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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Spindizzy | ||
| A device that made use of a relationship between electron spin, electromagnetism and gravity allowed any object to leave the Earth's surface. |
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.
| There was no longer any reason why a man-carrying vehicle to cross space needed to be small, cramped and penurious of weight. Once antigravity was an engineering reality, if was no longer necessary to design ships specially for space travel, for neither mass nor aerodynamic lines meant anything any more. The most massive and awkward object could be lifted and hurled off the Earth and carried almost any distance. Whole cities, if necessary, could be moved. Many were. |
| Technovelgy from Cities in Flight,
by James Blish. Published by Avon in 1957 Additional resources -
|
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.
(Scranton from 'A Life for the Stars' by James Blish)
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.
For other examples of city-sized force fields, compare to the wall of the air from Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star (1887) by Florence Carpenter Dieudonné, the lanson screen from The Lanson Screen (1936) by Leo Zagat, the langston field from The Mote in God's Eye (1974) by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle) and the bobble from The Peace War (1984) by Vernor Vinge.
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Tech news articles related to Cities in Flight
Tech news articles related to works by James Blish
Spindizzy-related
news articles:
- Artificial Gravity Generator Now Possible?
- Emdrive Electromagnetic Drive For Chinese Space Ships?
- Unwanted Cruise Ships Huddle Together Out At Sea
| Google's Cartographer Backpack For Indoor Mapping |
| Live Luggage Ready To Roll |
| Porter 'Robots' For Baggage, If Not People |
| Tweel - (Almost) A Smart Wheel |
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
