人教新教材选择性必修四Science fiction.docx

Science fiction       科学方法论包括这样的命题：一种严谨的理论不仅解释已知的现象，而且预见新的尚未发现的现象。科幻小说试图完成同样的事情以故事的形式写出这种理论用于机器、尤其用于人类社会时会产生什么效果。约翰·坎贝尔Science and literature have traditionally been hostile (敌对的) to each other. Writers have regarded scientists as dull creatures who take pleasure from destroying great works of the imagination with boring facts. Scientists have thought of writers as frivolous (肤浅的) people with no respect for the rules of evidence.Science fiction is the one area where these two opposing groups have met and exchanged ideas. As its name suggests, science fiction is a literature that predicts the technology of the future and the effect this will have on human society. Over the years, many of their speculations (推测) have been remarkably accurate. Space travel, communications satellites, nuclear power, robotics, cloning and mobile telephones all appeared in books before they appeared in reality. Yet sometimes the writers have got it wrong. Nobody predicted the emergence of personal computers, for instance. And contact with alien beings from other planets still seems a long way off, despite being a common subject of science fiction.Over the years, the time between the prediction of new technology in science fiction and its actual discovery has become shorter. It took 100 years before the moon landings predicted by the French writer Jules Verne actually took place. The idea of robots first emerged in the 1920s. The first was built in the 1970s. And in the 1940s, Arthur Clarke predicted that communications satellites would circle the globe by the year 2000. They arrived 30 years before they were due. Richard Dawkins, a British scientist, recently stated that scientific discovery showed the beauty and complexity (复杂性) of nature in a way that the human imagination could never do. Yet this is not the end of the road for science fiction. Many of the developments it has predicted have been in communications and we are now in what is called the “information age”. Over one-third of the people in the Western world are employed in the information industry. World leaders call for the establishment of “knowledge-based societies”.