Science Fiction
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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
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Cities in Flight is a classic set of novels, collected into one book. In the first and second novel, two key technologies are developed - drug therapies that bestowed long life and the spindizzy, which would shield an indeterminately large mass against gravity. The spindizzy was described as the result of the "Blackett-Dirac" equations.
New York, NY and Scranton, PA - see them while you still can. Note: the spindizzy is also known as the "Dillon-Wagoner gravitron polarity generator."
(From Bindlestiff cover of Analog, Dec. 1950) Paul Dirac was, of course, a real person; he made many contributions to the theory of quantum mechanics, and won the Nobel prize for physics in 1933. Blackett was a real person, a British astronomer who noticed a correlation between the following parameters of astronomical objects: the rotation rates, the gravitational fields, and the magnetic fields. He went on to describe this relationship in papers published in scientific journals like Nature. However, improved measurements of the magnetic fields of the planets in the solar system did not fit the equation. The equation also does not demonstrate how the magnetic field of the Earth undergoes periodic reversals. At present, the magnetic field of the Earth is attributed to the movement of the Earth's core. Blish did not originate the term "spindizzy", but cleverly appropriated it. In the 1930s, it was the slang term for the model racing cars tethered to a pole. See also the story Cities in the Air (1929) by Edmond Hamilton (Part two). The same issue has a picture on page 404 that was reprinted from a Hugo Gernsback magazine of 1922 showing cities held up by electromagnetic force to the cleaner, purer air high above the earth. Compare to this from And Then The Town Took Off by Richard Wilson. Comment/Join this discussion ( 3 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
Brin's 1990 Novel Earth Still Full Of Predictions
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
Gaia - Why Stop With Just The Earth?
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
Microsoft VASA-1 Creates Personal Video From A Photo
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
Splendid View Of Eclipse From Orbit Visualized And Repurposed By Arthur C. Clarke
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
SpaceX Wants A Moonbase Alpha
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
NASA Wants Self-Driving Or Remote-Controlled Vehicles For Lunar Astronauts
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
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