I concede Eagal's criticism was part-right, but this should really go to a YMMV, as our respective M's really did V. It came as a surprise that this was cut! (no mood or apetite for a flame-war by reinstating it to the page, though.)
** In The Holographic Excitation, there is a blatant (well, fairly subtle) shout-out to Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. Specifically, the The Science of Discworld series, co-authored with prominent British scientists, in which Pratchett's fantasy world is used to mirror and illustrate developing scientific thought. In the books, the wizards of Unseen University (among them a rather nerdy type with glasses who affects a big baggy parka) accidentally create a bizarre pocket universe centered on a spherical world which orbits its sun. Stuck for what to do with it, it ends up gathering dust inside a protective glass sphere on somebody's desk. Meanwhile a geeky glasses-wearing scientist in a parka fires up holograms of Earth, planets and solar system to please his girlfriend. Leonard speculates that everything might just be one giant information-gathering hologram, being read by intelligences an unguessable distance away...
The creation of the pocket universe in the Discworld - including Planet Earth - was done with the specific intention of averting a seriously Big Bang, by diverting a lot of dangerously destructive energy down a harmless path...
One of the authors of The Science of Discworld, Professor Jack Cohen, is well-known in US academic circles. In one of the books he explains the torrid time he had trying to convince a hostile audience of the truth of evolutionary theory. He was in East Texas at the time getting heckled by Creationists.
I concede Eagal's criticism was part-right, but this should really go to a YMMV, as our respective M's really did V. It came as a surprise that this was cut! (no mood or apetite for a flame-war by reinstating it to the page, though.)
Shout-Out:
- ** In The Holographic Excitation, there is a blatant (well, fairly subtle) shout-out to Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. Specifically, the The Science of Discworld series, co-authored with prominent British scientists, in which Pratchett's fantasy world is used to mirror and illustrate developing scientific thought. In the books, the wizards of Unseen University (among them a rather nerdy type with glasses who affects a big baggy parka) accidentally create a bizarre pocket universe centered on a spherical world which orbits its sun. Stuck for what to do with it, it ends up gathering dust inside a protective glass sphere on somebody's desk. Meanwhile a geeky glasses-wearing scientist in a parka fires up holograms of Earth, planets and solar system to please his girlfriend. Leonard speculates that everything might just be one giant information-gathering hologram, being read by intelligences an unguessable distance away...
- The creation of the pocket universe in the Discworld - including Planet Earth - was done with the specific intention of averting a seriously Big Bang, by diverting a lot of dangerously destructive energy down a harmless path...
- One of the authors of The Science of Discworld, Professor Jack Cohen, is well-known in US academic circles. In one of the books he explains the torrid time he had trying to convince a hostile audience of the truth of evolutionary theory. He was in East Texas at the time getting heckled by Creationists.
Edited by 89.242.243.136