Speed Of Dark: Winner of the Nebula Award (Tom Thorne Novels)

Product Information

he is pushing into my life, rushing me, making me feel slow and stupid. I do mind that. Yet he is acting like a friend, being helpful. It is important to be grateful for help."

some people don’t think too well, and it’s easy for them to blame someone else for anything that’s wrong in their own lives.In the near future, disease will be a condition of the past. Most genetic defects will be removed at birth; the remaining during infancy. Unfortunately, there will be a generation left behind. For members of that missed generation, small advances will be made. Through various programs, they will be taught to get along in the world despite their differences. They will be made active and contributing members of society. But they will never be normal. Set in our close future, genetic testing and treatment has cured most diseases including autism. But what about those born too late for treatment? This book follows Lou, a high-functioning autistic man who is part of the “missing” generation. He works for a corporation that is promoting a trial of a drug that might cure adult autism. Lou has a good job, friends who care about him, and

I do not understand God that way. I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that, my mother said. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. However, astrophysicists can estimate the local speed distribution of dark matter using numerical simulations of the formation of the Milky Way. These simulations start out with a volume of dark and visible matter that spans scales much larger than the size of the Milky Way. Within this larger volume, objects that have similar mass and structure to our Galaxy are identified. The simulations then zoom in on these Milky-Way-like objects and re-simulate them at much higher spatial resolution than the initial volume. By examining the behavior of dark matter particles near the Sun, zoom-in simulations that only include dark matter have shown that the local dark matter speed distribution differs from a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution [ 8, 9] by having fewer fast-moving particles and more slow-moving particles. However, simulations that include the physics of stars and gas show that the dark matter speed distribution may be closer to the Maxwell-Boltzmann model. Settling this issue has important implications for direct-detection experiments because it is the highest speed particles that are the easiest to detect.

I have read a lot from this author, she never disappoints, so I bought this book knowing nothing about it except the author and that I had not yet read it. Thoughtful, provocative, poignant, unforgettable, The Speed of Dark is a gripping exploration into the mind of an autistic person as he struggles with profound questions of humanity and matters of the heart. I agree that both are excellent and that both deserve the genre awards received, and that we should avoid easy comparisons. Executives, it had been explained repeatedly, needed these perks to help them maintain peak performance. They had earned the privileges they used, and the privileges boosted their efficiency. It was said, but Aldrin didn’t believe it. He also didn’t say it. Widen the interpretation of darkness a bit further, and consider the speed of dark matter. This mysterious energy makes up 80 percent of all matter in the universe. In a 2013 study, scientists determined that dark matter should have a speed of 54 meters per second, or 177 feet -- slow compared to the speed of light [source: Armendariz-Picon and Neelakanta]. Of course, dark matter velocity is theoretical at this point, as this matter has largely stopped moving, preferring to form haloes around galaxies throughout the universe. The 54 meters per second figure estimated its speed when the universe was first forming, extrapolated to how fast the dark matter could travel today if it were still in motion [source: Woo].

The number of scattering events between a dark matter particle and a nucleus depends on the strength of their interaction, the scattering cross section, which is governed by the microphysical theory of dark matter. But it also depends on the large-scale properties of dark matter, such as its density and characteristic speed in the Solar System. Observations have revealed that the local dark matter density, as obtained from the motion of stars near the Sun, is approximately 0.01 solar masses per cubic parsec [ 6]. This is equivalent to about one dark matter particle in the volume of a coffee cup. However, it has been difficult to measure the speed distribution of the local dark matter. This distribution is ultimately a reflection of how the dark matter assembles to form the Galaxy. Direct-detection experiments typically assume that the dark matter speed distribution is a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution [ 7], like that of air molecules moving in a room, but this is just an educated guess. The last factor is the most important for this book, Lou is autistic, what we would call today high functioning, though he is still autistic and struggles with 'normal' people, their behaviours and with general society. He has a job in a pharmaceuticals company in a special unit made up of autistic people who have good patterning skills. Lou sees patterns that other people do not, him and his co-workers have special conditions to allow them to use this skill for the company for whom they work. Lou and his cohort have another defining characteristic; they are probably the last people to become autistic adults, the treatments that were developed to treat autism were developed too late for them, but anyone younger has benefited from them. Elizabeth Moon was born March 7, 1945, and grew up in McAllen, Texas, graduating from McAllen High School in 1963. She has a B.A. in History from Rice University (1968) and another in Biology from the University of Texas at Austin (1975) with graduate work in Biology at the University of Texas, San Antonio.The title refers to a philosophical construct Lou thinks of—we know the speed of light, but when light gets there, dark is there before it, and we don’t know the speed of dark. At different times this is viewed as ignorance being illuminated, and as the darkness inside of the head being pierced by light. It’s indicative of how well Moon shows Lou’s perceptions from inside that we come to value what he is the way he is and hesitate with him over having his darkness illuminated. Aldrin, the team co-ordinator, believes the conscription of vulnerable people is ethically indefensible, since the results are not guaranteed. Lou and his colleagues are conflicted, torn between anger at the way they are treated and the possibility of having their most secret dream realized: to be like everybody else. My little grandson is nothing like Lou, but somehow I felt his echo in all Lou's travails. Like Lou, my grandson has his own distinct personality. And I must confess to at times wondering who he would be if he didn't have Williams Syndrome. Just as Lou wonders who he would be if he wasn't autistic. Most of the time, I just love my grandson for who he is. It's like there was a trajectory, and suddenly someone said, no not that way, here is your path.

As he's learning about brain function he begins to realise that he's not actually broken at all. He reads the following in a neuroscience textbook: Yes, it is a joyous celebration of differences in humanity, but more than that, this novel is also a great story. :) Along some distance, a shadow can become larger than the object creating it. When a shadow is bigger than the object casting it, it moves at a greater distance but in the same amount of time. If the shadow is large enough, it could move across the surface faster than light. There's a humour in Moon's writing that helped to ease some of the tension at just the right times:It's interesting to me that we spend the early part of our lives rebelling against normality (Why be normal, right?) only to want so desperately to be normal when our normality is not in our hands. Lou is born autistic, and even with the advantages of a future where more is known about the illness, there is still an enormous amount of prejudice towards people with autism. If your eyelids are feeling heavy, make sure you plan a pit stop to stretch your legs and get some fresh air. Caffeine helps and sharing your driving with another driver is a great idea from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents . There are plenty of nocturnal animals that are more likely to run out in front of you at night. It’s important to stay alert for any foxes, deer or cats that might suddenly appear and follow our advice on how to drive safely if there are animals on the road.