No.

Just… no.

Contrary to popular belief, a single person does not have that large of an effect on science. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that these guys aren’t brilliant and don’t deserve their credit or anything, I’m just saying that if one person discovered something, so could someone else. Maybe it’ll take a little while longer and maybe we’d be be living slightly differently because of it, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as drastic as sci-fi makes it seem.

And, no, I’m not just saying this. I totally have historical anecdotes to show that more than one person can, and will, discover or invent something.

The most universally known one idea, many inventors stories is, quite simply, the telephone. There were, what, five different people who all invented the telephone at roughly the same time as Alexander Graham Bell?  It was a lawsuit mess and we still don’t entirely know wtf went down.

And the same thing happened with calculus. Way back in the day, Newton was all grr cuz math wasn’t capable of handling his calculations so he went off and invented his own math, calculus. Eeeexcept Gottfried Leibniz kinda invented it too. And published his book on his calculus first. And, no, it wasn’t just copying each other’s notes – there were differences in their calculuses.

Then there are the times in which people do brilliant work and are ignored in their own times, such as Gregor Mendel. His contemporaries thought he was a nutter and that his pea experiments didn’t mean anything so he died with his scientific work unrecognised. Fast forward a couple of decades until all the other scientists caught up to his genius and realised that, damn, Mendel was fucking awesome and called him the father of genetics. Basically, Mendel’s discoveries were pushed back a few decades and it was like he hadn’t even existed until then – y’know, like what’d happen if Fleming hadn’t noticed the magic properties of mouldy bread. And, y’know what, the planet didn’t imploded and devolve into some lawless, heathen state.

Finally, how about the fact that ancient civilisations like the Romans did little things like, oh, invent running water and did some pretty sweet stuff with math, a lot of which was forgotten for a long time? Hell, the Greeks invented a fucking computer. Okay, so this kinda almost undermines my point, but the downfall of Greece and Rome kinda had to do more with stabbing than math. And we totally reinvented it all anyway, so the question is more like ‘how much more advanced would we be if the Romans hadn’t failed to keep all of their conquered land’.

I’m generalising, of course. I’m by no means a historian, just a girl who picks up a lot of odd facts and likes to rage at science fiction. Cuz, dammit, it’s very rare that I can read or watch sci-fi without groaning about how they fucked something up. Would things change? Probably, especially if you’re following the butterfly effect, but it wouldn’t be as immediately drastic as sci-fi makes it out to be. Things might be different, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world and I doubt that we’d all be living in concentration camps if we had no penicillin.

Anyway, what I meant to say before I went off on a tangent, is that, since I have no 30 page paper looming¹ over my head this summer, I should make my own damned writing goal for the next three months. Far simpler than nano too – I’m just going to write, at minimum, 1000 words per day of whatever I damn well please as long as it is fiction. Cuz I can totally write a 1000 word blog entry without effort. I mean, c’mon, all of my posts are just me rambling on about nothing anyway – it’s only a couple of steps above stream-of-consciousness.

Basically, I want to accomplish something, writing wise, with my newfound 8-5 life. Not even 8-5, really, cuz, as a chemist, I spent a lot – a lot – of time doing dick all timing slow moving liquid dripping through screens. Science (well, my science) is a lot of hurry up and wait so I spend a looot of time rushing about in a mad dash about the lab cuz I have to start an experiment by an hour after I arrive so that it’ll be done by five. And I do pretty much nothing between nine and five. Seriously, best career decision ever. Except for the part where you run experiments that last twelve hours and you end up working split shifts. At two in the morning. But other than that.

So much for having a blog entry about writing. Back to that.

In order to publicly humiliate motivate myself into actually following through with this goal, I am going to spam everyone with posts about how much I haven’t written and why I suck at life, possibly every day. However, unlike nanowrimo, I’m not going to post what I’ve written cuz I don’t have the excuse of lol I wrote it all in word wars to explain away my crappy first drafts.

And that is all.

Also, feel free to mock me when I fail at this.

And I start tomorrow. Either with my sci-fi romcom comic script, a novel(la?) length Rizzoli & Isles AU fic (boring AU – no vampires or space monsters or anything, just Jane attending BCU as an athletic scholarship student right after Maura broke up with the axe murderer and started her MD) or the modern,  genderbent Sherlock Holmes reimagining (or whatever the cool word for remake is these days) novel (series) @Sildra told me to write (well, sorta) a few months ago.

Basically, I’mma gunna be writing a lot of femslash. Or preslash, in the case of the girly Sherlock Holmes thing. It’s a series and I really, really love UST – especially slash goggle/deliberate shiptease type UST. Though I’m not sure if it counts as femslash for the comic script as one of the characters is an alien whose species has three (or more, haven’t exactly decided) genders. She, uh, looks pretty feminine? Well, more on the androgynous side of femininity, but still very clearly a woman. Except not.

Wait, how does word count work if I’m writing a script…? And I haven’t exactly, y’know, properly plotted out any of these ideas. I haven’t written much down for the first two and I don’t even have a crime for the last.

Dammit.

¹Heh. Looms.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle simply states that a fermion cannot exist twice in a quantum state.  At a more basic level (also known as, the level I’m at and I’m a fifth year chemistry student), two electrons with the same spin cannot be in the same quantum state.   They have to be of opposite spins.

Figure 1 is hydrogen. Yeah, it’s pretty boring.  One electron in the 1s orbital.  That electron could be pointing up or down (ie, of either spin), but by convention we write it upwards.

Figure 2 is helium… sort of.  In this example, two electrons are in the 1s orbital.  However, both electrons have the same spin.  That is what the Pauli Exclusion Principle says we cannot do.

Figure 3 is also helium.  Two electrons in the 1s orbital however, the second is pointing downwards, thus signifying a spin in the other direction.  That is the correct way of drawing the 1s orbital.

(The electrons can also be drawn on top of the line.  In fact, I had one chem prof who wanted them drawn that way and a different chem prof who wanted them to be drawn through the line.  Clearly, I like the second chem prof more.)

Now, back to the regularly scheduled tv discussion.

Last Thursday, Fringe made a grave mistake in science.

Yes, Fringe is all about mistakes in (fake) science.

This mistake, however, holds the singular claim (for this show) of pissing me off.

The mistake?  Nina Sharp was explaining to Olivia about why the two universes cannot be brought together – one will inevitably be destroyed.

Yes, that’s a pretty common theory and it always shows up in science fiction.  In fact, I have absolutely no problem with that – it’s effing theoretical physics so do whatever the hell you want.

Just don’t mutilate quantum mechanics whilst you do so.

You see, Nina’s reasoning for why two universes can’t exist at the same time was ‘you know the Pauli Exclusion Principle?’ and then smush the two snow globes together and one breaks whilst the other is perfectly intact.  Immediately, I hit the pause button on my dvr and yelled at the tv ‘but that’s not what the Pauli Exclusion Principle says!’  I also wished that I was watching this live so I could get on the twitters and tweet about it, but my twitter addiction is not the topic of today’s blog.

While the wiki article on the Pauli Exclusion Principle is pretty technical and could almost imply that two of the same things cannot exist at the same time, you do have to remember that things on the quantum level do not apply to the macroscopic world.  Last I checked, my location wasn’t uncertain.  I’m really damn sure that I’m sitting in front of my computer writing this blog entry.  However, that electron?  Yeah, that one over there.  Well, it might not actually BE over there.  It could be here.  Or there.

And somehow I got onto Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the Born Interpretation instead of the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

Right.

Well, I am in a class about quantum mechanics right now.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle simply states that a fermion cannot exist twice in a quantum state.  More generally, two electrons with the same spin cannot be in the same quantum state.   They have to be of opposite spins.

Figure 1 is hydrogen. Yeah, it’s pretty boring.  One electron in the 1s orbital.  That electron could be pointing up or down (ie, of either spin), but by convention we write it upwards.

Figure 2 is helium… sort of.  In this example, two electrons are in the 1s orbital.  However, both electrons have the same spin.  That is what the Pauli Exclusion Principle says we cannot do.

Figure 3 is also helium.  Two electrons in the 1s orbital however, the second is pointing downwards, thus signifying a spin in the other direction.  That is the correct way of drawing the 1s orbital.

(The electrons can also be drawn on top of the line.  In fact, I had one chem prof who wanted them drawn that way and a different chem prof who wanted them to be drawn through the line.  Clearly, I like the second chem prof more.)

So, yeah, absolutely nothing to do with two universes colliding.

Great job on the science there Fringe.  Great job.

At least Stargate made up a nonsense reason for why two people from different universes can’t exist in one universe at the same time.  Entropic Cascade Failure ftw!

Long story short?  If you’re going to make up science, make up science.  Don’t try to manipulate actual scientific principles to suit your own needs.