In attendance were
The meeting was most notable for a sad occasion: Eric Lindsay and his slightly dodgy ticker are bound north. Eric is to abandon the idyllic paradise of Sydney for some sordid beach resort called Airly (?) Beach. There, deprived of the society of persons of scientifically fictional thought-patterns, he will have nothing to do with his time but soak up Queensland sun and enjoy himself. Our hearts go out to him. But the leash drags them back, ha.
Ian Woolf reports that Encore, an independent cinema, will run an overnight SF marathon on the 28th of August, starting at 2300. The menu is Dune, THX1138, Silent Running and Forbidden Planet. On the 29th they start Anime for a week, but I didn't write down the names because Saint Ian the Unreliable promised to show me the list later. They were mostly well-known classics: Akira, The Ghost in the Shell, etc.. Encore will also take requests: Michael McGuiness immediately requested The Remarkable Mr. Wonderbird, and the version of Dr. Strangelove which identified itself as "Number 17 in our series Dead Worlds of Antiquity".
Ian Woolf reported on somebody's anti-gravity drive (that used a spinning magnetic disc) and someone's FTL communications gadget that transmits Mozart symphonies at 4.7 times the speed of light. There was a brief discussion of Sony's patents for cold fusion and ki enhancers.
G. P. Dalrymple received a letter from the French ambassador. Presumably this concerned his search for overseas science fiction societies, but everyone was so fascinated by listening to the reverend pronounce the French words that we forget what it said.
Gary also unveiled a plan to do a survey of blood types, comparing donations in a category with the population. His theory was that this would show whether there was a correlation between blood group and civic-mindedness. (A similar study might show whether there was a correlation between blood group and being accident prone.) Alas, the blood bank was uncooperative.
Science in the Pub (Duke of Edinburgh in Pyrmont) had a lecture on Science in the Media. Apparently the reporters mean well but we should blame the sub-editors, who have horns and pitchforks and smell slightly of sulfur compounds.
There are conferences on Space Travel (expensive) and UFOs (nutso) coming up.
Brian Walls mentioned that Paul Davies was speaking on The Fifth Miracle, i.e. the origins of life. A brisk argument ensued between proponents and rubbishers of Paul Davies. Anyway, it's on at Glebe Books, 1830 for 1900, 3rd August.
A new type of bacteria, known as nanobacteria because they are less than 100 nanometres long, has been discovered. They form mineral surface layers (much like the stomach ulcer bacteria). This is important because
A new volume of Feynman essays has been produced, from material recently discovered. Richard P. Feynman seems to be retaining his quality rather better than L. Ron Hubbard.
Brian also mentioned the Total Recall TV series. He showed signs of wanting to talk about it a bit more, but was drowned out by an argument about whether We Can Remember It For You Wholesale was about aliens who looked like mice. If anyone can explain what caused this argument please mail me.
Michael McGuiness saw a motorised skateboard.
David Bofinger mentioned a new process that may revolutionise the manufacture of diamonds. Reading breathlessly from a article he'd printed just before he left, he revealed this reduced the required temperature from the extremely high 1470 degrees Fahrenheit to the easily manageable ... 1290 degrees Fahrenheit. He then quickly changed the topic.
Mark Phillips reported the winners of the Nebula (Vonda McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun, apparently set in the court of Louis XIV), Arthur C. Clarke (James Lovergrove's Days) and British Science Fiction Society (Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow) awards. Ron Clarke mentioned that the George Turner award had been given to a fantasy writer named "Patsy someone". It was suggested that the Futurian Society might wish to have its own awards.
An academic book called Virtual History on the subject of alternate history has been written by someone called Nial Ferguson. It's apparently rather dry.
Fiction seemed mostly divided between those who wished to live on the asteroids and those who wanted to use them to stop people on Earth from living.
Eric Lindsay remarked that Asteroidia is the class (?) which includes starfish.
Niven's Belter stories (Gil Hamilton stories, Protector, Borderlands of Sol; Niven assumes the very different style of life in the belt combined with the expense of entering and leaving gravity wells would lead to a very different culture), C.J. Cherryh's Heavy Time (in fact all of Cherryh's Union/Compact/Merchanter series assumes extensive asteroid mining, since most industry is space-based), Greg Bear's Eon, Iain M. Banks' Excession (an asteroid used as cold storage for a battle fleet), a George Zebrowski story where Earth was destroyed by relativistic "darts" and the survivors lived in the belt, Asimov's Marooned Off Vesta and Pirates of the Asteroids, Heinlein's Space Family Stone, Niven and Pournelle's Footfall, the recent film Deep Impact, Fred Pohl's Gateway (and other Heechee stories, to a lesser extent), Bester's The Stars My Destination (where the scientists lived on an asteroid), the very large biologically implausible sock-muppet in Star Wars II: The Empire Strikes Back, and possibly the Jack McDevitt story which has waves of destruction passing though the galaxy and leaving ruins.
Next month: Lost Cities and Relics and Civilisations and Stuff Like That in Science Fiction. The month after that, Jupiter.
After the meeting proper John August gave a short lecture on Ritzian theory. Ritz was a turn of the century (got to stop using that expression in a couple of years) physicist, best remembered for some results whose names I forgot to write down (one was with Raleigh).
In addition to this he was the only person to seriously develop an example of an emission theory. Emission theories assume that every charged object is continuously radiating and absorbing electromagnetic radiation (leading, I presume to a big grunty vacuum background) which sounds very quantum-like but isn't.
This constitutes an alternative to Einsteinian special and general relativity and Maxwell's equations. Major changes are:
Further references are an American Journal of Physics review article (whose full reference I failed to write down, sorry, but from 1965), a letter by John to the editor of the Australian Sceptic and John's web page on the subject.