Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Fiction struggles to keep ahead of science

Faster than the speed of light?
New planets found orbiting a pair to twin stars?
Fish that live in dark caves have readjusted their internal clocks to a 47-hour period?
Stellar jays that can tell a good cat from a bad cat?
I subscribe to the magazine "Science News." It is a great little magazine that wraps up significant science advances or discoveries into very readable short takes. It also has one or two feature-length stories each issue. This last issue had a story on the new atomic clocks. They predict that some of the new clocks, if they had been set at the time of the big bang, would only be off by about 1 second after 8 billion years!
The magazine also covers advances in medical and biological science. Did you know they are working on a pace maker for the human heart that works on light beams? Or that stem cells from your bone marrow can rebuild heart muscle.
For those of us who try to write science fictions, the biggest challenge these days is keeping our imaginations working faster that true science. It seems that every time I think I've come up with some original idea, some scientist somewhere has already proven that idea either totally false or confirmed the basic theory and has laid out a plan to prove that theory.
Take time travel, for instance. Ever since there have been sci-fi writers, time travel has been a big issue because nothing, they said, could travel faster than time.
Guess what, a group of scientists have just reveal they have clocked a neutrino breaking the speed limit! There are still a lot of skeptics, but I don't doubt they will prove their observations. That would shatter the basis of Einstein's theories of space and time and perhaps open the door to real time travel, or the ability to travel to distant stars in less than the light years in less time than we now believe is necessary.
Wow! How cool would that be! That would simplify a lot of sci-fi plots. It's just what sci-fi writers need to craft a whole new realm of far-out stories. Writers, let your imaginations run wild.
Thanks to the all scientists that are willing to break the mold and look for the impossible.
You are making the jobs of writers much more fun.

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