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- This is a very different episode of Astronomy Cast. As we mentioned last week, Pamela recently attended the Dragon*Con science fiction convention in Atlanta, Georgia. While she was there, she participated in a special live edition of Astronomy Cast with special guest Dr. Kevin Frazier. Kevin is a NASA scientist, and the science consultant for the TV shows Battlestar Galactica and Eureka. He and Pamela work through physics and astronomy in popular science fiction. What they get right, and what they get wrong… so very wrong.
Episode 53: Astronomy in Science Fiction(27.4MB)
Show Notes
- Role of Science Consultants in Media: Dr. Grazier shares insights into his work as a science consultant, emphasizing the importance of scientific accuracy in storytelling and how it enhances narrative credibility.​
- Analysis of Battlestar Galactica and Eureka: The conversation explores specific examples from these series, highlighting where scientific principles are accurately depicted and where creative liberties are taken.​
- Common Misconceptions in Sci-Fi: They address prevalent scientific inaccuracies in science fiction, such as sound in space and unrealistic space travel mechanics, and discuss their impact on public understanding of science.​
- Balancing Science and Storytelling: The discussion delves into the challenges writers face in integrating complex scientific concepts into engaging narratives without overwhelming the audience.​
- Audience Interaction: Recorded live at Dragon*Con, the episode features questions from the audience, providing additional perspectives and inquiries about science in media.
Transcript
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Fraser Cain [00:00:35] Astronomy Cast, episode 53 for Monday, September 10th, 2007. Astronomy and science fiction. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts -based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today. Now, Pamela’s not with me this week. She’s actually on the road traveling still. She’s at another convention. But this is going to be a very different episode of Astronomy Cast. As we mentioned last week, Pamela recently attended the Dragon Con science fiction convention in Atlanta, Georgia. And while she was there, she participated in a special live edition of Astronomy Cast with a special guest, Dr. Kevin Frazier. Sounds strange to say that, Frazier. Anyway, Kevin is a NASA scientist and the science consultant for the TV shows Battlestar Galactica and Eureka. So he and Pamela work through the physics and astronomy in popular science fiction on television and in movies. So what they get right, what they get wrong, what they get really wrong. And Swoopy from Skepticality took my place and administrated the whole show. So I hope you enjoy this. Astronomy Cast. We’ve got 52 episodes of the regular show, plus a few special episodes. In fact, we didn’t miss a single week the whole year. So since Pamela isn’t here right now and she can’t hear me, maybe we’ll take a second and record a congratulation or email something in and we’ll surprise her and maybe play a few on the next episode. So enjoy the special episode. It’s a long one. It’s just shy of an hour. So make sure you got some time. But I really enjoyed listening to it and I hope you will too.
Fraser Cain [00:02:16] Astronomy Cast episode number 53 live from Dragon Con. This is Swoopy from Skepticality subbing in for Pam’s usual co -host, the very Canadian Frasier Cain of Universe Today. And I am here with Dr. Pamela Gay and her extremely special, very cool guest, Dr. Kevin Grazier from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. And as well as being a super genius, Kevin is the science advisor to Battlestar Galactica and Eureka. Hey guys, welcome to Dragon Con. Give them a big welcome.
Speaker 4 [00:02:58] So how’s it been so far? Oh, it’s been outstanding. Yesterday I did a panel with a bunch of Galactica actors along with Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden and Brent Spiner. I can die and go to Nerdvana right now.
Pamela Gay [00:03:12] Anyway. So yeah, it’s been great so far. This is the first time I’ve gone to a con and had people who weren’t astronomy professors come up to me and go, you’re sure this is so cool? Because when an astronomy prof, well yeah, I do astronomy, they’re going to hopefully think it’s cool otherwise why are they teaching astronomy? But normal people listen to and I met some face to face
Speaker 4 [00:03:31] and it was very exciting. Are you sure they’re normal? Okay,
Pamela Gay [00:03:36] they’re friends, family, freaks and geeks. That works for me. Roger. Got it.
Fraser Cain [00:03:42] I actually witnessed somebody recognizing you by your voice and getting very, very excited and oh I love you. And women who know science
Speaker 1 [00:03:51] are hot, right? Yes.
Fraser Cain [00:03:56] So what’s the, we always have to ask, coolest costume you’ve seen yet? The coolest what? Costume. Costume. Or a person that you hope was a costume?
Speaker 4 [00:04:11] That’s a good question. Oh, I know the coolest one I’ve seen. There was a Master Chief saw, that was just astounding. From Halo. Oh my God, there’s a lot of work into that. I mean, you’re at Dragon Con. A lot of skin. But then again, that’s all kind of samey.
Fraser Cain [00:04:25] Master Chief, that’s cool. What about best costume related to
Speaker 4 [00:04:31] Galactica? Well, Galactica doesn’t have a lot of great costumes. If I saw somebody like number six, that’d be pretty cool. But there’s been a lot of people in Galactica garbing the standard double twin tank top thing. That’s pretty much everywhere. I did see one good bridge costume but they’re pretty
Fraser Cain [00:04:51] ubiquitous. So today we’re going to talk about astronomy in film and television and what facts they do right, wrong, and just plain, totally very wrong. And I think you know what you’re talking about. So we can try and start on a, we’ll end on a positive note, so we’ll start with the concepts that just plain don’t make sense, the wrongest of the very wrong.
Pamela Gay [00:05:15] Well, I have to say the thing that most causes my brain to go, but we can’t do that, is artificial gravity. There are perfectly normal hanging out shuttlecraft that if you believe the mockups would fit in this room, which means they don’t have that much gravitational attraction of their own. There’s just not that much mass. And yet people experience gravity. Well, we have like two explanations for where gravity comes from. One is a particle physics explanation that would require them to have figured out how to not only detect but harness and utilize Higgs bosons, not Higgs bosons, gravitons, a different type of boson. We can’t detect them. If we can’t detect them, how are we going to manipulate them? And I know it’s the future in all of that. But the other explanation we have is relativity. And relativity explains gravity as mass physically warping space. And it’s a shuttle. A shuttle, again, doesn’t have enough mass to physically warp space and create gravity. So this is my personal pet peeve. Thank God we have Babylon 5 and other examples of things rotating and creating not artificial gravity but a force that keeps your feet on the hull. That works for me. I’m good with that.
Speaker 4 [00:06:43] On Galactica, what I tell people, I get asked a lot about artificial gravity and FTL. And what I tell them is, with the exception of artificial gravity and FTL, if you can make that leap, we do pretty much pretty well on the rest of it. Interestingly enough, we actually have explained in -house how these work. I’ve always also said in conventions, et cetera, that as long as it could potentially be a plot point, then I won’t go into how we have explained it internally. But we see them both as an offshoot of the same effect. Now, interestingly enough, I just worked on an anthology of essays called The Science of Dune. And it’ll be coming out in January. And in that, I never really realized until recently that in Dune, if you look at the suspensors, the essentially ionograph units and the FTL, they’re both offshoots of the Holtzmann effect. So even way back when, even Frank Herbert. It’s ill -defined. Frank Herbert did a very good job of attributing the technology to one non -defined effect and then having everything be an offshoot of that so it never grows old. It’s a classic forever because it doesn’t go into technical detail. And I think that’s brilliant. But at the same time, in his world, or universe, the Duneiverse, the Holtzmann effect is both anti -gravity and FTL. It does both. It’s just like we do. So he came in the same effect, what, 40 years earlier?
Pamela Gay [00:08:09] So when we don’t have a proper effect, we make up nouns.
Speaker 4 [00:08:13] Yes. Well, also you have to look at actually the Hollywood details. Do we want to have people floating everywhere? Would running to your viper be better than just
Fraser Cain [00:08:23] pulling yourself along on a cable? But it would be so cool if you rotated the galactica and
Pamela Gay [00:08:28] people had to try and figure out how to launch the vipers out of something that was spinning. That would just be so cool. That would be cool also. It would cost more money too.
Speaker 4 [00:08:37] It would cost a lot more money. Also, I worked on a chapter in a book about Halo, the physics of Halo, and talked about spinning something for gravity. And there are non -intuitive effects with that as well. I did computer simulations, yes I am in touch with my inner nerd, of how a trajectory of a projectile would work in a halo. If you go a long track or anti -long track, it’s asymmetric. Because we talk about spinning something for gravity, and if you’re on the hull, you’re fine. It’s like gravity. But once you start projecting things, it gets really weird. So the spinning thing is also, there are gotchas with that as well.
Pamela Gay [00:09:25] Physics makes things fun. Spinning physics makes things mathematically hard, but gets you almost artificial gravity. It’s a secondary force. Now, you mentioned quite, quite vaguely that you have explained faster than light and artificial gravity in Battlestar Galactica, but you’re not going to explain how, because it’s not a plot point yet. If you had to make hints at how faster than light travel could be done without breaking the laws of physics, what hints can you give us?
Speaker 4 [00:09:55] If you look in sci -fi, there are several ways that it essentially boils down to. You could compress space ahead of you. That’s implied in Star Trek, the warping space, which is also an offshoot of general relativity. You also could argue that that’s implied in Galactica, maybe. There’s also the, we were talking earlier about the Millennium Falcon. There is a line from Star Wars, a famous line where Han Solo says, of the Millennium Falcon, it’s a ship that made the Kessel run less than 12 parsecs. And then there’s a debate. Is he just full of it, or is he saying his ship can compress space so efficiently that it’s only 12 parsecs to the Kessel? And so there’s the whole space compression. There’s also literally leaving this physical universe, going to some dimensional, higher dimensional plane like hyperspace, like Babylon 5 goes to hyperspace, or was it ultra -quantum space? If you’ve seen the latest video, the newest DVD, Quantum Space. Some other plane where space is denser, and then coming back into our planet realm of existence, I would say it’s probably not what we’re going to do with Galactica.
Fraser Cain [00:11:10] Probably. That’s the best you can tell me? Probably? Maybe not?
Speaker 4 [00:11:15] Like I said, if it could be a plot point, and we still have, in my world, we still have half a season to go. Who knows? Next year, ask away.
Pamela Gay [00:11:29] So remember that. One of the problems with faster -than -light is, again, relativity. It’s always out there trying to just take all the fun out of science fiction. It says we can’t move faster than the speed of light relative to space around us. What it doesn’t say is that space can contract or expand, allowing us to move through this differently sized space that, when it unstreshes, is now it appears that we’ve moved faster than the speed of light. Now that was a very confusing statement, but back when the universe first was starting, it was expanding so rapidly that Kevin and I might have started off this far apart, but a fraction of a second later, he’s off an Andromeda. Very small fraction of a second. Very small. It wasn’t that he moved away faster than the speed of light. It was that space carried him. So we can explain faster -than -light just by saying that space -time itself adjusts to take us where we want to go. And this is where, in things like Dune, you have the guild masters going out, grabbing space, bringing it to them, and then letting go, and you get zonked back out to where you needed to get to. That’s just a cool concept that we can’t carry out.
Fraser Cain [00:12:48] This strays away from Galactica, but something else that is probably extremely questionable in television sci -fi on the show Farscape, the concept of the wormhole was a huge plot point.
Speaker 4 [00:13:01] Right. Actually, that was another one of the… I mentioned there are several ways it’s been done, and a wormhole is… Actually, it is an offshoot of general relativity. The wormholes can be shown mathematically to exist. They are a allowed solution for general relativity equations, but the wormholes, as we understand them, until recently have been microscopic. In the past few years, they have actually found solutions that allow macroscopic wormholes. The problem is through a wormhole, the tidal stresses are like a black hole, and you get torn apart, and that would ruin your whole day. But there’s also speculation that there are applications of something called the Casimir effect, or application of vacuum energy, and that’s something we can go way off into, but vacuum energy, that would allow you to stabilize a wormhole.
Pamela Gay [00:13:44] Now, one of the problems, though, with wormholes is while you can go in from either side, you can’t get out from either side. There are one -way passages to the center, which makes using them to get somewhere rather difficult unless we figure out how to not only overcome the fact that they’re unstable, but that you only go in. So there’s a lot of different problems with the mathematics behind wormholes.
Speaker 4 [00:14:09] Kind of like a cosmic roach motel. You check in, you don’t check out.
Fraser Cain [00:14:17] Well then, so the plot point about being able to predict where the wormhole would appear so that they could use it to get from point A out to point B is completely wrong in so many ways.
Speaker 4 [00:14:26] It’s wrong, but at some level, there’s a suspension of disbelief thing, and if we, working from both the science and sci -fi aspect, you realize that if you don’t have some kind of password night travel, like in Galactica, we see one star system in our lifetimes. And how exciting is that? So you do have to do something about it, and there are ways of at least doing it both speculatively and kind of sort of believable. There are also ways of doing it not believable. Actually, a great example of doing it horribly is the original Galactica. There’s an episode where they just ignore, relatively they ignore everything. They just say, you push out enough fuel out your tailpipe and you’re going to go to the speed of light. Do you remember that? But there was a line that says, if you don’t mind me using half my fuel, I’ll push her up to light speed. And even back then, I said, oh, god.
Pamela Gay [00:15:15] And what was particularly amusing about that is how did they get there if they hadn’t previously been going at light speed? This greatly disturbed me at a small age with the original Battlestar Galactica, because they were like going to Carillon and stuff. And then all of a sudden they get to the pseudo not quite earth and engage their light speed drives for the first time. How did they get there?
Speaker 4 [00:15:40] Okay, I just had a bigger problem with the fact that our whole 12 colonies have been destroyed, so let’s go to the party planet!
Pamela Gay [00:15:48] If your world has
Speaker 4 [00:15:50] ended, you might as well go celebrate. That’s the Prince 1999 version?
Pamela Gay [00:15:59] Why not?
Fraser Cain [00:16:02] Okay, what else? We have suspension of disbelief to help do some of these things that are sort of wrong and sort of not wrong. But what about stuff that’s just based on a factual mistake? I mean, like sound in space.
Pamela Gay [00:16:18] Oh yeah, not going to happen. I actually had someone send me this really well thought out question that made me think for a moment and go, yeah, that still doesn’t work. So in all of these sci -fi fighter things blowing up movies, you always hear the explosion. Not well, not always, but most of the time you hear the explosion. And the problem is that you have to have gas, you have to have air, or at least a rock. If you yell in one side of rock, sound will go through it and come out the other side. You have to have some sort of a medium to carry sound waves. Well, occasionally you have spacecraft fighting it out in really cool looking nebula. So you have pretty background and death and destruction all at once. What more could you ask for? And the question was, if you blow something up in a nebula that’s filled with gas, can you then hear the explosion? And the problem is these really pretty nebula that we’re looking at that look so rich and dense and colorful and gorgeous would have one particle in this room. So yes, there’s gas compared to the vacuum of everywhere else, but not that much. And the sound waves really, the particles aren’t interacting with each other, so the sound doesn’t get from particle A to particle B. So no, now if they explode while duking it out in the outer shell of a star, they can’t do that. But if they did, the gas in the star could conduct the sound waves. So really the only time you’re going to hear an explosion is when you’re inside of a star, and let’s avoid that. Even the corona would be a good vacuum.
Speaker 4 [00:17:56] Yeah, you have to be in the plasma. Which would kind of ruin your whole day and kind of the battle would be over before it started.
Pamela Gay [00:18:05] And then there’s other things that are factual errors. You must see this all the time. What are some of the things that caught your attention?
Speaker 4 [00:18:15] Firefly actually didn’t have sound in space. And on Galactica we had planned on not having sound in space, but we were overwhelmed. No, I know. But I knew you were thinking it. I could hear it. There were waves. Oh crap, that’s not right.
Pamela Gay [00:18:33] There was body language.
Speaker 4 [00:18:35] And we initially weren’t going to have sound in space, but if you get my… So anyway, the whole sound in space, it’s assumed that you tried it. And with stuff like firefly who didn’t get overruled, somebody comes down from on high and says that’s so counterintuitive,
Fraser Cain [00:18:58] it’s like, can we just add a little bit of sound?
Speaker 4 [00:19:03] It is. And yeah, people come into, especially astronomy, I think with more misapprehensions or misconceptions than any other topic maybe in academia.
Pamela Gay [00:19:16] And one of my favorites that was abused horribly this summer by every science special that could think of it was Apophis, this happy little meteor that’s going to get a bit too close for comfort to the earth, but not going to hit us. It started with deep impact. They took one image of one object and figured out it was going to destroy the entire planet. And you see this in other sci -fi. They get a single radar return off of some ship and they realize that its trajectory is on a head -on collision. It takes lots of images. Now, Kevin is a planetary scientist. He actually works hard to send things at other planets. And how many images do you usually think are needed to get orbits?
Speaker 4 [00:20:00] Depends on how you’re doing the orbit determination, but we do orbit determination in several different ways. From our spacecraft, we actually take images of moons compared to the background stars, and we can do fairly well at figuring out where we are with just a couple. But as far as something like an orbit determination for an asteroid, air, and meteorite, it takes several. It takes numerous, and you need them all over a period of time as well. If you’re going to shoot an image and go, holy frack, can I say that? And then run off down the hill and get yourself killed and deep impact. But anyway, you need a boatload. And also with the spacecraft, we have the benefits of Doppler, which they don’t. With a spacecraft, it’s a lot easier than with an asteroid because you don’t get much of a return signal from them. They don’t broadcast much.
Pamela Gay [00:20:47] And the other thing, especially with the Apophis Hype this summer, was orbits, once they’ve been calculated, tend to stay the same. So we know, tend to stay the same.
Speaker 4 [00:21:04] The Irokovsky effect. It’s throwing a monkey wrench into all the people doing near -Earth asteroid work. There’s an effect that happens with near -Earth asteroids that makes it so unpredictable that as you heat one side of an asteroid, it warms up. And if it’s rotating, which they all are, it tends to radiate that heat away and generate a thrust. Yes, photons generate thrust, believe it or not. And that makes them very chaotic and hard to project over long time periods. So that’s one of the increasing issues we have with the ability to predict long -term asteroid orbits. And that also is, that has come into play in sci -fi, whereas people can say in however many years we’re going to hit, well, maybe.
Fraser Cain [00:21:44] Sorry, go ahead.
Pamela Gay [00:21:45] It’s one of these things where you’re watching what’s going on and they say either single image, we’re all going to die, or they say, well, we don’t think it’s going to happen, but the vagaries of, no, you either know the orbit or you don’t know what’s going to happen within short periods of time. We can predict a few years out quite successfully. There’s no vagueness at the few year time scale. And then there’s other random things that get randomly done wrong, like the whole blowing up an asteroid is a good idea. I’m going to let you go on that.
Speaker 4 [00:22:24] I can go off -way on that. There were two movies that came out in the same summer, Armageddon and Deep Impact. Now, one is blowing up an asteroid, one they blow up a comet. And the two are very different paradigms.
Pamela Gay [00:22:41] Snowball, rock.
Speaker 4 [00:22:43] And dirty snowball. Turns out that if you blow up a rock, impacts tend to saturate. Let me back up. Armageddon is a great example of science done wrong, gone amuck. Now, while I’m a scientist, I’m also a huge sci -fi nerd. I love sci -fi. I’m all over it. So I’m all about suspension of disbelief. I understand that. Armageddon lost me literally in the first 30 seconds. You see an impact into Earth, a dinosaur killing an asteroid, and you see this explosion propagate over the entire planet. Not going to happen. What happens is, and this is pertinent to the question, I’m going to come around back to that. What happens is impacts tend to saturate, meaning that you get an impact of a certain size and once you get beyond that, for a large range of sizes, the explosion doesn’t get a whole lot worse. What happens is the explosion blows out hemispherically and then it hits the scale height of the atmosphere and tends to blow up, not out. The explosions tend to go in a hemisphere and then when it hits the atmosphere, much less dense up here than down here, it’s harder to push against this than it is to just blow up. So what that means is once you get an asteroid this big and an asteroid this big, the explosive impact is about the same, so to speak. It’s not a whole lot better. So if you are going to nuke, well firstly that means that the dinosaur killing impact you see in the beginning of Armageddon wouldn’t blow over the whole planet. Secondly, if you nuke an asteroid, split it into pieces, you risk the chance of doubling the explosive yield or tripling if you break it into more pieces. So not a good idea. If you nuke next to it, try to maybe vaporize some of the metal and rock, you might generate a thrust. You know they say this is how the world ends, not with a whimper but a bang. Well instead of bang, stick a small ion engine on it and push it for months and you actually much more subtly saved your sorry butts than with a big nuke. Comet is a different thing though. Comet is a collection of, it’s a dirty snowball. It’s ices like methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide, mostly water, and some rock. And you nuke one of those and hit it with a nuke and you might vaporize a good chunk of it and you might very well save yourself. Instead of splitting in half like Wolf Beatermen, they actually might have just vaporized the whole darn thing with a nuke. It’s very volatile stuff. It vaporizes very easily. That was more reasonable. Armageddon, well I could go off on the Armageddon tangent. We could be here an hour with me just ranting about Armageddon, but nuking an asteroid, not a good call. Especially, here’s a great analogy. Talking about astronomy is great by analogy when we’re talking about things that are the size of the universe, but you have a football field. You remember on Armageddon we have a 900 mile asteroid, the size of Texas is what they said. Firstly we know all the Texas size objects in the solar system. We’ve known that for a fairly long time. They’re not coming. Remember they said it has to be what, 900 feet deep, the hole? Take a football field. Drill the depth of a bottom blade of grass. That’s how deep it has to be to blow up the asteroid. No. Yeah, so there’s just, they just, and for a movie that, NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA, then they said, okay, we’re going to take oil drillers and make them astronauts without training. So you didn’t hear, and who were hearing this didn’t see the gesture, but you get the idea.
Pamela Gay [00:26:24] Yeah. So astronauts are really smart people. And oil drillers, some of them are, not all of them. So, now on top of that, our universe is good at providing us experimental evidence for whether the movies are right or wrong. And when the universe fails, NASA sometimes kicks in. And after the movie Deep Impact, there was the mission Deep Impact, which basically threw a refrigerator at a comet. How fun is that? And when they did, it sent dust, ice dust, snow dust out from the impact site. There was so much dust they couldn’t see the crater, the refrigerator sized chunk of metal made when it hit the comet. We know that when you go thwunk on a comet, you get little stuff. Now, when we look at some of the other planets and moons in the solar system, we find chains of craters that were all made at about the same time. And we think what happened was you take an asteroid, you hit the asteroid with another asteroid, you now have a bunch of small asteroid lets. You then let them hit a planet. The planet is rotating day to night, day to night, day to night, while it’s getting clocked. So these incoming asteroid fragments, instead of making one big crater, make a whole bunch of little craters. So, say there’s an asteroid headed toward California, because the universe has a sense of humor, and since there’s been so many movies about destroying California, the universe opts to actually play along. Well, if we blow up that asteroid as the Earth is rotating, depending on the direction of all the motions, you can end up with a whole string of destruction all the way around the globe in a nice, polite line. So rather than just blowing up Hollywood, you’ve now blown up the whole planet, which is not as fun.
Speaker 4 [00:28:23] I don’t think blowing up California is particularly fun.
Pamela Gay [00:28:28] I’m an east coaster. So, what other are your favorite things to pick on in movies and TV?
Speaker 4 [00:28:38] Oh, there’s a good one. Anyone here see Outland? Oh, boy. Remember Outland? It doesn’t really stick in the forefront of your brain, because it’s a long time ago. Oh, yes, Outland. Sean Connery had a low point in his career. Anyway, what am I going to mention?
Fraser Cain [00:28:58] Excuse me. Hello?
Speaker 4 [00:29:03] I teach a class at UCLA, and we have a standard rule. If your cell phone goes off, I get to answer it. It’s always fun when the boyfriend calls. Hello? Who’s this? Who’s this? I have been responsible for more breakups. Speaking of breakups, let’s go back to
Fraser Cain [00:29:19] Outland.
Speaker 4 [00:29:24] Firstly, it took place on Io. Io is a moon of Jupiter, spelled like it sounds. And the moon is so close to Jupiter that if you were standing on the surface of a brief minute dose of that radiation, you’d be toast. Okay, let’s suspend disbelief and go with the fact that you might be able to mine Io for anything other than sulfur. If they sprung a leak in their spacesuit or somehow were exposed to space, they would blow up and pop. You ever see that? And it was such a cool effect. They did it several times. No, sorry. Simple logic. Even if you’re not a rocket scientist, you have any air in your lungs. Where’s it going to go? Is it going to blow out your body or take the pathways resistance out your mouth? So, yeah, that was one that is just crying out loud. And that came out when I was a lot younger than now, too. And even then I was an old baby rocket scientist, and I still just shook my head and said, okay, we can do better than that. It’s kind of cool and kind of disgustingly gross, but still.
Pamela Gay [00:30:31] And you sort of had the opportunity to get that one correct.
Speaker 4 [00:30:34] Yeah, we did, actually. And last season of Battlestar Galactica, and let me point out with something we caught flak for, too. In the last season of Galactica, we had a story where we had two people locked in an airlock and they were losing air gradually and they were going to die. It was actually a married couple.
Fraser Cain [00:30:52] It was the chief in Cali. It was a tense episode. It was good.
Speaker 4 [00:30:57] Oh, I’m glad you liked it. Married couple with new little child. And he assigned her to do this job with them just because they’re so busy they don’t get to spend time together. I just want to spend a lot of time with my wife and now we’re both going to die and leave an orphan. So anyway, it was very, very sad, but they figure out the way to save them. Let’s blow them out the airlock into a waiting raptor. Cool. We caught grief for that because they didn’t pop and they didn’t freeze. You know, in space it’s cold, right? It’s not absolute zero, but it’s cold. What in space would make you freeze? It’s cold, but you ever notice that room temperature air feels okay? Room temperature bath water, kind of cold, right? Bath water carries away your heat faster. The air doesn’t carry away heat fast. Vacuum doesn’t carry away at all. You have to radiate away your heat, which takes a while. So you wouldn’t freeze. You wouldn’t pop. You would get the bends, which they did. Notice that when the next day, if you saw the episode, the chief’s getting out of bed and he’s not moving too quickly.
Pamela Gay [00:32:00] What are the bends?
Speaker 4 [00:32:01] The bends are when you inhale the gas in the air, the nitrogen and oxygen is obviously dissolved in your blood. And when the pressure that holds you in is alleviated very rapidly, nitrogen bubbles form in your blood. This is not good. This is what scuba divers will get if they rise too quickly and they end up sticking you in a hyperbaric chamber. Okay, so the chief got the bends. You see him slowly getting up and he’s hurting because he had the bends. And then he goes to see his wife, who is in a hyperbaric chamber, which is what they listened to me on. That’s one of the things they actually listened. I said, hey, they’d be putting them in this chamber. I sent them a picture of a chamber. They found one. They look almost exactly like the picture I sent them. They don’t look radically different. That’s probably why. But anyway, you see her in a chamber and I also told them, okay, what would happen? Your eardrums might pop, maybe nosebleed, blood vessels in your eyes might pop. You notice that Callie looks over at them and you see she’s got blood vessels popped in her eyes. So they did everything correctly. And we got crap from people who’ve seen 50 years of sci -fi doing it wrong and saying, oh, they’d explode. They’d freeze. No, they wouldn’t.
Pamela Gay [00:33:15] And shortly after that, on an episode of House, they actually they were up flying. And there was a person on the airplane that got extremely ill and they all thought they were going to die of this terrible virus or bacteria or something. And it turned out it was just a guy who had the bends, who the difference between scuba diving and flying in an airplane was enough to cause the joint pain, the all the other symptoms. Same situation. He got it right. And House got it right. People criticize him, but not House, because we’re familiar with the concept, but only within the science doesn’t change. Science is the exact same thing in space as an earth. It’s just a matter of scale. And space just happens to be a bigger vacuum than the altitude that airplanes fly at.
Fraser Cain [00:34:09] Well, so we talked about the bad, bad, bad stuff. And how often I might ask you in your your fun, cool job with as a science adviser, are there times when you advise something and and they tell you they can’t do it for whatever you don’t think you’re good enough?
Speaker 4 [00:34:28] Maybe. Well, there’s actually the biggest mistake. I’ll tell you the biggest mistake I ever made in Galactica was an omission. Actually, let me back up a second on often when I’m a science adviser, I’ve most often done my job when they don’t say something that’s originally in the script. So a lot of times my my job is something you don’t ever see. So that’s that’s not intuitive initially. But the biggest mistake I ever made was something I didn’t include it because I had a I don’t know brain fart. Can I say that? Absolutely. You can you can edit that out, right? You can brain bleep, right? Anyway, whatever. In the second episode, I was a baby science adviser then in the second episode of Galactica, we see Galactica under way replenishing another another vessel, the Vergon Express, and they’re pumping water over there. There’s underway, under rubbing water. And there are explosions in several Galactica’s water tanks, blows out water, which would impart a delta V, a delta velocity, a change velocity, and it would snap the lines and push Galactica away. And I I didn’t see that the first time I read the script and later on.
Fraser Cain [00:35:29] Oh, how could I miss this?
Speaker 4 [00:35:31] And I called him. I said, well, we just have kind of already filmed that stuff and the ship was sailed on that one. So it was just an omission. And I did not do it again.
Fraser Cain [00:35:39] But what’s the question? Answering that part. Well, do they ever if you advise them towards something that you see, do they ever choose not to take your advice for, you know, whatever reason? And sometimes you wish they’d maybe take your advice a little bit more.
Speaker 4 [00:36:00] There was, you know, they really don’t ever like callously ignore me very often. And there was one thing I was a little upset about, and that was an episode of Home Part Two, the constellations that they saw from the what racetrack called the Half -assed Planetarium show. Eventually, I wish would have been done a little differently. But there was also an episode in Exodus Part Two, the jump. You know, I’m talking about Galactica jumps into the atmosphere and plummets, launches vipers and jumps out right before impact. And that’s a case of willfully me telling them essentially I wrote my note was essentially I would be remiss my job as science advisor to point out that this couldn’t happen because Galactica would break up in the atmosphere. I call me I just did recently, but owing to the high coldest factor, go for it. But what I did add was I said, though, I did add to that as I said, but that much mass disappearing would suddenly leave a big suck. And you see him going, ah, grab it because the big all the vacuum came in behind it. So that was the one part where I added to that. But there was a place where I as I let my inner sci fi nerd come out and I said, this is just too cool to not do. And the fact of the matter is, is it’s something that Ron Moore had added to the episode after the people had written it. And it wasn’t going to not fly anyway.
Fraser Cain [00:37:21] So that was really cool.
Pamela Gay [00:37:23] If you’re going to have artificial gravity, you can hold the ship together and have greater integrity of the ship as well. But the fact that you had that vacuum, that was one of the things that was just so cool. Because one of the things that perpetually annoyed me about the Star Trek universe is all these times these people are transporting and this stuff is transporting. Where’s the air coming from that fills in where the human being used to be? The more you transport people off of the enterprise, the more atmosphere you need to put in. So, yeah, there’s there’s a space that needs air.
Speaker 4 [00:37:57] And when they get the bends by by materializing around the air that exists there beforehand. Sorry, I never thought about that. And with any luck, I won’t think about it again anyway.
Fraser Cain [00:38:11] Well, maybe so heading in a more positive direction. What are the things that that get done correctly? What are some really shining examples of good science in television movies?
Speaker 1 [00:38:21] I was especially astronomy.
Speaker 4 [00:38:23] Well, and having go to movies, if I can answer with movies, I love the 2010. I’m probably OK. I see people who agree with me. I will go out on a limb here and probably subject myself to ridicule. But I like 2010 better than 2001. You know, I didn’t worship the model of 2001 quite like some fans did. But I love 2010 and 2010 did so many things right.
Fraser Cain [00:38:44] It was just it was so cool.
Speaker 4 [00:38:45] They did the arrow capture at Jupiter. They like we do that with spacecraft. Now we do arrow breaking at Mars all the time. When they got to Jupiter, they got they found discovery in orbit, tumbling in orbit over Io coated in sulfur. Io is most volcanically active body in the solar system. It spews out sulfur from its volcanoes. They had discovery. They had to brush off the sulfur. There was so many small details. They had the Lexi Leonov, the spacecraft. The Russians had gone their mission to spinning for gravity. It was just it was so well done. And so many small details I thought were just so great. I’m tickled pink on that one. Of course, they do have sound in space. But, you know, hey, we’ll give them that one because everything else was done so well.
Pamela Gay [00:39:26] And you see some of the things that they did well getting stolen by other shows. Babylon five. You have the rotating crafts again. He didn’t bring it up. But on an episode of Battlestar Galactica, they go flying through a nebula. And afterwards, you see the chief scraping goop off of a viper. Also very accurate.
Speaker 4 [00:39:46] And that was actually my input.
Pamela Gay [00:39:51] So the really good shows not only get the science right, which doesn’t lead to misconceptions in the general public, but they also can lead to future goodness. So if we can just get one really good series, one really good movie like 2010, it can impact how everyone else is doing their science because it educates them on how to do it right.
Speaker 4 [00:40:16] And I could also add that we did something on Galactica that was almost right, but it’s closer than before. And if you look at it kind of doing iteratively, you can do it better than it’s done before. You can at least move towards doing it right. We had a supernova in an episode. And actually, that whole episode came from a lot of the ideas. That episode came from a little presentation I gave in the writer’s room over at Universal. I was talking with the writers about roadblocks or signs, portents, astronomical things we can find on the way to Earth that will lead us there. And we’re still kind of using some of those from that talk. But afterwards, I was talking to one of the writers and I said, you know, 800 million years after Earth was formed, the first life forms beyond Earth, it was algae, cyanobacteria, blue -green algae, whatever you want to call it, stromatolites. They’re all kind of the same stuff. And this life form, the first algae formed on Earth was about a billion years after, or 800 million years after the Earth was formed. Well, the way stars are, it doesn’t take a star much larger than ours. Our star that has a much shorter lifetime, our star has a 10 -billion -year lifetime. You get a little bit larger and you’re only down to a billion -year lifetime. Yes, bigger stars actually die much more rapidly. It’s kind of counterintuitive.
Pamela Gay [00:41:34] It’s like a race car. They blow through their fuel much faster, even though they’re smaller than, say, a fuel -efficient minivan.
Fraser Cain [00:41:40] Right.
Speaker 4 [00:41:41] So I said, I was wondering how many times in the history of our galaxy you had a planet where life first pops up, we’re here, boom, this heart blows up and wipes it out. And guess what? You had a planet with algae that they find because they need food. Any other, we say that any other life, or any other plants on that planet were a result of the 13th colony, the 13th tribe, left that there. They’re not indigenous. That kind of was the going idea. But we had that supernova actually occur where it blows up the planet that life had first formed. And they talk about a helium flash. And a helium flash is something that happens in the lifetime of a star. It happens when the star is nearing its end of its life. It doesn’t happen when it’s going supernova. But we’re able to get little things like that into the show. And maybe somebody will look up helium flash and learn about stars. I mean, I realize that was done wrong. No one’s ever called me on it yet. But now they will. But we get things like that out there. And maybe somebody will learn a little bit more about astronomy in so doing because it was a cool episode.
Pamela Gay [00:42:44] And there’s other things like flying through atmospheres that you guys have been working to get right. How atmospheres change in thickness as you go from the tops down.
Speaker 4 [00:42:53] Do you want to know the biggest serendipitous thing that’s happened on Galactica?
Pamela Gay [00:42:58] Go for it.
Speaker 4 [00:42:59] Kara had drawn her, sorry, the mandala, the pattern, the inner blue circle, the red and the yellow circle. And then it was decided to do the episode Malstrom, about a storm on a gas plant. And actually literally last year at DragonCon, quick anecdote, I left a panel discussion, turned on my phone, like a minute after I left this panel, and the phone rings. And it was one of the writers from Galactica. I pick it up.
Fraser Cain [00:43:29] I said, hello.
Speaker 4 [00:43:30] How was your panel?
Fraser Cain [00:43:32] Good.
Speaker 4 [00:43:33] Now, in episode 316, we were working with a storm. And how did you know I was in a panel?
Fraser Cain [00:43:37] How did you know where I was?
Speaker 4 [00:43:38] Oh, don’t worry. If we need you, we will find you. Anyway, so turns out that we’d had this pattern of the blue, red, yellow for a while. That had been done. And then we wanted to have Kara die in a storm on a gas
Fraser Cain [00:43:57] planet.
Speaker 4 [00:43:57] And it turns out gas planets have different levels of clouds. They have, like Jupiter, Saturn have three cloud decks. They have an upper level of ammonia crystals, sort of white with a kind of yellowish tinge, a middle layer of ammonium hydrosulfide, and lower level is water clouds. But it’s so deep that your light has extinguished by then. You end up getting, essentially, if you had a big storm, you can get a yellow, red, blue sequence.
Speaker 1 [00:44:20] No way.
Fraser Cain [00:44:21] Way.
Speaker 6 [00:44:22] Total.
Speaker 4 [00:44:23] It was totally serendipitous. They told me what they wanted.
Fraser Cain [00:44:27] I’m like, oh, you’re going to love this, guys.
Speaker 4 [00:44:29] Anyway, so that was something that just kind of worked and was really kind of serendipitous.
Fraser Cain [00:44:36] Anyway.
Speaker 1 [00:44:36] Unbelievably so.
Fraser Cain [00:44:38] Sorry? I said almost unbelievably so, because I really, I thought it was, I thought that was a stretch, actually. And so it’s so much cooler to know how right that was.
Speaker 4 [00:44:47] On Eureka, we had another serendipitous thing happen recently where we were working on the season finale for season one as we were airing the first episode of the
Fraser Cain [00:44:57] season.
Speaker 4 [00:44:57] And something happened in which, since this is still ongoing, I’m not going to tell you much in the way
Fraser Cain [00:45:02] details.
Speaker 4 [00:45:03] But I saw something in the first episode of the season
Fraser Cain [00:45:05] when, oh, and I jumped around and said, oh, I’ve got to talk to Jimmy.
Speaker 4 [00:45:07] I’ve got to talk to Jimmy. And I emailed Jimmy Polly, the executive producer, like that night. He said, we have to talk.
Fraser Cain [00:45:13] He came back.
Speaker 4 [00:45:13] I’m going into Vancouver to remember the film. We have to talk. And I saw something in the opening episode that actually will impact the finale and beyond. So serendipitous moments happen. And then it’s scientifically, it’s something that’s very scientifically accurate, valid. And if I’m here next year, I’ll be glad to spill it.
Pamela Gay [00:45:33] Did you mean season two?
Speaker 4 [00:45:35] Yeah, we were working on season two.
Pamela Gay [00:45:36] OK, you said season one. It confused me.
Fraser Cain [00:45:38] Sorry, season two.
Pamela Gay [00:45:40] So there is a lot of good science out there. And what’s cool is our universe offers so many crazy, fracked up things for us to study that there’s so many cool things that you can do right. They need to be hiring more people to say, look, you get this real color pattern when you look at gas giants. Look, you get these neat helium flashes and stars as they’re evolving. Look, you get these neat bursts of neutrinos, of gamma rays, of all sorts of little energetic things flying out of stars just as they’re starting to explode. The real science, in some cases, is so much cooler than the made up science. So maybe we need to force all of our science writers to take an astrophysics class that helps pay our salaries. Because the more you know about the real universe, the more cool things you can do in the science fiction universe. I guess this is where we ask you, what cool things have you noticed that you want to know? Are these right, wrong, or just plain stupid?
Speaker 1 [00:46:50] Say your name first.
Speaker 6 [00:46:52] My name is Kinsey. And one thing I’ve been curious about for a long time is it would seem to me that when, in science fiction, especially Star Trek, but in a lot of programs, they show the outside
Speaker 4 [00:47:03] of the ship.
Speaker 6 [00:47:03] Sometimes people go out of the ship. And it’s always very well lit. But I would think if they’re not near a star system, that it would be extremely dark out. And I was wondering if that’s true.
Speaker 4 [00:47:15] Hey. Doing it wrong?
Fraser Cain [00:47:17] Star Trek.
Speaker 4 [00:47:17] Doing it right?
Fraser Cain [00:47:19] Alien.
Speaker 4 [00:47:20] And the stroma looked pretty dark.
Fraser Cain [00:47:23] And yeah, it would be.
Speaker 4 [00:47:25] But then again, if you can’t see the ship, the audience would find that very unsatisfying if you can’t really see it. So Galactica is darker. And that whole thing is darker. But yeah, there’s a lot more light than perhaps would be in space. You’re absolutely right. And that bothered me from the original Star Trek on. They kind of dress it a little bit in the movies you see when Enterprise 01, the upgraded version, and even Star Trek The Motion Sickness.
Fraser Cain [00:47:49] Picture. I heard a gap.
Unidentified [00:47:54] Sorry.
Speaker 4 [00:47:54] It’s hard to get a motion picture, which actually I liked. We see they turn on the lights to light up the running lights, or light up the hull number and things like that. So they kind of address that a little bit. But yeah, I’ve always had a problem with that.
Pamela Gay [00:48:08] The original Battlestar Galactica, where you see the ship in deep space, and it flies by with a beautiful zoom -in of the name. No, that won’t. Putting the name written on a ship that should never enter an atmosphere only works if you put floodlights on the Vipers. Now, if you add floodlights to the Vipers, that would go so far in making all of these trying to find these pylons in the asteroid belts much more interesting.
Speaker 4 [00:48:36] But there are floodlights in the Raptors.
Pamela Gay [00:48:38] Well, add them to the Vipers.
Fraser Cain [00:48:40] That’s weight.
Speaker 4 [00:48:41] It’s a combat vessel.
Fraser Cain [00:48:42] Come on.
Speaker 4 [00:48:43] And they have DRADIS, OK? You don’t need the visual. And you can see them in the infrared. I’m on top of that, OK? Look, we had a 45 -minute discussion on the difference between ejecting from a Viper Mark II versus a Viper Mark VII. So we’re on top of that, too.
Pamela Gay [00:49:03] OK.
Speaker 4 [00:49:04] Speaking of nerds, anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 1 [00:49:08] Next question. Hello. My name’s Marty.
Fraser Cain [00:49:13] Hi, Marty.
Speaker 4 [00:49:15] In Galactica, they have what look like artillery.
Fraser Cain [00:49:18] So they even call it a flak barrier. The bad guys are coming in and they’re shooting things.
Speaker 4 [00:49:23] What would happen to the ship when you did that? Wouldn’t you go the opposite way of where you’re firing?
Pamela Gay [00:49:30] Conservation of mass. If I throw my watch at you, which I’m not going to do because you seem like a nice person. You don’t know that. I said seem. There is an equal and opposite action for every reaction or reverse the nouns how you will. This doesn’t weigh that much compared to me. The bullets that they’re firing, admittedly, they’re firing them at very large velocities, which creates a kick. If you throw them at a small velocity, smaller kick, the higher the velocity of the artillery, the larger the kick. But Galactica is fracking huge. I love being able to use this word with people who get it. It’s huge, which means that even though you’re hurling this artillery at large velocities, the Galactus is just hanging out going, okay, I need to adjust myself a centimeter or whatever the Battlestar Galactica units are in the current universe. It was very confusing in the original Battlestar Galactica universe. I remember as an undergrad nerd working with a friend very hard to try and figure out sectons and all of that other stuff, and we gave up. We never figured out what was time and what was distance. If you ever decide to share that information, there are a bunch of fan fiction writers who want to know the answer. But anyways, small artillery at a large velocity is still a huge mass, and it really is just going to hang out.
Speaker 4 [00:51:00] And going back to my water analogy earlier, that was an awful lot of water coming out of the side of the ship to impart that velocity. You know, I said earlier about the water coming out, spewing out, that was an awful big mass of water. That’s why I claimed that would create a kick, whereas the shells probably wouldn’t, not much.
Fraser Cain [00:51:22] Hi, my name is Jeremiah. I’m actually from a town called Oak Ridge, and they work with a lot of nuclear material. I’ve always found it a little weird that science fiction in particular has strayed away from nuclear power, explaining it as a source of energy or perhaps a source of propulsion. I was wondering what you guys thought, why that was.
Speaker 4 [00:51:46] Well, actually in Galactica, you notice that what’s the big bad weapon is our nukes. Because, you know, you can go to anti -matter, but that’s kind of trite in some respects, and nukes are something that we all relate to and can deal with, and, you know, I don’t know why people have generally strayed away from nuclear power.
Pamela Gay [00:52:07] It’s hard to build small nuclear reactors. And if you have a nuclear reactor, it’s hard to get it to help you to go fast. So the ion drives that we have in some spacecraft, you basically have something that’s releasing an ion, flinging it out the back, it’s been accelerated with magnetic fields. So it’s basically the equivalent of me sitting in a desk chair with wheels with my legs crossed so I have no feet touching the ground, and a box full of lead balls in my lap. If I sit there and hurl the balls long enough with enough force, I will start moving backwards in the chair. That’s how an ion drive works. You can eventually get going really, really fast, but it’s going to take you a long, long time, which isn’t exciting to watch. We want to watch those ships go from zero to mock, not mock, to warp.
Speaker 4 [00:53:05] An old town in space.
Pamela Gay [00:53:10] You want to go from zero to warp factor gazillion in three seconds or something. You’re not going to do that with an ion drive, and any nuclear drive is going to need huge amounts of casing around it. Casing’s way a lot. If they’re not going to put floodlights in the Vipers, they’re certainly not going to put safety protection and cooling and everything else you need for a nuclear drive. It’s a matter of they don’t get you there fast, and they get you there with a lot of weight.
Fraser Cain [00:53:45] We have time for one more question.
Speaker 4 [00:53:49] I know this is the astronomy cast,
Fraser Cain [00:53:50] but my question’s actually about Eureka. Go right ahead. I was wondering if there was anything that you were particularly proud of science -wise in Eureka,
Speaker 4 [00:54:04] and then conversely, if there was anything
Fraser Cain [00:54:06] where the writers brought you an idea, and you’re like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Pamela Gay [00:54:11] That you can admit to.
Speaker 4 [00:54:14] Yes to both. But actually they’re kind of a small thing. One small thing I was kind of proud of, and then I was almost sorry I did it immediately after, was I worked on the Cassini spacecraft. It was my day job. And notice what powers Sarah? Like a spare Cassini RTG. I got that in there. And then instantly the writer kind of took it, and we agreed on this very narrow thing, because it’s very sensitive at NASA, the whole RTG politics of the radioisotope. And then they took an ARAM with it, and saying, create this and do that, and like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Please, please, I don’t want to get fired. Please don’t do this. And so I had to beg. Please, please don’t let them say that. And then they scaled it back and ended up with what you ended up with. But I got this reference in the show. I was kind of glad about that. And the other question was what? Was there anything the writers put in that I said was ridiculous that I will admit to? Not while I’m employed.
Pamela Gay [00:55:21] Not being employed by anyone working in Hollywood, I’m in a safer position than Kevin is, although I do envy your position in some ways. I’ve periodically had people come up to me with TV ideas, and some of them are really great. The people who I respond to more than three or four times have really great ideas. But I have gotten single emails over the years of I’m working on a script, and there is some sort of an idea in the script that they want me to validate for them. And I have heard some of the most insane things. And no, I will not help you use quantum mechanics to explain telepathy or helmets that could be used to produce telepathy. Quantum mechanics does not work that way, and action at a distance really can’t be used in a meaningful way to direct things. So I believe in action at a distance. Electrons do do funky things, but we can’t make telepathy.
Speaker 4 [00:56:26] No quantum entanglement. No.
Pamela Gay [00:56:30] Sorry.
Fraser Cain [00:56:31] Sadly, we are out of time.
Pamela Gay [00:56:35] Well, you guys have been a great audience, and thank you so much for joining us in this special episode, Kevin. And that’s the end of this episode of Astronomy Cast, and we’ll be hanging out up here if you have any questions after the show.
Fraser Cain [00:56:50] Let’s give a round of applause to our panelists, Dr. Pamela Gay and Dr. Kevin Grazier.
Fraser Cain [00:57:05] This has been Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts -based journey through the cosmos. Show notes, transcripts, and more are available for every episode on our website. Check it out at AstronomyCast .com. We have archives of all past shows. Just click the archive link on our website, and while you’re there, get involved in the conversations on our forums. You can send us any comments, questions, or feedback to info at AstronomyCast .com. We read every email. This show is a nonprofit educational resource provided by Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. We’re supported through the kind donations of listeners like you. If you enjoy Astronomy Cast, why not give us a donation? Your donations help us pay for bandwidth and provide transcripts and show notes. Just click the donate link on our website to learn more. All donations are tax deductible for U .S. taxpayers. You can support the show for free, too. Write a review or recommend it to your friends. Every little bit helps. Click support the show link on our website to see some suggestions. To subscribe to the show, point your podcast -catching software at AstronomyCast .com slash podcast .xml or subscribe directly from iTunes. This episode was produced and edited by Rebecca Bemrose -Fetter. Music is provided by Travis Searle. Astronomy Cast is produced at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, with generous support from Universe Today.
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