Science fiction can spark science interest

Abstract

I disagree with Moishe Garfinkle’s letter (Physics Today, April 2013, page 11) about science fiction’s effects on the public’s appreciation (or lack of it) of real science. I have seen through the eyes of my students and the teachers I have helped train over the years that an interest in science fiction can be a gateway to a broader or deeper interest in science. I got interested in astronomy through reading science fiction as a youngster—as did Carl Sagan and a number of other astronomers. Perhaps Garfinkle has a negative view of science fiction because he knows it only from the movies and TV shows he mentions. Yet written science fiction can be far richer than the thin, barely scientific gruel dished up in many movies.I keep a website of astronomically reasonable science fiction at http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/resources/scifiprint.html and invite readers to sample some of the works featured there. A good number of PhD physicists and astronomers, including Gregory Benford, Alastair Reynolds, and Geoffrey Landis, are writing marvelous stories humanizing and extrapolating from our latest understanding of real science. Through such stories, science can become exciting and inviting, the very opposite of Garfinkle’s “dull and dreary.”© 2013 American Institute of Physics.