Posted on 05/09/2023 7:27:31 AM PDT by Red Badger
Weird science ping!................
Weird science and toss a smidgen of scientology on top.......
Got to feel sorry for American commies. Boo hoo. Atomic bomb blueprints sent to “Uncle Joe” Stalin, who cares?
Von Braun proved useful to the US. I don’t think he or his were any danger of providing secrets to the Soviets.
Ping
Parsons was a nasty piece of work.
Kind of a one-subject Edison, who was no prince either.
Left his initials on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so they’re also left all over the surface of Mars, by the wheels of the Curiosity rover.
Robert Heinlein was part of his circle for a while. A Parsons-like character appears in several of Heinlein’s novels. Some think that Heinlein told the FBI about Parson’s antics, which is why they kept an eye on him. The government gave him (Parsons) a lot of money to develop rockets.
And evil....
Not sure about that, Delos D. Harriman is a decent person, just obsessed by a single goal. He loves his wife even though he doesn't treat her very well.
I was thinking of Clark Fries, the younger brother of the main character in Podkayne Of Mars, who is a science prodigy but completely amoral. Among other antics, Clark smuggles a small, home-made atomic bomb on a spaceship that carries the two of them, along with their grandfather, to Venus from Mars.
LOL!
Because OF COURSE he was involved.
Nutcases flock together like birds of a feather................
Supposedly, scientology grew out of a conversation involving Hubbard, Heinlein, and another SF writer I don't recall. Hubbard's thesis was that writing for a penny a word was no way to get rich; if you were serious about it, you'd start a religion. Which Hubbard proceeded to do ... and also write massive tomes, as though he was still getting paid a penny a word.
Yes, I’ve heard the versions of the story that had either Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke at the table when Hubbard said the way to get rich was by starting a religion.
I read a lot of Asimov, both science-fiction and his popularization of science. The latter includes The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science, and a single-topic book, The Neutrino.
I looked forward to hearing him speak at the University I attended. I was greatly disappointed as he was a conceited person. I stopped reading him.
I suspect that if I were to re-read his Foundation books, I would seem them in a new light. “Guiding” humanity along sounds socialistic to me now.
BTTT
Wut?
A little bit of weird history.....................
Yeah, he was pretty full of himself.
I think he was influenced by other scientific egomaniacs of his time, John von Neumann being one, but there were many others. Asimov considered himself a member of that club, at least as I understand him.
He was a leftist I'm quite sure. He definitely believed socialism was the future. In that, he was not alone; the obviousness of socialism's superiority was "obvious" to the intellectuals of that time, educated in the 1920s and 1930s, when socialism was new, bright, relatively untarnished by any encounter with reality.
Of course, if they had taken time to study history, they might have figured out that socialist experiments of the past had come to bitter ends. But they thought that science and technology had finally reached a point where socialism could be made to work. Wrong again, for the Nth time.
Other very conceited scientists of the time included Brian Josephson (winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics) and Francis Crick (winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with James Watson). Both were almost insufferable, at least to me. They were brilliant though, really astonishingly so. So I guess one must make allowances.
Personally, I don't think Asimov really belonged in the same orbit as these people, but he thought he did.
I would be very much surprised if any of the people I named were other than left-wing in their views. Particularly after the advent of atomic weapons, the enlightened ones all believed that a form of international socialism and one-world government was the only way the human race could survive the knowledge they had generated.
[Personally, I don’t think Asimov really belonged in the same orbit as these people, but he thought he did.]
Yeah, but science is a much bigger deal than is science fiction.
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