John writes:

> Still, I'm not sure that SF gets all its ideas from Science and I feel
>  that concepts such as anti-gravity, wormholes, matter transportation
>  etc while not being scientifically proven facts (as far as I know),
>  are enthusiastically treated by many SF writers to the extent that
>  some of their ideas might well trigger channels of investigation by
>  scientists.

I mentioned earlier that HAL, Ellie Arroway and Dilbert are the most commonly
quoted fictional characters. Ellie Arroway makes the list for two reasons:
she's modeled off of a real astronomer, Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute,
but her contribution to the scientific discussion is twofold: the first is
that she is often somewhat derisively mentioned regarding her use of
headphones listening to cosmos, but the other is far more seriously
considered for her wormhole transportation system.

Carl Sagan wanted to write a philosophical novel in "Contact," one that
discusses the nature of our existence in the absence of any God, the nature
of faith, and our intrinsic loneliness, thus he made his heroine an orphan,
symbolic of us all. But to do this he needed a mechanism to transport Ellie
across the galaxy at speeds much faster than the speed of light. Sagan called
Kip Thorne at CalTech, a good friend, and asked him to see if he could devise
a theoretically plausible mechanism for Ellie's transportation mechanism. By
that time that Sagan had asked, Thorne had already made himself famous for
accurately characterizing the properties of the accretion disc surrounding a
black hole, allowing black holes to be affirmatively recognized for the first
time.

Thorne set out to what Sagan wanted and invented "wormholes" for "Contact," a
situation where an extremely advanced civilization might be able to grab one
of the microwormholes that might theoretically exist as part of the quantum
foam, greatly enlarge it, and make it stable by coating its sides with some
sort of substance that exhibits negative gravity.

While Kip Thorne's wormholes were only meant to be a literary device in the
novel, they did two things. The first was to spawn some truly serious
theoretical work on whether or not they could be true (the jury's still out),
and the second was to instantly make them part of the science fiction
vocabulary, used everywhere nowadays as if they were as much a proven fact as
the Roswell aliens.

Thus in this particular case, a science fiction novel did incite serious
scientific investigation, although the conditions were far from the normal.
Two extremely well-respected scientists concocted the notion in order to
better help Sagan write his philosophical novel, although as you can imagine,
the philosophy of the novel is almost always overlooked by the casual reader
and it is the wormholes that are the idea that remains etched in the mind.

Go to Google and type in "wormholes carl sagan kip thorne" and you'll find a
hundred sites that explain the history of the "invention" of wormholes in
some detail, including NASA, BBC and PBS sites.

Wirt Atmar

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