14.0752 scifi ahead of its time

From: by way of Willard McCarty (willard@lists.village.Virginia.EDU)
Date: Mon Mar 19 2001 - 02:21:18 EST

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                   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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