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Feb 9, 2024 · Thorne’s extensive knowledge of the wildest solutions in general relativity, from black holes to gravitational waves, made him exactly the right person to ask. He had been fascinated by astronomy since a young age, while growing up in Logan, Utah.
Nov 14, 2024 · The crafts of Visual & Special Effects have been fundamentally transformed by the science fiction genre. This page aims to introduce people to the artists and work behind the futuristic imagery and extensions of reality, both physical and digital, that make up the their favorite universes.
Dec 19, 2014 · Three astrophysicists separate science fact from science fiction in the blockbuster film 'Interstellar,' revealing a story steeped in real scientific knowledge but not afraid to delve into...
- Kelen Tuttle
- The Taser // Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle
- Helicopters // Jules Verne’s Robur The Conqueror
- The World Wide Web // Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F For Frankenstein”
- Humanoid Robots // Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy
- Liquid-Fueled Rockets // H.G. Wells’s The War of The Worlds
- Transparent Human Cells // H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man
- Invisible Material // Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in The Shell
- The Atomic Bomb // H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free
- Modern Submarines // Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
- Remote Manipulators // Robert Heinlein’s “Waldo”
Written under a pen name and published in 1911 by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (which also published theNancy Drew andHardy Boys novels), Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle sees thetitularcharacter invent a weapon that looks like an ordinary rifle but fires bolts of electricity. The book was a childhood favorite of Jack Cover and partly inspired the cre...
As a young boy, Igor Sikorsky read a Russian translation ofJules Verne’s 1886 book Robur the Conqueror, also known as The Clipper of the Clouds, and it fired his imagination. Sikorsky not only had Verne’s description of the helicopter, the Albatross, to stoke the flames of his passion, he also had illustrations by artist Leon Bennett, who worked fr...
WithoutArthur C. Clarke’s 1960s-era short story “Dial F for Frankenstein,” there might be no World Wide Web as we know it. The sci-fi story is about a global, interconnected telephone network that gains sentience—and it served as one of Tim Berners-Lee’s inspirations when he created the Web while working at CERN in the 1980s. In a 2002 Internet Soc...
Tomotaka Takahashi is one of the leading scientists working on humanoid robots, and for him, it all started with Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. The manga series, which initially ran from 1952 to 1968, follows the adventures of an android—the titular Astro Boy—created by Dr. Umataro Tenma. “When I was 4 or 5 years old, I read a comic book of Astro Boy an...
The father of rocketry, Robert H. Goddard, pinned his initial interest in making space travel a reality on reading 1898’s The War of the Worldswhen he was 16. In 1926, he launched the first liquid-fueled rocket, a momentous event in the history of space flight. Six years later he sent a letter [PDF] to War of the Worlds author H.G. Wells, in which ...
Scientists haven’t figured out how to make humans invisible yet, but it seems as though they are on their way—and that’s partly thanks to Wells’s 1897 novel The Invisible Man,in which a scientist makes himself invisible by creating chemicals that alter his skin’s refractive index to match that of the surrounding environment. Alon Gorodetsky, an ass...
Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell manga series, originally published between 1981 and 1991, features a technology called thermoptic camouflage, which renders its users near-invisible. Masahiko Inami, a professor at the University of Tokyo, read the manga while he was working on his Ph.D. and saidit made him realize that, while “it may not be pos...
In 1914’s The World Set Free,H.G. Wells predicted a city-destroying weapon, which he called anatomic bomb, that was small enough to be deployed from planes and “would continue to explode indefinitely.” His novel not only predicted the atomic bomb, it also inspired physicist Leo Szilard to help create it. Szilard read The World Set Free in 1932 and ...
In 1867, Jules Verne attended the Exposition Universelle and saw a model of the Plongeur, the first submarine to be propelled by mechanical power—via a compressed-air engine—rather than human power. Two years later, the author began publishing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a serial in Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation. The story featu...
Published under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald,Robert Heinlein’s short story “Waldo” is about a scientist named Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones who invents a device to help him manage his degenerative muscle disease. His machine can perfectly mimic his hand movements, but with greater strength and from a distance. This device is essentially a remote manip...
Sep 30, 2024 · This is a selective list of some short stories and novels that use more or less accurate science and can be used for teaching or reinforcing astronomy or physics concepts. I include both traditional "science-fiction" and (occasionally) more serious fiction that derives meaning or plot from astronomy or physics ideas.
Jul 12, 2024 · In ranked order, here are the best science fiction books of all time, featuring 'Dune,' 'Annihilation,' '1984,' 'Three Body Problem,' and more.
Aug 18, 2021 · These past 10 years have brought seismic change to science fiction and fantasy (sometimes literally, in the case of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series), and we wanted to celebrate the...
