It's always amazing how short sighted scifi is in some areas, and how optimistic it is in others. I don't have my own personal robot, but yet, in the 24th century, the Federation has yet to master a technology we're making strides in 300 years before hand.
*thinks of the satellite phone her brother used to call from Afghanistan*
I know the communicators had better range, but geeze there's more advancement in the last twenty-five years from "car phones" to my Razr than from my Razr to Kirk's flip-com.
The seemingly exponential rate of advancement is frustrating to someone like me: an aspiring sci-fi writer.
Every couple of months, I end up reading one of these articles about a new advancement that sounds like something right out of Babylon 5. Every time I come up with a tech idea for my stories that seems like it's a few hundred years away; they go and develop it today!
By the time I'm finally finished, I won't have a science fiction. It'll just be a...regular fiction.
In Boundary I had to project forward about 30 years.
Parts of that predicted future are undoubtedly too timid, partly because if I projected ALL the technology forward 30 years I'd probably have had to spend half the book explaining technology that doesn't exist yet, but it clearly implied in current R&D.
But yes, the damn scientists keep nibbling away at our fiction. Thank Gog that Threshold is finally going to be published, hopefully in time to keep them from making it completely invalid BEFORE publication. Obviously they'll invalidate it shortly thereafter (with probes around Enceladus or Ceres or both) but I'd like the main points to at least make it to publication time.
My uncle worked on "active adaptive camouflage cloth" up in Natick until he retired. Basically camo cloth that would automatically detect and blend with current background color scheme.
He didnt talk much about it but at the time he said they had developed about a 3" square of technically cloth but it was too stiff to bend (it was more like cardboard). But he said it would mimic the surrounding color fairly well when moved it created a sort of color blurring effect. Now that was years ago so God only knows where adaptive camo is currently in the R&D cycle.
Sort of. That image is a bit deceptive, though. I think the reversal of the straw is due to the curvature of the glass and not only the properties of the negative refraction.
If you had a flat interface you wouldn't see the image reverse. You'd just see it doing some weird angles. Like the straw would look more vertical for negative refraction, and flatter for positive refraction.
The best way to understand it is to draw some simple ray diagrams, and where you bend the light ray one way for positive refraction, bend it the same angle but in the other direction for negative.
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http://science.org.au/nova/newscientist/072ns_004.htm
There's a sculpture in Madrid showcasing the phenomenon
http://www.femto-st.fr/en/Popularization/An-introduction-to-phononic-crystals.php
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*thinks of the satellite phone her brother used to call from Afghanistan*
I know the communicators had better range, but geeze there's more advancement in the last twenty-five years from "car phones" to my Razr than from my Razr to Kirk's flip-com.
Reply
Every couple of months, I end up reading one of these articles about a new advancement that sounds like something right out of Babylon 5. Every time I come up with a tech idea for my stories that seems like it's a few hundred years away; they go and develop it today!
By the time I'm finally finished, I won't have a science fiction. It'll just be a...regular fiction.
Reply
Parts of that predicted future are undoubtedly too timid, partly because if I projected ALL the technology forward 30 years I'd probably have had to spend half the book explaining technology that doesn't exist yet, but it clearly implied in current R&D.
But yes, the damn scientists keep nibbling away at our fiction. Thank Gog that
Threshold is finally going to be published, hopefully in time to keep them from making it completely invalid BEFORE publication. Obviously they'll invalidate it shortly thereafter (with probes around Enceladus or Ceres or both) but I'd like the main points to at least make it to publication time.
Reply
He didnt talk much about it but at the time he said they had developed about a 3" square of technically cloth but it was too stiff to bend (it was more like cardboard). But he said it would mimic the surrounding color fairly well when moved it created a sort of color blurring effect. Now that was years ago so God only knows where adaptive camo is currently in the R&D cycle.
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I can only imagine what is still currently classified at more devoted research facilities.
What was it that Arthur C. Clark said about technology and magic?
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If I'm reading this right, then the picture here is the best way to explain it.
That is so cool, on its own....
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If you had a flat interface you wouldn't see the image reverse. You'd just see it doing some weird angles. Like the straw would look more vertical for negative refraction, and flatter for positive refraction.
The best way to understand it is to draw some simple ray diagrams, and where you bend the light ray one way for positive refraction, bend it the same angle but in the other direction for negative.
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Well, for a nanosecond.
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