Archive for the ‘Everything Else’ Category


Published by Gregory Benford on May 23rd, 2015
GB at the Verne conference UTOPIALES 2008

Henry Jenkins Gregory Benford (1941- )

“Science is … like literature, a continuing dialogue among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.”

— Gregory Benford

 The critic Susan Stone-Blackburn has described Gregory Benford’s Nebula-Award winning novel,Timescape (1980) as “a genuine marriage of science and literature.” On the surface, this claim sounds fatuous. After all, the whole point of science fiction as a genre is to merge science and literature. On the other hand, what Stone-Blackburn means is that Benford’s novel offers a profoundly original way of thinking about the relationship between the two terms.

Hugo Gernsbeck, John Campbell and many of the early promoters of science fiction thought one purpose of the new genre was to popularize scientific fact and scientific theory. They made scientists and inventors into protagonists driven by a quest for knowledge and a desire to uncover the universe’s secrets. However, they rarely explored the cultural realm of science, the working methods of scientists, or the historical conditions which shaped the priorities of scientific research.

One of Benford’s most important contributions has been to expand the way science fiction represents the contexts out of which scientific understanding emerges, the competing priorities and paradigms that govern which secrets are uncovered and what insights are ignored.

Benford, who teaches Plasma Physics and Astrophysics at the University of California-Irvine, knows those contexts intimately. He describes Timescape as a partially autobiographical novel. He and his twin brother appear as minor characters in several scenes, depicted as precocious and vaguely annoying students who are encountered by the novel’s protagonist, Gordon Bernstein, a harried junior faculty member.

Benford’s protagonist does not live in a hermetically sealed world, where he can focus on the problems which carry the book’s plot; he must struggle with senior faculty members who are gunning for his star student during his Ph.D. examinations; he must juggle the demands of teaching and grading papers and meaningless committee work and reviewing graduate applications; he must maneuver through the land-mines of departmental colloquia, jockeying for position and trying not to be blind sided by others who want to make good on their ambitions at his expense. His protagonist is someone who must risk his chances at tenure and promotion in order to explore a intriguing but unorthodox scientific hypothesis. Benford recognizes that scientists spend only a small portion of their lives doing meaningful scientific research (the stuff traditional science fiction is made of) and a lot of their time doing things that pay the bills and keep the grant money flowing.

The novel is autobiographical in another sense as well, drawing on Benford’s experiences as a graduate student at the University of California-San Diego in the 1960s and his experiences as an American on sabbatical at Cambridge University. His novel depicts two different scientific communities which must work together — across time and against the odds — to solve a vexing problem upon which rides, nothing less than, the survival of the planet. (Here, at least, he remains true to the pulp origins of his genre!)

One subplot takes shape in the context of La Jolla, California, in the early 1960s, the peak of the Kennedy era: “It was the continuing heady rush of the Sputnik phenomenon. Gordon was riding that wave himself, and he knew it; these were ripe times for science.”

The other plot shows us Britain in the near future (1998, to be exact), as the planet suffers ecological disasters which may destroy the potential for human life and as funds for scientific research are directed toward immediate utilitarian applications: “This year research was a puppet whose strings led to the World Council itself. The western nations had pooled their research efforts in a gesture towards economy. The World Council was a political animal. To Renfrew it seemed the Council’s policies boiled down to supporting highly visible efforts and little else.”

Benford is fascinated by the differences in how science operates in America and England, in times of plenty and times of scarcity. The two worlds are set equidistance from 1980, the year in which Benford wrote the novel, thus allowing him to look back on the recent history of his discipline and forward to the not so distant future.

As its title suggests, Timescape is a time travel story of sorts — not containing glistening time machines and hairy-chested morlocks, but rather grounded in more or less plausible extrapolations drawn from contemporary theoretical physics. In 1998, a team of scientists specializing in tachyon particles struggle to send a message back in time, warning the past about the causes of their contemporary environmental crisis. Tachyons are faster-than-light particles which therefore defy much of what we think we know about how time operates. In 1962, Gordon Bernstein tries to make sense of irregular patterns of interference that are disrupting his lab experiments, and gradually finds a way to decipher the signals being sent from the future.

Timescape is a novel about scientific problem solving, as both sides must overcome a succession of obstacles blocking their communication. Given our still primitive grasp of tachyons, the channels of communication between past and future are narrow and rudimentary — the simple dots and dashes of Morse code. The problems Benford’s scientists confront — issues of signal and noise, the need for redundancy of expression — are problems that shaped the early history of the telegraph and radio. Ironically, only when the precise, technical language of science gives way in the story to a more broadly human language — when a bureaucrat devises a simple test to see if the messages have gotten through, requesting that a note be left in a bank safe deposit box, or when a tired researcher starts babbling about his desperation and frustration — does real communication across time and space occur.

Benford has no belief in science as a universal language; its terms, concepts, and basic materials shift dramatically in the forty years which separate the two groups of protagonists in his story. The future scientists take for granted things that scientists in the 1960s did not yet know, and so there is confusion and misinterpretation.

For Benford, science is founded in human experience, human knowledge, human perspectives, and human biases. His scientists struggle to focus on technical problems amid complex personal relationships, try to isolate the challenges of the laboratory from the difficulties of the bedroom or from the tensions between mothers and sons, and yet, often, the insights which generate their scientific discoveries come to them from spaces far removed from their experimental apparatus.

As one of the book’s scientists explains, “theories are based on pictures of the world — human pictures.” Benford is interested in the way scientists think — and his characters approach their various tasks with wildly different methods. In one passage, Benford contrasts different approaches to their work of a theoretical and a experimental physicist:

His [John, the experimental scientist] emotions were bottled up in an obsession with machinery and some inner turbulence, almost a defiant anger at the universe for withholding its secrets. Perhaps that was the difference between merely thinking about experiments, as Greg did, and actually having to do them. It must be harder to believe in serene mathematical beauties when you have dirty hands.

In Benford’s fiction, we learn how characters’ minds work by watching how they calculate equations. In doing this, Benford blurs the boundaries between science and literature, making science the vehicle for exploring character. In one of the book’s most moving passages, a scientist works through some highly complex calculations as he sits on a transatlantic flight, searching not only for a technical truth but for a cosmic beauty.

There was more than remorseless crank-turning to be done here. The work had to have the right deft feel, to glide forward on its own momentum. Beyond the logical standards there were aesthetic questions…. There was no choice between beauty and truth, really. You had to wind up with both. In art, elegance was a whore of a word, bent a different way by each generation of critics. In physics, though, there was some fragile lesson to be learned from past millennia.

Benford can trace the processing of the individual human mind across page after page, circling through the complexities of theoretical physics and spreading outward to touch other parts of his characters’ lives.

At the same time, he recognizes that scientific research is at heart collaborative, building upon what has come before, drawing insights through uneasy and unstable alliances, making headway as much through the help of critics as allies, and making intuitive links that cut across fields of specialization. Benford implicitly rejects the cornerstone cliche of science fiction — the autonomous scholar whose knowledge is unlimited and genius unbounded.

Instead, his protagonists are all dependent upon others in their work group, yet each in his own way is brilliant, each makes a vital contribution to solving problems. Science remains heroic in Benford’s novel, all the more so, because no individual can find all the answers independently.

Timescape is also preoccupied with the ways in which the media reports scientific discoveries, examining how all levels of media, from Junior Scholastic to Life, from the network news to tabloid scandal sheets, represent and misrepresent scientific discoveries, sometimes damaging reputations, but sometimes helping to insure that resources are properly directed towards urgent problems. Benford’s protagonists must make their cases in venues other than scientific journals, must meet standards of proof and credibility far removed from the nuances of scientific method. In a throw-away passage early in the novel, Benford recounts a BBC debate between a rational U.S. ambassador and a passionate Argentinean:

The triviality of this point [the U.S. Ambassador’ argument] in the face of an avalanche of psychic energy from the Argentinean had put the ambassador far down in total points by the time the viewers phoned in their opinions of the discussion. Why, the ambassador fellow had scarcely smiled or mugged at the camera or smacked a fist on the table before him. How could he expect to have any media impact whatever?

The rational discourse of science fares no better than politics in this realm of media controversy.

Among the book’s more intriguing secondary characters is a media-savvy astronomer, clearly modeled loosely on Carl Sagan, who opportunistically exploits Bernstein’s research to help make the case for life on other planets, a much more attractive subject for the media to cover than our protagonist’s nuclear resonance experiments. Benford notes at one point, “It was odd how celebrity invaded science these days so that appearing on the Johnny Carson Show was more effective with the NSF than publishing a brilliant series of papers in Physical Review.”

Benford questions the values of such a culture, recognizing that some of the core questions physics must confront defy common-sensical understandings of the universe. He discusses, for example, how the theory of tachyons seems to defy our grasp of temporal relations: “Human language did not fit the physics. There was no tense of the verb to be that reflected the looping sense of time. No way to turn the language on the pivot of physics, to apply a torque that would make the paradoxes dissolve into an ordered circle, endlessly turning.”

To find answers, his protagonists must move beyond ideas easily grasped within their culture, even beyond the constraints of their era’s dominant scientific paradigms, and this ground-breaking makes it difficult to translate pure research into a language that wins grants and secures bureaucratic support.

Yet, Benford is also critical of the ways in which the language of science has shut out the general public and has encouraged its resignation and indifference: “For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than to try to understand it. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, Luv. Right.”

Science fiction is, after all, a genre committed to popularizing science, making its insights and conclusions accessible to a broader public. More people will understand time paradoxes and tachyons by reading his Benford’s novel than by reading his reports on “Coherent Radiation from Energetic Electron Streams via Collisionless Bremmstrahlung in Electrical Plasma Turbulence” in Astrophysics Journal. Yet, Benford is also aware that science fiction appeals to a narrow, self-selecting community interested in exploring a literature of ideas: “Science fiction can and does teach people things because after all, it is an elite literature and talks about arcane things sometimes. It’s programming is to blow your mind, occasionally, to open your horizons, to tell you things you didn’t know.”

Benford writes what is known as “hard science fiction” — which is to say, his novels are grounded in physic and astronomy, rather than in the social sciences. The trio of Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, known as the “killer B’s”, helped to revitalize “hard science fiction” as a subgenre in the 1980s. When I speak with MIT students and faculty who are enthusiasts of “hard science fiction,” they are quick to note that Benford really knows his science. Benford consults for NASA, was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society, and writes broadly about scientific questions for both Reason and Fantasy and Science Fiction (“A Scientist’s Notebook”). He has gained recognition as a practicing full-time physicist and as a widely published and prolific science fiction writer, best known for his Galactic Center Saga. Benford respects the earlier traditions of the genre, having collaborated on projects which extend the work of Arthur C. Clarke (Beyond the Fall of Night) and Isaac Asimov (Foundation’s Fear) as well as collaborating with Poul Anderson (Murasaki). He has edited many significant anthologies, often in collaboration with Martin Greenberg, centering on issues of alternative history, including Hitler Victorious and the What Might Have Been series.

In the end, however, Benford’s contributions to the genre aren’t the scientific facts and theories he teaches his readers, but his ability to open the culture of science to of those of us who don’t know a Bunsen burner from a test tube. Benford opens the poetry of higher mathematics to readers who struggled through Algebra II. To do that, he has had to fuse science and literature in a way few have done before.

Selected Works
The Galactic Center Saga:
1977 In the Ocean of the Night
1984 Across the Sea of Suns
1989 Tides of Light
1994 Furious Gulf
1995 Sailing Bright Eternity
Other Works:
1974 Threads of Time
1979 The Stars in Shroud
1980 Timescape
1983 Artifact
1984 Jupiter Project
1985 Deeper Than Darkness
1987 In the Ocean of Night
1987 Under the Wheel
1987 Hitler Victorious (ed. with Martin Greenberg)
1987 Great Sky River
1987 Heart of the Comet (with David Brin)
1988 In Alien Flesh (short stories)
1988 Nuclear War (ed. With Greenberg)
1989 Alternative Heroes (ed. with Greenberg)
1989 Alternative Empires (ed. with Greenberg)
1991 Beyond the Fall of Night (with Arthur C. Clarke)
1992 Alternative Americas (ed. with Greenberg)
1992 Murasaki (with Poul Anderson)
1995 Far Futures (ed.)
1995 Matter’s End
1996 A Darker Geometry (with Mark O. Martin)
1996 Shiva Descending (with William Rotsler)
1997 Foundation’s Fear
1998 Cosm
1998 If Stars Are Gods




Published by Gregory Benford on May 17th, 2015


OUT IN JULY…. I took a long look at my stories, and David Hartwell made his masterly editorial judgments, so here they are, out of 215 stories so far.


Published by Gregory Benford on May 17th, 2015

Some opinions harvested from Locus online and correspondence by

Gregory Benford


February 2015


Lois Tilton (appearing at



This year’s new author of promise is J Y Yang.








Reach for Infinity

Fearsome Magics


Gregory Benford to those below:


Gardner Dozois


Gordon Van Gelder


Jonathan Strahan:


Gregory Benford:


Gordon Van Gelder:







2) Sci-fi stories about zipping around space via wormholes



Gregory Benford:



David Truesdale:





Gregory Benford: Now, to conclude with a savvy editor:

David Hartwell:

The mainstream no longer distinguishes between fantasy and science
requires some bit of scientific knowledge. It was a commonplace in
lot of those, of the thousands being published.

it as ignorant or slackers.

The bottom line is that there are literally thousands of published but




Published by Gregory Benford on April 26th, 2015

9781596066861Limited: 250 signed numbered copies, bound in leather
Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition

Table of Contents:

Nobody Lives on Burton Street (1970)
Doing Lennon (1975)
White Creatures (1975)
In Alien Flesh (1978)
Redeemer (1979)
Dark Sanctuary (1979)
Time Shards (1979)
Exposures (1981)
Relativistic Effects (1982)
Of Space/Time and the River (1985)
Time’s Rub (1985)
Freezeframe (1986)
Proselytes (1988)
Matter’s End (1989)
Mozart on Morphine (1989)
Centigrade 233 (1990)
World Vast, World Various (1992)
In the Dark Backward (1993)
A Desperate Calculus (1995)
Zoomers (1996)
The Voice (1997)
Slow Symphonies of Mass and Time (1998)
A Dance to Strange Musics (1998)
Anomalies (2001)
Comes The Evolution (2001)
Twenty-Two Centimeters (2004)
A Life with a Semisent (2005)
Applied Mathematical Theology (2006)
Bow Shock (2006)
Reasons Not to Publish (2007)
The Champagne Award (2008)
Penumbra (2010)
Gravity’s Whispers (2010)
Mercies (2011)
Grace Immaculate (2011)
Eagle (2011)
The Sigma Structure Symphony (2012)
Backscatter (2013)


Published by Gregory Benford on April 18th, 2015




MY ANSWER:    The intrinsic beauty and elegance of  mathematics allows it to describe nature.

Many believe this seeming axiom, that beauty leads to descriptive power. Our experience seems to show this, mostly from the successes of physics. There is some truth to it, but also some illusion.


There is a ready explanation of how a distant primate came into the beginnings of a mathematical appreciation of nature. Hunting, that primate found it easier to fling rocks or spears at fleeing prey than chase them down. Some of his fellows found the curve of a flung stone difficult to achieve, but he did not. He found the parabola beautiful and simpler to achieve, because that pleasurable sensation provided evolutionary feedback. Over eons this lead to an animal that invented complex geometries, calculus and beyond.


This is a huge leap, of course, an evolutionary overshoot. We seem to be smarter than needed simply to survive in the natural world—earlier hominids did, even spreading over most of the planet. We did go through some population bottlenecks in our past, perhaps as recent as about 130,000 years ago. Perhaps those recent eras of intense selection explain why we have such vastly disproportionate mental abilities.


Still there remain, beyond evolutionary arguments, two mysteries in math: whence its amazing ability to describe nature, and why its intrinsic beauty and elegance?


Parabolas are elegant, true. They describe how hard bodies fly through the air under gravity. But the motion of a falling leaf, on the other hand, demands several differential equations taking into account wind velocity, gravity, geometry of the leaf, fluid flow and much else. A cruising airplane is even harder to describe. Neither case is elegant or simple.
So the utility of math stands separately from its intrinsic beauty. Mathematics is most elegant when we simplify the system considered. So with a baseball we account for the initial acceleration and angle, the air and gravity, and out comes a parabola as a good approximation. Not so the leaf.

And that parabola? We see its simple beauty far too slowly to be of any use in real time. Our appreciation comes afterward. To actually make a parabola work for us in baseball, we learn how to throw. Such learning builds on hard-wired neuronal networks in the brain, selected for over evolutionary times, since knowing how to throw a missile is adaptive. A human pitcher can more subtly affect the trajectory by throwing curves, knuckle balls etc. Those are certainly more complex trajectories and probably less elegant, but still well within the capability of our nervous systems. But for well-learned actions, all that processing goes on at unconscious levels. In fact, too much conscious attention to the details of action can interfere. Athletes know this—it’s the art of staying in the zone. Probably that zone is where the mind runs on its sense of rightness, beauty, economy of effort.


Further, elegance is hard to define, as are most aesthetic judgments. Richard Feynman once noted that it is simple to make known laws more elegant, say by starting with Newton’s force law, F=ma, then defining R=F – ma. The equation R=0 is visually more elegant, but contains no more information. The Lagrangian method in dynamics is elegant—just write the expression for kinetic energy minus the potential energy—but one must know a fundamental theory to do so; the elegance of the Lagrangian comes later, as a mathematical aid.


More recently, it is hard to devise an elegant cosmological theory that yields directly the small cosmological constant we observe. Some solve this problem by invoking the Anthropic Principle, and thus multiverses of some sort. But this ventures near a violation of another form of the elegance standard, Occam’s Razor. Imagining a vast sea of multiverses, with us arising in one where conditions produce intelligent beings, seems to many excessive. It invokes a plentitude we can never see. The scientific test of multiverse cosmology is whether it leads to predictable consequences.


Can multiverses converse with each other? That would be a way of verifying the basis of such theories. Most multiverse models seem to say there is no possible communication between the infinitude of multiverses. Brane theory, though, comes from models where no force law operates between branes, except gravitation. Perhaps someday an instrument like LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, can detect such waves from branes. But is it elegant to shift confirmation onto some far future technology? Sweeping dust under a rug seems inelegant to me.


Evolution doesn’t care about beauty and elegance, just utility. Beauty does play a secondary role, though. The male who best throws the spear to bring down prey is appreciated and may have a choice of many mates. It just so happens that the effective and now beautiful act of spear throwing is describable with fairly simple math.
We make the short step to say the underlying math is also beautiful.

Math’s utility implies that for a suitably simple model of the universe there should be a fairly simple mathematical theory of everything, something like general relativity, describable by a one-line equation. Searching for it on that intuitive basis may lead us to such a theory. I suspect a model that captures the full complexity of the universe, though, would take up a lot more than one line.

When we say a math model is elegant and beautiful, we express the limits of our own minds. It is not a deep description of the world. In the end, simple models are much easier to comprehend than complex ones. We cannot expect that the path of elegance will always guarantee we are on the right track.




Published by Gregory Benford on March 29th, 2015


                           Stephen Hawking


Please note that there may be incorrect spellings, punctuation and grammar in this document. This is to

allow correct pronunciation and timing by a speech synthesiser.

This lecture is the intellectual property of Professor S.W. Hawking.


In this talk, I want to put forward a different approach to cosmology, that can address its central question, why

is the universe the way it is. Does string theory, or M theory, predict the distinctive features of our universe,

like a spatially flat four dimensional expanding universe with small fluctuations, and the standard model of

particle physics. Most physicists would rather believe string theory uniquely predicts the universe, than the

alternatives. These are that the initial state of the universe, is prescribed by an outside agency,, code named

God. Or that there are many universes, and our universe is picked out by the anthropic principle.

The usual approach in physics, could be described as building from the bottom up. That is, one assumes some

initial state for a system, and evolves it forward in time with the Hamiltonian, and the Schroedinger equation.

This approach is appropriate for lab experiments like particle scattering, where one can prepare the initial state,

and measure the final state.. The bottom up approach is more problem in cosmology however, because we do

not know what the initial state of the universe was, and we certainly can’t try out different initial states, and see

what kinds of universe they produce.

Different physicists react to this difficulty in different ways. Some (generally those brought up in the particle

physics tradition) just ignore the problem. They feel the task of physics is to predict what happens in the lab,

and they are convinced that string theory, or M theory, can do this. All they think remains to be done, is to

identify a solution of M theory, a Calabi-Yau or G2 manifold, that will give the standard model, as an effective

theory in four dimensions. But they have no idea why the universe should be four dimensional, and have the

standard model, with the values of its 40+ parameters that we observe. How can anyone believe that something

so messy, is the unique prediction of string theory. It amazes me that people can have such blinkered vision,

that they can concentrate just on the final state of the universe, and not ask how and why it got there.

Those physicists that do try to explain the universe from the bottom up, mostly belong to one of two schools,

inflationary models, or pre big bang scenarios. In the case of inflation, the idea is that the exponential

expansion, obliterates the dependence on the initial conditions, so we wouldn’t need to know exactly how the


amount of exponential expansion. This leads to the notion of ever lasting or eternal inflation. The original










will exit inflation. Because there will be an infinite number of such exiting regions, advocates of eternal



I have outlined, has serious flaws. First, it is not gauge invariant. If one takes the time surfaces to be surfaces of


not increase. Second, it is not consistent. The equation relating the expansion rate to the energy density, is an

integral of motion. Neither side of the equation can fluctuate, because energy is conserved. Third, it is not



support a de Sitter space, except possibly at the Planck scale, where everything breaks down. For these reasons,


However, as I shall explain later, I think the universe may have had an initial de Sitter stage considerably larger

than the Planck scale.

I now turn to pre big bang scenarios, which are the main alternative to inflation. I shall take them to include the

Ekpyrotic and cyclic models, as well as the older pre big bang scenario. The observations of fluctuations in the

microwave background, show that there are correlations on scales larger than the horizon size at decoupling.

These correlations could be explained if there had been inflation, because the exponential expansion, would

have meant that regions that are now widely separated, were once in causal contact with each other. On the

other hand, if there were no inflation, the correlations must have been present at the beginning of the expansion

of the universe. Presumably, they arose in a previous contracting phase, and somehow survived the singularity,

or brane collision. It is not clear if effects can be transmitted through a singularity, or if they will produce the

right signature in the microwave background. But even if the answer to both of these questions is yes, the pre

big bang scenarios do not answer the central question of cosmology, why is the universe, the way it is. All the

pre big bang scenarios can do, is shift the problem of the initial state from 13 point 7 billion years ago, to the

infinite past. But a boundary condition is a boundary condition, even if the boundary is at infinity. The present

state of the universe, would depend on the boundary condition in the infinite past. The trouble is, there’ s no

natural boundary condition, like the universe being in its ground state. The universe doesn’ t have a ground state.

It is unstable, and is either expanding or contracting. The lack of a preferred initial state in the infinite past,

means that pre big bang scenarios, are no better at explaining the universe, than supposing that someone wound

up the clockwork, and set the universe going at the big bang.

The bottom up approach to cosmology, of supposing some initial state, and evolving it forward in time, is

basically classical, because it assumes that the universe began in a way that was well defined and unique. But

one of the first acts of my research career, was to show with Roger Penrose, that any reasonable classical

cosmological solution, has a singularity in the past. This implies that the origin of the universe, was a quantum

event. This means that it should be described by the Feynman sum over histories. The universe doesn’ t have just

a single history, but every possible history, whether or not they satisfy the field equations. Some people make a

great mystery of the multi universe, or the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, but to me, these are

just different expressions of the Feynman path integral.

One can use the path integral to calculate the quantum amplitudes for observables at the present time. The wave

function of the universe, or amplitude for the metric h i j, on a surface, S, of co-dimension one, is given by a

path integral over all metrics, g, that have S as a boundary. Normally, one thinks of path integrals as having two

boundaries, an initial surface, and a final surface. This would be appropriate in a proper quantum treatment of a

pre big bang scenario, like the Ekpyrotic universe. In this case, the initial surface, would be in the infinite past.

But there are two big objections to the path integral for the universe, having an initial surface. The first is the G

question. What was the initial state of the universe, and why was it like that. As I said earlier, there doesn’ t

seem to be a natural choice for the initial state. It can’ t be flat space. That would remain flat space.

The second objection is equally fundamental. In most models, the quantum state on the final surface, will be

independent of the state on the initial surface. This is because there will be metrics in which the initial surface is

in one component, and the final surface in a separate disconnected component. Such metrics will exist in the

Euclidean regime. They correspond to the quantum annihilation of one universe, and the quantum creation of

another. This would not be possible if there were something that was conserved, that propagated from the initial

surface, to the final surface. But the trend in cosmology in recent years, has been to claim that the universe has

no conserved quantities. Things like baryon number, are supposed to have been created by grand unified or

electro weak theories, and CP violation. So there is no way one can rule out the final surface, from belonging to

a different universe to the initial surface. In fact, because there are so many different possible universes, they

will dominate, and the final state will be independent of the initial. It will be given by a path integral over all

metrics whose only boundary is the final surface. In other words, it is the so called no boundary quantum state.

If one accepts that the no boundary proposal, is the natural prescription for the quantum state of the universe,

one is led to a profoundly different view of cosmology, and the relation between cause and effect. One

shouldn’ t follow the history of the universe from the bottom up, because that assumes there’ s a single history,

with a well defined starting point and evolution. Instead, one should trace the histories from the top down, in

other words, backwards from the measurement surface, S, at the present time. The histories that contribute to

the path integral, don’ t have an independent existence, but depend on the amplitude that is being measured. As

an example of this, consider the apparent dimension of the universe. The usual idea is that spacetime is a four

dimensional nearly flat metric, cross a small six or seven dimensional internal manifold. But why aren’ t there

more large dimensions. Thy are any dimensions compactified. There are good reasons to think that life is

possible only in four dimensions, but most physicists are very reluctant to appeal to the anthropic principle.

They would rather believe that there is some mechanism that causes all but four of the dimensions to

compactify spontaneously. Alternatively, maybe all dimensions started small, but for some reason, four

dimensions expanded, and the rest did not.

I’ m sorry to disappoint these hopes, but I don’ t think there is a dynamical reason for the universe to appefaoru r

dimensional. Instead, the no boundary proposal predicts a quantum amplitude for every number of large spatial

dimensions, from 0 to 10. There will be an amplitude for the universe to be eleven dimensional Minkowski

space, i e, ten large spatial dimensions. However, the value of this amplitude is of no significance, because we

do not live in eleven dimensions . We are not asking for the probabilities of various dimensions for the

universe. As long as the amplitude for three large spatial dimensions, is not exactly zero, it doesn’ t matter how

small it is compared to other numbers of dimensions. We live in a universe that appears four dimensional, so

we are interested only in amplitudes for surfaces with three large dimensions. This may sound like the anthropic

principle argument that the reason we observe the universe to be four dimensional, is that life is possible only in

four dimensions. But the argument here is different, because it doesn’ t depend on whether four dimensions, is

the only arena for life. Rather it is that the probability distribution over dimensions is irrelevant, because we

have already measured that we are in four dimensions.

The situation with the low energy effective theory of particle interactions, is similar. Many physicists believe

that string theory, will uniquely predict the standard model, and the values of its 40 or so parameters. The

bottom up picture would be that the universe would begin with some grand unified symmetry, like E8 cross

E8.aS the universe expanded and cooled, the symmetry would break to the standard model, maybe through

intermediate stages. The hope would be that String theory, would predict the pattern of breaking, the mass,

couplings and mixing angles.

Personally, I find it difficult to believe that the standard model, is the unique prediction of fundamental theory.

It is so ugly, and the mixing angles etc, seem accidental, rather than part of a grand design.

In string stroke M theory, low energy particle physics is determined by the internal space. It is well known that

M theory has solutions with many different internal spaces. If one builds the history of the universe from the

bottom up, there is no reason it should end up with the internal space for the standard model. However, if one

asks for the amplitude for a space like surface with a given internal space, one is interested only in those

histories which end with that internal space. One therefore has to trace the histories from the top down,

backwards from the final surface.

One can calculate the amplitude for the internal space of the standard model, on the basis of the no boundary

proposal. As with the dimension, it doesn’ t matter how small this amplitude is, relative to other possibilities. It

would be like asking for the amplitude that I am Chinese. I know I am British, even though there are more

Chinese. Similarly, we know the low energy theory is the standard model, even though other theories may have

a larger amplitude.

Although the relative amplitudes for radically different geometries, don’ t matter, those for neighbouring

geometries, are important. For example, the fluctuations in the microwave background, correspond to

differences in the amplitudes for space like surfaces, that are small perturbations of flat 3 space, cross the

internal space. It is a robust prediction of inflation, that the fluctuations are gowsyan, and nearly scale

independent. This has been confirmed by the recent observations by the map satellite. However, the predicted

amplitude, is model dependent.

The parameters of the standard model, will be determined by the moduli of the internal space. Because they are

moduli at the classical level, their amplitudes will have a fairly flat distribution. This means that M theory, can

not predict the parameters of the standard model. Obviously, the values of the parameters we measure, must be

compatible with the development of life. I hesitate to say, with intelligent life. But within the anthropically

allowed range, the parameters can have any values. So much for string theory, predicting the fine structure

constant. However, although the theory can not predict the value of the fine structure constant, it will predict it

should have spatial variations, like the microwave background. This would be an observational test, of our

ideas of M theory compactification.

How can one get a non zero amplitude for the present state of the universe, if as I claim, the metrics in the path

integral, have no boundary apart from the surface at the present time. I can’ t claim to have the definitive answer,

but one possibility would be if the four dimensional part of the metric, went back to a de Sitter phase. Such a

scenario is realized in trace anomaly driven inflation, for example. In the Lorentzian regime, the de Sitter phase

would extend back into the infinite past. It would represent a universe that contracted to a minimum radius, and

then expanded again. But as we know, Lorentzian de Sitter can be closed off in the past by half the four sphere.

One can interpret this in the bottom up picture, as the spontaneous creation of an inflating universe from

nothing. Some pre big bang or Ekpyrotic scenarios, involving collapsing and expanding universes, can probably

be formulated in no boundary terms, with an orbifold point. However, this would remove the scale free

perturbations which, it is claimed, develop during the collapse, and carry on into the expansion. So again it is a

no no for pre big bang and Ekpyrotic universes.

In conclusion, the bottom up approach to cosmology, would be appropriate, if one knew that the universe was

set going in a particular way, in either the finite, or infinite past. However, in the absence of such knowledge, it

is better to work from the top down, by tracing backwards from the final surface, the histories that contribute to

the path integral. This means that the histories of the universe, depend on what is being measured, contrary to

the usual idea that the universe has an objective, observer independent, history. The Feynman path integral

allows every possible history for the universe, and the observation, selects out the sub class of histories that

have the property that is being observed. There are histories in which the universe eternally inflates, or is eleven

dimensional, but they do not contribute to the amplitudes we measure. I would call this the selection principle,

rather than the anthropic principle because it doesn’ t depend on intelligent life. Life may after all be possible in

eleven dimensions, but we know we live in four.

The results are disappointing for those who hoped that the ultimate theory, would predict every day physics.

We can not predict discrete features like the number of large dimensions, or the gauge symmetry of the low

energy theory. Rather we use them to select which histories contribute to the path integral. The situation is

better with continuous quantities, like the temperature of the cosmic microwave background, or the parameters

of the standard model. We can not measure their probability distributions, because we have only one value for

each quantity. We can’ t tell whether the universe was likely to have the values we observe, or whether it was

just a lucky chance. However, it is note worthy that the parameters we measure seem to lie in the interior of the

anthropically allowed range, rather than at one end. This suggests that the probability distribution is fairly flat,

not like the exponential dependence on the density parameter, omega, in the open inflation that Neil Turok and

I proposed. In that model, omega would have had the minimum value required to form a single galaxy, which is

all that is anthropically necessary. All the other galaxies which we see, are superfluous.

Although the theory can not predict the average values of these quantities, it will predict that there will be

spatial variations, like the fluctuations in the microwave background. However the size of these variations, will

probably depend on moduli or parameters that we can’ t predict. So even when we understand the ultimate

theory, it won’ t tell us much about how the universe began. It can not predict the dimension of spacetime, the

gauge group, or other parameters of the low energy effective theory. On the other hand, the theory will predict

that the total energy density, will be exactly the critical density, though it won’ t determine how this energy is

divided between conventional matter, and a cosmological constant, or quintessence. The theory will also predict

a nearly scale free spectrum of fluctuations. But it won’ t determine the amplitude.

So to come back to the question with which I began this talk. Does string theory predict the state of the universe. The answer is that itdoes not. It allows a vast landscape of possible universes, in which we occupy an anthropically permitted location.

But I do feel we could have selected a better neighbourhood.


Published by Gregory Benford on February 25th, 2015

This essay was written before Sid Coleman’s untimely death in 2007.
(First published in Trapdoor 25)

Gregory Benford





Sid The Fan








After all, Sid attended high school and university simultaneously, getting his bachelor’s degree when he graduated from high school, a feat I’ve never known to be equaled. Sid went to Caltech for his doctorate with Murray Gell-Mann in 1962, age 25. He attended LASFS meetings. And so he swiftly became a major theoretical physicist. Many fans never quite knew his prominence.


Sid the Physicist









The Sidneyfest














Sid the Wit









Of course, Sid had his oddities. He was the worst driver I ever knew, distracted by conversation with his passengers, oblivious to the screech and shouts of near-accidents. Marta Randall remarked on how when she was the lead car on the several-car trip to a restaurant, she always saw Sid in her rear view mirror in profile, attentive to his friends. But then, Feynman considered dental hygiene to be a superstition, despite his rotten teeth. Einstein hated socks. We physicists have our foibles.



—Gregory Benford

Science Fiction Thrillers

Published by Gregory Benford on February 15th, 2015

Science Fiction Thrillers


From Dissolving Genres by GARY WOLFE


A genre that science fiction writers have been attempting to colonize with some regularity is that of the suspense thriller. Here the dissolution of genre boundaries is more subtle, since the imaginative material and narrative conventions of science fiction may be retained, while the plot, structure, and tone are borrowed from a mode of paranoid pursuit melodrama pioneered in espionage novels from John Buchan to Robert Ludlum. Initially, those novelists who seemed most successful—at least commercially—in effecting this merger were novelists whose starting point was the thriller rather than the science fiction tale: Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, and Peter Benchley are among the most prominent examples, with Crichton having based nearly his entire career on science fiction conceits. Occasionally, professional science fiction writers have ventured with some success into this arena (Frank Robinson’s The Power, 1956; D. F. Jones’ Colossus, 1966), but for the most part the very intellectual challenges that traditionally define an effective technological science fiction story seem to mitigate against the largely anti-intellectual (or at least anti-scientist), technologically ambivalent tone of the paranoid thriller.

This may be a rare case where the most visible barriers separating two related genres lie in ideologies of power rather than in narrative mechanisms. Nevertheless, science fiction writers fairly consistently try to bridge the gap, sometimes very successfully (as with Greg Bear’s 1999 novel Darwin’s Radio, which freely uses the multiple viewpoints and globe-hopping locations of thriller fiction, but offers a solidly imagined evolutionary speculation as its thematic center; or Ken MacLeod’s 2007 The Execution Channel, which treats themes of terrorism and environmental catastrophe with an unusual degree of political sophistication), more often with mixed results (such as Ben Bova’s Death Dream [1994] or Wil McCarthy’s Murder in the Solid State [1996], novels you have most likely never heard of for this very reason).

One science fiction writer who consistently tried to expand into the thriller market is Gregory Benford, one of the premiere hard SF writers of the last three decades; his most famous novel, Timescape (1980), was praised for its mainstream virtues, particularly its depiction of academic scientists at work in the 1960s, as well as its ingenious plot involving cross-time communication. In 1985, Benford published Artifact, a near-future archeological thriller involving the discovery of an ancient Minoan artifact that seems to contain some sort of alien singularity that, if released, could have catastrophic effects.

Despite the sophisticated physics that goes into the explanation of the artifact (some of which is relegated to an appendix at the back of the novel), this central science-fictional device is for the most part reduced to the role of a MacGuffin (to use Alfred Hitchcock’s term for an object whose sole purpose is to motivate characters) in what is primarily a novel of international political intrigue and adventure. Later, recognizing that novels like this were on the far edge of the genre in which he already had built a substantial reputation, Benford adopted the pseudonym Sterling Blake for his thriller Chiller (1993), a Robin Cook–style suspense novel involving cryonics.

In 1997, Benford returned again to this field under his own name with Cosm, which—despite another ingenious device at its center, again drawn solidly from theoretical physics (a chrome-like sphere accidentally created in a uranium nuclei experiment turns out to be a window into a newly created micro-universe—the “Cosm” of the title)—was sufficiently driven by a simple chase-and-pursuit plot that it briefly attracted the attention of Hollywood. But the novel is the result of two genres virtually laid one on top of the other, with the Cosm itself serving, on the one hand, as an inventive and evocative novum in the most traditional science fiction sense, and on the other as a thriller-MacGuffin like the artifact in Artifact. When the heroine, a Black physicist named Alicia Butterworth, removes the object from the laboratory at Brookhaven where it was created, she finds herself in the midst of an adventure tale involving fundamentalists, federal marshals, bureaucrats, and academic politics, while the provocative notion of a mini-universe evolving at a rate millions of time faster than our own takes a back seat to the cat-and-mouse pursuit plot. As in Artifact, Benford offers an afterword arguing for the plausibility of the physics involved, but for the purposes of the thriller aspect of the novel, the Cosm is for the most part simply a very strange object that might explode, like a smuggled atom bomb or a vial of deadly viruses.

Benford’s most successful foray in transforming science-fictional materials into the materials of the commercial thriller is the novel Eater, published in early 2000. Eater seems almost a deliberate exercise in genre dissolution. It begins as an astronomical puzzle, and in rapid succession turns into a first-contact tale, a world-threatening disaster epic, a tragic romance, a space adventure, and an ontological fable that returns to one of Benford’s favorite science fiction themes: the relation of organic to artificial intelligences in the universe. Benjamin Knowlton is a distinguished astrophysicist at the Mauna Kea observatory. His wife, an ex-astronaut, is suffering from late-stage terminal cancer as the novel opens. When a young colleague presents Knowlton with evidence of what appears to be a highly anomalous astronomical artifact—a repeating gamma ray burster—he is initially skeptical, but hesitant to discourage the enthusiasm of a younger, more idealistic scientist. One of the most impressive aspects of these early chapters is the manner in which Benford convincingly describes the real-life problems of science and science management; the varying styles of intellectual problem solving and reacting to new phenomena are an important part of the characterization of his major figures, and coping with scientific and political bureaucracies becomes an important survival skill as the plot unfolds.

The young scientist’s measurements hold up, however, and the mysterious object—which has many of the characteristics of a black hole—is not only real, but is headed toward Earth at a startling rate. The object, which comes to be known as “Eater of All Things” because of its tendency, like a black hole, to consume objects in its path, proves to be intelligent—apparently the remnant of an ancient civilization that, when faced with doom at the hands of the black hole, downloaded itself into the singularity’s magnetic fields and has been cruising the universe ever since, collecting samples from various civilizations. Now it demands the uploaded minds of several hundred humans—whom it identifies by name—to add to the collection. To underline the seriousness of its demands, it burns a huge swath across eastern North America, including the Washington, D.C. area. The scientists—who by now must contend with paranoid government bureaucracies as well as the all-powerful and possibly deranged alien—face the Abraham-like dilemma of whether to offer up the sacrifices. As a kind of supreme sacrifice, the dying astronaut volunteers to have her consciousness uploaded into a space vehicle, in the hopes that she can at least do some damage to the seemingly invincible alien. As do all seemingly invincible aliens, these have an Achilles heel waiting to be discovered, and while Benford’s version of it is more sophisticated and intelligent than most, the final chapters of the novel veer toward crowd-pleasing escapades and uncomfortable echoes of far less sophisticated works, including such pop films as Independence Day, Contact, and Armageddon.

Eater works well enough as a science fiction novel, in terms of its scientist characters, the depiction of alien intelligence, and the nature of the central problem and solution, that it might seem perverse to cite it in the context of novels that test the boundaries of genre, or that contribute to the dissolution of their source genre. But the solid science fiction narrative at its core is repeatedly diluted by echoes of other genres—not only the thriller, but the epic disaster novel (which Benford had visited before with his 1980 Shiva Descending, co-authored with William Rotsler), the academic novel, and the mainstream novel of science, which Benford had blended effectively with a science-fictional conceit in his classic Timescape.

Still, the novel must be counted as a more successful hybrid of science fiction and the thriller than some prominent examples of the reverse—novels by thriller writers seeking to exploit science-fictional plots—such as James Patterson’s Where the Wind Blows (1998) or Michael Crichton’s Timeline (1999), both of which cavalierly violate the terms of their science fiction rationales in order to expediently deliver the next chapter-ending cliffhanger.



Published by Gregory Benford on January 29th, 2015

Contested Ground





Pros & Cons




The Daily Dot held that












Hating Lovecraft



Older’s petition offers a threefold argument:



Third, that Lovecraft was a ter­rible wordsmith.”

Kevin concludes:


But…as Nick Mamatas put it:




Noting this, Baron Groznik said…





fun and relatively peaceful.”









Published by Gregory Benford on December 16th, 2014



Here we assemble several of Stephen Hawking’s many remarks on the long range prospects of humanity. His hallmark in all such comments has been caution. He feels radiating powerful signals to announce our presence is an unnecessary risk, in case aliens might wish us ill. Risk aversion also features in his thoughts on subjects he has thought on a great deal, since his teenage years, when he was a prodigious science fiction fan.


We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. There have been a number of times in the past when survival has been a question of touch and go, like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963, and the frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future. We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully.
This is why I favor “personed” space flight and encourage further study into how to make space colonization possible.
But I’m an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space. Once we establish independent colonies, our entire future should be safe.