Monthly Archives: October 2015

Electrifying: Tesla on television

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Posted on behalf of Liesbeth Venema

teslaseries_poster_medtAn eccentric genius in an impeccable suit and a level-headed young sidekick who have to use their wits to combat a time-travelling automaton and save the Earth. No, this is not the plot of the latest Doctor Who. It is Nikola Tesla and the End of the World, a fun and highly original four-episode science fiction series created by Ian Strang nominated at the 2015 Raindance film festival best British Series category (and available free to view online).

What is the greatest innovation the world has ever seen? According to physicist Sophie Clarke (played by Gillian MacGregor), the doctor in this fictional duo, it is the transmission of energy. This is a topic the real-life nineteenth-century engineer-inventor Tesla thought a great deal about, and in a way that often leaped far ahead of his time. Tesla shaped the modern world with inventions such as the alternating current system for large-scale electric power distribution, radio transmission and fluorescent light bulbs.

Several of these exist only as sketches for patents, and more than a few conspiracy theories about their intended purposes do the rounds. It doesn’t help that Tesla himself made outrageous claims such as being able to receive extraterrestial signals. He indulged in ambitious visions of human advancement and tried to build a power station — the infamous Wardenclyffe tower in New York —  that would provide the world with free wireless communication and energy by making use of the Earth’s electromagnetic field. The project was doomed, leaving Tesla penniless and with his reputation shattered. Recent years have seen a renewed interest and re-appreciation of his work. For example, a new documentary, Tower to the People, hymns the concepts and humanitarian vision behind the Wardenclyffe project.

Doubly ahead of his time

For an SF series like Strang’s, it is a stroke of genius to transport to the present a charismatic inventor decades ahead of his contemporaries and pair him up with a down-to-earth physics lecturer. The action starts when Clarke stumbles upon a detailed sketch for a wireless power transmitter with Tesla’s signature and does the only reasonable thing a clear-thinking experimental physicist would do: tries to build it.

Tesla (Paul O'Neill) and Dr Clarke (Gillian MacGregor) find their way round the London Underground.

Tesla (Paul O’Neill) and Dr Clarke (Gillian MacGregor) find their way round the London Underground.{credit}Ian Strang{/credit}

Clarke’s first test, sensibly carried out outside at a safe distance from any power cables, doesn’t go as expected. The machine’s mechanical components become unexpectedly electrified: discharge currents flow, bulbs light up, an energy beam shoots out and finally, a rift in time and space appears through which a rather dashing Tesla (Paul O’Neill) materialises.  And with him, a whole bunch of misguided conceptions about technology, humanity and social norms.

This Tesla is full of initiative and wants to see immediately what great social advances his inventions have wrought. Inevitably, modern life disappoints him. He decides the world needs to be enlightened with his ideas — which for him, means he has to enlist the support of industrialists: “Bring me to Richard Branson!”

Clarke’s answer to Tesla’s rash plans is to go to her London university to do proper tests. But her motto — “There’s value in understanding how things actually work” — falls on deaf ears. The two must, however, overcome their differences as it soon turns out something went horribly wrong. The time machine conveyed a villainous figure to the present who also intends to deploy Tesla’s inventions — but to destroy the human race. Soon, lightning bolts are striking all over London and, as a warm-up, the Bank of England is blown up.

Dr Clarke and the 'time machine'.

Dr Clarke and the ‘time machine’.{credit}Ian Strang{/credit}

Only in the fourth episode do we see this mysterious figure – and an answer to the burning question of why he has a bad French accent (no spoilers, you’ll have to see for yourself). Fortunately, by the end Tesla has learned to value Clarke’s common sense and has accepted her as his equal.

Strang has taken a great physics geek idea and run wild with it. There are some wonderful exchanges between Tesla and Clarke: in one striking scene, the mismatched duo walks back to London along a deserted path on an icy afternoon, arguing about whether or not Tesla waves are possible. Unavoidably, a few action scenes feel a bit amateurish, but a huge amount of attention has gone into details such as the original musical score by Canadian songwriter Connie Kaldor.

One quibble: though Clarke disproves many stereotypes and doesn’t overplay the geek-card, she could do with a bit more personality. Throughout she remains unreasonably unfazed. She announces that “something is wrong with the weather and I am pretty sure we have something to do with it” as if saying she may have accidentally knocked over a shelf in Ikea’s furniture showroom.

But her character will surely develop in further episodes, which I absolutely hope will be filmed. (Strang promises to do so if there is sufficient interest.) For now, we have to trust that Clarke isn’t going to sit still knowing there is an evil force lurking in the future waiting to destroy the world as we know it, using Tesla’s invention of free energy transmission. “I’d better get on that,” she assures us.

Liesbeth Venema is senior physics editor at Nature. She tweets at @LCVenema.

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Robots I have known

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Posted on behalf of Celeste Biever

Bonding with RoboThespian at London's Science Museum.

Bonding with RoboThespian at London’s Science Museum.

You remember your first robot – at least, if you are as fixated on them as I am. A recent review of three books that explore the implications of artificial intelligence took me back to 2006 — and the machine that lit my obsession. It wasn’t pretty or even cute, though many automatons are. It was creepy: a four-legged metal crawler that could figure out how to limp if one of its legs was shortened.

At the time, I was a technology reporter for New Scientist with an assignment to write a news story about the quadruped. In order to limp, the robot first had to detect that something had changed. To do this, it maintained a software version of itself, which it constantly compared with the position of its real physical body. When the two no longer matched, it knew it had to modify its gait to cope with its new shape.

It seemed neat, even potentially useful, but not the stuff of philosophy — until a computational biologist I spoke to cast the machine in a new light. Because the robot built a model of itself that was distinct from its real physical body, he suggested that its creators had – perhaps inadvertently – given it a sense of self. With at least the semblance of an inner experience, he said, the robot provided a glimmer of what consciousness could look like in a machine. That was it. My world shifted, I understood the power of robots and I was hooked.

Trading places with Abbie the robot arm at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Trading places with robot arm Abbie at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Until then, I had regarded them as either gimmicks that disappointed or cold, destructive Terminators. The crawler represented a third option: a way to figure out how humans work.

My next discovery was Nico, a metal skeleton that could recognise its reflection in a mirror. Dressed in a sweatshirt and baseball cap, he did this in a similar way to the crawler: he compared what he saw in the mirror to the movement commands he had just sent to his body, and looked for a match.

Nico didn’t really recognise himself. He just reproduced the behaviour – or so many biologists I spoke to insisted. But the Turing test challenges us to consider what the difference would be between behaviour that seems human and that of a real human. And undeniably, Nico classified his own reflection differently from the sight of anyone else.

Nico set me on a roll. Weekly news meetings became a sport in which I competed with biology reporters to discover beings that chipped away at what it means to be human. Scrub jays are birds clever enough to move their food stores to trick potential pilferers, but I discovered a furry robot that passed a test for theory of mind and a wheeled rover that deceived its opponent to play hide-and-seek.

Sparring with Jedibot at Stanford University in California.

Sparring with Jedibot at Stanford University in California.

These synthetic creatures had a crucial selling point: people had programmed them and so understood how they worked, making them the ultimate tool for discovering whether simple rules can produce complex behaviours. Unlike animals, with robots you know exactly what your psychological ingredients are.

My passion led me to shake hands with a knee-high pearly white humanoid as it stepped off the red carpet at the Robot Film Festival (in TriBeCa, New York, in 2011 – I was a judge). I fenced with an orange robot arm, Jedibot. And I mentally ‘traded places’ with another orange robot arm, Abbie, as we worked together to insert screws into a tabletop. The point was to see if the switch improved our ability to collaborate, a psychological trick that is known to work with human-only teams.

Throughout these adventures, my feelings towards robots have often dramatically differed from many others’. Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, for instance, are among those who have recently warned that the creation of artificial intelligence is risky because of the potential to create Terminator-style killing machines. There’s also the fear, fashionable right now, that robots are on the brink of making human jobs redundant, leaving us with nothing useful left to do.

Perhaps I should be more afraid. But I can’t help but think of one further entry in my robot diary: there is a piece of software that falls for the same optical illusion as people. Trained to estimate the lightness of a pixel based on examples of images it had seen, the program classified grey regions of an image as darker when placed on a white background and lighter when on a black one. This highlights the main reason I don’t fear robots: if you believe that we humans are just complex machines — and I do — aren’t we on some level just one big happy family?

Celeste Biever is Nature’s chief news editor. She tweets at @celestebiever.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

The ornithological photographer

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3Q: Todd Forsgren

Black-headed nightingale-thrush (Catharus mexicanus).

Black-headed nightingale-thrush (Catharus mexicanus).{credit}Todd Forsgren{/credit}

Many ornithologists use mist nets to capture birds briefly to collect key data or ring them before release. Photographer and birdwatcher Todd Forsgren has spent years working with researchers to freeze-frame those moments, now collected in Ornithological Photographs (Daylight Books).  He talks about the ethics of mist netting, the challenge of photographing hummingbirds, and upcoming projects such as photographing the lengths we go to to rescue critically endangered species.

Zeledon's antbird (Myrmeciza zeledonia)

Zeledon’s antbird (Myrmeciza zeledonia).{credit}Todd Forsgren{/credit}

Do you think mist netting is ethical?

I do. The moment birds spend in the net seems strange and perilous, but is an important contribution to the gathering of data that is incredibly valuable for conservation. Some people don’t like it as a practice, as there is a low incidence of mortality. In my view it is justified, especially since recent research suggests that incidents of injury are quite low due to rigorous oversight and training of ringers. Exponentially more damage is done per year by outdoor cats or office buildings with their lights left on overnight during migration, and climate change too. (For example, data from the North American Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) programme suggests that bird populations overall are declining, on average, by 1.77% per year.) I’m very proud to say that every bird I photographed was released by the ornithologists with status code 300 – meaning it flew off without any apparent harm. By contrast, John James Audubon and other early ornithological painters would shoot birds out of the sky to make their paintings.

How do you take these avian ‘portraits’, and which is your favourite?

Keel-billed toucan (Ramphastos sulfuratus)

Keel-billed toucan (Ramphastos sulfuratus).{credit}Todd Forsgren{/credit}

Basically, I very quickly create a photo studio around the bird. I have a white cloth as a background, which an assistant holds behind the bird, and a flash with a soft box on it, to create the right sort of lighting effect and to ‘freeze’ the bird’s motion. All the birds I’ve photographed have been caught in the course of scientific research, and I always defer to the scientist’s judgement: if a species is too sensitive or has been in the net for a while we don’t photograph it. As for a favourite, I think the keel-billed toucan is the most ostentatious of the images — it’s just so colourful and charismatic. I took the photo on a second trip to Costa Rica, on my second-to-last day there; we never managed to catch one on the first trip. The first worm-eating warbler I saw as a young birder was so vivid, that’s always been a special species for me. The hummingbirds are very frustrating to photograph because my depth of field is only an inch or so and they’re often fluttering around quite a bit. You’ve got to work really fast. So the three hummingbirds I photographed are also very special.

 What else are you working on?

I’m hoping to ramp up another project centring on wildlife, photographing the great lengths that humanity has gone to in order to alter or restore landscapes to keep critically endangered species alive. I’ve also been photographing US Geological Survey experimental forests in the American West, looking at the infrastructure and traces of scientists working in the landscape. I find that the alterations and evidence of scientific research can be very interesting in and of itself. For example, at H.J. Andrews and Cascade Head Experimental Forests, both in Oregon, researchers have set up long-term log decomposition studies that I’m following. But I also just had my first child, so I imagine I won’t be working on much other than that over the next few months.

Interview by Daniel Cressey, a reporter for Nature in London. He tweets at @DPCressey.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.