Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 752.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 07:13:36 +0000
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Why Science Fiction Is Ahead of Its Time
From: Osher Doctorow, Ph.D. osher@ix.netcom.com, Fri. March 16, 2001 9:09 PM
Science fiction crosses categories in an interdisciplinary manner. As I
indicated in my previous contribution, objects and their relationships which
cross interdisciplinary categories or fields (especially with laws that cut
across fields) appear to be among the most fundamental in both humanities
and science.
Category theory was developed by Saunders MacLane of the University of
Illinois at Chicago and by S. Eilenberg in the 1940s and especially extended
by K. Morita of Tokyo in the late 1950s, but remained for most of the time
until the present limited to cross-subdiscipline work within a single
discipline such as finite set theory or ring theory in algebra. Science
fiction, from its inception by Jules Verne around the turn of the 19th
century, dared to go beyond subdisciplines and cross whole disciplines of
science - oceanographic, atmospheric, space, cosmological, etc. They had to
translate mathematics into English, French, etc., and in the process their
creative genius was stimulated both by the translation and by the
inter-disciplinary fundamental relationships and objects. My wife Marleen
J. Doctorow, Ph.D. taught psychology at California State University Long
Beach for approximately eight years using among other texts a combined
science fiction-psychology text by Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest science
fiction authors whose former editor John W. Campbell, Jr. anticipated the
atom bomb and who himself (Asimov) anticipated much of modern robotics and
wove stories relating medieval scenarios and galactic space travel and
psychology/psychiatry and robotics and detective investigation and
sociocultural/historical studies. Asimov's marriage to Dr. Janet Jeppson,
M.D., a psychiatrist, played an important role in his inter-disciplinary
orientation. After his death, she continued his Foundation Series of
science fiction in collaboration with the authors Brin, Benford, and Bear.
(My own interdisciplinary orientation also derives from my over 32 year
marriage to Dr. Marleen J. Doctorow, Ph.D., licensed psychologist.)
Osher Doctorow
Ventura College, Doctorow Consultants, etc.
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