Gregory Benford is a physics professor. Benford sets his story in the same place where he teaches, the University of California, Irvine. Benford composes a cast of characters, likely based on his experience as a teacher there. Benford develops his story to not only accurately reflect science, but also to accurately reflect the personalities and politics of life in the physics department.
Cosm and Real Life Physicists
The main character, Alicia, is introduced to readers when she encounters the frustrating experience of a meeting with the University “safety Nazi.” Right away, the reader understands that this book doesn’t supply a glorified view of life as a particle physics professor. Alicia must report to her less-than-understanding superiors throughout the book, and they are portrayed as an obstacle to real learning and research. This is a very realistic ingredient of a professor’s life. He or she is mainly focused on making new discoveries, while a university Dean must be thinking of liability and the safety of its people and property first.
University Administration Heirarchy
Benford creates other relationships and personae that Alicia must encounter. A hierarchy is outlined right away: first the Dean and his committees, followed by the professors, and then beneath them are green postdocs. Each level has a certain power over the next, as Alicia experiences from both sides.
With a reality-based pecking order established, Benford then focuses on the differences among the people in their respective fields, and also throws in Alicia’s faculty obligations. She must teach an introductory physics course and is supposed to help mentor minority students. Like many college science professors, Alicia feels that “teaching was all very fine, but research made her heart sing.” (51) Her class is little more than a bother to her, and she often writes up lecture notes moments before class.
Physicists: Ambitious or Curious?
However, one of Alicia’s traits as a physicist could be construed as more rare in the field. Benford paints a portrait of some of the scientists as overambitious and only wanting to create a name for themselves. “Only the relentless could weather through to their reward,” (45) she states of physicists. However, Alicia, we learn, is there on an outright quest for knowledge, and she declares she is doing her experiment out of “burning curiosity, not the ambition stuff.” (37)
Experimental and Theoretical Physics
Ambition and personal life aside of Alicia aside, Benford spends a lot of time outlining the difference in theorists and experimentalists. These differences make a lot of sense for each category’s interests. Experimentalists such as Alicia prefer hard data and tangible scenarios, while theorists like the character Max are much more adventurous and need not hard data to back up their predictions, just good math.
Benford sets up a realistic portrait of life as a particle physicist. It’s interesting to read the realities of these people. Since the brain power of physicists is astounding, it’s easy to glorify their lives. In a book like Cosm, one gets to see that despite their big brains, these characters have similar struggles as us; gruff bosses, arrogant colleagues, and workplace politics run as rampant at UCI as any office.
With a realistic backdrop, Benford uses real science to create a fantastical scenario that one might imagine could be happening at some particle accelerator as we speak.
See Larry Niven's Ringworld and Rocheworld by Robert Forward for more science heavy sci-fi reading.
Source
- Benford, Gregory. Cosm, Aspect, 1998. ISBN: 0380974355
