What Helps Scientific Thought Grow and Change?

Science is marvelously adaptable. To quote Isaac Asimov, "that is really the glory of science—that science is tentative, that it is not certain, that it is subject to change" (Freedman 131). But what causes scientific evolution? What are the catalysts that make it happen? There's no lack of variables in the equation—politics, social mores, technology, necessity—but for this essay I'd like to focus on one special thing that's spurred a lot of innovation: science fiction writing.

"Making predictions is tricky, especially about the future," physicist Niels Bohr once quipped (Ellis 431). Notwithstanding, science fiction writers from Mary Shelley to H.G. Wells to Asimov have taken on the challenge, letting their imaginations soar. Fact followed fiction in many cases. Okay, we still don't have jet packs or flying cars—but let's look at what we do have.

In his futuristic The Sleeper Awakes, published in 1899, H.G. Wells wrote about a wondrous door that opened and closed seemingly by itself: two men "walked straight to the dead wall of the apartment opposite the archway. And then came a strange thing; a long strip of this apparently solid wall rolled up with a snap, hung over the two retreating men and fell again" (Wells 35). Automatic doors weren't invented for another 55 years, and they weren't even installed until 1960; now they routinely usher us in and out of grocery stores, airports, and our home garages.

 Author H.S. Keller introduced us to both videophones and the concept of webinars in his 1915 story John Jones's Dollar Black Cat: "The professor of history," he wrote, “ .. seated himself in front of the Visaphone and prepared to deliver the daily lecture to his class, the members of which resided in different portions of the earth" (Prucher 264). Sounds pretty plausible nowadays, doesn't it?

Video communication was simply ubiquitous in Star Trek, that fount of inventive ideas. Stephen Hawking says, in his foreword to The Physics of Star Trek that "science fiction .. is not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination (Krauss xii), and "today's science fiction is often tomorrow's science fact" (Krauss xiii).

Star Trek writers (and noteworthy science fiction authors in their own right) such as Harlan Ellison and D.C. Fontana came up with the flip-top communicator, which Motorola's Martin Cooper used as a model when he designed the first cell phone in the 1970s (Nierman 25). The writers also introduced an appliance called a replicator, which could produce a complete object out of thin air—much like the 3D printers we use for prototypes today. Star Trek is also credited with inspiring technologies as diverse as the QuickTime media player and ion propulsion in space (Nierman 26). In fact, science fiction writing gave NASA so many ideas that they named their first orbiting vehicle the Space Shuttle Enterprise, after Star Trek's futuristic spaceship.

Remember Einstein’s quote about imagination being more important than knowledge? George Smith, in "Revisiting Accepted Science," tells us "a great many fundamental claims of science first became accepted on the basis of remarkably little evidence" (548). Indeed, a great deal of the scientific growth and evolution in the past hundred years or so has been brought into being through very little evidence at all—simply a fiction writer’s optimistic vision of the future.

It's not all flying automobiles and jetpacks; still, it has a way of spurring scientific growth and change. There's no better way to conclude this entry than by citing our own Freeman Dyson: "Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams" (9).

Works Cited

Ellis, Arthur K. Teaching and Learning Elementary Social Studies. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1970. Print.

Dyson, Freeman. Imagined Worlds. Hyderguda: Harvard Universities Press (India) Limited, 1999.Print.

Freedman, Carl Howard, ed. Conversations with Isaac Asimov. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Print.

Krauss, Lawrence. The Physics of Star Trek. Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2007. Print. 

Nierman, Dave. Facebook Rules! Why You Friend Certain People, Block Others, and How to Decide Who You Should Be Friends With. Minneapolis: Two Harbors Press, 2010. Print.

Prucher, Jeff. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.

Smith G. Revisiting Accepted Science: The Indispensability of the History of Science. Monist 93.4 (2010): 545-579. Web. Accessed via Academic Search Complete October 18, 2012.

Wells, H. G. The Sleeper Awakes. London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Print.

© Shaii Stone 2012