From the Knowledge Newsletter

Dear Friends:

This week, a golf-cart-sized robot is set to explore Mars, and the president of the United States is saying that humans should follow. And I used to think radio was a miracle! But if radio is miraculous, then what do you call real-life robots riding interplanetary spacecraft? Magic? Not quite. But it does seem to me that science and fiction are blurring into each other once again.

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Q. Who said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"?

A. That would be science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. It's his "Third Law," formulated in a 1962 book called Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible.

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Q. What are Clarke's First and Second Laws?

A. First: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

And second: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

Clarke has been coming up with even more laws in recent years. For example, his 69th Law states that "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software."

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Q. What's so special about Clarke that he gets to make laws?

A. Well, he's probably one of the most celebrated science-fiction authors of all time. But that's not all. He's also the father of today's satellite communication systems, which are based on a technical paper he published in 1945 called "Extra-terrestrial Relays" that showed how satellites in geostationary orbits could relay signals anywhere in the world. Today, the orbit that most communications satellites use--far above space shuttles and space stations at some 42,000 kilometers up--is called the "Clarke Orbit."

You probably also know Clarke from his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I keep special track of him because he lives off the southern tip of India on the island of Sri Lanka, which used to be called Ceylon, which used to be called Serendip.

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Q. What do atom bombs, spacecraft, credit cards, jukeboxes, waterbeds, and gene splicing have in common?

A. As sci-fi author Bruce Sterling has pointed out, they all appeared in science fiction first. Yet Sterling isn't bragging. He says that "science fiction is visionary by design and prophetic only by accident. You'll have a hard time finding androids, aliens, time travelers or psychic powers at the
K-mart, even though science-fiction writers have obsessed about them for 70 years."

I don't know. Have you been to a K-mart lately? Still, Sterling is trying to make a point about sci-fi. For him and a whole new generation of writers, it's less about predicting the future than about describing "future sensibilities--how it might feel, what it might mean."

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Q. Who coined the word "cyberspace"?

A. Another sci-fi guy, William Ford Gibson. It started with a 1982 short story called "Burning Chrome" and hit fever-pitch in a 1984 novel called Neuromancer, which has been translated into about 20 languages and inspired hit movies like The Matrix. In fact, the term "the matrix" appears in Gibson's Neuromancer novel, too.

Gibson imagines a corporate-controlled 22nd century where access to information is all, and life can hardly be separated from the "consensual hallucination" of computer networks. What does Gibson have to say about the cyberspace of today? This: "The net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it."

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Q. Can science make you invisible?

A. Susumu Tachi of Tokyo University believes it can. Tachi has created a prototype "cloaking device" that is literally a cloak--a raincoat, to be precise. A camera films a scene behind the raincoat, and a projector bounces it off the garment's front, which is covered with tiny reflective beads called retroreflectors. The process creates the illusion of invisibility because you can see "right through" the person wearing the coat and watch what's going on behind him.

It's just a camera trick, and hardly ready for Wal-Mart, but people are excited about the possible applications. Hate hard landings when you fly? Pilots could look right through the bottom of a cockpit to gauge their distance from the runway. Think invasive surgery should be less so? Surgeons could make smaller cuts if they could peer through your skin. Of course, the military likes the idea, too.

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Q. What is nanotechnology?

A. It's the manipulation of matter at the atomic or molecular level to create novel structures, like carbon molecules arranged in nanotubes, which are 100 times as strong as steel but far lighter. And while it's all about being little, nanotechnology may be the next big thing to come out of science fiction.

Nanotech takes its name from the word "nanometer," which is just one-billionth of a meter. How small is that? Small. Almost inconceivably small. A strand of your hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide. The DNA inside your cells is about two nanometers wide. A nasty virus might span a hundred. In fact, one nanometer is just about the length of 10 hydrogen atoms strung together.

Already nanoparticles make your tennis racquet stronger, your pants more stain-resistant, and your hard drive store more data. Proponents describe a future in which nanotechnology will lead to wonders, such as minute diagnostic systems that can detect cancers when they are no more than a few cells in size or data-storage systems that could house the Library of Congress in something the size of a sugar cube.

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Q. What about nano-sized robots, or nanobots?

A. They are, for now, just science fiction.