Word: moone
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...dead. His technological spawn, however, did not stop. American scientists worked alongside emigre German scientists to incorporate Goddard's innovations into the V-2, turning the killer missile into the Redstone, which put the first Americans into space. The Redstone led directly to the Saturn moon rockets, and indirectly to virtually every other rocket the U.S. has ever flown...
Though Goddard never saw a bit of it, credit would be given him, and--more important to a man who so disdained the press--amends would be made. After Apollo 11 lifted off en route to humanity's first moon landing, the New York Times took a bemused backward glance at a tart little editorial it had published 49 years before. "Further investigation and experimentation," said the paper in 1969, "have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well...
Disciples of Piaget have a tolerance for--indeed a fascination with--children's primitive laws of physics: that things disappear when they are out of sight; that the moon and the sun follow you around; that big things float and small things sink. Einstein was especially intrigued by Piaget's finding that seven-year-olds insist that going faster can take more time--perhaps because Einstein's own theories of relativity ran so contrary to common sense...
...Sean Connery found to his dismay in the James Bond film Goldfinger. But while laser weaponry never really took off, lasers certainly did. Today they are used for, among other things, dentists' drills and delicate eye surgery, recording and playing back compact discs, measuring the distance to the moon, creating and viewing holograms, industrial cutting and welding, sending voices and data through the air and down optical fibers, surveying roads and building sites, generating energy in controlled-nuclear-fusion experiments, "painting" dots on a drum in laser printers and as high-tech pointers in lecture halls...
...Burroughs (if you're a junkie) or the uncanny knack of William Gibson (if you're a career computer criminal). But Ballard is surely the most insightful artist the genre ever produced. While most SF writers of his generation were down at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory cheering on the moon landings, Ballard was in a London art gallery throwing a Pop Art happening with a crashed car and a topless model. Ballard's approach to the future was never rooted in engineering, physics or rocket science but rather in medicine, psychology and Surrealism. Time has been kind...