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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
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![]() Michel Arden, fearless French adventurer, appears before the Baltimore Gun Club to address them on various matters. Among them, the idea that the projectile shot from the great Columbiad may be just the beginning of fast spacecraft.
The existence of light pressure was demonstrated as theoretically possible by James Clerk Maxwell in 1873. Confirming laboratory experiments waited until the turn of the century. Walter James Miller, the translator of the 1978 edition, notes that, "Verne is right on top of new developments in physics . . . . James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) has recently discovered that light exerts a pressure on surfaces."
The first person to suggest solar sailing was probably Johannes Kepler, in a 1608 letter to Galileo: "Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will brave even that void.”
Golden age sf great Edmond Hamilton uses this idea explicitly in his 1929 short story The Comet Doom; see the entry for ship propelled by light pressure.
Compare to these propulsion systems: Light Pressure Propulsion (1867),
apergy (1880),
Beam-Powered Propulsion (1931),
Granton motor (1933),
Vibration-Propelled Cruiser (1928),
geodynes (1936),
ion drive (1947),
Planetary Propulsion-Blasts (1934),
stardrive (1953),
solar sail (light sail) (1962),
Lyle drive (1961),
laser cannon (1966),
Bussard ramjet (1976),
asymptotic drive (1976),
Interstellar Laser Propulsion System (1985). Comment/Join this discussion ( 3 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,' said lead researcher Katsu Takahashi.
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