Way-Out Science

Here are two excellent books of popularized science by Englishmen, books which twenty-five years ago would have been viewed with sour skepticism by most scientists and incredulous bewilderment by most general readers.

Arthur C. Clarke scans the speculations of science-fiction writers for the past fifty years, sieves them through the critical apparatus of the professional scientist, and presents them as “An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible.” In 1938 this would have seemed like polling madmen for their theories of psychosis, though even then anyone who took the trouble could have discovered that at the heart of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity there stands a science-fiction parable or trick story: that a man in a windowless rocket accelerating at one gravity per second would be unable to tell whether his rocket were so accelerating, or standing still on Earth’s surface in our planet’s gravity field. Also in 1938 Professor Goddard was successfully building liquid-fuel rockets in America and on his own initiative refusing, with a stubborness for which his countrymen must be thankful, to share the results of his research with inquisitive German scientists.

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Fritz Leiber

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Here are two excellent books of popularized science by Englishmen, books which twenty-five years ago would have been viewed with sour skepticism by most scientists and incredulous bewilderment by most general readers.

Arthur C. Clarke scans the speculations of science-fiction writers for the past fifty years, sieves them through the critical apparatus of the professional scientist, and presents them as “An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible.” In 1938 this would have seemed like polling madmen for their theories of psychosis, though even then anyone who took the trouble could have discovered that at the heart of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity there stands a science-fiction parable or trick story: that a man in a windowless rocket accelerating at one gravity per second would be unable to tell whether his rocket were so accelerating, or standing still on Earth’s surface in our planet’s gravity field. Also in 1938 Professor Goddard was successfully building liquid-fuel rockets in America and on his own initiative refusing, with a stubborness for which his countrymen must be thankful, to share the results of his research with inquisitive German scientists.