Commissioning Fanfiction for Science Communication – Inviting Pitches · 6:30pm Oct 5th, 2019
Update: The deadline to send pitches for this project has now passed. However if anyone has an idea for a story about one of the topics listed below, feel free to contact me. I might be persuaded to commission it.
As I announced in the summer, I am now launching a new science communication project where I will be commissioning stories. Yes I am offering to pay you to write ponyfic if you have a good idea for a story inspired by particle physics and can convince me you can write it.
Here’s how it works. Here is a list of particle physics research topics:
- Dark Matter
- Neutrinos
- Antimatter
- Future Colliders
- Cosmic Rays
(See below for further details and a links to blog posts explaining these).
Pick one of these and come up with a story idea. How you interpret this is up to you. You don’t have to explain the details of the science (I can do that in a blog post). I want something that will attract lots of readers and make them curious about the topic so they want to know more, but not be so contrived that it’s not a good story.
Write a short description of your story idea (I suggest 200 words max) and send me a pitch by PM. Send me more than one if you like. Feel free to contact me with any questions.
I will pick the ideas that I think will make the best stories and have the best chance of getting lots of readers. I expect to pick about five, but this will depend on the number and quality of pitches I get. Please draw my attention to some of your past hits to show me what an awesome writer you are, but if you don’t have a track record but reckon you have a great idea, feel free to pitch it anyway. I am after good writers, not trained physicists. Ideas from those without a science background are very welcome as long as you are willing to engage with it.
If I choose to go with your idea, I will suggest we chat over Skype and you can ask any questions about the particle physics. Like any editor, I may make some suggestions, but it will be your story. I will read the draft and correct any problems with the science. I will then write a blog post explaining the particle physics in your story.
You then publish it on Fimfiction. We both promote it on our blogs and other channels and enjoy the fame when it becomes a sensational hit. I will stalk the comments to talk to readers about the science and it monitor the interest it generates. This is a science communication experiment – I want to see if it works and I may write up and publish the results.
Terms and Conditions
Stories should be suitable for a wide audience. Nothing Mature or anything too controversial or that requires knowledge of other fanfiction. Stories that can be enjoyed by both young children and adults are encouraged.
I am offering £25 GBP per 1000 words (currently $30.83 USD). I am happy to make an initial payment by Paypal on receipt on a long description and writing sample, with the remainder paid upon completion.
Maximum length 8000 words, but I think shorter stories are generally better. Give a target length in your pitch.
I will decide on the timetable as we go along. I won’t make any decision for a few weeks – we have a finale to watch and other things to do – if I get plenty of submissions I may then set a deadline. If there is not so much interest I will leave it open until I get enough ideas that I like. I then envisage publishing stories maybe one every month.
Why am I doing this?
After years of messing around writing science-themed pony fanfiction, and building up a niche following within the fimfiction community, my efforts received an unexpected recognition at home when I won an award from Oxford University for Public Engagement with Research, and was shortlisted for another, earlier this year. This crazy hobby of mine has become the thing that has won me most recognition.
This follows my otherwise undistinguished career as an experimental particle physicist, in which I failed to find Dark Matter, failed to measure the shape of the Neutron, failed to win sustained funding work on a project at Fermilab. Along the way I dabbled in geophysics and failed to show a link between groundwater flow and the geomagnetic field.
I would love to be able to take the time to write some amazing stories about ponies and particle physics. However, I have too many other duties and distractions at the moment. I now have a fancy new title as Public Engagement with Research Leader, with the task of promoting ways to get academics talking about their research and interacting with ordinary people. As good researcher knows that when you have more awesome ideas than you have time to pursue them, the answer is COLLABORATE. And since I won a cash prize with my award, this gives me the funds to spend on something wacky like commissioning fanfiction.
This way, I can also demonstrate to my university friends a way to use fanfiction to promote their research to the public, which does not require them to write stories, which your average professor lacks the skill to do. If this is a success—if I can show that it gets lots of people engaging with particle physics research at Oxford—then I can present it as a method that any researcher can follow to raise public awareness of their research. I would be then be in a good position to apply for funding for a larger project.
But I’m not there yet. This is all an experiment, and experiments rarely go exactly to plan.
Particle Physics Research Topics / Story Prompts
Dark matter: One of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy is: what is the dark matter – the invisible mass required to explain the motion of stars and the structure of universe? Particle physics provides a possible answer—it is made up of an as-yet-undiscovered particle, abundant and massive enough to account for the majority of the mass of the galaxy, yet which interacts with ordinary matter so weakly that such interaction has never been conclusively shown to exist. There are a series of big experiments in underground laboratories aiming to see such an interaction and verify the hypothesis. For more details, see my blog post: The Many Ways to Search for Dark Matter.
Neutrinos: Neutrinos are ghostly particles, which fill the universe. Produced by nuclear processes in stars and nuclear reactors, they whizz through the Earth at almost the speed of light and only very rarely hit an ordinary atom. Yet understanding neutrinos has proven to be essential to build a working model of particle physics. They are enigmatic particles. The realisation that they could 'oscillate' between different flavours, and thus evade detection, has been one of the biggest discoveries in 21st century particle physics. For more details, see my blog post: Neutrinos Down the Rabbit Hole. Story now published:
Antimatter: Antimatter is a strange mirror reflection of the matter in our universe. Antiparticles have identical, but opposite, properties to particles: negatively charged electrons are mirrored by positrons. Antiparticles can be created, studied, and are used in medical technology. It remains a mystery why our universe is almost entirely made of matter, when we believe the Big Bang created both particles and antimatters. The answer may be connected to subtle asymmetries between particles and antiparticles, being probed at high energy interactions at experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and other big machines. For more details, see my blog post: Oxford Research into Antimatter.
Particle colliders: Particle colliders are the favourite research tools of particle physicists. We use high electric fields to push particles to close to the speed of light, then focus them into two beams, which we let smash together. The goal is to identify new scientific phenomena in the resulting particle debris. The first colliders were relatively small gadgets housed in a single room. CERN’s first accelerator, the synchrocyclotron was built in 1957, followed by a series of bigger and bigger machines, leading up to the Large Hadron Collider. What is future? The Next Linear Collider may be built in Japan. There are also plans for a Future Circular Collider and other more exotic designs. For more details, see my blog post: Collider Physics – The Art of Smashing Particles.
Cosmic rays: Our planet is continuously bombarded by high-energy particles from outside the solar system. When the highest energy primary cosmic rays wham into the top of the atmosphere, they send a shower of secondary particles raining down on the surface. A few of these have an energy many times that reached by particle accelerators. These Ultra High Energy cosmic rays are so rare that to have a chance of seeing any you need a detector covering a big area. For more details, see my blog post: Cosmic Rays: Extreme Energy Messengers from Space.
Man, I would be into this if I hadn't just signed up for a contest. :B
Congratulations, you're an award-winning physicist. That it's more of a "you're Neil DeGrasse Tyson" award than a "you're Albert Einstein" award can be left for footnotes/fine print/otherwise swept under the rug.
This is very cool. I wish I had the time/gumption to actively participate, but I'll be very interested to see what comes of it.
Hmm...
I can't promise anything, though I do have a few ideas. I'll certainly provide a signal boost, though.
Oh, another thing about neutrinos: there are hundreds of millions of them in every square inch of the planet's atmosphere, and the average interaction rate is one of them per decade across all of your body's atoms combined. They'll often make it all the way through Earth without hitting anything on the way.
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FOME's Imposing Sovereign's II? I'd better make sure I'm still open for submissions until after that.
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I certainly hope when I'm a best-selling popular science writer it will look good on the dust jacket.
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Thanks
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That's the one! I'll at least signal boost this blog when next I post (and you've already gotten one from FOME! :)
This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen on fimfiction!
Wow, congratulations! Good luck!
Physics has never been my strong point (much like math). I come to a stuttering halt when I consider dark matter, and why it doesn't just build up in the cores of planets until they turn into black holes.
Hrm.
As a Sci-fi nerd, I am abundantly interested.
As a SciTwi fan, I can probably do something.
Is there a deadline, I don’t think I saw it in the blog but I have been wrangling a six year old today.
I'm potentially interested, even though I'd have to read up on a lot of stuff to make such a story work. For now, though, I'm busy with continuing own projects, finishing some stories and doing art, which I don't know how long is going to take. I hope you have this going for a while and that you will eventually do it again should I miss this opportunity.
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Or does it?
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My current thinking is I will consider pitches until the end of November. If I get some good ideas before that, I will take them. After that it will depend on whether I've assigned all my budget. I will post updates to my blog.
This is the sort of thing I just do normally.
- MLP: FiM
- Romance
- Drama
- Sci-Fi
Somepony is sabotaging Moondancer's research. When Twilight offers to help, the two friends discover a dangerous secret.On a skim read of this, the Dark Matter entry sounds like you're focusing on WIMPs. It would be weirdly funny for Rainbow Dash to end up learning about them just because she's trying to shake the image of sports jock, so she focuses on the wimpiest thing in science.
I read this blog, and I'm really starting to wonder if I know you from the world of physics. :3c
This is very inspiring.
I dunno if I can write anything Pony-related with it, but it's definitely very inspiring
Let's do some particle physics. Cracks knuckles.
-GM, master of all the bosons. All of them.
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And you can use basically the same premise for neutrinos if you're willing to exchange the pun for fact. They can make it all the way through the planet without anything noticing and saying "hey, this is a solid object" to them.
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To be fair, the entire problem with dark matter is that we basically have to take it on faith that it exists because nothing else works without it.
5132860 I see. Like Congressional ethics.
The thing that puzzles me about Dark Matter, is that if you cant see normal matter, its dark, and Ive seen descriptions of the Oort cloud, per star, that claim up to ten times the mass of the star left over. Thats an awful lot of dark normal matter? And a lot more too large to be obscuring dust material?
What I really like, which is being demonstrated more and more, is that we live in 4 spacial dimentions and time, and gravity is the fractal dimention value. That, and Hawkings use of the Flat Torus takes a 3 dimentional soft fractal structure that needs 5 spacial dimentions to exist in and has all the required properties of a singularity while being physically extant in size.
But, you wanted to ask about things you know people can believe. No non illuminating sensors, demonstrations of causal loops, or the fun stuff you can make money with?
Id love to have a go, but I have less sense of story, than a brick.
Okay, so... this may all sound like babble to you, someone who's trained in the (current) math and theory when I'm not so intensively trained, but I wanted to pass the idea by anyway.
I'm pretty sure the universe has more than four dimensions, because where does the spacetime flex into when a black hole forms? Sure, time slows as space condenses, but is that because space is converting into time? I doubt it, any more than electricity is removed when magnetism manifests. Heck, why dimensionality at all? Well: space expands when energy fills it... leading to the possibility that any fundamental force represents an axis of spacetime traversal (volume/dimensionality) within a universe.
What I see is that the forces are paired (as fields or flows), so why would gravity break symmetry by being unpaired? Instead, I'd propose that a new model would have to be written to accommodate a force that pairs with and balances gravity... that also implies that electromagnetism is still two separate forces, but with a single fulcrum of function. (Which explains TWO particles carrying it, thanks, as opposed to the one particle per force and one brief-or-virtual per interaction type everything else gets - though aren't force-carrying particles supposed to all be solitons? Or did I get the definition of soliton wrong?) But it does solve the dark matter problem: dark matter is the gravitic/??? shadow of energy or mass in different dimensional alignment with what we perceive as "realspace". To do more than faintly interact, however, you'd have to have a way of bending or crossing that spacetime. Enter one more pair of forces: phase, allowing for depth of spacetime when mass is added (somewhere to flex into and out of by passing across the boundaries of visibility), and density, relating to the "solidity" or viscosity of space and time and the intensity of vacuum energy. This allows a mass to push its energy across a depth of volume, creating higher and lower density.. but may also create different "levels" of spacetime visibility by aligning them across different "signal groups" through phase.
So:
Strong/weak (atomic-level)
Electric/magnetic (molecular-level)
Gravitic/??? (...let's call it thaumic, see below) (stellar-level)
Phase/density (quantic? DImensional? "Depth"? Tesseractine?)
Time/space (volumetric-level, universe-level)
This gives us ten forces (if we were to count both time and space as such), leading to ten-dimensional theory. (I hear some types of string theory cover that number easily.)
Measuring this is not easy, however. We'd have to test materials for ability to interact. Hoping for a post-trans-uranic material that does this is wishful thinking (even though I hope there's an island of stability out there to find). But does the math work out? Well.... let's poke at neutrinos, since they barely interact with anything we perceive in 3D space. What if they are dark matter? How does that affect the system? Do they fit the proposed model?
Now enter magic. If you can move objects, teleport, or channel energies, there has to be a means. Yes, that implies using physics to justify magic. So let's not.... yet. First find out if there's a way to do it without impossible materials and special rules. Is there? Sure. Extreme electromagnetics can take advantage of electro-weak unity and bend spacetime. But what if there's a less energy-intensive way? How large an effect can we get? What would cancel gravity sufficiently?
Oh, right, gravity is currently viewed as an unpaired force. So then: Thaum. By adding this (yes, vaguely-defined) force, suddenly there's a potential way to balance gravity against density. What if this is the repulsive-effect nature of dark energy? (Which seems to have been theorised out of existence, according to what I've read; but the universe's expansion is still accelerating as far as we can see, so something needs to explain it.)
Now you need a lever or a channel (a linear "lever"). A thing to balance energies off of. Something that will carry thaum, like the atomic-shaped density packets we call matter carries gravitic force. Density manipulation of spacetime via thaumic field? Constructs of energy that self-resonate? Wait... that sounds like spirit-form tulpa. Or atoms and particles again. Does it depend on density? Can we get it to interact across phase plateaus/boundaries? Am I getting out of line? Sure sounds like magic. Where does the energy come from???
It's all merely hypothesis unless the math checks out sufficiently and we find a way to test it against physical models. This would all be easier if we had a gravito-thaumic device, a thaumometer if you will, to either directly measure field intensity or instead changes in the local field.
Oh, hey. That could potentially find pockets of dark matter, wouldn't it? Or read out gravitic signals (an ansible? We'd have to tune it, like radio, I suppose), or subspace tunnels/presences (spirits? time-walkers? spells?)... or not. Maybe it can only measure large effects -- I mean, dark matter is weakly-interacting for the most part, isn't it? But magic being real implies a "large" effect, large enough to produce telekinesis at least. If a magic-user is simply wielding a lever to channel some larger force... how sturdy are they? Are they using a self-reinforcing construct? (The more energy you add, the stronger it gets, but it would balance off of something to produce its structural force. You don't get a tokamak if it can't withstand its own magnetic field.)
The whole idea hinges on some funny-sounding ideas, but I STILL think gravity needs a partner and 3D/4D spacetime needs somewhere to bend into and out of for dimensional theory to make good sense to me.
I must admit, I'm not sure I understand this approach.
My Little Pony fanfiction seems like it's intended to reach a more general audience, sure, but then you're not approaching that general audience with more general topics.
The thing that really put me off science was realizing that most of it seems to have changed from seeing it as a methodology to find answers to problems, and instead become a fact-memorizing endeavour for social status. Most people will never interact with any of these topics:
Directly in their lives. It's abstract. So teaching them about it doesn't really increase the science education in the world, it increases the fact memorization.
I'd probably point to Richard Feynman's autobiographies as a really good example of an alternative. He shows the usefulness of the mindset, and shows being a scientist as an achievable and aspirational figure.* That's the kind of story I'd be more interested in telling here.
This is something I should be interested in doing. I think stories really need to teach things. At the moment, I'm trying to do a bunch of stories that educate people about political science ideas to share that language. I just wrote this one to explain how past colonialism results in present injustices.
But I feel like that kind of idea is different to the ones you're approaching. I feel like giving people a way to recognize inequalities is relevant to my audience, and I feel like they're ideas that people are choosing not to pursue by other means. And I don't think stories about dark matter or antimatter qualify in either of those regards.
If I was going to do a science outreach story again, I'd make it about teaching how science actually gets used, having it solve practical problems. About a character figuring out, say, why balls keep moving in a cart if the cart stops. About the process of learning, not jumping to the knowing.
STEM science doesn't have a problem of legitimacy. My beloved soft sciences like economics and psychology have driven themselves to wrack and ruin bending over to fit into the STEM mould, and now everything I love is heterodox. It has a reputational problem of being a modern day mysticism, of impossibly smart people in lab coats divining answers from equipment nobody could ever get a chance to touch.
Approaching these very complex subjects in a simple way doesn't solve or approach that problem. It just reinforces the fact-learning for social status thing.
Which, if you want more people to know about those subjects - cool. That's fine and cool and good. But I don't think that's your real end goal, or should be by itself. It's useless information in the hands of most of the people who'd learn it, except as social capital. You might give a few geeks some higher level "Did you know-" conversation starters, but I think that's where this ends.
If you want people to appreciate how important science education is, though, or how it's useful to them, or develop an interest in learning instead of just knowing these things, then I feel like this is a very superficial approach. You'd be better off with commissioning stories like The Study of Anglophysics.
As someone coming at this from the soft sciences, we're currently fighting to be seen as legitimate at all. It works better to try and engage people with the ideas at all, because a lot of them are... well, frankly, borderline contraband. When designing a school curriculum, it's designed with the idea that the world needs more scientists, not more poets. The world needs more engineers, not more school counsellers. The world needs more doctors, not more sociologists. More Ph.Ds and less philosophers.
(Bluntly, more people who know how to build facial recognition into a drone and less ethicists to say you shouldn't.)
((Actually, if you'd be kind enough to let me kvetch just a second longer?
I live near one of the top five universities in Australia, the University of Queensland. They already axed their journalism program once, and their soft sciences are only just being kept afloat now by a massive grant from white nationalists, in exchange for hosting a degree in "Western Civilization".))
So I guess what I'm trying to say here is, like, a short fictionalized breakdown of high level concepts into storytelling doesn't really advance a goal here, because science facts are already seen as social capital. "Science is fucking awesome" is one of the most followed pages on Facebook. People already think this is valuable to be taught, and know, but being told this information won't actually 'demystify' science or make people think they're capable of going into the sciences themselves - and you're limiting your audience, by telling that story, to those people.
* I originally used my own examples here because I usually feel most qualified talking about my own stuff, but I don't want to come across as self-aggrandizing in saying this.
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I will have to take a look at that.
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That’s one way to do it, although it’s best to have a bit more connection to the science than one pun.
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There is more than one type of Dark Matter. Normal – or baryonic – dark matter such as objects in the Oort cloud account for a few percent of the missing mass. The mystery is what is all the rest.
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There are a lot of theories about dark matter. The approach we take as experimental particle physicists is to work on the hypothesis that there exist particles with a given mass, density, and interaction rate in the universe. We then build an experiment to search for these that will either detect them, or if it doesn’t set a limit on the interaction rate. Dark matter is a mystery, but to build an experiment, we need a clear idea of what we want to test.
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The aim of this project is to engage people with the particle physics research program we are doing at Oxford. The topics are indeed abstract and the challenge for the writer is to either find and tell the story behind it (as a science journalist would), or to create their own story to engage people with the topic.
Of course there are other ways you can use stories to boost science education or recruit students, but this project is about creating stories to illustrate current particle physics research. I am aware my topics are not what writers would usually choose to write about, which is why am I offering a financial incentive to participate. I think the ideas you suggest would be great stories, but they don’t come under the scope of this project.
While Richard Feynman was a great writer as well as a great physicist, he is a problematic role model as he was such an arrogant chauvinist. There’s one chapter in ‘Surely You’re Joking…’ which tells some particularly shocking stories of how he treated women. I know quite a few teenage boys decide to study physics because of his books – but not always for the right reasons. His autobiographies are not really about physics, they are about Richard Feynman.
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Big agree on Feynman - there's the phrase "critical support" here where you endorse someone while still being very critical of specifics, and that definitely applies with him. It was still the best example that came to mind in terms of storytelling if we're planning on replacing the protagonist with Twilight Sparkle.
I am terrible at writing, but I know about electoral mathematics. I recommend that rate the best idea +9 and the worst idea -9 and then rate all other ideas relative to these ideas. Disallow 0, thus forcing yourself to come down 1 way or another. That will help you sort the story-pitches. Rating candidates this way is called Score-Voting or Range-Voting and is 1 of the best methods for single-winner elections —— ¡it definitely beats Plurality (vote for 1) and IRV (instant-runoff voting)!
I boosted the signal about your contest in the Group The Skeptics' Guide to Equestria.
The Skeptics’ Guide to Equestria
My hit of a story has over 95 000 views on Youtube:
Here's my first draft of one of my ideas for your contest:
I have some other ideas as well if you're interested.
PS. As with all the contests on this site, I'm promoting yours on my userpage in an attempt to get you more contenders. Good luck!
Hmm. Challenging indeed.
For my history, I've written a few, this is the biggest non-sci-fi success I've had;
- MLP: FiM
- Dark
- Adventure
The Mane 6 are accidentally sent to an alternate world in turmoil.(sadly (a monumental understatement), the re-write didn't do as well)
But the one time I tried writing more sciencey stuff was the best success I've ever had:
- MLP: FiM
- Sci-Fi
Luna discovers a vast and ancient being approaching Equus. When she and Celestia go to meet it, they see into the early dawn and eternal twilight of their universe.(Sat in the featured box for a few days and even hit the top of it for awhile)
You should take a look, though (especially at the comments) - it sounds like this is the exact sort of thing you're looking for, though this would've been about vacuum decay, entropy, the heat death of the universe, cosmology, the big bang, simulated minds, the Landeaur Limit, or a number of other things passingly mentioned (like averaging statistical results to pick out a signal from a lot of truly random noise).
It seems the OC in the story might be a good starting point for something related to one of the topics here. Hard to think of how, though. Feel free to feed me ideas. Even if they're not good they could be the starting point to build something good from.
Honestly I've been toying with an all-original (non ponyfic) story and one element in it was something like a weaponized particle accelerator built by a very advanced civilization. Not a collider, though.
EDIT:
I should've read more carefully or skimmed better. I guess it can't be a sequel to After Eternity, then (right?). I think I'll post this, anyways, though.
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I thought the understanding was that because dark matter doesn't experience regular electromagnetic interactions, it doesn't collide with itself and clump together like gas and dust do. So when gravity does succeed in bringing it together, it just ghostly passes through itself, since it lacks that electromagnetic interaction (so no friction or collision as we think of them), and ends up orbiting itself.
Model it and you'll find it ends up orbiting, spending the overwhelming majority of its time far away from the central object at the apoapsis, and that fits with observation that dark matter is typically concentrated in halos around galaxies rather than in them.
Now that people have had some time after the contests from last month to think about pitches, do you have an end-date in mind? I'm hoping to give this a shot if I can, but I've got some other stuff I need to do through this coming month, so it'd be good for me to know if I can prioritize that and still pitch some ideas afterwards or if I need to try to come up with pitches concurrently with that work.
Also, do you have any plans for what to do with any story ideas that end up abandoned by their originator? Thus far I haven't had any ideas that serve as viable nucleation sites to crystallize my creativity into a story of the sort you're looking for, but I might be able to make someone else's pitch work – and that's even if the pitch in question doesn't itself serve as the inspiration I need.
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I was thinking of 30 November as a 1st-round deadline for pitches, but I've been so busy with other stuff myself that it might make sense to delay it a bit more. I will try to get a blog post update out by tomorrow.
I don't think I can hand out other people's story ideas. I could offer some of my own.
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I'd been thinking just with permission, say if someone who submitted a pitch realized they wouldn't be able to do it after all and gave you the go-ahead to let other people use it. That said, if you have ideas yourself, that would certainly work too. Maybe even better for the purposes of this experiment, actually, since coming up with ideas is something I could see a lot of professors being able to help with even if they lack the skill to execute those ideas on their own.