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G0TEZ > OM 30.01.11 00:21l 85 Lines 3716 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 3E0054G0TEZ
Read: GUEST
Subj: Re: G0TEZ > Isaac Asimov
Path: IZ3LSV<F6CDD<GB7CIP
Sent: 110129/2153Z @:GB7CIP.#32.GBR.EU #:5898 [Caterham] $:3E0054G0TEZ
From: G0TEZ@GB7CIP.#32.GBR.EU
To : OM@WW
Hi Warren and anyone else interested.
I have had a long interest in science, mainly physics, as well as Sci Fi.
I always thought that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was rather
obvious and Schroedinger's cat did far more to confuse people than clarify
quantum mechanics. Still, it doesn't annoy me as much as the fact that
modern revisionist history has tried to exclude Pierre Curie in favour of
his wife. Anyone who wants to check can find out that Pierre was famous
for discovering piezo electricity and his work in cryogenics, in fact
there is a temperature named after him called the Curie Point, close to
absolute zero and he had a Nobel Prize before he met and worked with his
wife,Marie on Radium. She is often quoted as having a Nobel Prize but the
fact is that she shared half a Nobel with her husband, giving her 1/4 of a
Nobel while the other half was given to Henri Beccquerel for his work in
radiation.
Still, they did deserve there Nobel prizes for contributing to science.
Modern prizes are conferred for the most strange reasons, not least the
one given to Pres: Obama last year for promoting world peace in the
previous year.............?!
I thought you had probably seen Bicentennial Man as it has been repeated
so often on TV. The film maker can be forbidden for adding a love interest
to
it to attract the film goers. It is well known that Asimov never had any
heroines, in fact nothing nice to say about women except for the character
of Susan Calvin who appears in most of his robot stories. She is portrayed
as a dried up,bitter misanthropist with no interest outside
robopsychology.
It is mentioned in his autobiography that he did have a girl friend not
long after starting to write SF, in fact, it was while he was with her
that he wrote his only love story set on venus before we knew that the
surface of Venus was hot enough to melt lead on a warm summer day.
What she did to him, Asimov never explains but he never had a sympathetic
female character after that.
When you watch the last scene in Bicentennial Man you will see what I
mean.
In the book the robot, now a man, dies alone and his last words ar "Little
Miss."
Games People Play was so popular that it prompted a pop song but, even
now, 45 years later, I see people argue and automatically characterise
them as Parent Child paradigm or Child Adult paradigm. It is amazing how
you see grown adults displaying infant behaviour, almost stamping their
feet and
screaming when frustrated. The trouble is that the adult version of foot
stamping can turn into full blown violence - not nice at all.
I learnt a lot, much earlier from Straight and Crooked Thinking by
Robert.H.Thouless, also very informative but when I looked for that on the
'net I found it was long out of print and, even, quite collectable. Boy, I
feel old!
It might be worth mentioning that SF paperbacks were used as ballast in
ships returning from the USA in the late 40s and 50s. I don't know why but
enterprising sailors would sell them by the bagfull at 2/6d per CWt,
making them less than a penny each. That lead to me being given about two
dozen books a week like Astounding and Amazing. A lot of the stories were
rubbish but many of the authors I mentioned were in among them and, like
Asimov, were actually writing the stories just before I read them, even
though I thought they were years old. happy times when you live on a
remote farm with about a dozen neighbours and a million sheep!
CUL. Shalom and Shin, as the man from TOS would say.
73 - Ian, G0TEZ @ GB7CIP
Message timed: 21:52 on 2011-Jan-29
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