Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
This is definitively the year of bacteria in terms of scientific discovery and ground-breaking experiments. It was only a few months ago that a new strand of DNA was engineered in a lab, creating an organism with semi-synthetic (“alien”) DNA. And it’s…
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This November week brings us an exciting space event to follow, unique in kind. ESA’s spacecraft Rosetta, that has successfully reached Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko last August, will try, for the first time ever, to land its Philae probe on the comet surface….
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The usual update about my latest published articles on other blogs/magazines – these ones on from Serious Wonder. This time I have only included the ones on space and physics, leaving science and SF for another post. WILL WE EVER WALK…
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That SF has anticipated and/or even come out in first instance with some of the most creative ideas now seriously considered for scientific research is nothing new. Just think about the Ringworld concept, or hypersleep (with or without cryogenic components). Or the amazing Dyson sphere, which is one…
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If there is a space object I have always found incredibly beautiful is the star cluster of the Pleiades – alternatively called M45, or “The Seven Sisters”- immediately recognisable for the hot blue, luminous stars immersed in a nebula and visible…
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Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven, is the first of a series of stories – including prequels and sequels – set in a version of the universe called the Known Space. It features as backdrop an artificial structure of 600 million miles in…
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If there is something difficult to realise is how vast space is. No matter how hard we try, as humans we lack mental categories to figure it out. Another difficult thing is obviously to map it – and we do…
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This Sunday Earthians will witness something truly unique, estimated to happen maybe once every million years: a comet the size of a small mountain will fly by Mars, becoming the first comet to have ever come so close to Earth in recorded history….
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Astrophysics has to make sense, especially in a SF book. When designing your fictional worlds you need to make sure things can survive on their own, short of creating an alternate physical universe – and I won’t even start imagining how difficult…
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I have posted a while ago something about the music of space – ie, the eerie sounds celestial bodies make when translated into plasma waves. Today we have a different category of… artists: sub-atomic particles, and the amazing symphonies a…
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