Arthur C. Clarke
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Revision as of 18:58, 2 October 2008
Arthur C. Clarke (16 December 1917 - 18 March 2008) was an astronomer and prolific science fiction writer.
Clarke's most famous work is 2001: A Space Odyssey. He collaborated with famed director Stanley Kubrick to make the major motion picture, while simultaneously writing the novel of the same name. The story itself is based in part on various short stories by Clarke, most notably "The Sentinel". "The Sentinel" was written for a 1948 BBC competition, but it wouldn't be published until 1951, as "Sentinel of Eternity".
During World War II he worked on the team that developed radar. He proposed the idea of communication satellites placed in geostationary orbits in 1945, long before any government would have taken the concept seriously enough to issue a patent on it. Clarke popularized the idea of "space elevators" (first proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) in his book Fountains of Paradise. Space elevators are now being seriously investigated as a method of reaching space from the surface of the Earth.[1] He was also one of the foremost supporters of Richard C. Hoagland's proposal of life underneath the ice shields of Jupiter's moon Europa,[2][3] an idea he was inspired to toy with a bit in the sequel to 2001, 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984).
Although born in England, he lived most of his later years in Sri Lanka, because he loved scuba diving. He was buried with a 'Secular Ceremony' on 22 March 2008. [4]
Clarke's Laws
- First law: When a distinguished, but elderly, scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- Second law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Footnotes
- ↑ Space.com's article re: Space Elevators
- ↑ Obit Mentioning his correspondence with Hoagland
- ↑ Enterprise Mission's mention of A.C. Clarke
- ↑ "Sir Arthur was quoted as saying religion was "a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species", and he left written instructions that his funeral be completely secular."