The cosmic dancers : exploring the physics of science fiction /
You may not qualify as a scientist, but you love reading science fiction and are intrigued by problems of time, space, mind, and reality. You'd like nothing better than to explore the solar system, travel to the stars, and really penetrate the mysteries of hyperspace, curved space, black holes,...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Harper & Row,
c1983.
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| Edition: | 1st ed. |
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Table of Contents:
- What the dance is: Scenario stories; Futurology; In search of change; How to read this book.
- Newton's Principia, some science fiction writers don't like it!: The travel plan of Cyrano de Bergerac and Newton's First Law of Motion; Which way cometh the black cloud? Is reality deterministic and causal? Action and reaction, the Third Law; Reactionless drive, or the Dean Drive; The conservative reality.
- Gravity scenarios: A tunnel through the earth; A voyage near a neutron star; What causes tides? Gravity and antigravity;
- How large is our spaceship?: Exploring the solar system; Stage I, artificial satellites; More Stage I, escaping the earth; Stage II, where to put up a space colony? More Stage II, solar sails; The Dyson Sphere, an astounding Stage III idea; Time is on our side.
- Simulation of gravity: The planet of Mission of Gravity; Elevators to the sky; Coriolis force; Mass, weight, and weightlessness; Is gravity a pseudoforce.
- Wave fantasies: 'Silence, please'; Stations of the (electromagnetic) spectrum; Light fantasies.
- Time for the stars: Did Einstein like science fiction? The slowing down of shiptime; Time dilation and relativity of reference frames; Contraction of distances or Lorentz contraction; Which twin is older? Moving at the speed of light; Can we build a time machine? Tachyons.
- Energize! Energize!: The science fiction story of nuclear energy; The final solution to the nuclear controversy (in the form of a satirical zigzag through thorny issues); Holocaust visions.
- Star dance: Moon stories; The Stars, My Destination; Some scenarios from The Avatar; A guide to building your fantasy planet.
- Entropy and life in the universe: Negentropy; Entropy and life; Extraterrestrial life and communication; Extraterrestrial life in science fiction.
- Interstellar travel: Interstellar navigation; Prelude to hyperspace.
- Curvaceous space-time: When light rays take on a curve; The curvature of time; Gravity and clocks.
- Black hole, the infinity box: How to visit and escape a black hole; Mini-black holes; the possibility of space and time travel through the black hole; Where are they? A hole-y dream.
- Where are the universemakers?: The expanding universe; The curvature and future of the universe; The cyclical universe.
- Taking the quantum jump: What's inside the atom? Atoms, light, and the quantum jump; Light quanta and matter waves; Probability and uncertainty; Atoms and uncertainy; Accepting quantum duality.
- How to bell Schrödinger's cat: Schrödinger's cat; The conventionalist's cant versus hidden variables; The cat in many worlds; Collapse and consciousness; Bell's Theorem and the ansible; The Dancing Wu Li Masters.
- The mind and the quantum: Psychology and science fiction; The schism and the new physics; The mind and the quantum.
- The paranormal and time travel stories: Telepathy; Complementarity, mind and time, the conceptual basis of time travel stories.
- Mysticism in science fiction and the new physics: The joy of all things; The holographic model of rality; Beyond the stargate; Transcendence in science fiction.