In message <[log in to unmask]>, Wirt Atmar
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>Because I'm more sensitive to the situation now, I've been looking for some
>indication of the impact of science fiction on "real" science. I've mentioned
>before that in 40 years of attending scientific meetings, I've never once
>heard of a science fiction author being quoted, other than Arthur C. Clarke's
>communications satellites, HAL, and Carl Sagan's Ellie Arroway. I may have to
>slightly revise that statement now.

>I've included below an announcement that was released today by European Space
>Organization and the Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam that actually
>references a few science fiction stories. Although the article is long, the
>reference of interest is Reference [6], which occurs near the middle of the
>article and at the very end. However, at the risk of raising more ire, I am
>unsure why they included this note. It certainly does nothing to raise their
>credibility or provide any sort of additional factual information.

Well, you certainly won't raise my ire with it; I tend to agree with you
here.

And I'm glad to see you follow that august scientific tradition by
which, when doubts are raised about a scientist's position, then that
scientist himself will be one of those working most assiduously to
resolve the situation, without bias to either side :-)

I too have been looking, and my example, which was my holiday reading,
is J Richard Gott's 'Time Travel in Einstein's Universe'. I didn't know
of Gott before, but his bona fides are that he is a professor of
astrophysical sciences at Princeton. If that's good enough.....

The book is pop-sci for the non-mathematician like me, but I think his
serious work is serious enough. However, he does include a large number
of references to science fiction. Many of them, perhaps, are to make his
readers feel more at home, and possibly do detract a little from his
serious points.

But equally, I was surprised at some of the points he made about the
quite solid grounding of some science fiction, and the reciprocity with
which sci-fi and 'real science' can exchange ideas. I'd always assumed
that, at best, S-F put an accessible face on some scientific concepts,
or explored their social consequences, but it seems to go further than
that.

For instance, HG Wells, in 'The Time Machine' talks about time as a
fourth dimension. Commonplace now, perhaps, but revolutionary then,
anticipating Einstein's use of the concept by a whole ten years.

He also quotes Gregory Benford's 1980 Nebula award-winner, Timescape.
Thereby returning the compliment that Benford paid him by quoting a
(real) 1974 scientific paper of Gott's in the novel as the mean by which
the hero learns how to build his tachyon transmitter...

One of my particular favourites is Robert Heinlein's 'All You Zombies'
(1959), which I remember rather ill-advisedly reading to my school
Literary Society, to general incomprehension. But the thrust of it is
that the protagonist is his own father and his own mother, and so has a
completely circular world-line - his path in space-time. And as he says
at the end 'So I know where I came from. But where did all you zombies
come from?'

Gott covers the Sagan/Contact/Kip Thorne/wormholes area, and how the
paper that Kip Thorne wrote as a result of thinking the physics through
for Sagan sparked renewed scientific interest in the theoretical
possibilities of time travel.

The SF settles down after a while, and we get into Cauchy horizons, and
the warping of spacetime, and Gott's conjecture of the self-starting
universe - shades of the Heinlein story - but there are still a few jeus
d'esprit on the way.

For instance, that the warp drive means of moving through hyperspace, as
used by the starship Enterprise, is theoretically possible, but that the
Enterprise couldn't lay its own warp drive path as it went along. I
don't know how they know.

And I thought I had the author caught out about what sort of worldline
Bill Murray had in Groundhog Day, but he caught himself just in time -
in the Notes at the back - and correctly described it as a many-worlds
spacetime, (as in one of the non-Copenhagen interpretations of quantum
mechanics), as Bill Murray can alter his behaviour in each one, and his
colleagues and the rest of the townspeople react differently according
to this.

It's a fascinating book; though if it was a little 'light' for me, I
daresay it might float away completely for Wirt :-)

But it was interesting to see how comfortably a respected scientist was
able to straddle the two worlds of science and science fiction, without
ever confusing the two, and (I suppose) without ever fearing that it
would detract from his serious reputation.
--
Roy Brown        'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd     useful, or believe to be beautiful'  Wm Morris

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