The Compleat McAndrews

Some of the other “great invariants” needed the efforts of many people before they were firmly defined and their significance was appreciated. The idea that mass was an invariant came about through the efforts of chemists, begi

Finally, although the idea that angular momentum must be conserved seems to arise naturally in classical mechanics from the conservation of linear momentum, in quantum physics it is much more of an independent invariant because particles such as protons, neutrons, electrons, and neutrinos have an intrinsic, internal spin, whose existence is not so much seen as deduced in order to make angular momentum a conserved quantity.

This sounds rather like a circular argument, but it isn’t, because intrinsic spin couples with orbital angular momentum, and quantum theory ca

There are other important invariants in the quantum world, However, some things which “common sense” would insist to be invariants may be no such thing. For example, it was widely believed that parity (which is symmetry upon reflection in a mirror) must be a conserved quantity, because the Universe should have no preference for left-handed sub-nuclear processes over right-handed ones. But in 1956, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang suggested this might not be the case, and their radical idea was confirmed experimentally by C.S. Wu’s team in 1957. Today, only a combination of parity, charge, and time-reversal is regarded as a fully conserved quantity.

Given the overall importance of invariants and conservation principles to science, there is no doubt that McAndrew would have pursued any suggestion of a new basic invariant. But if invariants are real, where is the fiction in the sixth chronicle? I’m afraid there isn’t any, because the nature of the new invariant is never defined.

Wait a moment, you may say. What about the Geotron?

That is not fiction science, either, at least so far as principles are concerned. Such an instrument was seriously proposed a few years ago by Robert Wilson, the former director of the Fermilab accelerator. His design called for a donut-shaped device thirty-two miles across, in which protons would be accelerated to very high energies and then strike a metal target, to produce a beam of neutrinos. The Geotron designers wanted to use the machine to probe the interior structure of the Earth, and in particular to prospect for oil, gas, and valuable deep-seated metal deposits.

So maybe there is no fiction at all in the sixth chronicle — just a little pessimism about how long it will take before someone builds a Geotron.

Rogue planets.

The Halo beyond the known Solar System offers so much scope for interesting celestial objects of every description that I assume we will find a few more there. In the second chronicle, I introduced collapsed objects, high-density bodies that are neither stars nor conventional planets. The dividing line between stars and planets is usually decided by whether or not the center of the object supports a nuclear fusion process and contains a high density core of “degenerate” matter. Present theories place that dividing line at about a hundredth of the Sun’s mass — smaller than that, you have a planet; bigger than that you must have a star. I assume that there are in-between bodies out in the Halo, made largely of degenerate matter but only a little more massive than Jupiter.

I also assume that there is a “kernel ring” of Kerr-Newman black holes, about 300 to 400 AU from the Sun, and that this same region contains many of the collapsed objects. Such bodies would be completely undetectable using any techniques of present-day astronomy. This is science fiction, not science.

Are rogue planets also science fiction? This brings us to Vandell’s Fifth Problem, and the seventh chronicle.

David Hilbert did indeed pose a set of mathematical problems in 1900, and they served as much more than a summary of things that were “hard to solve.” They were concise and exact statements of questions, which, if answered, would have profound implications for many other problems in mathematics. The Hilbert problems are both deep and difficult, and have attracted the attention of almost every mathematician of the twentieth century. Several problems of the set, for example, ask whether certain numbers are “transcendental” — which means they can never occur as solutions to the usual equations of algebra (more precisely, they ca

At the moment there is no such “super-problem” set defined for astronomy and cosmology. If there were, the one I invented as Vandell’s Fifth Problem would certainly be a worthy candidate, and might take generations to solve. (Hilbert’s Fifth Problem, concerning a conjecture in topological group theory, was finally solved in 1952 by Gleason, Montgomery, and Zippin.) We ca

In general relativity, the exact solution of the “one-body problem” as given by Schwarzschild has been known for more than 80 years. The relativistic “two-body problem,” of two objects orbiting each other under mutual gravitational influence, has not yet been solved. In nonrelativistic or Newtonian mechanics, the two-body problem was disposed of three hundred years ago by Newton. But the nonrelativistic solution for more than two bodies has not been found to this day, despite three centuries of hard work.

A good deal of progress has been made for a rather simpler situation that is termed the “restricted three-body problem.” In this, a small mass (such as a planet or small moon) moves under the influence of two much larger ones (stars or large planets). The large bodies define the gravitational field, and the small body moves in this field without contributing significantly to it. The restricted three-body problem applies to the case of a planet moving in the gravitational field of a binary pair of stars, or an asteroid moving in the combined fields of the Sun and Jupiter. It also offers a good approximation for the motion of a small body moving in the combined field of the Earth and Moon. Thus the problem is of practical interest, and the list of workers who have studied it in the past 200 years includes several of history’s most famous mathematicians: Euler, Lagrange, Jacobi, Poincaré, and Birkhoff. (Lagrange in particular provided certain exact solutions that include the L-4 and L-5 points, famous today as proposed sites for large space colonies.)