It has been argued that science fiction (SF) gives a kind of weather
forecast - not the telling of a fortune but rather the rough feeling of
what the future might be like. The intention in this book is to consider
some of these bygone forecasts made by SF and to use this as a prism
through which to view current developments in science and technology.
In each of the ten main chapters - dealing in turn with antigravity,
space travel, aliens, time travel, the nature of reality, invisibility,
robots, means of transportation, augmentation of the human body, and,
last but not least, mad scientists - common assumptions once made by the
SF community about how the future would turn out are compared with our
modern understanding of various scientific phenomena and, in some cases,
with the industrial scaling of computational and technological
breakthroughs.
A further intention is to explain how the predictions and expectations
of SF were rooted in the scientific orthodoxy of their day, and use this
to explore how our scientific understanding of various topics has
developed over time, as well as to demonstrate how the ideas popularized
in SF subsequently influenced working scientists.
Since gaining a BSc in physics from the University of Bristol and a PhD
in theoretical physics from the University of Manchester, Stephen Webb
has worked in a variety of universities in the UK. He is a regular
contributor to the Yearbook of Astronomy series and has published an
undergraduate textbook on distance determination in astronomy and
cosmology as well as several popular science books.
