t's a well-known fact that time flies when you're having fun, which in some ways is a caution against enjoying your life too much, lest it race by like a summer afternoon. Still, this month marks the fifth anniversary of Lab Notes, and on this 66th visit to your computer screens, I must say I'm enjoying it as much as ever. I hope you are, too. And since I've got a million exciting things I haven't talked about yet, the fun should hopefully continue for many years to come.
The very first Lab Notes column was "Blue Moons for a Distant Jupiter," which appeared in May of 1999. It discussed, somewhat breathlessly, the discovery of a planetary system around an ordinary, yellow, sunlike star. This was huge news at the time, especially for science-fiction fans, and with a bit of work I was even able to show how the largest planet—a "hot Jupiter" orbiting at Venuslike distances from its parent star—could possibly support an Earthlike moon. Well, sort of; this hypothetical world would be steamy hot, with very short days and nights and a huge gas giant hanging motionless in its sky.
Today, writers don't have to work nearly as hard to imagine Earthlike worlds out there among the nearby stars. Astronomers have developed a variety of new techniques for identifying planets, from Doppler shifts to stellar wobbles to measurements of the very tiny drop in brightness that occurs when a planet passes in front of its sun. As a result, the Extrasolar Planets Catalog now includes some 123 confirmed planets in 108 different planetary systems. Skipping the arithmetic, this means there are 13 multiple-planet systems currently known, many of which could easily support a planet like ours. Of course, no one has yet developed the technology to detect Earthlike worlds directly, or to take accurate measurements of the atmospheres of distant planets. So confirming another Earth out there is a real challenge, whose ultimate success you'll hopefully be reading about in a future installment of Lab Notes.
Now, as a sort of fifth anniversary celebration, I've looked back over all the 65 columns that have gone before this one. And, being scientifically minded, I couldn't help analyzing the data for interesting patterns. For example, we've had to retract statements on three occasions, meaning our overall accuracy has been around 95.3 percent for the columns as a whole, and probably closer to 99.5 percent on a per-fact basis. For journalism at the cutting edge of cool new science, that's not too bad, although, to serve you better, we'll certainly try to improve those numbers for the next five years. Though it may come as no surprise to Lab Notes readers, I also discovered I'm becoming longer-winded as I get older. Actually, this trend leveled off in 2002, and lately my tendency is to show greater variance in the length of these columns. And as many readers have noted, although I'm an aerospace engineer, we really do talk about biotechnology as much as we talk about space. Mea culpa.
A graph is worth 1,000 words
Perhaps the most surprising bit of numerology is a correlation between the length of my columns and the month in which they're written. As it turns out, Lab Notes ebbs and flows with the seasons, peaking at an average of 1,660 words in the late spring, bottoming out at 1,300 in the late fall, and peaking again in the holiday season. The length is also remarkably consistent at this time, although the smallest variance occurs in May, and the largest in September. There's no corresponding relationship between length and subject matter, so this really is a scientific discovery of sorts: the seasonal activity of the North American Sci-Fi Bum. I have no idea what causes this, and frankly I'm a bit creeped out. Is there no free will?
I see eyes glazing over out there, so I'll wrap this up with some pretty pictures, which give an idea what you and I and the editors of Science Fiction Weekly have been talking about these past five years.
This tells me right away that we're not giving enough coverage to the paranormal: ghosts and flying saucers and whatnot. Regardless of varying opinions on these matters, they're certainly worthy of scientific investigation and discussion, especially here. So stay tuned!
In closing, I'll point out that the subject matter for each Lab Notes is discussed for weeks beforehand, and must pass a ruthless screening process consisting of myself and Scott Edelman agreeing that yeah, this is the cool thing to write about this month. We make every effort to tie each story to something fun in the movies or on TV, in comic books or even—though it boggles the mind—in regular books. This is, after all, an arm of the SCI FI Channel. So it's very interesting to see that columns inspired by reality and current events outnumber the ones inspired by fiction. Since there's no shortage of good fiction out there, this really is a testament to the power of reality, to demand our attention and get it. Even here.
Wishing us all another five good years ...
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, nanotechnologist, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon's "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and most recently, Lost in Transmission. His acclaimed nonfiction book, Hacking Matter, is now available in paperback.
