AFTERWORD
WHEN ONE IS dealing with hard science fiction, I’m told it’s particularly important to get the facts right. For example, one of the best and most well-known hard science fiction writers, Larry Niven, got a very important fact wrong in his first story, “The Coldest Place.” In it, the coldest place concerned was the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun. However, Mercury was found to rotate in a 3:2 resonance with the Sun before the story saw the light of day, meaning it was published with known scientific errata. Oh well. Didn’t seem to hurt his career much.
As The Punch Escrow is set in the mid-twenty-second century, I expect history will show I’ve gotten a lot of things wrong. I did my very best to avoid such missteps, but since I am only a fan of quantum physics and not a quantum physicist myself, I leaned on my friend Joe Santoro, a real-life medical physicist, to vet—and sometimes invent—the science necessary to make this world scientifically plausible. Joe is one of the nicest, smartest guys I know. He’s probably blushing, reading this. Still, without him, there never would have been a Punch Escrow.
In April of 2016, after I was sure this book would be published, I conducted a short interview with Joe.
Tal: Let’s get the obligatories out of the way. Please state your name and what you do for a living.
Joe: My name is Joe Santoro, and I am a medical physicist. I work in a radiation oncology clinic at a hospital on Long Island. We’re the guys who make sure the medical linear accelerator is delivering the correct radiation dose to patients undergoing radiation therapy. We also come up with the treatment plans for patients that dictate where the radiation will get delivered. We’re responsible for routine quality assurance of most of the various components that comprise the radiation delivery chain, i.e. the CT scanners, LINAC, on-treatment imaging, et cetera.
Tal: What made you want to get into physics?
Joe: Now you’re making me use my way-back machine. I guess I would have to narrow it down to three things at a really early age: astronomy (just looking up at the sky), magnets (which are cool at any age), and a fascination with things just crashing into one another. I subsequently became obsessed with meteorology to the point where I was making weather reports daily and posting them on the classroom door. Incidentally I didn’t end up “specializing” in either meteorology or astronomy, but these early interests were springboards into studying (particle) physics and mathematics later in life. To this day I still love a great meteor shower, looking up at the moon, or spending hours a day on
Tal: In science fiction books, scientists are often presented as characters with no sense of humor. I think that’s why Andy Weir’s The Martian was so beloved by the scientific community, because it presented hard science side by side with toilet humor. It was something I wanted to capture in Sylvia. She’s a quantum physicist, but one who’s also happy to drop a fart joke at any given moment. As a professional physicist, how much of a role does humor play into your daily work life? Can you cite any examples?
Joe: It’s funny you ask that. When I think back on the influences that shaped my personality as a scientist (and just a regular person), I think of Peter Venkman (Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters) and Chris Knight (Val Kilmer’s character in Real Genius). Perhaps it was just a function of watching and rewatching these movies at a really mentally malleable age, but both characters made the prospect of being a scientist seem like something really cool to aspire to.
I think having a good sense of humor allows you to deal with the absurdity, randomness, beauty, and cruelty of the universe in a way that complements science’s attempt to establish some sort of framework for all that. I think taking oneself too seriously is a hazard in both scientific pursuit and life’s pursuits. After all, what’s the point if you can’t have a good laugh every now and then?
It goes without saying that working in a radiation oncology department can be extremely stressful and tragic on an almost daily basis. I’ve been at places where joking around is discouraged, and I can tell you, people don’t last too long at those places. Without being able to joke around with the people I spend the better part of my day with, I think I would want to throw myself in front of train at the end of the day.
Tal: While writing the book, I’ve asked you to help me create a lot of absurd tech: convert mosquitoes to flying steam reformers, keep self-replicating nanos in check with ecophagy cages, build quantum switches for improbable bombs, and make human teleportation possible with density functional theory. Your one caveat to me was: beware of using too much deterministic language when describing how things work. Can you elaborate on why you said that?
Joe: Did I say that? It sounds quite serious. I guess what I meant is that when talking about things inherently “quantum,” it requires us to use the language of chance and probability instead of certainty. Quantum physics describes the world of the extremely small, and at these scales, familiar quantities like the position, velocity, momentum, and energy of an object become fuzzy and probabilistic. Instead of specifying these quantities as definite values like we’re used to for, say, a car traveling on a road, we have to instead speak of the expectation value of these quantities for an object like an electron. Quantum physics can say that the most probable location to find an electron orbiting a proton in a hydrogen atom is 1.5 times the Bohr radius but nothing more definite. This is in contrast to saying that our car is at position X, Y, Z, traveling at velocity V. It’s definitely a different way of thinking about reality, and I’m not sure anyone really ever gets used to it.
Tal: Okay, last question before I let you go back to saving the world one patient at a time: What one quantum physics breakthrough would you like to see happen within your lifetime?
Joe: That’s a doozy. If you’re going to make me pick just one, I would have to say commercially viable quantum computing coupled with photonic data storage and transfer. The exponential increase in the processing capability of a quantum computer will enable humanity to solve all sorts of currently intractable problems across dozens of disciplines. This also has to be accompanied by a completely new way to move and store such enormously large quantities of data, which means moving away from electronic data storage and buses to light-speed photonic data storage and busing. There are even some people using organic compounds like DNA as a means of storing extremely large quantities of data. The coupling of these nascent technologies can potentially change the course of humanity in unimaginably fantastic ways.
Tal: That’s it! I’ve had it with your shenanigans, Joe. Get the hell out of my book!
Seriously, though, I can never thank Joe enough for helping me build the world in which The Punch Escrow takes place. He’s an amazing guy and represents the ideal intersection of scientific curiosity and human empathy. We need more Joes.