Here's another interesting panel discussion topic from this year's WorldconThe idea has its roots in antiquity, in Plato's Cave and the Hindu idea of Maya, "illusion." However, it's only been with the rise of virtual reality technology that it's really taken off in its current form. Even in the late 70's and early 80's I came across sf stories in ( Read more... )

Here's an interesting panel from this year's Capricon. Why does pretty much every human culture have at least some concept of an afterlife? Maybe it's just part of a vague "spirit world," or maybe it's an elaborate system of heavens and hells for different classes of people (Chinese tradition has eight cold hells and eight hot hells, each lasting ( Read more... )

Is it a contradiction in terms? Is it a harbinger of the future, and if so, what kind of future?

Yet again we have someone weighing in on the philosophy of art as related to AI art bots ( Read more... )

Quantum weirdness is one of the most disturbing elements of modern physics -- and it can't be wished away as irrelevant, mere simplifications of mathematics, because it has actual measurable consequences in modern electronics. Integrated circuit design has to take into account quantum interactions in order for the chip to work properly ( Read more... )

Fantasy is almost synonymous with magic. In fact, some readers will argue that a work without magic cannot be classed as fantasy, and will instead insist on calling it science fiction, or slipstream, or psychological horror, or anything but fantasy ( Read more... )

When you first study exponents and roots, you learn that there is no square root of a negative number. However, if you move beyond basic arithmetic to higher math, you learn about something called an imaginary number, which is a number that, when multiplied by itself, produces a negative number. It's generally represented with the letter iAlthough ( Read more... )

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Over at a blog that I'd prefer not to link to because I really don't like giving its owner any more publicity than I need to, there's been some discussion about the problem of people who are upset about Tolkien's always-evil orcs and want to forcibly rewrite the legendarium to change this. The original writer (who is quoted by The Man With The ( Read more... )

There are points at which theoretical physics starts looking more like philosophy than an actual hard science. Quantum mechanics is the most obvious, with its arguments about the Copenhagen Interpretation vs. the Many Worlds Interpretation, a question that cannot be empirically tested. But some other areas of physics seem to be going down ( Read more... )

Another interesting item on the MidSouthCon programming lineup ( Read more... )