Einstein and Asimov

Don't you love the supreme confidence of the man?

Einstein's theory was first—and dramatically—confirmed during a solar eclipse within four years of its publication, making him an instant celebrity. When asked how he would have felt if he had been proven wrong, Einstein replied: "I would have felt sorry for the Lord. The theory is correct."

The World lost a great mind when he died, one wonders what could have been achieved, scientifically, had he lived on.

Not possible, of course. Yet in some ways he does live on. There are other great minds that have taken up the reins of his thinking.

People like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson and not to forget Stephen Hawkinge, of course.

There are hundreds of people out there working on scientific ideas and principles who are, like Einstein, not hidebound by tradition or bogged down in the quagmire of ‘accepted wisdom’.

It is such people as these that we look up to in order to transform our humdrum lives into a hotbed of excitement such as we can only currently imagine. Perhaps we cannot imagine but there are equally great minds out there who can imagine for us.

I am thinking of the late Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke being just two examples of those people who see things in our future that pass other people by.

Asimov imagined worlds where a man called Hari Sheldon would be able to predict the future by using social mathematics; he modelled human behaviour into a predictable, mathematical sequence of circumstances.

Imagining such a thing is only a step away from doing it. Nothing starts without an idea, an initial premise.

Clarke had a computer called HAL. It defied a human, “I’m sorry, David. I cannot do that,” it told the spaceman.

We already ‘talk’ to computers and we even have speech recognition on telephones. How long will it be before our telephone says, “I’m sorry, I cannot do that,” to us?

When Asimov and Clarke wrote these stories there was little in the way of computing as we know it. Their minds and Robert A Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Sagan, et al, were projected into what they imagined our future to be.

We can visit that future—their future, by reading their books. We can brighten our lives by soaking up their words and turning that text into vivid images in our heads.

Newer generations of authors have more to ‘feed’ on. They are more accustomed to new ideas, new technologies, than us older writers so that they can develop more intense ideas of what might be based on those technologies.

Not only what we might refer to as ‘Standard Sci-Fi’ but also works in the genre of ‘steam punk’ might also grasp the modern technology nettle in their modelling of the future in the way that Rudyard Kipling did in his ‘steam punk’ story about airships (‘With the Night Mail’ in 1905 and ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’ in 1912). Kipling had less to go on in terms of flight than we did but still made an excellent fist of those stories.

[Sci-Fi is far from new!]

Einstein was brilliant. There is no doubt of that. He is the man who wrote down the future as a fact.

Equally brilliant, to me, are those who write down the future as possibilities.