Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The Physics of Vampires

I love Facebook. People who are as strange as you find you, so one of my "friends,"Rae Lori, whom I have never met, linked to this fascinating article.

http://io9.com/5241252/physicists-prove-that-vampires-could-not-exist

Did I ever mention that I love vampire novels? That I've sold at least 200 of them?

And right now, it's vampire week at ravenousromance.com, where the vampire novel of the day is 20% off. We have 5 vampire series.

4 comments:

Kristin Laughtin said...

I love that this kind of stuff gets seriously debated in academic journals. I can just imagine someone opening it up and wondering what was going on.

I'm a bit amused that they used predator-prey ratios to argue the non-existence of vampires, though; I wrote a story with vamps for my own amusement once, and whenever they tried to explain their existence, it became a "this doesn't seem physically possible!"* moment. The first thing I thought of was the lack of a functioning circulatory or respiratory system, brain waves, etc.

*Reference from Red vs. Blue, a Halo-based web series.

Jill Elaine Hughes said...

what these academics have failed to account for is the fact that not all vampire lore requires that a) vampires must kill their prey to feed or b) any prey that is fed upon automatically becomes a vampire. Neither is necessarily true. Plenty of vampire stories allow the living to be fed upon without dying or becoming undead themselves.

Pab Sungenis said...

The beautiful thing about vampires, like other fantasy creatures, is that because they DON'T exist in the real world, you can tailor their characteristics to your own needs.

marcinko said...

Well, if you like vampires AND physics, could I be shamelessly self-promoting and mention my atom-age vampire story "Temperance," in Cecilia Tan's BITES OF PASSION anthology?