EAN: 9783319517582

SCIENCE AND FICTION ALL THE WONDER THAT WOULD...

It has been argued that science fiction (SF) gives a kind of weather forecast - not the telling
of a fortune but rather the rough feeling of what the future might be like. The intention in
this book is to consider some of these bygone forecasts made by SF and to use this as a prism
through which to view current developments in science and technology. In each of the ten main
chapters - dealing in turn with antigravity  space travel  aliens  time travel  the nature of
reality  invisibility  robots  means of transportation  augmentation of the human body  and 
last but not least  mad scientists - common assumptions once made by the SF community about how
the future would turn out are compared with our modern understanding of various scientific
phenomena and  in some cases  with the industrial scaling of computational and technological
breakthroughs. A further intention is to explain how the predictions and expectations of SF
were rooted in the scientific orthodoxy of their day  and use this to explore how our
scientific understanding of various topics has developed over time  as well as to demonstrate
how the ideas popularized in SF subsequently influenced working scientists. Since gaining a BSc
in physics from the University of Bristol and a PhD in theoretical physics from the University
of Manchester  Stephen Webb has worked in a variety of universities in the UK. He is a regular
contributor to the Yearbook of Astronomy series and has published an undergraduate textbook on
distance determination in astronomy and cosmology as well as several popular science books.

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