306
NOTES
the writings of the Mahabharata, which described strange, powerful
weapons, including flying craft.
Page 36: Weapons created from focused light beams... Movies like this
have also spread a number of misconceptions about lasers. Laser beams are
actually invisible unless they are scattered by particles in the air. So when
Tom Cruise had to navigate through a maze of laser beams in Mission Impossible, the lattice of laser beams should have been invisible, not red. Also in
many ray gun battles in the movies you can actually see the laser pulses zip
across a room, which is impossible, since laser light travels at the speed of
light, 186,000 miles per second.
Page 37: Writing about Einstein, Planck said, "That he may sometimes
have missed the target..." Asimov and Schulman, p. 124.
4:
TELEPORTATION
Page 53: The earliest mention of teleportation can be found... The best
recorded example of teleportation is dated October 24,1593, when Gil Perez,
a palace guard in the Philippine military guarding the governor in Manila,
suddenly appeared in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City. Dazed and confused,
he was arrested by the Mexican authorities who thought he was in league
with Satan. When he was brought before the Most Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, all he could say in his defense was that he had disappeared from
Manila to Mexico "in less time than it takes a cock to crow." (As incredible as
the historic accounts of this incident may be, historian Mike Dash has noted
that the earliest records of Perez's disappearance date from a century after
his disappearance, and hence cannot be fully trusted.)
Page 34: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for his Sherlock Holmes
novels... Doyle's early work was renowned for the methodical, logical thinking typical of the medical profession, as seen in the superb deductions of Sherlock Holmes. So why did Doyle decide to shift sharply away from the cold,
rational logic of Mr. Holmes to the seat-of-your-pants, harrowing adventures of
Professor Challenger, who delved into the forbidden worlds of mysticism, the
occult, and the fringes of science? The author was profoundly changed by the
sudden, unexpected deaths of several close relatives in World War I, including
his beloved son Kingsley, his brother, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews.
These losses would leave a deep, lasting emotional scar on him.
Depressed by their tragic deaths, Doyle embarked on a lifelong fascination with the world of the occult, believing perhaps that he might be able to
communicate with the dead via spiritualism. He abruptly shifted from the
world of rational, forensic science into mysticism, and went on to give famous lectures around the world about unexplained psychic phenomena.
Page 58: This uncertainty was finally codified by Heisenberg... More
precisely, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that the uncertainty in
the position of a particle, multiplied by the uncertainty in its momentum,
must be greater than or equal to Planck's constant divided by 2n. Or the product of the uncertain in a particle's energy times the uncertainty in its time
NOTES
the writings of the Mahabharata, which described strange, powerful
weapons, including flying craft.
Page 36: Weapons created from focused light beams... Movies like this
have also spread a number of misconceptions about lasers. Laser beams are
actually invisible unless they are scattered by particles in the air. So when
Tom Cruise had to navigate through a maze of laser beams in Mission Impossible, the lattice of laser beams should have been invisible, not red. Also in
many ray gun battles in the movies you can actually see the laser pulses zip
across a room, which is impossible, since laser light travels at the speed of
light, 186,000 miles per second.
Page 37: Writing about Einstein, Planck said, "That he may sometimes
have missed the target..." Asimov and Schulman, p. 124.
4:
TELEPORTATION
Page 53: The earliest mention of teleportation can be found... The best
recorded example of teleportation is dated October 24,1593, when Gil Perez,
a palace guard in the Philippine military guarding the governor in Manila,
suddenly appeared in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City. Dazed and confused,
he was arrested by the Mexican authorities who thought he was in league
with Satan. When he was brought before the Most Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, all he could say in his defense was that he had disappeared from
Manila to Mexico "in less time than it takes a cock to crow." (As incredible as
the historic accounts of this incident may be, historian Mike Dash has noted
that the earliest records of Perez's disappearance date from a century after
his disappearance, and hence cannot be fully trusted.)
Page 34: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for his Sherlock Holmes
novels... Doyle's early work was renowned for the methodical, logical thinking typical of the medical profession, as seen in the superb deductions of Sherlock Holmes. So why did Doyle decide to shift sharply away from the cold,
rational logic of Mr. Holmes to the seat-of-your-pants, harrowing adventures of
Professor Challenger, who delved into the forbidden worlds of mysticism, the
occult, and the fringes of science? The author was profoundly changed by the
sudden, unexpected deaths of several close relatives in World War I, including
his beloved son Kingsley, his brother, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews.
These losses would leave a deep, lasting emotional scar on him.
Depressed by their tragic deaths, Doyle embarked on a lifelong fascination with the world of the occult, believing perhaps that he might be able to
communicate with the dead via spiritualism. He abruptly shifted from the
world of rational, forensic science into mysticism, and went on to give famous lectures around the world about unexplained psychic phenomena.
Page 58: This uncertainty was finally codified by Heisenberg... More
precisely, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that the uncertainty in
the position of a particle, multiplied by the uncertainty in its momentum,
must be greater than or equal to Planck's constant divided by 2n. Or the product of the uncertain in a particle's energy times the uncertainty in its time