The Philadelphia Science Fiction Society

The September 2026 meeting of PSFS will be held in person at The Rotunda, located on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. Street and garage parking are nearby, and the location is near SEPTA transit stops. PSFS meetings begin with club business, followed by the author or artist guest talk and Q&A.

The guest speaker for the Septmber 2026 meeting will be physicist and science fiction editor John Ashmead.

John Ashmead has a BA in physics from Harvard, summa cum laude, and a masters in physics from Princeton. For several years he was an assistant editor for Asimov's SF Magazine.

He is a frequent speaker at Philcon, Balticon, Capclave (& WorldCon & NASA) on Time Travel, Invisibility, Star Gates, Parallel Universes, and related topics. Recently he co-edited (with Darrell Schweitzer) Tales from the Miskatonic University: What evils lurk in the dark reaches of the Dewey Decimal System?

He has been working on a series of papers on the relationship between time and quantum mechanics: the basic question is “does quantum mechanics apply in the time direction” or if you prefer, “is time fuzzy?” This is one of the trickier frontiers in physics: time all smooth and unavoidable, quantum mechanics fuzzy and never quite as observable as one might hope. It’s a bit like wresting with a smoke demon. So he has been forced to ask: “how do we know what’s true?” “what makes a theory believable?” And the most important: “how do you prove a theory is false?” and “why do you want to?”

He will be speaking about “How to think about weird things?”
Between General Relativity (stretchy time, black holes, warp drives) and Quantum Mechanics (tunneling thru barriers, going through two doors at once, and — what is it about those dead-and-alive Schrödinger Cats?) science has certainly produced its share of weird things. How do we tell scientifically sound weird stuff from the latest outpourings of the flake factories? Falsifiability—give me something I can prove wrong!—is part of the answer. But not, as we will see, all of it. We discuss how to separate the physics from the phake; talk about the difference between “Quantum Woo” and “Quantum Wright” and put some hard numbers on those hard-to-pin down Schrödinger cats!