Some fictional extrapolations of Victorian technologies, such as steam locomotives and hot-air balloons that go far beyond historical limits use physics to great effect.
I met my first steampunker two years ago at San Diego Comic-Con International. She wore a leather corset over a full, striped skirt, had red, white, and yellow contact lenses in her eyes, and wielded a Gatling gun made, I presumed, of light plastic but painted to look metallic. I introduced myself, flashed my press badge, and asked if she minded fielding a few questions.
Steampunk, in case you didn’t know, is an increasingly popular subgenre of fantasy and science fiction. Its authors extrapolate the capabilities of Victorian technologies, such as steam locomotives and hot-air balloons, far beyond historical limits, yet the societies they depict remain more or less Dickensian. Although steampunk eschews interstellar travel, sentient robots, and other futuristic staples of science fiction, technology still serves as the principal plot stirrer.
Members of the League of S.T.E.A.M. posed for me in the San Diego Convention Center during last year’s Comic-Con International.
My Comic-Con interlocutor, it turned out, liked the aesthetics of steampunk far more than she did its literary or cinematic expressions. The clothes and accoutrements are not especially difficult to buy or make. What’s more, whereas steampunk clothes are as visually striking as a superhero’s skin-tight costume, they are generally more flattering and practical to wear.
Given its prominence in Victorian science, physics turns up in steampunk novels, sometimes underlying elements of their plots. Stephen Baxter’s Anti-Ice (1993) follows the technological, economic, and strategic impacts of a material, anti-ice, that releases copious amounts of energy when warmed. Like its real-word inspiration, nuclear energy, anti-ice ends up being weaponized by the country that discovered and monopolized it— in Baxter’s novel, Great Britain.
In James P. Blaylock’s Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992), the hero, Langdon St. Ives, uses a time machine invented by the famous physicist of the book’s title. And in Ian R. MacLeod’s The Light Ages (2003), the Industrial Revolution begins in England, as did the momentous original, but a century earlier, in 1678, when one Joshua Wagstaffe discovered a magical and useful substance called aether.
Of course, anti-ice, Kelvin’s time machine, and aether are all fictitious, but can one do real, worthwhile, and innovative physics today with Victorian equipment?
Heat exchangers and tree leaves
Three years ago I visited Eric Cornell’s lab on the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado. After he’d shown me his cold-atom experiments, the Nobel laureate took me to a large room, stood by a drum-shaped piece of equipment that looked as though it belonged in a brewery, and then described a fascinating low-tech experiment.
The equipment was a heat exchanger that converted waste heat in the form of warm air into mechanical energy then electrical energy. Given that the goal of Cornell’s heat exchanger is to harvest low-grade waste heat, it’s unlikely that a Victorian physicist would have seen a need to build one like it. Perfecting various engines that created waste heat as a by-product was a higher priority. Still, it’s conceivable that James Joule (1818–89), if he’d set himself the same goal, could have devised a machine similar to Cornell’s.
Of course, unless they’re performing a historical reenactment, modern physicists do not deliberately limit their equipment to museum pieces. Even so, if you browse general physics journals today, it’s possible to encounter investigations that a Victorian could plausibly have carried out.
My favorite recent example is a paper that appeared last month in Physical Review Letters. Kaare Jensen of Harvard University and Maciej Zwieniecki of the University of California, Davis, determined the distribution of leaf size versus tree height for a wide range of seed-bearing trees. By modeling the trees’ vascular network as a hydraulic pump for distributing chemical energy, Jensen and Zwieniecki could account for the distribution’s characteristic shape, notably its well-defined upper and lower bounds.
Although their theoretical analysis invoked the modern concept of microfluidics, the physics, as far as I could tell, would have been familiar to Lord Kelvin (1824–1907)—the real one, that is.
