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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 11/07/97 -- Vol. 16, No. 19
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets on the third Saturday of every month in Belleville; call
201-432-5965 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
: STARSHIP TROOPERS GET-TOGETHER : STARSHIP TROOPERS GET-TOGETHER :
1. STARSHIP TROOPERS opens this weekend. We will have a club get-
together at the Hazlet Multiplex, tomorrow, Saturday, November 8.
If you are interested in joining us, it would be useful if you let
us know, but not absolutely required. You can just look for us at
the theater. We will go to the 1:00 PM screening. Following the
film we will go a short distance north on Route 35 and have lunch
and discuss the film at the Red Oak Diner. Join us for the film
and/or lunch. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. URL of the week:
http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html.
Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel" with computer-generated
illustration of the library. [-psrc]
===================================================================
3. Among my friends there is a repeatedly told story. In fact it
has been told for several years now so it must, in fact, have even
happened more than a decade ago. One of us was working one day
when his nephew came up to him and asked him to load a certain
program on his computer. "I can't do it now, I'm busy," our friend
said gently. "Well can you give me the floppy and I can boot it
myself?" That stopped my friend in his tracks. A three-year-old
child knew how to boot a computer. My friend is not much younger
than I am and when I was a child computers were generally found
mostly in science fiction movies. I did not encounter my first
real computer until the summer before my senior year in high school
and then they were cumbersome affairs that could run programs
handed to them on cumbersome decks of cards. Someone like me could
run a program maybe three or four times a day, if I wanted to put
in the effort to get my deck, look at the paper output, type new
cards, and resubmit my deck. I look around at work today and most
people are doing jobs that would have been incomprehensible to my
high school class.
Okay, so the ability to compute is in the hands of younger and
younger people these days. Why is that so significant? Well I was
reading an essay by Alan Lightman. He talks about how Isaac Newton
was in his early 20s when he discovered the law of gravitation.
Einstein was 26 when he postulated special relativity. At 35
Maxwell had postulated his equations of electromagnetism and had
already retired. If you take Nobel Prize winners in physics and
see when they actually did the work for which they got the prize,
it averages about 36. Change the field to chemistry and it goes up
to 39. There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics (Ah, what a pity!)
but it you take a look at the big prize winners in Mathematics and
they have done their work mostly in their 20s. Now Andrew Wiles
used no computers to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, but for a lot of
math the computer is an irreplaceable tool. If we are talking
about a more physical science, it becomes an even more important
tool.
So a lot of us have heard about very young children learning
computers and we have shrugged it off as an interesting social
phenomenon. But to science it is a lot more than that. Imagine
how science would be stunted if people did not have paper and
writing implements at all or until they were 25. They had to
scratch their ideas in sand and remember what other people had told
them. Imagine they had to pass their ideas on orally. Then paper
and writing comes along. How much better this is for thinking out
mathematics and for writing about physics. How much better it is
for drawing diagrams to help one think and for telling others about
ideas. But still people learn to write in their 20s and 30s. How
much time is lost that way. And it is prime time, literally. It
is the limber years of thinking. Then when five-year-olds learn to
write and get used to paper and pen. There would be a huge jump in
scientific productivity. And it is only fully realized when the
very young are learning to write.
Can we expect the same sort of jump in scientific productivity when
the very young learn to use computers? Oh, absolutely. And 3-D
computer games are going to improve spatial thinking. But the
computer will also shape the sort of discoveries that are made.
The discoveries will be more those that require spatial thinking or
rapid but simple computation. Already there is a burgeoning of
interest in fractal geometry. There the computer is an immense
aid. On the other hand it was not a big help to Andrew Wiles in
proving Fermat. It may be that Fermat was proven in what is
historically a nick of time. Wiles sort of complex reasoning may
be replaced by a lot of research into the new fields that are made
easier by the computer. We chip away at the unknown generally in
the area of least resistance. And it is our tools that determine
where the least resistance is. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
[Conscience is] the inner voice that warns us
someone may be watching.
-- H. L. Mencken
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