5 Inventions We Owe to Science Fiction

iStockphoto / Alex Nikada

In more ways than one can probably imagine, science fiction has helped generate ideas for investors dating back centuries. Human imagination generally has preceded ingenuity, which is increasingly catching up as technology accelerates, making ideas that were once solely in the realm of sci-fi more feasible in the real world. Over the past few decades, many literary concepts have entered the real world, including:

Electronic Book Readers

Say what you will about the level of sophistication of devices such as the Kindle, Electronic books are a growing segment today in large part due to the vision put forth by Douglas Adams. His classic 1979 work "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" used a self-reference to the novel to describe the process of how "you push this button here, you see, and the screen lights up, giving you the index.."

Wireless Tracking Monitor Bracelets

Using wireless technology to transmit the location of a person, tracking bracelets are used to keep tabs on house-arrest criminals as well as honing in on the location of various VIPs, for security purposes, using wireless technology. First mentioned in the 1990 novel "Shadowspeer" by Patricia Jo Clayton, in the context of government officials keeping track of inter-stellar travelers, the bracelets gained widespread use beginning in the late 1990s.

Light Sculptures

While Science Fiction has brought us its share of operational innovations, there are also a number of breakthroughs in technical art that can be attributed to the genre. In 1973, Isaac Asimov's "Light Verse" foretold light sculptures as means of creative expression. Asimov described them as "a new symphony of light...crystalline effects that bathed every guest in wonder..."

Networked Electronic Voting Machines

Although some might argue that we're still waiting for reliable electronic voting, John Brunner envisioned electronic voting in his 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider". Interestingly, the novel is based on the premise of a network which had shifted the powers to the elites and a hacker who uses a program to help democratize society once again. While others foresaw electronic voting, none of them saw a full, decentralized network of voting the way Brunner did.

Computerized Language Translation Software

Since Adams' novel broke a lot of technical ground, we return to "Hitchhiker's" for our final invention reference. Not only did the novel foretell computerized language translation, but it would even lend the term "Babel Fish" to the web site that would make computerized translation available to the general public.

This guest post comes from Maya Richard (@ gmail.com) who writes on the subject of high speed internet.

Walking Proteins Move Cargo

Kinesin dimer / David S. Goodsell, Scripps Research Institute

One way to transport objects inside a cell is by the use of Kinesin motor proteins. Three things are required: a motor to move the cargo, a track along which to move it, and the cargo itself that needs to be delivered.

Motor Proteins

Proteins are essential components of cells that are involved in a number of processes. They are formed by linking amino acid molecules together in chains. The sequences of amino acids needed to build proteins are specified by genes as part of the genetic code.

Motor proteins are a special form of protein that do physical work. Remarkably, these proteins have the ability to move along surfaces, transport cargo that is attached to them, or produce force. They use the chemical Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) as an energy source to power their movement. The motor protein myosin, for example, is involved in the the contraction of muscle fibers in animals. Dynein is a motor protein that is found in flagella, the long tail-like structure that projects from certain types of cells like sperm to help the cell move.

Microtubules

Microtubules are one of the components of the cytoskeleton, the infrastructure that supports the cell. They are made by linking repeating units of the tubulin protein together. The resulting chain is then curled into a hollow cylindrical shape. They can grow or shrink to produce force, and also serve as conduits along which other cellular components can be transported.

Kinesin Cargo Transportation

Small molecules in the cell can move to where they are needed by the process of diffusion. However, larger molecules that are synthesized in the cell body are transported by motor proteins to their destinations. Kinesins are a type of motor protein that use microtubule tracks to walk along. 

Two intertwined chains with globular heads on one end form a Kinesin dimer. To move, the heads repeatedly attach and detach to the tubulin units of the microtubule track, moving everything forward in a hand-over-hand fashion. The opposite ends of the dimer drag the cargo along that they are attached to.

Thanks to Nested Universe reader Faris Naji for inspiring this topic, and discovering the attached video which shows the Kinesin protein in action.

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When Fact Meets Fiction – Learning Science the Fun Way

iStockphoto / Ugur Evirgen

I don’t normally read science fiction, but Michael Crichton is an entirely different story. I fell in love with his work even before he gained a greater degree of fame with Jurassic Park and its sequels. Right from Andromeda Strain to the Sphere, I’ve enjoyed the way he combines a little bit of fact and a whole lot of fiction to spin a believable yarn about worlds of both the future and the past.

Another author who qualifies for such bouquets in my book is Dan Brown, not for The Da Vinci Code, the famous (notorious) bestseller that caused a ton of controversy, but for its sequel, Angels and Demons, which in book, was a better book than the Code. I particularly took a great deal of interest in the Large Hadron Collider and the way antimatter was explained and used to cause great mayhem and potential destruction. And when I saw the fine print that said that this fact was indeed fact and that fiction had been woven around it, I looked up the project on the Internet and read all I could about it. I admit I was a bit smug when I could tell all my friends that I knew all about this project more than a year ago, and even though they initially thought that I had turned into some kind of science junkie (which I definitely am not), they were surprised to learn that good fiction can have fact as its basis.

Science is a subject that not everyone understands easily; but when it is couched in fiction, when a compelling yarn is woven using the slightest thread of truth, it’s then that people want to learn more and discover more. That’s the best part of books, the fictional kind, because they teach you more than their subject-specific counterparts ever will. Just ask any aficionado of medical and legal mysteries – they’re bound to be familiar with a whole lot of facts, processes and procedures that relate to hospitals and the courtrooms respectively.

And that’s because they don’t consider the process as one of learning, but one of enjoyment. Reading these books are leisure activities for them, while slogging over textbooks is drab, routine work that must be done to achieve good grades. There’s a vast difference in the results achieved when a task is done just for the sake of it and when it’s really enjoyed wholeheartedly. And this delineating line is where fact meets fiction!

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of web learning versus class learning. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com

Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence MeetUp

iStockphoto / Kronick

Monica Anderson will speak about Model Free Methods and Artificial Intuition at the Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence MeetUp at the TechShop in Menlo Park, California at 12 noon Sunday, November 23, 2008. The talk is one hour, followed by an hour discussion about any AI related topic.

Attendance is free but limited to 70 people. The event will be video recorded and may be posted on the web later.

Please join the AI MeetUp group and RSVP on the web site below if you want to attend: http://www.meetup.com/ai-silicon-valley/calendar/9183657

The calendar page http://www.meetup.com/ai-silicon-valley/calendar is updated regularly.

Chris K. Haley, NestedUniverse.net. Get free RSS or email updates here.

Your Entire Life On An iPhone

iStockphoto / James Benet.

Thanks to Mohir at K21st for a recent article describing how Professor Lee Cronin and Dr. Malcolm Kadodwala of the University of Glasgow have developed a nanotechnology technique that can store 150,000 times more data per square inch than current technology.

With this technique, the researchers were able to assemble a functional nanocluster just one nanometer in size. This tiny size would permit an incredible storage of 500 trillion bytes per square inch - enough capacity to store

• 100 million MP3s
• 5 million CDs
• 100,000 DVDs
• 100 years of video at 1Mbps

With storage capabilities like this, we'll soon be able to realize projects at a mass level like Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits. Gordon's project aims to store and index an entire human's lifetime of books, emails, phone calls, video, audio, and more.

Combine this incredible amount of data storage with an eyeglass cam, and OCR, speech and facial recognition software. Now imagine being able to search and play back anything you've ever seen, heard or read right from your iPhone.

You can read the original article from the University of Glasgow here.

Chris K. Haley, NestedUniverse.net. Get free RSS or email updates here.

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Brain Science Is About To Fundamentally Change

After inventing the Palm Pilot, Jeff Hawkins focused his efforts on neuroscience. He describes his memory-prediction framework theory of the brain in his book On Intelligence.

Predicting Patterns

This theory describes the process of how the brain makes predictions of future events by matching sensory inputs to stored memory patterns. Inputs that are processed from the bottom-up interact with expectations from the top-down to generate predictions. When a particular level recognizes a pattern, a label is associated and forwarded to the next level in the hierarchy.

Jeff Hawkins was inspired by an issue of Scientific American dedicated to the brain. He saw that neuroscience lacked a comprehensive framework to describe the operation of the brain and embarked on an effort to build one. In this TED video, he describes his ideas and their implications on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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Singularity Summit VIP Pass Contest Results

Congratulations to Faris Naji, the winner of the Nested Universe Singularity Summit 2008 VIP pass giveaway.

The drawing was held by numbering the six entries in order of their arrival. Then random.org was used in Integer Generator mode to select a number from 1 to 6, 3 being the value that was returned.

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Daniel C. Dennett and The Awesome Power of Memes

Daniel C. Dennett is a philosopher who co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter. In this video from a TED conference, he expands on Richard Dawkins' concept of memes - ideas that survive by their ability to replicate in a manner analogous to genes.

His Secret to Happiness

Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

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Quantum Suicide and The Large Hadron Collider

Stern-Gerlach experiment. Source: Wikipedia Commons. Licensed under GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2.

Quantum mechanics is a theory that describes the behavior of objects at the atomic scale. The effects of quantum mechanics are typically observable only at this small scale, and not at larger ones, except in unusual or contrived situations.

Electron Spin

Electrons have a property called spin that may be measured in relation to an arbitrary axis. The name is somewhat misleading. It's not quite the same concept as a ball rotating around an axis but there are some useful similarities. Since an electron has an electric charge, its spin causes it to interact with a magnetic field, deflecting the electron's path in a manner similar to the way a charged sphere's course would be altered. An electron can have its spin measured by passing it through a magnetic field. If electrons were truly spinning spheres, a beam of electrons would spread out smoothly when passed through a shaped magnetic field since each rotating sphere would take on an arbitrary spin alignment.

However, what is actually observed is amazing and counter-intuitive. The 1922 Stern-Gerlach experiment showed that spin is quantized and only two values are observed - denoted up and down.

Standard Interpretation

In the standard Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the electron does not have a definite spin until a measurement is made, and the quantum wave function collapses to a definite value. Schrödinger's Cat is a famous thought experiment which was originally conceived by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation. In a variation of this thought experiment, one imagines that a cat is placed in a box with a flask of poison and a device that can measure electron spin.

If a single electron that is passed through the device is measured with spin up, the flask of poison is released and the cat expires. If the spin is down, the cat survives. There is a 50 percent chance of either outcome. If the box is sealed so that it is impossible to determine the state of the experiment from outside, the cat will exist in a superposition of states to the outside world with equal probability of it being alive and dead. It's not that the cat actually exists in one state or another according to the Copenhagen interpretation. The cat has become entangled in the quantum wave function describing the contents of the box and truly exists in a superposition of both states.

iStockphoto / Sirin Buse.

Quantum Suicide

However, in the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, two different worlds exist - one in which the cat remains alive, and another in which the cat has perished.

A thought experiment called Quantum Suicide has been crafted as a hypothetical test of the Many-Worlds interpretation. In this experiment, an observer takes the place of the cat and the experiment is performed many times. In some worlds, the observer perishes, but his conscious experience continues in the worlds in which he survives. He will never observe his own death. The observer perishes in half of the worlds, but it does not appear that way from his point of view. After repeating the experiment as many times as necessary to satisfy his curiosity, the observer concludes that the Many-Worlds interpretation is correct.

With the Large Hadron Collider shut down for two months due to a malfunction, some have suggested with tongue-in-cheek that the Quantum Suicide experiment is being conducted in real time with our own world. In some parallel universes, the LHC creates stable black holes which destroy the Earth. We only remain conscious to observe this in universes where that doesn't happen. In those universes, events happen that prevent the LHC from creating those kinds of black holes.

While the LHC's troubles are more likely explained by mundane problems, the idea behind the Quantum Suicide thought experiment is still an intriguing one.

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How to Enter the Nested Universe Singularity Summit 2008 VIP Pass Giveaway Contest

Nested Universe is giving away two VIP passes to the Singularity Summit 2008 on October 25, 2008 in San Jose, California, USA. Click here to enter your name for a chance to win.