All the Wonder that Would Be by Stephen Webb

All the Wonder that Would Be by Stephen Webb

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 theirday, 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.

Dr. Stephen Webb has a B.Sc. in Physics from Bristol University, and Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Manchester University. He was elected as a Member of Institute of Physics and awarded status of Chartered Physicist. Stephen has three previous books with Springer, including; Measuring the Universe: The Cosmological Distance Ladder (1999), If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens...Where Is Everybody (2002), and Out of this World (2004). All have been well received and reviewed. If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens...Where is Everybody? has won several awards and was shortlisted for the prestigious Aventis Prize for popular science writing. All three books deal with areas of astronomy and cosmology that have seen tremendous advances in recent years.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9783319517582
ISBN 10	3319517589
Title	All the Wonder that Would Be
Author	Stephen Webb
Series	Science And Fiction
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Springer International Publishing AG
Year published	2017-05-10
Number of pages	344
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.