Instead of going to class in our beloved basement lecture hall, on Thursday morning the Launch Pad workshop members got some fresh air and sunshine. We drove out to Vedauwoo Rocks east of Laramie for a three-mile hike.
It was quite pretty. The rocks are ancient granite, cracked and eroded into mysterious almost-familiar shapes. Around the rocks there's a small valley lush with trees, wild sage, and grass. Beaver dams have created several ponds, and we saw moose, hawks, and some small critters.
I was a little bit dubious about how much preparation everyone was making for a simple three-mile hike, but at this elevation it's only prudent to bring along plenty of water, wear a hat, and slap on the sunscreen and bug repellent.
We finished our hike by about noon, and lunched on tasty, high-calorie Mexican food, which we all devoured as if we'd just finished a forty-mile forced march.
After a bit of tidying up we resumed our exploration of the Universe, as Dr. Mike gave a lecture on the End States of Stars.
Stars burn until they use up their hydrogen fuel. Then they start to go off the main sequence. Red dwarf stars go quietly — they burn sedately for a trillion years or so, then gradually gutter out. You're left with a big ball of helium and heavier elements slowly shedding its residual heat in the last days of the Universe.
Bigger stars have a more exciting finale. As they use up their hydrogen fuel, they form a core of helium and heat up into a red giant. The core starts to burn helium and heavier elements as fusion reactions battle gravity to keep the star from collapsing. Eventually the star's outer layers blow off leaving behind a white dwarf.
If it's a big star, more than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, the core collapses into a neutron star and the resulting blast of neutrinos creates a supernova explosion visible in other galaxies. And if the star is bigger than 3 solar masses, it collapses all the way into a black hole.
We learned the basics of neutron stars and black holes, because they're such weird and interesting objects. Science fiction writers just can't leave them alone.
And to finish the day, Dr. Verney gave a talk about the importance of science education and the need to promote creativity. This isn't an easy balance to strike. For scientific literacy one needs a substantial base of pure facts. But a concentration on learning facts is often blamed for a lack of creativity.
Education seems to go in cycles — a Hobbesian period in which we have to pound the basics into the little monsters' heads, followed by a Rousseauian cycle in which we free their unique snowflake souls. Right now we appear to be in the transition from a Hobbesian period to a Rousseauian one. (These often track political cycles in the United States, with a slight lag time.)
As to myself . . . I'm honestly not sure how much science fiction writers can help. To a large extent we preach to the choir. People who aren't interested in science aren't likely to read something called science fiction.
That being said, it's actually quite remarkable how much SF readers do learn from the fiction they read — including a lot of nonsense. We do have a duty to get stuff right, or at least to make it clear to our readers what's real and what isn't.
With that we went off to dinner, and then (after blogging) collapsed into bed.
The Cambias Digression 