Don’t be negative!
After reading Kaku’s article on our universe, I found this neat little article on exotic matter, which mainly talks about what would happen if you had something with a negative mass. To really appreciate it, you probably need high school physics - knowing Newton’s law of gravity and conservation of momentum - but it’s a cool little discussion anyway. Negative matter (very different from antimatter!) almost certainly doesn’t exist, but it’s great fun to think about what would happen if it did. To me, that’s probably one of the most fun things in physics - considering something which should be impossible, such as travelling faster than light or time travel, for instance - and then thinking about what would happen because of it. In many ways, I guess it’s what good science fiction writers do, and of course no-one has done it better than Asimov, who came up with brilliant stories about the way that new discoveries in science would change not just technology but shape society too. Cool, hey?
Incidentally, does anyone know for certain the truth behind the story that “Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every category of the Dewey Decimal system”? Many, many sites list it as true, but others say it’s only a legend, and that he’s only in 4 of the 10! I’d love a definitive answer…
Joel Says:
I can’t give you a definitice answer, but after a quick look through the 689 records the Library of Congress Catalog returns for the query “Author/Creator = asimov, isaac”, I noted books with Dewey numbers in all categories except the 100s. Not every entry had a Dewey classification, and in some cases he’s only written introductions/forewords/afterwords to the books. So he may or may not have a book in every category of the Dewey Decimal system, but he’s awfully close.
As to whether he’s the only author… that’s a fact I’m not even going to attempt to check.