I am watching the Syfy’s series “Childhood’s End” this week. It is based on a science fiction novel by British author Arthur C. Clarke, one of my favorites growing up. One of the main characters is a very bright boy who at the end of the premier episode last night becomes an astrophysicist, despite this scientific profession being made entirely superfluous by the advanced technology of the alien Overlords.
This morning Robert Scherrer, the chairman of the department of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt University, lamented in an editorial* for Wall Street Journal that children no longer have any reason to be interested in science, mainly because most of our household gadgets fall into the category of magic—alluding to Clarke’s observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
“The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
#1 by Brooks Henderson on January 11, 2016 - 5:16 pm
This sounds like a good series. I’ll have to check it out if I can find it on demand somewhere.