Imagination race: what scientists learned from writers

The grandiose “Andromeda Nebula” by Ivan Efremov called for a whole generation to build communism in a single galaxy. In addition to predictions of photo flights, star portals, hyperboloids, robots, blasters, science fiction writers tried to guess the main thing: is the future communism or capitalism? Cosmic “brothers in mind” were mostly seen as older brothers: it seems that they are an echo of authority, reverence for “who art in heaven.” In the dispute of the era, missiles served in two ways: those with nuclear warheads, which were carefully considered at the negotiations between the USSR and the USA, did not go into direct use, fortunately. Others, with astronauts on board, were supposed to fly to Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti and finally resolve the earthly dispute: cap or social.

The early Strugatskys confidently predicted in World of Noon: “Now there are no more non-communists. All ten billion are communists.” To transfer them, then, by a time machine to the US Congress for a July 2023 meeting on alien UFOs, they would have written: “The capitalists of the USA are hiding: Tau-Chinese communists flew to Earth in saucers to take our planet into the World of Noon!”.

Later, the sign of their forecast changed. The triumph of capitalism, even on the “separately taken” pages of the Strugatskys? But take a closer look at the early Arkady and Boris: light, harmony, romance, universal brotherhood. Late: anguish, heavy dystopias, if the victory over communism, then gloomy, pyrrhic. But unlike the science fiction brothers, the United States itself does not yet recognize victory. In June 2021, their intelligence captures: “UFO (UFO) is a threat to national security.” And in 2023, pushing even another “weeping of the Earth” away, Congress listened to the reports of a special working group of the Pentagon and the CIA on unidentified alien invaders: “144 objects since 2017, 18 of them clearly violated all the laws of physics.” And in my opinion, the “List of Sidney Sheldon” is more mysterious and ominous: a catalog of incredible deaths of ufologists, their number, circumstances (look on the Internet) are beyond probability.

About his UFO version later – first a fantasy overture. Cosmonaut Yuri Baturin, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with the patriarch of Soviet cosmonautics, Academician Boris Chertok, published an 864-page volume “Cosmonautics of the 21st century”. Its themes are: “future energy”, “virtual astronomy”, “atmospheric energy and climate control”, “asteroid danger warning system”. Academician Chertok is the author of the chapters “Military operations from space”, “Weapons of the future – electromagnetic projectiles”. The book contains the works of leading specialists of the country, academicians of the Russian Academy of Sciences, luminaries of the exact sciences. But, having outlined the boundaries of scientific forecasts, they entrusted estimates of the more distant future to … science fiction writer Anton Pervushin: the chapter “Space Age Noon”.

The “passing over” in the book was preceded by an interesting list of scientists’ inaccurate predictions. The famous Lord Kelvin: “Aircraft heavier than air are impossible” (15 years before the flight of the Wright brothers). He: “It will be proved: X-rays are a fiction.” Vacuum tube inventor Lee de Forest: “Only a dreamer like Jules Verne can say that it is possible for a person in a multi-stage rocket to reach the gravitational field of the Moon and return to Earth.” Rutherford: “The energy of nuclear decay is negligible. Anyone who counts on receiving an additional source of energy indulges in empty dreams.

There are also optimistic errors. Kurchatov (1956): “Controlled thermonuclear reaction will be mastered in 10-15 years.” Wernher von Braun (1965): “In the near future, a ticket to the moon will cost $ 5,000.” When Efremov, in The Andromeda Nebula, attributed interstellar flights to the distant 25th century, he was reproached: “disbelief in the power of science” …

I happened to publish conversations with Yuri Baturin on astronautics, but it was most interesting to talk with him about the content of one of the chapters of his book with Academician Chertok. The title of the chapter was “The Riddle of Science Fiction Writers’ Efficiency in Science and Technology Forecasting.” Based on the letters and works of Albert Einstein, Baturin explored the role and laws of human intuition. I found out: the “mechanism of intuition” of scientists of a certain type (Euclid, Newton, Maxwell, Poincaré, Einstein) is very similar to the intuition of writers. Overcoming the chaos of the initial facts, they create a “simplified but clear image of this world” (model), then place in it “the center of gravity of their emotional life.” It is in this “emotional core” that the axioms of specific areas of science are born, and from the axioms hypotheses, theories, laws …

This is only a brief hint at Baturin’s work on the mechanism of intuition. As an additional confirmation, I will cite the well-known words of Einstein about Dostoevsky, which I have quoted more than once on other occasions: “Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientific thinker, more than Gauss! I read The Brothers Karamazov with delight. This is the most amazing book I have ever come across. I do not need to engage in literary analysis, explore psychological subtleties, anyway, such studies will never penetrate into the core of such a creation as The Brothers Karamazov!

Usually they state: “Dostoevsky is a prophet”, putting an end to this: “A prophet – he is a prophet. His works, respectively, are prophecies. And Einstein was amazed by the Karamazovs because he saw that “core of intuition” from which his and Dostoevsky’s scientific and artistic discoveries emanate with rays … Herbert Wells in the novel The World Liberated (1914) described the “atomic bomb” dropped from an airplane based on the splitting of the atom (That’s what he called her)! And Dostoevsky predicted the revolutions of the twentieth century, the types of its movers. The relationship between real science fiction and real science: not conflict, but complementarity. Intuition, “beauty” also reign in the world of scientists.

Landau: “A beautiful scientific hypothesis can be wrong. But true, accurate – never ugly.

A prominent scientist, popularizer of sciences, Professor Sergei Kapitsa, founded the Nikitsky Club in 2000. Like the well-known “Club of Rome”, forecasts were also made there on the basis of interdisciplinary analysis. Scholars, politicians, businessmen, diplomats, writers were invited, from among whom I read several reports, and in 2010, as part of the Nikitsky Club, I spoke at the European Business Congress (Cannes). Sergei Petrovich, among other things, defended the thesis: since the beginning of the twentieth century, the most important breakthrough ideas have been born at the intersection of sciences and other types of knowledge. He cited interesting facts: the Club of Rome and the well-known RAND Corporation, predicting the development of science and technology for more than 50 years, also attracted science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

Under the influence of Sergei Petrovich, I, having reinterpreted Marx’s thesis into “forecasts are the locomotives of history”, ended my conversations with leading figures of various sciences with a request to predict the future on the basis of their areas of knowledge. In economics, the boundary of scientific forecasts was marked by: Doctor of Economics Evgeny Grigoryevich Yasin, teacher of liberal economists, Minister of Economy of Russia (1994–97), and Mikhail Leonidovich Khazin, a bright representative of the opposite direction (in October 1997 he gave an accurate forecast of the default of August 1998- th).

When asked to give a forecast of economic and political development until the end of the 21st century, both answered: it is impossible, the economic models used do not allow us to give a qualified forecast for more than 30 years. In my opinion, this betrays Yasin and Khazin as scientists – not producers of sensations, high-profile headlines. Not “British scientists”.

But we’ll talk about closer forecasts next time.