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Article ID: CBB761628864

Ahead of Time: Gerald Feinberg and the Governance of Futurity (2019)

Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 34
Issue: 1
Pages: 216-237

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/703511

DOI: 10.1086/703511

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Methodology Speculation Atomic, nuclear, and particle physics Particles (nuclear physics) Futurology Science and literature Social change Science fiction 20th century, late Clarke, Arthur C. Feinberg, Gerald

Looking back at his research on tachyons in the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Gerald Feinberg recalled that he started thinking about particles that go faster than light after reading James Blish’s 1954 science fiction story “Beep.” While the technical conceits of Blish’s tale may have stirred Feinberg’s curiosity, its literary implications were yet more significant. As a story about faster-than-light messages that travel backward in time, “Beep” thematizes the capacity of speculative fictions to affect the present and reorient the future. For Feinberg, stories like “Beep” and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End offered conceptual resources as well as models for practice, affirming a science fiction way of doing science. By attending to Feinberg’s work on tachyons as well as his ventures in futurology, such as The Prometheus Project, this essay shows how Feinberg’s reading of science fiction reinforced a speculative approach to knowledge and innovation, an understanding of theoretical science as intimately aligned with science fiction, and a conviction that science fiction was a vital instrument for science policy and social change.

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Article Amanda Rees; Iwan Rhys Morus (2019) Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-15). unapi

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