Sunday, 11 October 2020

The Back Of His Neck

Theoretically, a new radio telescope:

"...ought to penetrate far enough around the universe to pick up the radio equivalent of the radio temperature at the back of Martels' own neck."
-James Blish, Midsummer Century (London, 1975), 1, p. 5.
 
This is the highly relevant passage that I mentioned here.
 
By "...cranking the gain up all the way...," Martels gives the telescope:
 
"...a setting which should have effectively relocated the campus of Sockette State in the heart of Ursa Major No. 2, a cluster of galaxies half a billion light-years away..." (p. 6)

Such relocations occur in Blish's Okie series but, here, more plausibly, the relocation is merely "effective."

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

But in the actual here and now the technological changes that most interests me are those which I will soon lead to mankind TRULY getting off this rock! Think SpaceX and how the work of Tesla could apply to Mars and the Moon, for starters. And those innovations should lead to unexpected, serendipitous discoveries in other lines of investigation in all kinds of fields.

Ad astra! Sean