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"For the sciences, the way to change science's perception of things is to wait until all the old farts have died off."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Spy Beam | ||
| A surveillance device that projects energy into a room, revealing conversation taking place. |
| He said "The commission will, of course, have a spy beam on our conversation. This is against the law, but they will use one nonetheless..."
"However," and Avakim seated himself deliberately, "the recorder I have on the table - which is a perfectly ordinary recorder to all appearances and performs its duties well - has the additional property of completely blanketing the spy beam. This is something they will not discover at once." |
| Technovelgy from Foundation,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the object-finder beam from L.F. Stone's 1931 story The Conquest of Gola and the spy-ray goggles from 'Doc Smith's 1934 novel Triplanetary.
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Timeline
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'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
'It seems that at one time computers were designed directly by human beings.'
'...the spot was a lonely one in an uncharted region, far from the normal lanes of space traffic.'
'I squatted down beside the roller and tried to make some sense out of the knobs. There were thirty-nine of them...'
'...I don’t understand technical things — tell me, does it ever feel anything?"
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'My chemists are all working on the preparation of the artificial blood.'
'The image on the Trimagniscope tube was an enlarged view of one of the pocket-size books found on the body...'
