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Broca's Brain: The Romance of ScienceSpockБЂ™s pointy ears and permanently querulous eyebrows were considered by network executives far too daring; such enormous differences between Vulcans and humans would only confuse the audience, they thought, and a move was made to have all physiologically distinguishing Vulcanian features effaced. I have similar problems with films in which familiar creatures, slightly changed-spiders thirty feet tall-are menacing the cities of the Earth: since insects and arachnids breathe by diffusion, such marauders would asphyxiate before they could savage their first city. I believe that the same thirst for wonder is inside me that was there when I was ten. But I have learned since then a little bit about how the world is really put together. I find that science fiction has led me to science. I find science more subtle, more intricate and more awesome than much of science fiction. Think of some of the scientific findings of the last few decades: that Mars is covered with ancient dry rivers; that apes can learn languages of many hundreds of words, understand abstract concepts and construct new grammatical usages; that there are particles that pass effortlessly through the entire Earth so that we see as many of them coming up through our feet as down from the sky; that in the constellation Cygnus there is a double star, one of whose components has such a high gravitational acceleration that light cannot escape from it: it may be blazing with radiation on the inside but it is invisible from the outside ...» |
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