Book Review: Why You Can’t Catch A Rocket To Mars

A somewhat interesting, if flawed, set of reflections on the state of modern science research from Professor Lyndon N. Smith.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Time for another non-fiction review! This time I’m taking a look at Why You Can’t Catch A Rocket To Mars by Professor Lyndon N. Smith. The book comprises a series of reflections from the author on the state of modern science research and society, attempting to find answers to the question of why the rate of scientific progress and technological innovation appears to have slowed in today’s world when compared to the giant leaps and grand promises of yesteryear. For this, the author offers up a number of potential reasons with—in some cases wildly—varying degrees of reasonableness. The author also speaks in depth about various topics which could show avenues for advancement, particularly those relating to his field of expertise in machine vision and computer simulation. Sprinkled liberally throughout are pop-culture references and delightful illustrations made by the author. Overall the book was an interesting read for the most part. But all that being said, it did come with some fairly serious problems.

The parts I enjoyed the most were actually the sections on convolutional neural networks, machine vision and future developments for artificial intelligence to aid with scientific research. Many of the other topics I had no problems with at all; I defer to the author’s substantial experience with research university administration, and I could well imagine that such an emerging environment would indeed take lots of valuable time away from scientific research unnecessarily. Also the sections on funding, impact, and reinventing the wheel were enlightening and insightful. As I mentioned above, I loved the author’s own illustrations—while many were undoubtedly there to get around the problem of copyright, he clearly has a deft hand with a pencil and a paintbrush, and they were a lot of fun. However, I did feel that the author has perhaps a naive view of our current technological ability to send a crewed rocket to Mars, and there was clearly a lot of wide-eyed admiration for Elon Musk whose companies in recent times seem to be getting on despite, rather than because of, his leadership. Sadly not a lot of time was spent talking about the actual engineering and technologies which are being developed for Mars projects. It felt like the author is of the opinion that—barring all the roadblocks discussed later in the book—it’s a simple matter which could have been done already.

I don’t usually like to be too detailed with my negatives, but this deserves calling out. There was a lengthy section on how a preponderance on the need for political correctness is holding back science, as well as a comment that could be taken as transphobic, all of which I thoroughly disagreed with and found to be fundamentally flawed in its reasoning. There were also no specific examples given within the section as to why political correctness is the enemy of science, nor what “false claims about reality” it makes. As usual with these kinds of baseless rants, it seems that much is left to innuendo. It came across as the typical nonsense of a white, middle-class man complaining that “you just can’t say anything anymore”. Once I had gotten through this section, I had hoped that would be the end of it, but to my dismay, further “anti-PC” jabs kept on popping up every so often.

There was also a lot of weird pseudoscience in the book, where the author has clearly strayed from his area of expertise. For instance, mentions of the discredited Rupert Sheldrake in order to highlight dogmatism in the scientific community. The author then talks about vitamin C and aspirin to cure cancer as though it were again a simple thing that everyone is ignoring. Plus an equally weird disdain for complex—or rather, “fancy” looking—mathematics as though it were totally unnecessary (as someone who does not understand mathematics at the best of times, it all looks unnecessary to me, but still…)

And finally, towards the end, the book completely goes off the rails and the author betrays a distinct lack of understanding regarding Special Relativity, leading him to declare that time dilation due to velocity isn’t a real effect (someone really should tell our GPS satellites that!) and that it is possible for two spacecraft to accelerate away from one another at a relative velocity greater than the speed of light (no, you cannot simply add velocities together at relativistic speeds. It doesn’t work that way. Our ability to do so at low, everyday speeds is an approximation.)

I think crucial to all of those misunderstandings were some errors in the basic postulates: chiefly that the speed of light has to be relative to something. It isn’t. The second postulate of Special Relativity does not define what the speed of light is, instead it holds that it is the same for all observers in all reference frames. Also an understanding of mass-energy equivalence, which is precisely what prevents anything from simply accelerating to superluminal speeds. I’ve mentioned this on the blog in my previous post—the faster we go, the heavier we get and therefore more energy is needed in order to keep accelerating. And because mass and energy are the same thing, the more energy you put in, the more mass you have. Eventually you get to a point where you would have infinite mass and would need infinite energy to go any faster. That is the speed of light. That is why only massless particles can go that fast.

You can probably tell I got quite frustrated by the end. That kind of physics has become a bit of a pet subject for me.

I will say, bringing it back to the positives, I appreciated the author’s wild speculation about the mid and far futures. There were some interesting ideas here, and I do prefer to take an optimistic outlook. I don’t agree that dystopian stories represent doom-merchantry, I prefer to see them more as a catharsis. But I like to speculate favourably on the heights we could reach as a species out there among the stars. As a sci-fi author, it is my bread and butter, after all. That kind of speculation is healthy, and good, and we definitely shouldn’t limit our imaginations to our current understandings of physics, lest we discard potentially great discoveries out of hand.

Would I recommend this book? Honestly, it’s a mixed bag. It was good for some of its insights, particularly into the role of artificial intelligence in science research (of which I felt like I learned a lot), and there were the other valuable insights mentioned above that made it worth reading. But it did stray significantly and got very weird. If you’re interested in the better observations, and like nice hand-drawn artwork and plenty of discussions about pop-culture, then it might be worth wading through the problematic bits.