John writes:

>  Regardless whether you over
>  simplistically label science fiction books as morality plays, any
>  open-minded person would find value and validity in some of the
>  imaginative and revolutionary scientific concepts portrayed in some of
>  the books.
>
>  Read some Robert Forward, Larry Niven, Alfred Bester to name a few...
>  Don't let your scientific blinkers blind you to their contribution.

I feel like I'm strangling people's pet rabbits here. Either that or being
the first to tell you all that the Easter Bunny isn't real, but let me say
again, in 40 years of sitting in on scientific and engineering meetings, I
can't ever remember a science fiction author being quoted or his ideas
considered when making either design or policy decisions (with the exceptions
that I noted earlier: HAL, Ellie Arroway, and Dilbert; these are often
referenced).

In our own balliwick, how many of the ideas of science fiction authors do you
think were given due consideration when the HP3000 was being designed or
evolved over the last 30 years? Or the Macintosh or PC? Or the internet? What
I wrote originally, and completely stand behind now, was: "There are
legitimate approaches to the analyses of complex problems. Quoting science
fiction authors is not one of them."

Nonetheless, I am the first to admit that science fiction stories play a
valuable role. While it's not so much true of the biologists that I know,
every physical scientist that I've ever spoken to avidly read science fiction
when they were a child. Indeed, as I've said before, it was often the
deciding factor in their desire to become a scientist and it still often
forms a deep psychological backdrop against which they mentally work, but
it's never more than that. All of the stories read as a child wash together
into a gray blur. They have no techical credibility, but what's leftover from
that childhood is the excitement of discovery of the unknown, and that's
enough to drive a lifetime's worth of curiosity.

My own PVR is filled with favorite episodes of "Enterprise" and "Stargate
SG-1". If you can get past the suspension of disbelief that none of this
could ever possibly occur -- and that's easy to do because the quality of
science fiction writing and effects has so dramatically improved since the
1950's -- I still greatly enjoy the shows for the sense of discovery and
exploration that they embody. But much more than that, I enjoy the people, if
for no other reason than I "know" them. Dr. Samantha Carter and Dr. Daniel
Jackson (may he rest in peace) are people who are the spitting images of
people I've known all of my adult life.

About a year ago, Ken Hirsch put up a note about a young physicist who was
completing his doctorate at CalTech when World War II broke out. He was
drafted into the Army as a private, immediately put on inactive duty status,
and then given the honorary rank of Major and assigned to 20th Bomber Group
in Kharagpur, India as an analyst. His story is very much worth reading:

   http://raven.utc.edu/cgi-bin/WA.EXE?A2=ind0108D&L=hp3000-l&P=R4861

Very much the same thing happened to me, 20 years later, in 1963. I came to
school at New Mexico State and signed on with the Physical Science Laboratory
of NMSU at the same time, employed under contract to the Applied Physics
Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University and the Naval Bureau of Weapons. The
only difference between our stories was that I was a freshman, given the
assumed rank of Captain (O-3) at 17 years of age, a secret clearance, and two
Department of Defense identification cards, one of which I was to carry on my
person at all times and the other to give to the enemy, whoever that might
be. That last part was made somewhat vague.

My father saved my travel orders from my first outing to Guam:

     http://aics-research.com/guam.html

While Drs. Carter and Jackson are with the SGC and I was with the SGI
(satellite ground instrumentation) group of PSL, and they travel to distant
worlds, while I only traveled to California, Hawaii, Guam, Wake, Samoa and
Greenland, and while their trips are over and done with in 45 minutes and
each of mine lasted from three to ten months each, their stories seem very
much the same to me and evoke a deep sense of pleasurable nostaglia every
time I watch them.

But most importantly, I very much like the people. They ring true with me.

But not a whit of this influences the science that I do other than to refresh
my sense of excitement for discovery. And I think that that's true for every
other scientist and engineer that I know as well.

Wirt ("Never give up. Never surrender") Atmar

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