(this is me, being resolute. [g])

[fox]

Y'all know I love a good (i.e. well-written) movie review. Here is one, of a new movie I haven't heard of called "Sunshine" (note: I have seen a film called "Sunshine", but it was about Ralph Fiennes and Jennifer Ehle as two or three generations of Hungarian Jews in the second world war, and also it was about five years ago; this recent one is apparently about the sun going dim and some astronauts going up in a spaceship to reignite it) --

Considering that the movie is set only 50 years in the future, the sun seems to be dying several billion years prematurely, especially in a "hard" (i.e., quasi-plausible) science-fiction film. Man, am I glad I didn't go off on a rant about that before learning that the film's science adviser, Dr. Brian Cox of CERN (Conseil Europeen Pour le Recherche Nucleaire [European Laboratory for Particle Physics]), thought of it, too.

The sun is not "dying in the normal sense," IMDb.com reports, but in the Cox scenario "has instead been 'infected' with a 'Q-ball' -- a supersymetric nucleus, left over from the Big Bang -- that is disrupting the normal matter. This is a theoretical particle that scientists at CERN are currently trying to confirm -- the film's bomb is meant to blast the Q-ball to its constituent parts, which will then naturally decay, allowing the sun to return to normal."

I'll buy that. Blasting a Q-ball to its constituent parts sounds normal to me, but then I read every sci-fi magazine published during my adolescence, and my hero was John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of Astounding/Analog, who insisted his fiction not be preposterous, but sensible and possible, such as a mission to the sun to blast a Q-ball to pieces.

But enough about me. What about the Q-ball? It's a "non-topological soliton," Wikipedia explains, before grumbling in a related article, "it is not easy to define precisely what a soliton is." Don't you love this stuff? Isn't it better than a lot of analysis of the psychological interactions among the crew?

(emphasis added.)

In conclusion: welcome back, Roger. We've missed you.

Comments

[thalia]

Roger Ebert is a Chicago treasure, and I'm going to cry for days when he dies. I'm *so* glad he finally seems to be recovering for real. If only Gene were still around, too....