The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon... Read More.
Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin
"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine
"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review
"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.” — Douglas Adams There’s not a lot of science in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but it’s a fantastic book, and the quote above is quite correct.
But did you ever notice how many movies or TV shows have people/aliens/robots jump into spaceships with rocket thrusters and be able to travel between planets in a few minutes (hours or days at most), or even between entire stars without even a mild, appeasing nod toward hyperspace or faster-than-light travel?
The new Battlestar Galactica series does pretty well with some of its science, but not on this point. Rocket-propelled Vipers and Raptors can search an entire solar system worth of planets and asteroids in a few hours. I do like that the battles take place at high speed, although I’m not sure we should even see the enemy visually at the speeds these ships must travel.
In Enemy Mine, there is apparently interplanetary space travel, if not interstellar space travel, for one-man (Drak?) ships on some quite short time scale. The meteors also hit pretty damn slowly for something that should be traveling at kilometers per second.
In The Empire Strikes Back, we have Luke in an X-wing travel to the Dagobah system also in a few hours (if not, where does he pee?), without any evidence for hyperspace capability. In the Star Wars universe, it seems any child with a few hours to spare can cobble together a bicycle capable of near instantaneous interstellar flight.
Star Trek also commits the sin of faster-than-light ships, but is at least consistent with their warp speeds and the travel time between stars and different parts of the galaxy (although how you split a galaxy into “quadrants” is a little unclear to me). This was even a major plot element for Voyager since at top speed it would still take them many decades to make it home. Big props for understanding how big space is even with ludicrous warp speeds.
There are a few terrific exceptions. 2001 comes to mind, with the multi-year trip to Jupiter requiring cryogenic suspension for the astronauts. But most movies/TV shows just absolutely suck on this point. Too slow, I imagine a director or producer saying. Does it really matter? People don’t want to think.
I do, and I don’t believe I’m alone.
Relativity pretty much never even rears its interesting but complicated head in a TV show or movie. It would be interesting to see this handled well in more than a single Twilight Zone episode. The model everyone has for space is boats in the ocean, which is a tiny drop in a bucket with nothing like the right relative distances or speeds compared to space.
As we transitioned in class last night from properties of light to size scales, light-speed and how its finite velocity gives us distances (in light years) seemed a natural course for the lesson plan.
One of the things we did that I thought resonated with last week’s “Cold Equations” stuff was looking at two versions of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star.” The 1955 story is a classic, a Hugo winner. Short and sweet, it delivers on multiple levels. If you haven’t read it, track it down and give it a try, keeping in mind it is over 50 years old. I’ll probably let a few spoilers go a paragraph or two below.
First, let me start with some science elements before moving to what is going to be the meat of the post. There are several science errors that can be chalked up to the era the story was written in. Clarke writes about a star going supernova, and the remnant being a white dwarf. Wrong. Only neutron stars or black holes are produced in supernovas. Moreover, the star is supposed to be 100 light-years away from any other star systems, very unlikely for any star young enough to go supernova (only the most massive stars with short lives explode as supernovas, and they’re only formed in the plane of the galaxy where the stellar density is high). To pile on, stars that go supernova don’t live for the many billion of years necessary to allow intelligent life to evolve (probably — took over 4 billion here, 3 billion in my novel Spider Star for the Pollux system). There are a few other technical details to pick on, but a lot of good stuff. The Jesuit astrophysicist in the story has a handful of papers published in the Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I myself have several dozen in those venues. We publish more than they did 50 years ago.
Those are nits given the decades of additional knowledge. Where’s the beef? OK. Just like with “The Cold Equations,” the TV version raped the original story. There the corporation was made the evil enemy rather than the cold equations of physics, so even with the tragedy the audience could hate a personal enemy that had evil qualities. A little different with “The Star,” but a big change.
Spoilers. In the published version of “The Star,” the Jesuit’s faith is shaken by how callous God is sacrificing a peaceful, magnificent civilization to mark the way to Bethlehem, even while remarking we cannot judge. There is nothing to undercut this challenge to faith, the issue of this reconciliation of the marking of the coming of the son of god and the supernova. In the Christmas-time special 1980s Twilight Zone episode, nicely done for the budget in general, an extra bit was added.
The extra bit was a poem the aliens left to be found, beginning, “Do not mourn for us…blah, blah, blah, we’ve had a good, happy run…”
WTF?
It’s a total cop out, a 180 degree turn on Clarke’s intention with the story, something to let the Christmas-loving Christians feel okay about the faith-shaking story. It’s TV pandering to a mass audience for ratings. It’s cheap, stupid, and disinengenous. The commentary on the DVD remarks that some fans complained about the change. I haven’t been able to find much on the internet (the TV show was pre-internet mostly, unlike 1990s sci-fi channel version of “The Cold Equations”). But it’s another example of the difference between published sf and TV/movies.
No sir, I don’t like it. We don’t need the happy ending every time to reach the mass audience, do we? Really? Can’t we leave the classics as is, to love or hate as our predilection?
The Future Is Now: Terminator vs. Predator (Vision)
January 27th, 2008
Contact lenses are under development that will allow wearers to watch video and maps beamed directly into their eyes similar to the overlays from the Terminator movies. Maybe I need to add those movies to my science-based sf films….naw. I had similar technology in my first novel, and my pro-scitech stance led me to have lasik eye surgery about five years ago (still see 20/20, one of the best spent $1200 ever).
This is somewhat timely as my current topic in my Science and Science Fiction course this week is light and how it and its strangely wonderful properties are used in science fiction. I used clips from Predator to illustrate “Predator vision” — seeing in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum at wavelengths at 7-14 microns where human beings glow brightly with thermal radiation. We also looked at active camouflage used in the movie, which is also being developed. Another topic we we will discuss is how light slows down through different substances, sometimes to ridiculously slow speeds, but nothing as extreme as in the classic Bob Shaw short story “The Light of Other Days.” (It isn’t really feasible, but it is a really cool idea.)
There are a lot of different different classic science fiction stories depending on light. Some that come to mind to me are “The Star” by Arthur C. Clarke, “The Lady Vanishes” by Charles Sheffield, “First Contact” by Murray Leinster, “Luminous” by Greg Egan, and I’m sure dozens more. I’m always on the lookout for things for my class. One resource that I use, but could use updating, is Andy Fraknoi’s list of Science Fiction Stories with Good Astronomy and Physics. I’ve thought about making my own such list, but it seems a little daunting to do a comprehensive job.
The Difference Between Hard Science Fiction and Mundane Science Fiction
January 25th, 2008
Jim Kelly’s essay in Asimov’s this month is about “mundane science fiction.” Mundane science fiction is, according to wiki:
Mundane Science Fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction. Inspired by an idea of Julian Todd, the Mundane SF movement was founded in 2004 by novelist Geoff Ryman among others.[1] It focuses on stories set on or near the Earth, with a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written.
That unfounded speculation about interstellar travel can lead to an illusion of a universe abundant with worlds as hospitable to life as this Earth. This is also viewed as unlikely.
That this dream of abundance can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.
That there is no evidence whatsoever of intelligences elsewhere in the universe. That absence of evidence is not evidence of absence — however, it is considered unlikely that alien intelligences will overcome the physical constraints on interstellar travel any better than we can.
That interstellar trade (and colonization, war, federations, etc.) is therefore highly unlikely.
That communication with alien intelligences over such vast distances will be vexed by: the enormous time lag in exchange of messages and the likelihood of enormous and probably currently unimaginable differences between us and aliens.
That there is no present evidence whatsoever that quantum uncertainty has any effect at the macro level and that therefore it is highly unlikely that there are whole alternative universes to be visited.
That therefore our most likely future is on this planet and within this solar system, and that it is highly unlikely that intelligent life survives elsewhere in this solar system. Any contact with aliens is likely to be tenuous, and unprofitable.
That the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.
Geoff Ryman has contrasted mundane science fiction with regular science fiction through the desire of teenagers to leave their parents’ homes.[2] Ryman sees too much of regular science fiction being based on an “adolescent desire to run away from our world.” However, Ryman notes that humans are not truly considered grown-up until they “create a new home of their own,” which is what mundane science fiction aims to do.[2]
By 2007 the mundane science fiction movement was noteworthy enough that Interzone decided to devote an issue to the genre.[3]
In his Asimov’s essay, Jim Kelly wondered, “how was MundaneSF all that different from what had up until then been called hard science fiction?”
Well, as a self-proclaimed “hard sf” writer I have an opinion. Let me start off by saying I don’t write mundane science fiction in general because I find it, on its own merits, boring and uninteresting. At least to me. One example is Kim Stanley Robinson’s book Red Mars, which isn’t a bad book, but didn’t surprise me enough in particularly good ways or provide enough sense of wonder to read the others in the series. I’d seen the technology one place or another, and the speculation was so probable that I was bored through stretches.
Mundane science fiction also offends me by the notion that we know what is most probable. We don’t, in my opinion, and some (but by no means all) of the conventions it rejects are not at all improbable. I agree that FTL should be off the table and don’t use it in my own novels. But that doesn’t mean that interstellar travel won’t happen, and it does seem that planets are abundant. We’ll have the technology in decades or less to even identify Earth-like worlds with life (e.g., through detecting O2 absorption signatures). SETI has barely scratched the surface of parameter space and we sure haven’t been looking very long. And so what if vast distances “vex” interstellar communication? I don’t get that. That would still be cool as hell and assuming we don’t go extinct what are centuries? And this business about abundance of resources…all the quantitative evidence historically has indicated that Malthusian disasters are very overrated. The abundance we have in the 20th and 21st centuries would boggle the mind of the richest people on the planet in previous times.
In short, I find it narrow, uninspiring, and unlikely from some perspectives.
What I write, and define to be “hard sf” is science fiction that doesn’t stray into the impossible. I have aliens in my stories. I have interstellar travel. I have tenuous connections over vast distances. I have a future of abundance. It’s a mix of preference and what I see as probable. And on the science issues I strive for as much accuracy as I can muster. I have pages and pages of calculations to justify some events and physical structures in my novels. Some of it is simple, some is complex, and some my readers will never notice.
So to summarize, mundane science fiction is science fiction that improbably anticipates no new discoveries or technologies and makes some narrow-minded assumptions that are unwarranted, while hard science fiction merely limits itself to avoiding scientific error and impossibility.
I know which one I prefer.
They both suffer from unfortunate, sucky names, don’t they?
So there’s a new movie coming out next month, Jumper, based on an sf novel by Steven Gould, whose writing I’ve admired over the years (“Peaches for Mad Molly” is a truly original story).
I just came across this story about the director Doug Liman and lead actor Hayden Christensen of Star Wars infamy visiting MIT to talk about the movie and the science behind it with physicists there.
WTF? The “science?”
And what’s worse, I think the MIT guys are buying into it with what I believe are misleading statements and loose language. I’ve kept up with quantum “teleportation” and the term is BS. What happens is that you use the action of quantum “entanglement” which means that two particles (for instance) share a relationship of particular properties (e.g., spins) and you move them apart very careful so they don’t interact with their surroundings. Then, you measure the spin of one of them. Simultaneously, the spin of the other “collapses” into the corresponding matched state. This has been referred to as the teleportation of information. The only thing traveling infinitely fast is the state of the other particle. We’re not actually teleporting any actual object or particle of any kind.
This quantum teleportation is nothing like the transporter beams of Star Trek or the “Bamfs!” of Nightcrawler.
But the MIT scientists, even with their minimal qualifying statements, don’t exactly say it isn’t in very clear terms. It could be the person writing the article putting their own spin on it, to make it as exciting and relevant as possible, which given the state of science writing (and we’ve got a showbiz article here), is very likely.
I haven’t jumped off the ledge quite, but Christensen’s statement about how a movie like Jumper with its unexplained teleporting will make kids want to grow up to be scientists is troubling to me. I mean, it might. But where’s the science in Jumper? A tenuous link to some lab experiments that aren’t actual teleportation? It might as well be Kirk Cameron making wild claims of proving the existence of God with bananas. At least Christensen gave Star Trek credit for inspiring kids to become scientists (arguably true in my case), and not Star Wars. The science in Star Wars…do not want.
I’m all for inspiring kids, but why not put some real science in movies instead of trying to justify it after the fact? Authenticity beats the veneer of authenticity any day. And will keep me from jumping.
From time to time I’ll write about the courses I’m teaching, at least when I think it’s interesting behind the scenes. It should be this semester.
Last year and this year both I’ve started my Science and Science Fiction class with “The Cold Equations,” a famous proto-hard sf story by Tom Godwin. My course is nominally a physics course with a goal of teaching science and science communication through science fiction in its various forms, but I don’t start with a very deep physics lesson (although later in the course we do focus on Newton’s Laws as applied to spaceships). I want to start with a discussion of the philosophy of science in juxtaposition with humanistic sensibilities. This story historically has generated a lot of discussion and strong feelings, and that’s what good literature should do (whether or not the prose is particularly literary). One website going into this discussion about this story is here, although there have been a lot of stories, essays, and discussions in a lot of venues.
With minimal introduction, we read the original short story in class Wednesday. Its intent, from my perspective, is that the laws of physics have no emotions, no human qualities, and ignorance of them will get you killed no matter how innocent or tragic the situation. But the story has flaws of various sorts, and moreover some people just don’t don’t want to accept this thesis. (Reminding me about forbidden story themes.) The story can be read in different ways, and it’s certainly a complex, emotionally charged situation with high stakes that leads to critical thought.
I followed up this year with the 1996 movie version. It’s padded out a bit, but more importantly for my purposes, changes the story in a way to clearly highlight some of the humanistic objections and flaws of the original.
The course assignments are: read “Think Like a Dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly, which is a modern high-quality humanistic response to “The Cold Equations,” and to write a 3-4 page response to the two versions of the original story and Kelly’s reaction, focusing not on the science but just on emotional reaction. I’ll start teaching science (beginning with light) next week, but want to get critical thought and engage both hemispheres of the brain and talk about the metatext of stories. We’ll have an hour of discussion before switching topics, and hope for some thoughtful responses. (That’s a hint if you’re in my class and reading this blog!)
I have a special affinity for “The Cold Equations” because I once met Tom Godwin’s daughter at an Armadillocon back in the 1990s and she spoke with me at length about her father and the story. When I told another Clarion West class mate about this, she asked me, “How much did she weigh?”
A few days ago there was a New York Times Freakonomics blog entry on this question that’s worth a read. I suspect anyone finding their way here is going to agree with the people interviewed there, and with me, that the answer is “yes.” In particular there, the question referred to “manned” space exploration, which is a more expensive proposition with less bang for the buck, in general, when compared to the more general question. I still say “yes.”
Let me reiterate, in my own very bried way, the case for manned space exploration and some rebuttals to the usual objections. It doesn’t cost that much in the grand scheme of things, has enormous spiritual and financial return per dollar invested, and will likely lead to bigger returns that are currently unforseeable. Everything isn’t about, nor should it ever be, just about making money. Giving up space exploration will not allow us to solve any higher priority problems any better than we are doing already.
The United States is the richest and most technologically advanced nation on Earth. We can and should explore our universe in every way possible, and we’re better equipped to do it than anyone else. Failure to do so results from myopia and politics, nothing else, if we turn our back on the final frontier.
It won’t be fast. It won’t be easy. It won’t be completely safe. However, the potential upside is enormous and no less than the salvation of the entire human race if there is a catastrophe here on Earth (e.g., an asteroid impact or man-made disaster). If the government won’t do it, private industry likely will, as there will be a market for the super rich in space tourism.
I look forward to a future in space, for at least some of us. Maybe the Chinese.
Top Ten Science-Based Science Fiction Movies (Revised)
January 13th, 2008
I posted this originally at www.sfnovelists.com, but decided that I’d like it in my own archives, too, and it would make a good filler for a lazy Sunday (which isn’t really because I have to write a self-assessment and run for three hours today, but that’s my problem). Anyway, here it is in case you missed it over there.
***
This is a revised version of a list I posted on my blog a couple of days ago that was also farked. I was convinced that the Alien and Aliens movies had a number of shortcomings compared to some other films and have added on a couple of others in their place. The tragedy is that with decades of science fiction films, it’s a real struggle to find even ten that have good science. Here’s my take.
Every top ten list is biased, and so is this one. My particular biases are that the movies have to strive for, and achieve most of the time, scientific accuracy. At least nothing too grossly wrong, and some instances of, “yeah, that’s not intuitive but that’s how it would work!†I’ll limit my list to the physical sciences and space-oriented movies. There are many fine movies that won’t make the list simply because they skimp on the science in one way or another, or I’ve never seen them. Apollo 13 was very scientifically accurate, but that’s a historical movie, not science fiction.
Here’s the list in chronological order, with a few words of explanation.
Destination Moon (1950). This movie was made with the involvement of the space community of the day and Robert Heinlein who wrote the story it was based on. Special effort was made for scientific accuracy and they got a lot of things right. Probably the biggest mistake was proposing that only private industry, not the government, would make it to the moon.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A classic, and probably the film closest to error free in terms of the science. There wasn’t any sound in space, and gravity was supplied by rotation in a realistic fashion. Lots of good details that were right. Credit Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrik for listening and caring.
2010 (1984). Not as visually stunning or powerful (or slow) as 2001, but mostly good science throughout, particularly with respect to working in freefall and vacuum environments.
Predator (1987). There were two great things in this movie. No, not future governors! Two nice science things. The first is the idea of an alien that sees in a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and having that actually play a role in the plot. The second was the camo suit, which is a technology we’re likely to develop this century at close to that level of effectiveness.
The Abyss (1989). This fine movie takes place underwater rather than in outer space, but it’s an alien contact story. A lot of the details of this exotic environment are treated correctly and play roles in the plot. I first watched this in Greg Bear’s basement at a party and it was fascinating to hear him give his commentary on some scenes. Another great Cameron film (but be sure to see the director’s cut).
Contact (1997). Probably the second-best movie on the list in terms of scientific accuracy. There are a few minor errors in it, but it gets so many things right including some concepts tough to convey to an audience. Credit Carl Sagan for helping here.
Deep Impact (1998). OK, this movie I didn’t love. I mean, we’re supposed to find sympathetic an annoying reporter vying for the first question at a presidential press conference? Some minor scientific errors here, but they tried and succeeded in getting a lot of things right, too.
Red Planet (2000). I was kind of surprised to see this movie on my list. While this isn’t a bad movie, it just goes to show how few movies out there are really based in science and make it part of the story. In any event, they did a good job with gravity on the space craft, fire in freefall, Martian gravity, and more. I mean, counter-rotating rings for artificial gravity?! Super. Taking along a robot with a “military mode†is just kind of dumb, however, but not bad science.
Minority Report (2002). Now, I don’t think there’s much merit in the future-seeing psychics, but a lot of the near-future tech is plausible and realistic. Good, thoughtful movie that way.
Primer (2004). A smart little movie about time travel. I’m letting this one in because it feels realistic with the engineering and science and makes you think, a lot, about exactly what is going on. A smart movie: that’s a rarity in Hollywood movies and to be commended. Look for analogies in the time travel in Feynman diagrams.
The much longer list of science fiction movies with bad science includes almost every space-based movie I haven’t mentioned, and most others. Armageddon currently holds a special place in my heart for its mind-numbing scientific ignorance and I use it for instruction in my Launch Pad Workshop. I’d like to recommend Phil Plait’s great website Bad Astronomy for reviews of science in some of these movies and many others.
So yesterday I had a post about what I thought were the ten best science fiction movies in terms of the physical science. I’ve been convinced to make a couple of substitutions and will do that over at www.sfnovelists.com tomorrow with a link from here. One reaction I often get when I become critical about the science in a science fiction movie is, “Lighten up, it’s only a movie!”
Well, to me one of the things I love about a story, whether it’s written or a movie, is being able to lose myself in it and enjoy vicariously another time and place through the actions of characters I grow to care about. In order to “lose myself” in a story, I require the “suspension of disbelief.” That is, even though I know the story isn’t real, I can ignore that fact as long as the story is either internally self-consistent with it’s laws (e.g., vampires can’t abide the sun) or the laws match those of the physical universe that I know. If they don’t, the story had better be a fantasy with quick indications for me to set aside my understanding of physics and replace it with an openness to magic with its own rules. The difficulty with science fiction is that the amazing speculative stuff is predicated, usually, on technology based on physical laws that we know today — or at least on science that doesn’t violate our current understanding of those laws. So that means for me to keep my suspension of disbelief and hang in there with the story, the science can’t be too wrong or I’ll lose my ability to lose myself in the story.
Then I just get pissy and rant about it and my friends tell me to lighten up, and ask if they should invite me next time or not. (Actually most of my friends are cool and have science-heavy backgrounds so it turns into a rantfest more often than not when we catch a real stinker.)
But this is all a long-winded introduction to this issue, keeping a science fiction story real, and how that’s different in movies and books.
First off, let me pass on what little I’ve learned about how movies are made and what typically directors and producers care about. I’ve had some friends in Hollywood and some who have written scripts, both produced and not, and here’s what I know from them. They don’t care about the science and they don’t care about getting things right. They care about audience reaction and box office, and the details of getting things right are not worth that hassle if it costs time or money. This leads to one immediate difference between books and movies.
Movies are looking for audiences in the millions — hundreds of millions worldwide in the best case scenario. Scientific literacy is just not that high in the U.S. population let alone most other countries. So what if Mike Brotherton gets annoyed and doesn’t put the movie on his list? For every viewer like me there are ten that didn’t even realize there was a problem. And as far as moviemakers are concerned, minor problems, what they call “Refrigerator door” problems, are okay. These are problems viewers only realize when they’re getting a midnight snack as they’re opening the refrigerator door, hours after the movie is over. If it doesn’t affect the immediate experience, it isn’t worth worrying about, especially if it’ll cost money to fix. Movies also must show everything happening, and audiences will not suffer through lectures, so why bother with an elaborate justification for something unusual if there isn’t room in the movie to explain it? Why not just make it happen, if it’s at least the second-cousin of plausible in the director’s scientifically illiterate head?
Now, books are a different issue. There are a lot more books out every year than movies, and they’re a lot cheaper to produce. A bad movie gets a million viewers, while a good one a hundred times that. A bad book (or just an overlooked one) gets thousands, maybe ten thousand readers, while a popular one maybe a hundred times that — to the level of the audience of a bad movie. And book readers are picky because they have so many books to choose from. Most science fiction fans see most science fiction movies that come out, but even a voracious science fiction reader can only read maybe ten percent of the books coming out. Moreover, the “refrigerator door” problem can hit a book hard, coming in the middle of the experience, souring the rest. And if you have to, you can take the time for an explanation (what’s called an “info dump”) — readers have a lot more patience for those than movie-goers.
So most readers are niche readers, working hard to find exactly what they like, and then repeating with the same authors and the same genres. The niche of “hard science fiction,” that I like and write, is really for the picky reader who wants the science to be right to avoid the loss of the suspension of disbelief. It’s stories that have a lot of science and depend on the science as more than window dressing. Silly tropes like universal translators, magical spaceship gravity, and human-impersonating robots in the present are things to be avoided, because they’re things that hard sf readers will think about and reject as implausible or unexplained.
I find enough good hard science fiction out there to keep me happy. Writers I enjoy at novel length for hard science fcition include Joe Haldeman, Gregory Benford, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Greg Bear, Alastair Reynolds, Greg Egan, Larry Niven, Wil McCarthy, Robert Reed, Robert Sawyer, and many others. I’d love to make a list of the top ten science-based science fiction books, but I’d have the opposite problem from movies. Too many choices, and not enough time to read all the worthy candidates.
Movies, not so tough. I’m going to watch Primer tonight, but otherwise haven’t seen a good new science-based science fiction movie come out in close to ten years. Does anyone know any?
Every top ten list is biased, and so is this one. My particular biases are that the movies have to strive for, and achieve most of the time, scientific accuracy. At least nothing too grossly wrong, and some instances of, “yeah, that’s not intuitive but that’s how it would work!” I’ll limit my list to the physical sciences and space-oriented movies. There are many fine movies that won’t make the list simply because they skimp on the science in one way or another, or I’ve never seen them. Apollo 13 was very scientifically accurate, but that’s a historical movie, not science fiction.
Here’s the list in chronological order, with a few words of explanation.
Destination Moon (1950). This movie was made with the involvement of the space community of the day and Robert Heinlein who wrote the story it was based on. Special effort was made for scientific accuracy and they got a lot of things right. Probably the biggest mistake was proposing that only private industry, not the government, would make it to the moon.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A classic, and probably the film closest to error free in terms of the science. There wasn’t any sound in space, and gravity was supplied by rotation in a realistic fashion. Lots of good details that were right. Credit Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrik for listening and caring.
Alien (1979). Let’s give this one credit for also knowing that “In space no one can hear you scream.” This film isn’t heavy on the science, but we have slower than light vehicles that take many years to travel between the stars requiring humans to use hibernation. A planet with an unbreathable atmosphere requires air masks, as used, and not full space suits.
2010 (1984). Not as visually stunning or powerful (or slow) as 2001, but good science throughout, particularly with respect to working in freefall and vacuum environments.
Aliens (1986). This movie gets a lot of the same things right that the original did, along with having a smart plot and appropriate use of technology. One of my favorite films to boot.
Predator (1987). There were two great things in this movie. No, not future governors! Two nice science things. The first is the idea of an alien that sees in a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and having that actually play a role in the plot. The second was the camo suit, which is a technology we’re likely to develop this century at close to that level of effectiveness.
The Abyss (1989). This fine movie takes place underwater rather than in outer space, but it’s an alien contact story. A lot of the details of this exotic environment are treated correctly and play roles in the plot. I first watched this in Greg Bear’s basement at a party and it was fascinating to hear him give his commentary on some scenes. Another great Cameron film (but be sure to see the director’s cut).
Contact (1997). Probably the second-best movie on the list in terms of scientific accuracy. There are a few minor errors in it, but it gets so many things right including some concepts tough to convey to an audience. Credit Carl Sagan for helping here.
Deep Impact (1998). OK, this movie I didn’t love. I mean, we’re supposed to find sympathetic an annoying reporter vying for the first question at a presidential press conference? Some minor scientific errors here, but they tried and succeeded in getting a lot of things right, too.
Red Planet (2000). I was kind of surprised to see this movie on my list. While this isn’t a bad movie, it just goes to show how few movies out there are really based in science and make it part of the story. In any event, they did a good job with gravity on the space craft, fire in freefall, Martian gravity, and more. Taking along a robot with a “military mode” is just kind of dumb, but not bad science.
The much longer list of science fiction movies with bad science includes almost every space-based movie I haven’t mentioned, and most others. Armageddon currently holds a special place in my heart for its mind-numbing scientific ignorance and I use it for instruction in my Launch Pad Workshop. I’d like to recommend Phil Plait’s great website Bad Astronomy for reviews of science in some of these movies and many others.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.†— Albert Einstein
This is going to be a call for reason to the smart people out there who do stupid things too often, too consistently, or too loudly. All smart people do stupid things. I’m a really smart guy, and I’ve been aghast at how stupid I’ve been from time to time (and can barely stand the notion that I’m likely to do even more stupid things in the future). The difference from me and what I call “stupid smart people” is that they’re blind to their stupidity, don’t care about it, or don’t try to learn from it.
I recall reading something somewhere about the difference between intelligence and wisdom (it might have been in an article about dungeons and dragons even), where they illustrated a couple of people with one but not the other. Richard Nixon had intelligence but no wisdom. Edith Bunker (addle-minded but moral wife of bigot Archie Bunker on All in the Family) was all wisdom and no intelligence. Nixon is the quintessential stupid smart person.
I’m equating wisdom here with a type of intelligence, one that “smart” people should have or be capable of achieving. When smart people do/say/believe stupid things, it’s akin to them lacking wisdom, and the stupid things could be avoided if only they applied some of their smarts in a different or more global way. It’s often a failure to see the forest for the trees. Sometimes it’s forgetting that forests are made of trees.
One example I see in astronomy all the time has to do with uncertainties. It’s pounded into our heads as graduate students that a data point doesn’t mean much if you don’t know its error bars, and we often spend more time generating the uncertainties than we do determining the data values. That’s fine as far as it goes. But here’s where the stupid comes in sometimes. There are two kinds of uncertainties: formal and systematic. It’s often possible to calculate and show formal uncertainties, which are usually based on well-understood statistics of shot noise or error propagation. A lot of the time these are worthless, because they’re much smaller than the systematic uncertainties, which depend on the validity of the technique. A simple example of the difference is calibrating how bright a star is in absolute terms. We do this regularly by comparison of photons received in a time period compared to some standard reference stars, and use statistics of photons and detector noise to determine formal uncertainties. The systematic error comes up in the choice of reference stars (or the change in seeing without changing extraction apertures, etc.) — if the standard star turns out to be a variable for some reason, then the formal uncertainty means nothing.
In astronomy, adding those formal error bars to a plot, even when the systematic uncertainties are known to be much larger and more important, will make many an audience member smile happily even when they don’t mean anything. That’s being a stupid smart person.
Another example from my personal experience. Back when I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, computer security gave us placards to put on top of our computer to indicate whether we were working on classified or unclassified projects. The idea was to make it easy for our colleagues to know when they shouldn’t be looking at our monitors because we were doing classified work. Do I have to explain why this is the dumbest thing ever, and it’s okay that our national laboratories have had to step up security efforts?
Lest I remain too abstract, let me compile a list of a few stupid smart people and explain my reasoning. (Nixon should go without saying.) Here they are: Mike Huckabee, Michael Crichton, John Stossel, Bjorn Lomborg, Bill Clinton, Ralph Nader, the RIAA, and Harlan Ellison.
Huckabee thinks it’s not important for a president to understand science at an eighth-grade level and argues in one breathe in favor of science and technology in America and then denounces evolution on the other. They’re the same thing, and if he’s not smart enough to see it, he’s not smart enough to be president.
Michael Crichton did his own investigations into global warming and decided it was all BS, not only publishing his novel State of Fear but going on to lecture about his conclusions. Huh? He has ancient credentials as a medical doctor, but scientist he isn’t and understanding he lacks. I’ve been irritated with Crichton long before his attention-grabbing anti-global warming lectures because the theme of so many of his novels is that of Frankenstein: scientists playing god shouldn’t.
John Stossel, supposedly unbiased reporter, then did a piece critical of global warming, using Crichton as essentially his only source. This is even worse than the more typical case of stupid smart reporter, who mindlessly adopts the bias of balance, telling both sides of a story as equal even when one side is only represented by a few cranks.
Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical enquirer,” is a smart guy who seems to lack a lot of wisdom. He seems motivated to be iconoclastic and contrary, and perhaps to sell a pile of books, but keeps pointing at individual trees that are fine and healthy in a burning forest. He agrees that global warming is happening, but wants to point out things like the cold produces more deaths than the heat, as if these small individual facts and other silver linings he finds are the equivalent of the problems humankind faces.
Bill Clinton nearly lost his entire presidency because he couldn’t keep it in his pants, and we as a people apparently don’t let our leaders get away with that any more. (There really should be a cabinet level position of Head of State that Presidents can avail themselves of without repercussion.)
Ralph Nader today still insists that there was no difference between Gore and Bush in the 2000 election and his candidacy had no role in making Bush President.
The RIAA claims, in courts in a very serious manner on a regular basis, that every music download is a lost sale, going to exquisite detail calculating their lost revenue. I suppose every advertising dollar is also 100% lost revenue, which is why no companies advertise. The industry needs to find a different business model, and making fallacious arguments with a straight face for so long and so strenuously is just dumb.
Harlan Ellison, who is a wonderful writer, spends too much of his limited time on Earth tilting at people downloading his stories. He’s being stupid with his time and probably hasn’t lost a dime that he’ll ever notice.
There are some well-known pro-science writers and personalities out there who have consistently failed to impress me with their smarts, making errors in both big and small picture thinking. I don’t know that I’d call them smart stupid people — it’s probably more of a case of them writing lots of stuff and some of it just not being very well thought out. I almost didn’t mention them, but we should all welcome criticism, shouldn’t we? These include Stephen J. Gould, Natalie Angier, Susan McCarthy, and Michael Shermer.
My own failure tends to be wasting my own time on internet forums arguing with the stupid stupid people or trolls. I have a few hot button issues having to do with attacks on science that keep me from seeing the forest sometimes. Like Harlan, my time on Earth would be better spent writing a new book rather than warring with the annoying.
I was in the habit back in the 1990s of collecting quotes. I came across the file earlier today and thought I’d share. Quotes range from Einstein to Hemingway to the Tick and even Mariah Carey. I used some in my first novel. Enjoy!
Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account? -Jean Paul Richter, German Writer (1763-1825)
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody. -Buckminster Fuller
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. -Henry David Thoreau
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller, German Writer (1759-1805)
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward. -Arthur Koestler
It is only the wisest and the stupidest that cannot change. -Confucius Analects
Life is life–whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man’s own advantage. -Sri Aurobindo
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. -Heraclitus, Greek philosopher (500 B.C.)
When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. -Joseph Campbell
The meek may inherit the earth, but they won’t get the ball from me. — Charles Barkley —
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy. -F. Scott Fitzgerald, [The Crackup]
Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. -Albert Einstein
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. -Linus Pauling
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
Be humble, for the worst thing in the world is of the same stuff as you; be confident, for the stars are of the same stuff as you. -Nicholai Velimirovic
An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit. -Gaius Plinius (c. 61-112 A.D.)
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? -Albert Einstein
“Never risk anything unless you’re prepared to lose it completely — remember that.” — Ernest Hemingway
When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts….A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child. -Sophia Loren
You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down. -Mary Pickford
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men. -Alice Walker
We cannot glimpse the essential life of a caged animal, only the shadow of [her] former beauty. -Julia Allen Field [Reflections on the Death of an Elephant]
Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth. -Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. -John Kenneth Galbraith
Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up. -Robert Frost
It is man’s sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.
-Albert Schweitzer
The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.
-Emile Zola
“As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full, and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.”
– Rabbi Nachmann of Bratzlav
To gain that worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
-Bernadette Devlin
He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determines the end. -Harry Emerson Fosdick
The only journey is the one within. -Rainer Maria Rilke
The secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for. -Dostoyevsky
One who walks in another’s tracks leaves no footprints. -Proverb
May you live in interesting times. -Ancient Chinese Curse
Not all those who know their minds know their hearts as well. -La Rochefoucauld
The only time you don’t fail is the last time you try anything–and it works. -William Strong
Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind. -Seneca
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place. -Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -Carl Sagan
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. -Henry David Thoreau
The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it. -Arnold H. Glasow
By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.
-Rabindranath Tagore
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. -Martin H. Fischer
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. -Helen Keller
Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life. -Sandra Carey
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. -H.Berlioz
If you consult enough experts, you can confirm any opinion.
Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. -Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -Bertrand Russell
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. –Carl Sagan
He who has a why can endure any how. -Friedrich Nietzsche
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. -Bertrand Russell
If you judge, investigate. -Seneca
If you want your eggs hatched, sit on them yourself. -Haitian proverb
“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.” – Helen Keller
After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box. -Italian Proverb
“Every morning I get out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me.” — Ray Bradbury
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, “Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days.” Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that … The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed … [However] Revelations 21:8 says “But the fearful, and unbelieving … shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.” A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C. — From “Applied Optics” vol. 11, A14, 1972
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
-Ursula LeGuin
A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it. -Alistair Cooke
The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven. -John Milton
Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff. — Mariah Carey
As Isaac Asimov said about evolution in a 1980 address to NCAC “(creationists) make it sound as though a ‘theory’
is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.”
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. -General George S. Patton, Jr.
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be. — Abraham Maslow
Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.
— Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest:
Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but can’t remember what they are.
–Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today show, August 22
I haven’t committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.
— David Dinkins, New York City Mayor, answering accusations that he failed to pay his taxes.
Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.
— Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, D.C.
“Well, once again my friend, we find that science is a two-headed beast. One head is nice, it gives us aspirin and other modern conveniences…but the other head of science is bad! Oh beware the other head of science, Arthur, it bites!”
–The Tick
“Clown makeup, so central to adults, is not a mask, shielding inner evil, but a mirror, taking what’s deep inside the viewer and projecting it back. The evil, in other words, is in the eye of the beholder.”
— Bruce Feller, author of “Under the Big Top: A Season With the Circus”
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. -George Bernard Shaw
Grad school is the snooze button on the clock-radio of life. -Comedian John Rogers (who holds a graduate degree in physics)
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. -Thomas Jefferson
“Virtually all scientists have the bad habit of displaying feats of virtuosity in problems in which they can make some progress and leave until the end the really difficult central problems.”
— Malcolm Longair
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
— John Muir, 1869
I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. — George Bernard Shaw
“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”
– A. Einstein
Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated.
— M. C. Reed.
A plan so cunning, you could stick a tail on it and call it a “Weasel”
– Blackadder III
“The great questions of the day are settled not by speeches and the decisions of majorities, but by blood and iron.”
— Otto von Bismarck
The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn’t have the craft. -Jean Erdman
The value of the average conversation could be enormously improved by the constant use of four simple words: “I do not know.” -Andre Maurois
Ten years of rejection slips is nature’s way of telling you to stop writing. — R. Geis
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
— Pablo Picasso
Go often to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path. –
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. -Abraham Lincoln
[Nuclear war] … may not be desirable.
— Edwin Meese III
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
— Albert Einstein
“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.” -H.G. Wells
“Go out every day and create at the top of your lungs”
– Ray Bradbury
“The difference between the amateur and the professional writer is that the professional did not quit.” – Richard Bach
Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life. – Germaine Greer
“If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.” – Andre Gide
“Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don’t need you.”
– James Michener
“To live is to war with trolls.”
-Henrik Ibsen
“Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”
–Mark Twain
“You can’t say ‘I won’t write today,’ because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.”
–Dorothy C. Fontana
“Whatcha doin’?” “Looking for frogs.” “How come?”
“I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.”
“Ah, but of course.”
“My mandate also includes weird bugs.”
-Calvin and Hobbes
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
— Dorothy Parker
Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else — unless it is an enemy.
— A. Einstein
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together
— Herbert Prochnow
Yield to Temptation … it may not pass your way again.
— Lazarus Long, “Time Enough for Love”
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
— Groucho Marx
Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.
— Wernher von Braun
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
— Oscar Wilde
We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time. — T.S. Eliot
“There were endless winters and the dreams would freeze…” — Jim Steinman, lyrics to ‘Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer than They Are’
I went on to test the program in every way I could devise. I strained it to expose its weaknesses. I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold. I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be absent — not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case. Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar’s temperature to be less than absolute zero. I had found an error. I chased down the error and fixed it. Now I had improved the program to the point where it would not run at all.
— George Greenstein, “Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black Holes and the Fate of Stars”
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
— Abraham Lincoln
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
— Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …”
— Isaac Asimov
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
— Lazarus Long, “Time Enough for Love”
The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to the consumer in this day when individualism is an increasingly important thing to people.
— Donald N. Smith, president of Burger King
A Severe Strain on the Credulity
As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth’s atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard’s rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt … for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his “chair” in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to
re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react … Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
— New York Times Editorial, 1920
After his Ignoble Disgrace, Satan was being expelled from Heaven. As he passed through the Gates, he paused a moment in thought, and turned to God and said, “A new creature called Man, I hear, is soon to be created.”
“This is true,” He replied.
“He will need laws,” said the Demon slyly.
“What! You, his appointed Enemy for all Time! You ask for the right to make his laws?”
“Oh, no!” Satan replied, “I ask only that he be allowed to make his own.”
It was so granted.
— Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary”
The following is from the business section of The Kansas City Star, Jan
17, 1995:
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
– Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
– Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”
– The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
“But what … is it good for?”
– Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
– Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
