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Seven science lessons from Doctor Who

Doctor Who’s fictional world isn’t girdled with the basic scientific principles that govern our world. But that doesn’t mean that Doctor Who’s science is total fiction – in fact, most of the extreme science in the show is based on very real, and often very cool, scientific precepts. Here are just a few of them.

7. Being too plugged-in can make us vulnerable

Kin Cheung/AP
Careful - logging onto free public wifi networks can be a dangerous move, especially without taking certain precautions.

While it’s not particularly likely that an alien will use the satellite network to steal our faces while we watch television, or build a wifi network to snag our literal, personal identities, the concept is based in an obvious truth.

It is now widely known that the NSA reads our texts and Google reads our email. Logging onto an unsecure wifi network can easily compromise our personal accounts and information. All too frequently, hackers access private websites and trace our locations from our cell phone data.

“We are living in a wifi soup,” as Doctor Who puts it – and, as far as soups go, it’s a dangerous one. 

Practice smart browsing when using a public wifi network. To gauge the level of security on a website, check for the “S” (for secure browsing) in “HTTPS”; avoid logging into multiple accounts or typing in personal information; and keep your firewall on. To avoid being traced via a cellphone, take the battery out (turning it off is insufficient). Consider storing personal information on a portable USB, not on a cloud. Stay safe, Whovians. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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