“Not Your Grandfather’s Gravity” at the Philadelphia SF Convention

I’ll be doing my Not Your Grandfather’s Gravity talk this coming Saturday at Philcon at 1pm.   I’ve been scheduled for six panels as well, five as moderator.  These are on Fiction of China Mieville, Alien Life in the Solar System (besides us), Future War, Tapping the Quantum Foam (entertaining nonsense:  crank up the balonium generators), What Makes H. P. Lovecraft Unstoppable (ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn), and Dark Matter gets Darker.

Full schedule:

Fri 8:00 PM in Plaza V (Five) (1 hour)
THE FICTION OF CHINA MIEVILLE (771)

   [Panelists: John Ashmead (mod), Meredith Schwartz, Andrew C. Murphy]

   Exploring the work of the popular author of Perdido Street Station
   and others.  What makes his work so special

Sat 12:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Two (1 hour)
ALIEN LIFE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM (848)

   [Panelists: John Ashmead (mod), Alexis Gilliland, Eric Kotani]

   Making up planets around stars we do not know is relatively easy.
   Let's talk about a more difficult approach... imagining alien
   lifeforms in the solar system as we now know it

Sat 1:00 PM in Plaza III (Three) (1 hour)
NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER'S GRAVITY (890)

   [Speaker: John Ashmead]

   Einstein's theory of gravity is our best to date -- even though it
   is known to be incomplete. Now it is in the crosshairs! Several
   competitors -- string theory, loop quantum gravity, emergent gravity
   -- have come out in the open & it's a horse race! We'll look at
   weird twists of space & time, dark energy, neutrinos just spotted
   going faster than light, the curiously shy Higgs particle, & the
   whole universe from its birth in the Big Bang to its death -- &
   possible rebirth

Sat 7:00 PM in Plaza II (Two) (1 hour)
FUTURE WAR (748)

   [Panelists: Alexis Gilliland (mod), John Ashmead, Amy Bailey, Frank
   O'Brien]

   It's commonly said among Air Force officers today that the last
   human fighter pilots have been born. Drones and remotely-piloted
   planes are the future of air warfare. What about the other branches
   of the armed forces? Robots are filling more and more roles. Will
   there come a point where there are few or no human soldiers? What
   are the implications? Is this a good or bad development

Sat 8:00 PM in Plaza V (Five) (1 hour)
TAPPING THE QUANTUM FOAM: CAN "ZERO POINT" ENERGY EVER BE REAL? (902)

   [Panelists: John Ashmead (mod), Jay Wile, Marvin Kaye]

   Infinite free energy drawn from the quantum vacuum - con games and
   pseudoscience today. But does our present understanding of quantum
   physics suggest it could ever become reality? Would the process pose
   any dangers

Sat 10:00 PM in Plaza III (Three) (1 hour)
WHAT MAKES H.P. LOVECRAFT UNSTOPPABLE? (826)

   [Panelists: John Ashmead (mod), James Chambers, Chris Pisano,
   Darrell Schweitzer, Eric Avedissian, Roman Ranieri]

   Great writers, we contend, are the ones the critics cannot stop.
   Major critics, notably Edmund Wilson, tried, but to no avail. Today
   Lovecraft is famous world-wide.  Yet when he died in 1937, his only
   published book was a wretchedly amateur production which had barely
   sold a hundred copies.  What made the difference?  Was it all those
   role-playing games and plish Cthulhu toys? The movies? Or something
   inherent in the texts

Sun 1:00 PM in Plaza V (Five) (1 hour)
DARK MATTER GETS DARKER: NEW DISCOVERIES, NEW MYSTERIES (904)

   [Panelists: John Ashmead (mod), Paul Halpern, Jay Wile, Eric Kotani]

   Dark matter detection experiment CoGeNT has seen a possible signal,
   similar to the much-disputed DAMA/LIBRA result, that might confirm
   the controversial claim that dark matter has not only been observed,
   but that it varies with the seasons. Meanwhile the XENON100 detector
   has just released results from its most recent rum: they don’t see
   anything. 

   Are we closing in on dark matter, or is it getting more mysterious?