systems that are more organic than the hardware we've come to expect from sci-fi over the last 60 years -- flying saucers, spaceships, laser blasters," said Derrickson. That's why Klaatu -- envisioned as a "being of light" (rendered in CGI) -- shows up in an organic "spacesuit" of gray tissue resembling human placenta, serving as an incubator for the human body the alien ends up inhabiting.

The scientific jargon was reasonably correct, too, as evidenced by the exchange between Klaatu and the physicist played by John Cleese in a short, but pivotal scene in which no words needed to be spoken by way of introduction: just the language of advanced mathematics. Carroll, naturally, was delighted that a theoretical physicist was chosen to represent the best of mankind's higher nature -- and noted that he'd recognized the equations on the blackboard as pertaining to dark energy: "If an alien being from a highly advanced civilization were to land on Earth, that would definitely be the first thing I'd ask about."

Much of this was the outcome of the various technical consultants Derrickson and his team hired to help them write the script and design the look of their futuristic world. The most involved was Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with the SETI Institute who helped develop the central astrobiology in the film, reading the script and making corrections as needed so that the film -- while entirely science fiction -- nonetheless made some scientific sense. Derrickson joked that initially he was chagrined to get the first draft of the script back from Shostak with huge sections crossed out as being wrong-wrongedy-wrong. Derrickson needed more than that, and wasn't afraid to say so: "I said, 'Okay, I get it, the draft was wrong, now stop being so condescending and help me figure out what the lines should be.'" And Shostak came through with some pretty interesting stuff.

Great things can come out of these sorts of "What if...?" collaborations, from both the entertainment and scientific standpoints. As Carroll put it, "Scientists work at the edge of what we know and don't know, but there are some fascinating speculative questions that simply can't be empirically tested. The thought experiments provided by science fiction are a great way to creatively explore those questions." And it explores them in an exciting, visually appealing way -- with killer robots! And massive explosions!

When Carl Sagan was writing Contact, for instance, he spent a considerable amount of time working with Caltech physicist Kip Thorne (author of Black Holes and Time Warps) to come up with a theoretically acceptable premise for interstellar wormhole travel and time travel -- a concept preserved in the 1997 film version starring Jodie Foster. In fact, it is now a convention of the of science fiction genre. And Thorne's work has also inspired countless technical papers in an equally ground-breaking area of theoretical physics/cosmology.

And it's not just the technological marvels and fringe science that can find their way onto the silver screen; the scientific method and culture of science is just as important. Jennifer Connolly plays astrobiologist Helen Benson, and from a science standpoint, I thought her first scene -- teaching a class about extremophiles and asking them to determine which species would most likely be able to survive on Callisto -- was an excellent depiction of a major part of scientific life: teaching.

Similarly, I loved this summer's blockbuster Iron Man (starring Robert Downey Jr. as flawed MIT genius-turned-superhero Tony Stark), not so much for the special effects and jaw-dropping futuristic technology, but for the way it depicted the scientific process: an idea, a laboratory prototype, careful testing through trial and error to refine the design and iron out bugs (eg, the infamous "icing problem"), until one produces a truly awe-inspiring piece of technology. Scientific progress, like most worthwhile human endeavors, is more about imagination backed by practical hard work than outright magic -- even if the end result seems pretty magical. Kinda like the movies...

Photo: Publicity still from The Day the Earth Stood Still, starring Keanu Reeves. Source: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

November 13, 2008

This year's "Large Hadron Collider Rap" was a bona fide YouTube sensation. But singing songs about physics is a long, time-honored tradition that originated in England. At least that's what physics professor Walter Smith of Haverford College says. Smith runs what he describes as the premiere online collection of physics songs in the world. (You might snarkily observe that it is the only such collection. But you'd be wrong.)

The illustrious 19th century physicist James Clerk Maxwell -- author of the famous wave equations for light -- also composed alternate lyrics to the then-familiar folk song "Comin' Through the Rye," substituting the meeting of two young lovers with a rumination on the physics of collisions. By the early 20th century, Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory had made singalongs a tradition of their winter holiday parties, with participants like J.J. Thomson (who discovered the electron in 1897 and snagged a Nobel Prize for his trouble) standing on chairs and singing parodies at the top of their lungs. One assumes that copious pints of beer were involved.

Before he achieved national fame for his satirical ditties, Tom Lehrer was a physics grad student at Harvard, where he penned an entire musical show called The Physical Revue. (The title parodies a leading physics journal, The Physical Review.) And for the last couple of years, the American Physical Society (publisher of said Physical Review) has sponsored an evening physics singalong at its annual March meeting -- just as a way to unwind a bit after three full days spent juggling 15 different parallel technical sessions on everything from superfluidity and evolutionary dynamics to exotic nanostructures.

That's a scientific tradition with universal appeal, I think. Who can resist They Might Be Giants crooning, "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas..." -- not to mention the entire "Schoolhouse Rock" oeuvre? Although the gold standard, in my opinion, is Monty Python's "Galaxy Song":

Always Chasing Rainbows

October 05, 2008

The South Pole is a prime location for scientific research, most notably those who study neutrinos, and those interested in meteorology. That doesn't make it a friendly work environment: it is bitterly cold, with temperatures averaging -40 degrees F during prime research season (and wind chill factors of 100 degrees below zero). Just to get there requires several different airline flights over many days, and the final leg is an 800-mile flight from the coast of Antarctica to the Pole in a cargo plane, which keeps idling as everyone piles out and unloads the cargo, lest it freeze up in the interim. In fact, certain times of year it's not even possible for a plane to land.

But the location has it perks, too, thanks to all the tiny ice crystals scattered throughout the atmosphere. When sunlight reflects and refracts off of them in just the right way, the result is a dazzling ice crystal halo -- the South Pole's version of a rainbow.

I first heard about ice crystal halos many years ago from Robert Greenler, a retired physicist (professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) who became fascinated with the phenomenon, even making three separate trips to the South Pole himself to observe them directly. He's written two books on the subject: a classic introductory text called Rainbows, Halos, and Glories, and more personal memoir: Chasing the Rainbow: Recurrences in the Life of a Scientist.

That's how I learned that the halo effects occur when small droplets of water in the atmosphere freeze into various hexagonal crystalline forms: the two most common are a hexagonal plate crystal, and a cylinder-shaped hexagonal crystal resembling a pencil. When oriented just so, at times when they are plentiful enough, these crystals behave like prisms when sunlight shines through them, refracting the ray by specific degrees (22 degrees and 46 degrees trigger the most common halo effects).

Halo effects are recorded with a device dubbed "R2D2": it contains a video camera operating in time-lapse mode to track the sun around the sky and maintain an extended record of the effects. Nature, of course, is fickle about granting such displays. "You can get all your equipment set up and then you wait. And wait. And wait. Either halos come, or they don't," Greenler admitted.

Ice crystal halos might be Nature's own optical art, but scientifically, they serve a much more practical purpose: mapping the characteristics of crystals in the atmosphere can help with climate modeling. But until recently, the instruments scientists were using to measure them couldn't get decent images of ice crystals smaller than 25 microns. Accurate measurements are critical because the size and shale of the ice crystals have an impact on how much incoming sunlight is absorbed into the atmosphere, and how much is reflected back out into space -- and that in turn affects greenhouse warming.

Now, however, scientists from the Universities of Hartfordshire and Manchester in England, collaborating with Colorado State University, have developed a new optical scattering instrument that can measure ice crystal halos down at that teensy micron level (it's comparable to the smallest cells found in the human body). There are two versions: a ground-based instrument, and a second instrument tat fits under the wing of a research aircraft and measures the cloud particles directly. Rather than trying to take a full image of an ice crystal, the instruments record the detailed pattern of scattered light from each crystal and then extrapolate backward, interpreting those recorded patterns and matching them to effects associated with known ice crystal shapes.

The equipment has only been tested in the lab to date, and those results appeared in Optics Letters, but the next step is to send the instruments into actual clouds to make some real-world measurements. They don't necessarily need to go to the South Pole, however: the scientists are especially interested in studying ice crystals in high-altitude cirrus clouds, which cover more than 20% of the Earth's surface on any given day. Still, for anyone willing to brave the wind chill factor, the new instruments might be able to shed more light not just on climate modeling, but the less well-understood variations of ice crystal halo effects.

Photo: An ice crystal halo. Source: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day. Taken by Jean-Marc LeCleire.

Monumental Quirks

August 04, 2008

Mankind does love its monuments -- even physics has its chosen landmarks. Case in point: Washington, DC, boasts a famous bronze sculpture of Albert Einstein on the southwest corner of the National Academy of Sciences building. Sculptor Robert Berks placed his larger-than-life physicist inside a circular granite dais embedded with some 2700 metal studs. Those studs aren't just arbitrary: their placement represents the locations of various astronomical objects at the exact date and time when the great Einstein was born.

The inscriptions on the "pages" the bronzed Einstein holds in his left hand aren't arbitrary either: they are the equations for the photoelectric effect (for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics); general relativity; and his most famous contribution to physics, the equivalence of energy and mass (E=mc<2>).

It all started when scientists noticed something strange about the periodic table of elements. The atomic number of an atom shows how many protons it has (and therefore which element it is), while its atomic weight includes both protons and neutrons.

[UPDATE: In the interests of brevity, I elided over some critical technical points in my original post. A couple of scientists (including my own spouse) were nice enough to email and alert me to this misleading error. Below is my revised version of the problematic paragraphs, because this makes for an excellent "teaching moment," not just for me, but for my readers. And I encourage those who want to learn more to (a) follow the links included in posts, and (b) explore the wonders of Google on their own.]

The problem of the missing mass had to do with the fact that the atomic nucleus always weighs less than the total mass of the protons and neutrons -- which violates energy conservation. So where did the missing mass go? Physicists really don't like to see their laws violated in this way (and they really don't like to see over-simplified explanations of nuclear decay on blogs!). But they had to wait until 1905 for a satisfactory solution, when Einstein showed that mass can be converted into energy and vice versa. The two are equivalent, and interchangeable.

So, the atomic weight of an atom is the masses of the protons and neutrons plus the binding energy (because mass and energy are equivalent). Fair enough. The catch is, the binding energy is always negative, so you always get a slightly smaller number than when you started. Problem solved, and in the process, scientists realized they had a nifty source of energy. When an atom loses protons or neutrons, this changes its atomic weight, and the lost mass is radiated as energy, causing the atom to get lighter and disintegrate into an isotope of the same element, with the same number of protons but fewer neutrons. Or it could decay into a different element of lesser weight if it loses protons. Iron is the most stable element so it serves as a sort of boundary between the lighter and heavier elements. You can fuse lighter nuclei, which then release energy, or you can split heavier atomic nuclei (fission)  to release energy.

I've veered off into nuclear decay for a reason. There's an even stranger monument of sorts to Einstein in the Netherlands: a large orange building called the Haborg Facility, which is covered with physics equations by Einstein and Max Planck. It's a monument to nuclear decay, specifically. The building is chock-full of nuclear waste from two nuclear reactors in the Netherlands, and recently made the list of "10 Most Bizarre Monuments" over at Oddee. [WARNING: two of the other nine featured monuments are NSFW.]

See, they needed a place to store this pile of nuclear waste materials for 100 years or so, at which point the waste would no longer be radioactive. Artist William Verstraeten came up with the idea of turning the problem into an art installation. Every 20 years, the building will be repainted in a lighter color to symbolize the slowing decaying radioactivity in the waste materials. Apparently, it's even open for tours, and won an award earlier this year for "most beautiful waste facility." I have to wonder how stiff the competition was in this particular category, but clearly, one man's radioactive trash can become another man's treasure.

Photos: (top) Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington, DC. Source: Wikimedia Commons. (bottom) Habog Facility, the Netherlands.