The golden rules of science fiction and my own work

Isaac Asimov

These are, according to Isaac Asimov, the two golden rules of good science fiction:

1.      Any scientific claim (even a prediction) must always be compatible with current science. It would not, therefore, be good science fiction a novel where the squaring of the circle with a ruler and compass was achieved, because it has been shown mathematically that this is impossible. Or traveling through space at a speed greater than that of light, without using some scientific trick that makes it possible to achieve it, such as going through the world of tachyons.

2.      Predicting social consequences is better than predicting technical advances. Thus, in a hypothetical novel written in the nineteenth century, predicting the parking problem would be much better than just predicting the car. An example of this kind of good science fiction, mentioned by Asimov in this regard, is Robert Heinlein's short story Solution Unsatisfactory, written in 1941, which not only predicted the atomic bomb as a means of ending World War II (in which the United States were not yet taking part), but also predicted the subsequent equilibrium between the great powers and the permanent threat of a war of extermination.

To be exact, these two laws are my elaborations of what Asimov wrote in two popular articles published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction: Future? Tense! (1965) and O Keen Eyed Peerer into the Future (1974). To be even more exact, Asimov's laws were three and, similarly to his three laws of Robotics, he called them the three laws of Futurics.

Science and Science Fiction: mutual influences in the 20th century

H.G. Wells

NOTICE for those of you who have subscribed to the posts of this blog by email: Google has announced the end of "feedburner", its notification service, which was being used by this blog. From now on, another service will be used: "follow.it". You may initially receive two notices, one from each service.

Halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, the British H.G. Wells also practiced the literature of scientific prediction, although his predictions are usually longer-term than Verne's, more remote from the technique of his time, so very few have come to be carried out. We still don't have The Time Machine and can't see it anywhere near. We cannot make artificial men by vivisecting animals (The Island of Doctor Moreau). Nor can we make ourselves invisible (The invisible man). And fortunately the Martians have not invaded us (The War of the Worlds). In 1938, a radio dramatization of this novel by Orson Welles caused a mass panic in the United States. Despite the boom in science fiction at the time, the public was still as credulous as when it had been fooled a century earlier by the articles in the Sun.

Wells also wrote (of course) about a trip to the moon and populated our satellite with intelligent giant ants, although the procedure to make the trip is more imaginative than, and as impractical as Verne's. But his great scientific foresight success is the novel The World set free (1913), which not only anticipated the atomic bomb, but also influenced its practical realization, stimulating Leo Szilard's research on the neutron chain reaction. Although Wells also made a tremendous mistake in this novel, by predicting in 1913 that the First World War would start in 1956. But as he said a few years later: [I have] always been... a rather slow prophet. You can also see my review of this book in Goodreads.

Science and Science Fiction: mutual influences until the 19th century

Illustration of the Sun article

In the early years of the 20th century there was a flood of titles that led to the recognition of a literary genre called science fiction.

In fact, science fiction novels, understood as works using science (especially future advances) as an essential element of the plot of a novel, are very old. Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian satirist from the 2nd century, is usually considered the creator of the genre. One of his works (Vera Historia) tells of a journey from Earth to the moon in a ship that, lifted by a waterspout, is launched into space. The moon is inhabited by an advanced civilization, which has crossed space and is at war with the inhabitants of the sun over a conflict of interest regarding the colonization of planet Venus. As he didn't know about the existence of interplanetary vacuum, Lucian never thinks of explaining how his characters could breathe during their trip.

Artificial neural networks

Perceptron

One of the oldest applications of artificial intelligence is based on the simulation of animal nerve cells (neurons). Neural networks are made up of many interconnected components, and they are capable of some computational activity, although the neurons that make up these networks are usually quite simplified, compared to those that are part of the nervous system of human beings and other animals.

This type of application has been the subject of multiple exaggerations and unusual predictions. These networks have been said to be capable of solving the most difficult problems, NP-complete problems, like the traveling salesman problem, and similar ones. A normal program can solve these problems, but the time needed grows exponentially as a function of the size of the problem, while a neural network can solve them in a short time. To some extent this is true, provided that we bear in mind that the solution obtained is not necessarily the best, but only an approximation, which is often sufficient for our needs.

More scientific misrepresentations from the media

On my first day every year, lecturing in the degree on Telecommunications Engineering, I used to say this to my students:

Don't believe any scientific news published in the press or in generalist media. Most of them are false or have been misunderstood.

In previous posts I have mentioned several cases of scientific misrepresentation by the media, although sometimes the fault lies not with the journalist, but with the scientist, who tries to sneak in philosophical ideas based on reductionist materialism as if they were science. In this post I'm going to comment on three relatively recent news stories, published in the Spanish press, and try to explain what is really behind them.

Did Dante anticipate Einstein?

A recent article has stated that Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy offers a cosmology that closely resembles what Einstein expressed in his general theory of Relativity. Is there any truth in this?

In another post in this blog I summarized the history of cosmology, from the geocentric Greek version formalized by Ptolemy, to the modern version by Copernicus, Kepler and Newton. It is evident that Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy at the beginning of the fourteenth century, could not know about modern cosmology, but he did know the Ptolemaic system, which he adopted in its entirety, with an important addition.

The relationship between the systems of Dante and Einstein was pointed out in an article published in Scientific American in August 1976, written by J.J. Callahan and entitled The curvature of space in a finite universe. This article compares Newton's universe (finite, non-homogeneous, Euclidean and with one center), Leibnitz's (infinite, homogeneous, Euclidean and without a center) and Einstein's (finite, homogeneous, non-Euclidean and without a center). By adapting to Euclid's plane geometry, the first two can be represented by graphic models as those in the attached figure.

Chronologies and Julian days

Joseph Justus Scaliger

One of the fundamental concerns of civilized man is the study of the past, natural or human. For this, it is necessary to be able to fix the date on which each event took place. This is the goal of a science called chronology.

If the exact date of an event is known, we can define it by giving the day, month and year in which it took place. For example, we can say that the Second World War began on September 1, 1939. We have no problem with the day and the month, but how are the years numbered? Obviously we must take an origin or starting point that everybody will agree to use.

This dating system causes a curious effect: the numbers assigned to the years after the origin grow towards the future, while the previous years grow towards the past. Thus, the year 2000 of our era came after the year 1000, but the year 2000 B.C.E. came before 1000 B.C.E. (see below the meaning of these acronyms). The years prior to the origin work as negative numbers.